Hi all,

Like many I expect I'm on the hunt for the perfect dungeon explorer game, and when Descent came along I thought that this could be the one. So I snapped up the base game, then added a couple of expansions and Road to Legend and all was well. However, after some initial excitement in my player group their enthusiasm all but died.

The game just took too bloomin' long!

Similar to another recent thread on here discussing game balance, my group (again RPGers) tended to play cautiously and deal with monsters spawning behind them. Eventually as Overlord I found myself deliberately withholding cards because I wanted them to get to the end of the quest. I knew that playing a single spawn card from my hand would simply extend the game by a quarter of an hour or more. And when you're four hours in and worrying about last train times it's the last thing I'd want to do!

So this has gotten me thinking every now and then what I could do to re-stimulate the interest, other than simply state "come on guys, you don't like the game because you're playing it wrong" (which would seem like a design flaw to me).

After mulling it over a little it occurs to me that the things which slow the game right down are the aforementioned monster spawns, and the endless character respawns too. To my mind they can turn the game from a steady paced advance toward a goal, into a grinding war of attrition.

So I'm wondering how I might play a house variant wherein spawns are mostly removed.

My first thought is along the lines of taking out Overlord cards and removing player resurrection and town portals. As I see it this would present some immediate challenges:

1. Less for the Overlord to do . He'd do little more than move the monsters and roll the dice. But tbh, the game should be so much faster that he gets to do the more quest-specific room content more.
2. Player death . If someone dies early, no resurrection means they have a boring evening as a spectator.
3. Balance . Obviously a biggie as the game has been balanced around the threat mechanic, etc.

However, I don't think these are insurmountable. Point 1 above wouldn't bother me. But perhaps I could allow the Overlord to have a setup hand, drawn randomly which does not get replenished throughout the game. Maybe he could draw a certain number of cards, and discard down to a threat limit determined by the party level or something. Then during the game he could play say a max of one per turn (to prevent card-hoarding and spamming all abilities at once).

As for player death one could perhaps just hand out a single "resurrection scroll" at game start. Or perhaps the players could be allowed to forfeit a treasure chest draw for such a scroll. That could work quite nicely, particularly toward game end where they trade-off fighting the big boss with three tooled up warriors or four less well equipped adventurers when they reach that gold chest.

Balance is something which would need to be experimented with. But this could be managed with the treasure/potion levels, threat cards at game start as mentioned before, treasure handout rate, upgraded monster stats, etc.

I'd be really interested to hear what people think. I'm bound to have missed out loads of stuff as this is something I've only given cursory thought to.

Essentially I'd love to hear any ideas I might try to utilise the great mechanics and components in Descent, but in a pacey game which would play out in 1-2 hours.

maxvon_d said:

No offense intended, but saying it's a design flaw that the game isn't what you want it to be sounds overly arrogant to me. You're basically saying it's the game designer's fault for not knowing what you and your friends wanted the game to be. The game designer is the one who decides what the game will be; if the customer misinterprets that it's just plain unfortunate, but it certainly isn't a design flaw. Again I'm not trying to insult you here, nor am I saying it's your fault for hoping the game would be something different. It's just an honest misunderstanding. You can either give up and sell the game or you can take steps to fix it (happily, you seem to have chosen the second route.)

maxvon_d said:

I agree with your overall assessment of the situation. I've definitely had games where I (as OL) avoided spawning things simply to let it end faster, and our group does play it "competitively" most of the time. The game does take a long time to play. I'm generally opposed to house rules in Descent, but I certainly don't mind looking to see if any ideas catch my eye. =)

I'd also like to take a moment to commend you for having played first and thought about house rules after you know what's ruining the fun in your games. A lot of people just make up rules on the spot when something doesn't make sense and I think this has been the source of more than a few of the "balance concerns" threads we've seen around here. Not all of them, but some.

maxvon_d said:

These sound like good ideas, at least in theory. Obviously you'd have to try them to see how well they work in practice. My friends and I play Doom with no respawns for the marines (Doom and Descent are sisters in their game mechanics, if you weren't aware) and that works out well. It definitely makes the game harder for the "heroes" but it isn't insurmountable. Also, when one marine dies, the others aren't usually very far behind so the problem of spectators probably won't be as bad as you think. The thing about no respawns is, since the OL no longer has the option to optimize CT by killing the squishy one over and over, he begins to see the merits of whittling them all down slowly. Keeping them alive keeps them confident, which increases their odds of making mistakes, then it just becomes a game of knowing when to bring the hammer down and end it (and hoping they don't survive/finish their goal first.)

I'd say banning all spawns (and hero respawns) would be a good place to start. The number of monsters will be much fewer, but the heroes only have one life each so it should still be challenging. Let the OL draw cards as normal, just remove all spawns from the deck. If this proves too easy for the heroes, put back the spawn cards and allow one OL spawn per area (you could use the spawn marker from RtL to track this). No Threat to flip it back, just one spawn per area. If the no spawning idea proves too hard for the heroes, let them each pick two heroes at setup, the second to come in if the first dies. Effectively they now have two lives each instead of one. Etc, slowly unfold your house rules until you find a nice balance.

I have to say, this sounds like an intriguing idea. I might just have to suspend my no house rules policy and give this a spin myself. =)

I would reccomend against removing glyphs, though. Respawning aside, the ability to run back to town and restock would be more important than ever in this variant.

maxvon_d said:

That's another interesting idea. Speaking of gold chests, if the OL can't spawn monsters then the heroes will become quite godlike once they have decent silver/gold treasures. Perhaps giving the OL X spawn cards each time a chest is opened would be wise (1 for copper, 2 for silver, 3 for gold - or you could base it on the number of curses found inside...) Room clearing is a threat the OL can't ignore even without house rules, often spawned monsters are more effective that printed ones purely because they have time to act before dying.

Here's a tangent to play with: Give the OL a regulated number of spawn cards and ignore printed monsters (except the boss and quest-important guys, of course.) There will be fewer monsters in general, but the ones that do appear will have time to act at least once before giving their lives for the Master.

maxvon_d said:

I think you have some interesting ideas here. As I said before, normally I'm against house rules because rebalancing everything is just too much work, but I might have to give this idea a spin myself. Also, are you familiar with Kevin's "Dungeon Delve" variant? That might also give you the shorter game you were hoping for.

To take another tack, I'm kind of curious about your gaming sessions. You said you have Road to Legend - are you playing it? Because while the overall game is obviously far larger with that expansion, single dungeon levels and encounters are much, much shorter with RtL (with the exception of rumor dungeon levels, OL keeps, etc.). I don't find it too difficult to have a quick session that involves only some over-world action, and then one or two levels of a dungeon, or one or two encounters. When those are done, you pack it all away and don't have to worry about writing down the state of the board.

If nothing else, I'd say try using the non-RtL rules, but instead of playing a monstrous quest from a quest book, flip an encounter card, or flip a dungeon level, and then play that. If one dungeon level is too short, string together two.

A Road to Legend normal dungeon level can be done in less than an hour, so the game gives you the option of playing short sessions.

If you don't want to play a whole campaign but want shorter sessions, you could try to play the Road to Legend dungeon levels in an unconnected way, with the basic Journey into Darkness rules (5 Conquest for the heroes at the start of the dungeon level, they lose if ever they get to 0, they win if they kill the boss and exit through the portal).

Edit: Same answer than Cymbaline. I Should read other people's posts before answering.

The game already HAS a resurrection-limiting mechanic: it's called conquest. If you want the heroes to revive less, hand out fewer conquest tokens. That will make things harder (especially if you're reducing conquest by a lot) and will need to be balanced somehow, but creating an entirely new, untested mechanic for allowing limited resurrection that ignores hero conquest values and the amount of conquest the quest normally gives you is foolish, in my opinion: it will only unbalance the game even more, and less predictably, while achieving the same effect.

Heh, foolish and arrogant. Tough crowd.

Thanks for the suggestions though. I'll have a think about some options and see if I can convince my game group to playtest. Also I'll have a look into the Dungeon Delver variant.

One variant would be to give the heroes 0 conquest at the start. Hand out conquest as normal for glyphs and stuff but not remove conquest when they die, instead charge the conquest when they resurrect. So if they don't have enough conquest to get a character back (since it would put them in the negative and they would loose) they will have to find a glyph or kill a boss to do it.

This has two advantages imo. First of all players that die are not out for ever, they still have an interest in the game since they can come back. Secondly it keeps the balance created by conquest values. A big sturdy character is hard to kill, but also a lot harder to get back once dead. A cheap runner however could be sacrificed if you knew that doing so would get you a glyph.

This might not be balanced with removing spawns however, since it only really matters if the characters die at the start. You would probably have to limit something else for the players, like giving them less items or something like that.

Pretty cool ideas here. I have my own set of variant rules but the problem is they make it too easy for the heroes.

Instead of holding back spawn cards, dump them for threat and start playing every other card you have like it's burning a hole in your pocket. Want the heroes to move faster? Make it a point to save up a few trap cards and then play them all on the hero that is lagging in the back, and then make sure you mention that you are intentionally targeting the rearmost player.

If your player are advancing slowly, use treachery to buy cards that force them to move quickly. Personally, I like the rolling boulder. You dont have to place it in a space for maximum kill potential, but in a space where it'll make the players get off their rumps!