So my friends and I have been playing this and find that the overload after a few quests gets so much threat and cards, that it forces the game from a fun dungeon crawler into a speed run through the dungeon. I don't think we're doing anything wrong, but we barely made it through the first 3 rooms of quest 3 and the overlord has all his power cards played and we have lost all our conquest tokens. Our toons aren't horrible, but without a taunt or anything our ranged players die multiple times and we lost. Does anyone have any fix or suggestions for this?

timmfiji said:

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something but you have to be doing something wrong.

So are you playing the base game, and between Quests you are allowing the OL to keep his threat and cards between quests?

To the best of my knowledge, the OL doesn't keep threat and cards between Quests. The "campaign" rules for the base game are horrible to say the least. The OL gets some starting bonus using those campaign rules, as do the heroes, but I don't recall anything about him keeping threat and cards between dungeons.

The game IS a speed run. That's the natural consequence of allowing the overlord to gain more resources every turn: the onus is on the heroes to accomplish their goals in a proactive manner. This tendency is only increased by the fact that combat in Descent is extremely deadly, with most monsters dying in one hit and the distinct possibility that a hero can go from full health to dead in a single round, making initiative and spawning both extremely powerful. Most of the game's strategy revolves around speed.

And for the overlord to win the game in area 3 of quest 3 is certainly possible, if he's good/lucky enough relative to the heroes.

That said, if the overlord has all 6 power cards out after 3 areas, you're doing something VERY wrong. The overlord should be hard-pressed to do that in 15 turns (assuming 4 heroes), even if he plays no other cards at all , and 5 rounds is a long time for the heroes to spend in one area unless under extreme duress.

It's possible that your heroes are just way too slow and methodical, but it's worth checking for rules errors. As Remy mentioned, every quest is independent and the overlord (and heroes) should be starting the quest out from scratch. The overlord collects two cards and threat equal to the number of heroes on his turn (not on each hero's turn), he's limited to one spawn card per turn, and he can only spawn monsters in revealed areas, outside the heroes' line-of-sight.

You should also note that the number of heroes has a big effect on difficulty: larger parties of heroes have an easier time. If the heroes are having trouble, you should definitely play with 4 heroes, regardless of the number of players at the table.

If you still aren't sure where our expectations diverge, maybe you could give a more detailed account of your game?

Sure I'll try to be a little more descriptive.

We do not carry over threat, nor conquest tokens, nor cards. We have the OL drawing 12 threat per turn (we have 4 players/heroes) and I think it was 4 cards per turn. Now, we are still kind of new, so admittedly we were moving slowly. We had a mindset like, "Let's not open a door until we clear this room." Even of the spawned monsters. The OL had all his power cards in play, I want to say by the 6 or 7th turn, with the 48 threat he earned + cards he discarded for threat. We also used custom characters so maybe that is where we messed up.

timmfiji said:

OL is to draw 1 threat/hero, meaning 4 threat per turn in your case. And he also draws 2 cards/turn, not 4 as you state. Your Overlord has been boosted alot.

Moneseki said:

Yeah. That'll do it, right there. He's getting triple the threat and double the cards he should be.

If you're new to the game, I'd recommend staying away from house rules, including custom characters. Descent is horribly complicated, so I'd say leave it as-is for quite some time. It'll take you lots of games before you even understand how the game actually works, and probably more still before you have a good enough grasp of the mechanics to try and fix them. I'd recommend giving the Rules another read through, and the FAQ, too. I did it after each of our first four games, and always found something new. Still am, really.

As far as strategy, most players start the game out by clearing all rooms before moving on, looting after clearing, buying lots of health potions and no fatigue ones, and so on. That's fine. Eventually, however, you'll learn that health potions are nearly worthless, fatigue potions are the economy of the game, and it's all about speed. No rush, just realize that you're still getting to know the game.

A few additional things you may have missed: the Overlord starts with zero threat and three cards in his hand.

I'm guessing this is based on a misreading of the "Basic Campaign Play" rules printed on the quest guide. You seem to be giving the overlord the bonus listed in his table every turn; that's supposed to be a one-time bonus at the start of the quest.

Most people don't use the basic campaign rules at all; they can have an unpredictable effect on game difficulty, the scaling doesn't make much sense (hero bonus goes up exponentially, overlord goes up linearly), and don't create much feeling of continuity anyway. The quests give the distinct impression of being designed for fresh heroes, starting from scratch. FFG didn't even consider those optional rules important enough to put them in the actual rulebook; one might even suspect they were added just to fill up space on the quest guide cover.

But if you're going to use them, you at least need to be aware that the overlord "receives more power to begin the game ," not every turn.

Out of curiosity, where did your custom heroes originate? If you're using the official build-your-own-hero rules, you should be aware that it's quite possible to make blantantly overpowered and/or severely handicapped heroes using those rules; they're unclear, unbalanced, and not newbie-friendly. I don't recommend using them at all, but I certainly wouldn't try to use them until you have some experience with the game.

If you're using custom heroes that were created by someone else, then they might be perfectly fine for new players, possibly even better than the official heroes...depending on their design, and the skill of the person who made them. But if you continue to have trouble with game balance, I would definitely consider going back to the standard heroes until you get things sorted out; one less variable to worry about.

Antistone said:

Yup, definitely a misread, this makes more sense. Actually, I think our characters are ok. Conquest value of 3 for all of us. We all just liked the idea of making our own. We probably spent way more time working on these guys than reading the rules -> misplaying the game! Well the game got out of control when we switched overlords and we interpreted +2threat/hero as in addition to the 1tht/hero per turn. Otherwise the game is still awesome, he was just burning through cards like there was no tomorrow and we were dropping conquest tokens quickly. I am glad I brought this up with you guys though. Very information.

A little tangent, is it best to buy expansions in release order or is it ok to switch the order up?

I'd suggest Road to Legend, that introduces campaign rules which more/less work and gives the games a really epic feel to them.

Takes a fair while to get through the whole campaing, but it's taken the game from a nice dungeon bash to an awsome campaign for our group.

timmfiji said:

• Well of Darkness / Altar of Despair - Get one of these if you like the "vanilla" game (each quest is stand-alone) and want to give your heroes more of a challenge (via treachery).
• Tomb of Ice - Pick up this one if you like the "vanilla" game and your heroes need a boost (via feats).
• Road to Legend - Get this one if you want to play an extended campaign.
• Sea of Blood - Another extended campaign, but new groups should hold off on this one. It hasn't been out very long yet, so the community is still working out the bugs. Newer groups would probably be better off with RtL.