My group, which has been playing this game since it came out, has grown to feel that D:JitD is a game that's heavily in favor of the overlord, to the point where the heroes stand little chance of winning. When this game first came out the forums seemed to be full of people that felt just the opposite, that the poor besieged overlord rarely had a chance. My friends and I, honestly, would disagree with that viewpoint.

To give a bit of background, my group considers itself to be fairly intelligent gamers - we're all college-educated board and pencil-and-paper RPG game vets who have been playing stuff like this for a long time now (we picked up JitD hoping it would be like the classic Hero Quest). We go about the game thinking tactically and methodically, spending quite a bit of time planning and executing our turns. To give an example, last night with five of us total we spent seven hours on the last quest form the original JitD game and only went through areas one and two, losing when we reached area three. Off the top of my head the heroes and overlord only had about 10 turns apiece, give or take.

It seems to us that if the overlord plays in a tactical, intelligent manner that the players should rarely, if ever, win.

• Things like interrupting and stopping movement to specific squares with pit traps (at the end of movement these will cause a player to be stuck in a pit with LOS only to adjacent squares) or crushing block traps (which allow heroes to be placed at the overlord's discretion on an adjacent square after the block falls) or halting turns all together (paralyzing gas). This impedes access to objectives (doors / quest items / getting close to players to heal, aid in defense, or attack a strategically important objective).
• Because leaving players behind to block monster spawning strings out the party and reduces front-line combat effectiveness it can easily happen that monsters spawn in nooks and crannies players don't have LOS to and the straggler at the back will get eaten by beastmen or the like. meanwhile heroes at the "front" advancing will be left without support and also be unable to provide offense that's nearly as effective. The subsequent caution players must exercise slows the pace of their advancement while providing more opportunities for the overlord to draw cards, amass threat tokens, play traps and play more power cards.
• Cards like Poltergeist (that let the overlord rearrange pieces board as they see fit and close doors on the overlord's turn, blocking LOS and impeding movement) and Dark Charm (which should be a one-hit kill to a player, or near to it) are horribly imbalanced, especially the former of the two.
• Abilities like poison (essentially doubles damage, in healing terms, and prevents a player from recovering from damage), double-shot and knockback (OL chooses the direction of the hit, so players can be tossed around the map to the OL's advantage, without even damaging them...imagine your magic-user suddenly surrounded by monsters).

It's difficult to fully encapsulate the experience we've had, as the best way to do that is to sit down and play through a game of JitD with us. But ultimately the overlord's effectiveness, many powers, and lack of any true fragility seem to dwarf anything the heroes' need for caution, degraded front-line effectiveness and fragility.

The first solution we've come up with to this is to increase the amount of conquest tokens the heroes are allotted at the start. Instead of the fixed amount each quest prescribes we think that giving conquest tokens equal to the total conquest value of all heroes is a good idea. Additionally, we're all willing to admit that there's some aspect of the rules that we've grossly misunderstood in our time playing this game, although we feel that's unlikely. What we're confident this is not is a case of us playing our heroes poorly.

Any thoughts/feedback/ideas would be greatly appreciated. Especially helpful would be any house rules you've adopted or comments on the above idea regarding conquest tokens.

Thank you!

-James

First: how many heroes are you playing with, and what expansion components are you using? Larger parties of heroes have a substantially easier time (in particular, spawning and turn-ruining traps are much less effective against large parties); the dark glyphs from Altar of Despair (especially the sundered glyph) can make dungeons a lot nastier; while the feat cards from Tomb of Ice can help the heroes out noticeably.

Lots of groups seem to have a breakthrough when the heroes realize that the game is a race, and things don't need to be done in traditional dungeon-crawler style: chugging vitality potions constantly to move farther (or make more attacks), looting the room before killing the monsters, and leaving slow monsters behind without killing them are all potent tactics, and while it is possible to take things to an illogical extreme, keeping these in mind as options can make a big difference.

You mentioned Poison as a major factor - it probably shouldn't be. Healing in Descent is usually not worth it; vitality potions are generally a lot more valuable than healing potions. If the heroes are pausing to top off their health between rooms, that's suicide.

Still, a lot of things that you mention as being problems (spawning, messing up hero plans with traps, leveraging powerful monster abilities) ARE the overlod's most effective tools, and a mainstay of overlord strategy for most groups. Those probably aren't what's different between your group and other groups.

I would definitely play with 4 heroes and try changing who's playing as the overlord, if you haven't.

As for house rules, mine are quite extensive . I would be very interested to hear what happens if you group plays Enduring Evil, but it's not actually designed to weaken the overlord. It does alter some of the strategy, though (for example, spawns are generally less important), and changes a lot of details, so it's certainly possible it would shift the balance of power for you.

Letting the heroes start with conquest equal to the sum of their conquest values is probably not a good idea; I've actually seen people suggesting the opposite, giving heroes something like 20 minus the sum of their conquest values to start with. Higher-conquest heroes tend to be regarded as better, if anything, though it's difficult to make generalizations because heroes vary a lot in power and there's a strong link between conquest value and attack type (4 = melee, 3 = ranged, 2 = magic).

You might try allowing the heroes' conquest total to go negative, and finishing out the quest regardless. That should at least give you an idea of how much extra conquest you'd need to give the heroes in order for them to win, and may give your players some important late-game experience. It's actually uncommon for the overlord to win at the tail end of the quest; you may find that if the heroes can get through some tough room in the middle that the remainder isn't that hard.

James,

The general consensus is that vanilla JitD is balanced to slightly in favor of the heroes. You mention the final quest, which is not one of the most difficult and should normally not result in such an early loss. Therefore it might still be that your group is misplaying some rules or making play mistakes. In response to the issues you mentioned I'll offer up some advice for the heroes:

- Prioritize. If there are monsters with nasty abilities or dice rolls, go for them first or stay out of reach. Let tanks walk into the fray with a dodge order, then go for the kill next round. Leave skeletons and the like alone if needed. Speed is of the essence.

- Stick together. You can't always cover every spawn point. As a rule of thumb, try not to let more than 1 beastman hit anyone. Skeleton spawns are not preventable anyway, so focus on the beastmen. Dodge and guard orders are very good against spawns.

- Have a plan B. If you keep getting wrecked by blocks, pits and gas, then try not to make your plans dependent on single actions. Assemble in front of a door and open it next turn, it's usually worth the extra turn for the OL. Try to avoid long rushes by melee heroes if they can be wrecked by a single pit/block.

-Count and deduce OL cards. There are 2 beastmen spawns, 2 pits, 1 paralyzing gas, 1 mimic, 1 curse of the monkey god and 1 crushing block. Also 1 dark charm but it's not preventable, so you might as well discount it (except sometimes when it's wise to unequip a blast weapon). If you've left the OL a good opportunity for a BM spawn and he doesn't take it, he probably doesn't have it. Same for traps. Charge is another card you may want to count if there are ogres and the like around.

Also check out this forum and BGG for more strategy tips.

Hi there, James.

I have a super trick for ur heroes, and the OL should probably allow this since he is already 'so powerful'

CHOOSE your Heroes instead of randomizing. U could try several different tactics:

2 Tanks, 1 Mage, 1 Runner:

Usually the 2 tanks will cover and protect the party. The mage is the crowd controller, especially after getting a Blast weapon. The runner is the one to get chests and activate glyphs before the monsters can even blink.

1 Tank, 2 Mages, 1 Runner:

The tank is very important here as he's the main shield of the party. The 2 mages can easily take out enemies, often with a single blow from afar. The runner, is as always, very important for giving the party good treasure weapons even before exchanging the first blow with the monsters guarding a room.

As u can see, customizing your party can REALLY give u an edge. Imagine 4 mages in a party... They'd easily clear monsters with their spellpower. But they would also die to traps very easily, not to mention their low health if trapped in melee. I suspect that though your party is experienced in gaming, they probably did not choose their heroes to form a superb combination party. As with the 4 mages, you can also imagine 4 tanks in a party. They'd be sorely tested if the OL knew his stuff and kept using ranged attacks.

JdeFalconr said:

Having read your post I think the problem is you're over-thinking things. Your heroes also seem to be trying to eliminate every monster on the map and prevent others from spawning. This will not work, and if that's what your heroes are doing then it's no wonder the Overlord is ruining them so easily. First off: seven hours for two areas? I know the game can take a long time but that sounds a bit high even for this game.

JdeFalconr said:

Except for that last bit and "getting close to heal" this part seems spot on (more on that anon). The OL should be doing these things and it sounds like he has his part of the game figured out.

JdeFalconr said:

Never split the party. Don't string people out to cover LoS across the dungeon, instead keep the party together and focus on covering LoS where you are now. As long as the OL can't spawn a beastman warparty close enough to hit you on the same turn, it doesn't matter where he chooses to put them. Don't worry about monsters spawning in rooms behind you, don't even try to kill them unless they manage to catch up. But always, always keep the party together. They should never be further apart than across the room, barring special quest circumstances. This is probably the single biggest reason why the Overlord keeps winning, because he can pick and choose who to attack to gain the most threat/conquest for the least effort and then swarm them with monsters.

JdeFalconr said:

I haven't seen Poltergeist in play that many times myself, but when it did turn up it wasn't horrible. Yes, it did all the things you said there, but the heroes were able to manage because they were in one place and could focus all their firepower on whichever direction the threat came from next. Dark Charm is indeed nasty, but there is a roll involved which means it doesn't always work. There are also skills and tactics which can lessen the effectiveness of such cards. Your heroes won't always have those skills, but tactics like knowing when to throw up a Dodge "just in case" can be helpful. On the list of potentially broken cards, these two certainly don't make my top ten.

JdeFalconr said:

As others have already said, healing is highly overrated. To the point that a lot of the time it's not even useful. In our games the heroes will occasionaly use things like Crystal of Tival, but they don't waste their time with healing potions. They don't even always pick up the ones on the ground. If you get hit badly, it's usually better to just die (lose the CTs) and come back fully healed from town. The game then becomes about gearing up the tanks - who are ususally the ones worth 4 CT - so that it isn't worth the OL's time to try and kill them, and then using those guys to protect the squishier 2-3CT heroes as much as possible. This goes double with poison. Trying to heal poison is a waste of time most games. Just eat the CTs and then earn them back later in chests and glyphs.

JdeFalconr said:

In fairness, I don't think it's a case of playing poorly so much as you're trying to play a different game (namely: HeroQuest.) HQ was and still is a great game, but it was designed differently. For one thing it was expected that the heroes would win by the mechanics (each die had 2 hero shields and 1 monster shield, so heroes were just plain better at shrugging off damage AND they had more hit points on average than the monsters.) The traps were printed on the map, very few monsters were added beyond what was shown on the map, etc (wandering monsters were fairly rare as I recall.)

Descent is a down and out brawl. The Overlord is intended to have a fair chance to win, so if the heroes strut around like they own the entire dungeon and can control everything, well, they're going to fail. They can't control everything. The Overlord has the ability (and often the opportunity) to spontaneously place traps and monsters exactly where he needs them, over and above what he gets for free on the map. The heroes, by contrast, are mostly generated at random. Random heroes, random skills, random treasures. MOST hero parties still end up being good enough, since the balance was obviously drawn up with this randomness in mind, but the point is that the heroes need to make due with what they have while the overlord gets to respond to the situation as it unfolds. To win, the heroes need to stay focused on the goal, stick together, and plan ahead to mitigate potential traps the OL might have planned.

Fatigue is a HUGE advantage for heroes, which is why you see other posters talking about how good vitality potions are. Fatigue can give you a couple extra movement when a pit opens up beneath you. It can give you an extra die when your one point shy of killing that monster. It can let the tank take a Battle action and still move forward with the party. Being able to replenish that at the drop of a hat is vital. Dying because you took damage is not vital - ressurection is cheap and easy.

I'm sure you guys already know how fatigue works - as you said, you're smart and experienced gamers. It sounds like you're worried too much about healing and controlling the board when that is not the heroes' domain. Run through, complete your mission, get out. Anything that isn't blocking your path forward isn't worth dealing with. And remember: The quest ends as soon as you complete your goal. You don't need to get out again, so don't hold anything back for the escape.

Your initial post was quite comprehensive in some ways, but unfortunately missing some important details, such as:

- Do you always play with 4 heroes?

- Although you've clearly stated you are playing the original quests, which expansions elements are you using? Your mention of the Poltergeist card implies you are using Treachery at the very least.

That said, so long as the answer to the first question is yes, there should be little problem with winning JitD: Quest 9 - with ONE possible exception. If you are indeed using Treachery and the Dark Glyphs from AoD, then I can imagine your conclusion being valid, since Dark Glyphs are ridiculously broken. However, as you mention only things like Poltergeist and Dark Charm as being the 'overpowering' elements (the first of course is the best card imaginable, but it's still only one card...Dark Charm, on the other hand, is less spectacular), I'm inclined to think you haven't been using Dark Glyphs.

A key aspect of this game is that there is much more skill in playing the Heroes than in playing the Overlord . New players usually just can't fathom how much this is true. The Heroes have just so much power and control over the game that it can really frighten a poor unprepared Overlord. But precisely because they have so much control, it is UNBELIEVABLY easy for the Heroes to make mistakes, and lots of 'em. The Overlord's job is to be flexible and to pounce on these mistakes. If the Heroes never make mistakes and never have atrociously bad luck, there's never anything even the most experienced Overlord can do, at least on easy maps like JitD: 9.

So, I know it's the line that everyone hates to hear, but...it sounds like your Hero players are just making mistakes. Plain and simple. You have simply NO idea how many times I've seen the line "We're smart, we play lots of games, we've played RPGs..." In the end, it doesn't mean much. Descent just seems to be one of those games at which people in general tend to be bad. This is often because precisely the skill set people THINK should help (RPG experience) actually works against you. Being slow and cautious is bad, being methodical is bad, killing monsters is bad, healing is bad, making sacrifice plays is good, getting treasure before you kill the monsters is good, getting ALL the treasure is bad...the list goes on and on.

I find the game can go either way in favour of the heroes or the Overlord. I don't find these balance issues personally but I think I would be a rich man for every person that came on the boards here claiming balance issues.

I'm in full agreement with most of the above. It cannot be stressed enough, however, that it matters a *great* deal how many heroes you're using. If you're trying to play with only two, then yes, most of the base game quests will be extremely difficult for the heroes to win. The balance rules don't work very well at all (that's not necessarily to say that one should never play with two heroes, but be aware that it is much more difficult).

To respond to some of the specifics you mentioned:

* Traps are indeed useful. Pit traps, however, are rarely a significant threat (not the standard, non-Treachery variety, anyway). Your reference to "at the end of movement" perhaps betrays a flaw in your hero tactics: you should often save a couple of fatigue points in case the overlord plays a trap, so the overlord can never play a trap "at the end of movement", because if they play a trap, you can spend the reserve fatigue to deal with it.

* Healing is very weak. I'd go further: pretty much all means of healing in Descent are simply not worth bothering with at all. Healing potions are awful, the healing runes are awful, hero abilities that heal are awful (Ispher's is worth using, as it's free, but still very weak). If you're spending effort to heal, you're making a mistake. Poison, for this reason, is not a concern.

* You shouldn't be leaving heroes behind to cover spawns, as noted above. The overlord *will* play spawns: if they're a serious threat, kill them; if possible, ignore them. Focus on ensuring that spawns that are played (especially melee ones) can't do serious damage the turn they're played.

* I have personally never found Poltergeist to be that good, but I'm willing to believe I'm mistaken on this one, as I've never known Jeff (The_Immortal) be wrong. It's at least a moderately good card, at any rate. Dark Charm is useful, but certainly not broken.

* Your list of overpowered abilities for some reason does not include Web, the ability that *is* commonly regarded as overpowered, or at least badly-designed. Quick-Shot is not overpowered, as monsters that have it do less damage than normal for their tier. Knockback can be good, but is usually found on slow melee monsters that rarely get to hit anyone anyway.

I do have to agree with the OP in that I believe the Overlord has a distinct advantage in Descent. I'm going to preface my discussion by saying I am playing with the base game and the WoD expansions only, and I am playing as the OL for a group of four heroes that are currently making their way through the base campaign. I let the players choose their heroes, as well, in order to ensure they create a balanced group.

We've played through the first six quests now, and the only one the heroes actually won via the base game rules was the third one. The other five, they either were wiped out or could have been at various stages. As the OL, I constantly find myself holding back and not finishing off the heroes just so the game can continue, at least until the final room of the dungeon (where anything goes) They really don't make very many mistakes- they stay grouped, they do their best to avoid putting squishy toons in vulnerable positions, and they use a crap-ton of fatigue- certainly a lot more than they heal. They've never taken more than four hours to get to the last boss of any given quest either, so it's not like they are moving slowly. The most I've ever gone through my entire OL deck in a game is twice, and that's only if I pull Evil Genius fairly early.

When I can use a Dark Charm as an insta-kill 5 out of 6 times, or open a pit that does 6 damage with Trapmaster, it's very easy to knock the heroes out. Monster-wise, Beastmen and Sorcerers in particular do some pretty sick damage for their size. The addition of Treachery with WoD has greatly helped me as well; it allowed me to get rid of cards I never use (gust of wind, anybody?) and replace them with much better ones. The heroes did get some very nice equipment upgrades (both base and treasures) in WoD though so I don't feel like the expansion by itself changed the game balance greatly. It may have tipped it a bit more in the OL's favor but the original game has plenty of imbalance by itself.

For all I know, of course, the balance issues may be addressed in future expansions. For now, though, what I've ended up doing is upping the number of conquest tokens to 5 every time heroes activate a glyph instead of 3. By doing that, I find that I can go all-out as the OL and the heroes have about a 50% chance of winning, which is a nice place to be in.

I think every group is going to have a unique experience, and a good OL will use house rules that help balance things out. When I play as OL my goal is NOT to win quickly. It's to provide a fun, challenging experience for the heroes that they have at least an even shot at defeating me. Once you've played a few quests, you should be able to get some idea of if that's happening or not, and if it's not, how you can modify the rules so that everybody who is playing has a good experience!

@ Dameon:

It's definitely a lot harder to play the heroes than it is to play the overlord. Some of what you're experiencing with your group may simply be the heroes having a steeper learning curve. I like that you're adjusting the balance simply by tweaking CT numbers, though. It's a minor change that can make a big difference in how balanced the game feels but is easy to dial back as the heroes improve.

A minor comment on Dark Charm, though - there's actually a 1 in 6 chance the spell fails, and then a 1 in 6 chance the attack misses (just like any attack). So your Dark Charm will actually result in zero damage almost a third of the time (11 out of 36). It's certainly a powerful card, but it's not quite the insta-kill you describe.

Dameon,

If four heroes failed to beat quests 1 and 2 with only WoD as an expansion, either they were very unlucky or they are not playing well. One point: on most base game quests you shouldn't come near going through your overlord deck even once, let alone *twice*. Quest 1, for example, should take around 6-9 turns to beat if the heroes are playing well. I suspect that they are still playing too slowly.

Dark Charm has overall only a little over a 50% chance of scoring a kill, what with the fail-chance, the attack miss-chance, and the chance that the attack will just roll very little damage. And that's only towards the end of the game when the heroes have gold-level weapons. It's totally useless starting out, most of the time.

A few questions:

• Are they using a "runner"? That is, do they grab all of the key items (keys, encounter markers, glyphs, important chests) in an area in the same turn they open it? If not, they should be.
• Do they always try to kill all the monsters? This is a common mistake among new players: quite often the majority of monsters can and should be ignored.
• Do they place orders a lot (unless they're Guard orders with a garuanteed target)? While orders have their uses, overuse of them is another common mistake: unless you have skills that key off them, most turns should not involve placing an order. Dodge and especially Aim orders are very weak, and should very rarely be used.
• With particular reference to quest 1, do they understand the value of closing a rune-locked door after entering it if backtracking is not required? Once the final glyph in quest 1 is activated, the heroes almost cannot lose as it is adjacent to the door (so can't be blocked) and monsters cannot open the runelocked door so spawns become useless.
• You said they were spending fatigue a lot. This is good, but what are they spending it on? Fatigue should mostly be spent on movement points. If they're spending most of it on extra attack dice, something is wrong.
• How long, in terms of turns (4 hours isn't that helpful, as this will vary a lot with playstyle) are they actually taking to get through a quest?

On the other hand, yes Gust of Wind is awful, and 5 conquest for a glyph sounds like a good houserule given the issues you're having (you may need to discard it if the heroes get better), and it is true that WoD helps the Overlord a lot more than the heroes.

"Never" been wrong? Well I'm certainly flattered, but I don't think that can possibly be true. But thanks anyway. ; >

I simply must quickly comment on this quote by Dameon:

Dameon said:

This is another statement I've seen so often that it makes me both laugh and groan. I *guarantee* you, you let me do this, and I will win even the toughest of the JitD quests with probability 90%. Let me pick the skills too and I win with probability 99.9%.

The thing is, I often see "letting the Heroes pick their characters/skills" as a "balancing" mechanism for players that are losing. The irony is that these players are so bad that they don't KNOW which Heroes to pick, and so it isn't really an advantage at all; in fact, probably a random draw is just as good! Of course, as I've already stated, in the hands of an expert, this is enormously powerful, but that's the rub...for choosing Heroes to be an advantage, you have to be good already, but if you're good already, you don't need the advantage.

As Mr. YellowPebble says, number of turns is important. If the Heroes are spending 4 hours to play 20-25 turns (which is about what it takes for the OL to reshuffle once and then get partway through the deck again), then they should seriously think about spending the same amount of total time but playing just 10 turns instead. The first quest can theoretically be beaten in 2 moves, if you let me pick my skills and Heroes. More practically, you can aim for 3 with the right draw (and I have done this once). 5 or 6 should be the most you need for any group. Quest 2 is similar. Others may need slightly more, but if the OL is reshuffling twice, the battle has long since been over. Time and distance have always been the TRUE enemies for the Heroes.

I should point out that I didn't you had never been wrong (which is most unlikely), merely that I had never known you to be (which is less impressive).

2 turns sounds awfully quick. I'm struggling to work out how that's possible, actually. I suppose you send one runner after the key, another to open the runelocked door and gold chest (and probably close the door again), and send the two most powerful combatants back to town. Then on turn 2, send the two heroes in town (who hopefully have some decent gold weapons) into the room to kill the giant. I don't have the quest book to hand to check how do-able that is, but it does sound a bit of a stretch (though I appreciate you're only positing a theoretical possibility). I must admit my own minimum time is about 6 turns, but I have played Quest 1 largely with only two heroes, which I think slows things down a bit. At any rate, yes, if you're going through the deck once on Quest 1, you have gone very far astray (not that anyone has actually claimed that, I note- but going through the deck twice on *any* base game quest, even with Evil Genius in play, is probably a bad sign).

Ahem. Not sure I really had a point here, but heh ho.