After "my personal' disappointment on the announcement of a new Descent product I went looking for something else. I came across a Kickstarter project, Bardsung. Bardsung has a lot of resemblance to descent as a dungeon crawler and in my opinion has a lot of potential as in its lore and gameplay mechanics.

But this game has the same element what frustrates me with most dungeon crawler board games: Luck. Don’t get me wrong, I truly love throwing dice, but within this system it doesn’t matter how strong you are, if you roll a miss, it’s a miss. And sure that’s part of the game and I get that. But sometimes you miss multiple times what gives away the feeling of being a strong buildup character.

So after learning about the combat system on this project I thought about a system (which I shared with the creators) that could also be applied to Descent. So here is my thought about ‘Despair’ in Descent:

Every time a hero rolls a X, that hero gets one despair token , up to 3 tokens max . Depending of what type of character you are, you can activate the despair ability with yet another miss, so an action out of despair. The extra action will look like this:

Melee attack : If you miss, you may discard 3 despair tokens to make the attack a hit. This can only by activated when you have 3 tokens. 3 tokens will give you 2 hearts/hit points, add this to the rest of the result. discard the tokens.
magic attack : after a miss, Discard 3 tokens to make another magic attack. Discard the tokens after this attack. If this attack is again a miss, no new despair tokens are added to the hero chart for this attack.
Ranged attack : If an attack is missed, discard 3 tokens to get: 1+ range and +1 heart/hit point to the attack.

If a hero takes a rest action, alle despair tokens are to be discarded from that character sheet.

Overlord :
I haven’t got a lot of experience with OL gameplay, but for this roll I was thinking of something like: Every attack that misses, the OL gets a despair token, 5 tokens max . If he has 5 tokens (maybe this needs to be more), he can draw an OL card from his deck to his hand. Discard the despair tokens.

What are your thought about this? Is this a suitible mechanic to apply to the gameplay?

Cheers!

It sounds interesting. You can try and tell us how it actually works. If I'dd go with this, I'd use the same thing for melee attack , no matter if it's ranger or magic.

6 hours ago, TryFal said:

After "my personal' disappointment on the announcement of a new Descent product I went looking for something else. I came across a Kickstarter project, Bardsung. Bardsung has a lot of resemblance to descent as a dungeon crawler and in my opinion has a lot of potential as in its lore and gameplay mechanics.

But this game has the same element what frustrates me with most dungeon crawler board games: Luck.

I was on the same boat. Disappointed in the new Descent reveal so I headed to the kickstarter in search of a good dungeon crawler. I found Bardsung and actually made a pledge of 100 £, but after watching various videos on yt, I quickly reduced it to 1 £. In all 5 or 6 videos the same thing happens: heroes explore a tile and get rushed by the monsters and the games bogs down. Also, not in single one of those videos have I seen the mysterious wandering monsters which fuel the stretch goals. Beacuse it's luck based you may never see a wandering monster in the entire game.

Long story short, I continued my search and found Cronicles of Drunagor. It looks so promising I preordered it from a retailer cos I missed the kickstarter.

I like your idea about despair tokens but I agree with leewroy that melee and ranged should be treated the same.

The dreaded "X"!

For that reason I must say I like the Ariad plot deck since it's basic ability is to reroll it.

11 hours ago, Preotet said:

I was on the same boat. Disappointed in the new Descent reveal so I headed to the kickstarter in search of a good dungeon crawler. I found Bardsung and actually made a pledge of 100 £, but after watching various videos on yt, I quickly reduced it to 1 £. In all 5 or 6 videos the same thing happens: heroes explore a tile and get rushed by the monsters and the games bogs down. Also, not in single one of those videos have I seen the mysterious wandering monsters which fuel the stretch goals. Beacuse it's luck based you may never see a wandering monster in the entire game.

Long story short, I continued my search and found Cronicles of Drunagor. It looks so promising I preordered it from a retailer cos I missed the kickstarter.

I like your idea about despair tokens but I agree with leewroy that melee and ranged should be treated the same.

Yea I totally get you there. The thing is with the YT videos is that they only explain the small basic of the game and there was some real bad luck with the rolled dice. But then I thought about it, and descent isn’t that different, you only get to upgrade your dice a bit and learn some abilities and start from point A and get to a certain goal. I’m not trying to justify the project, but I think there is some good potential. This game is clearly in the early stage of development and its a big plus they kind of listening to the community.

but ones I have some time, I’ll try the despair system. Unless somebody outruns me with it 😛

Need to think more about it, but it can be usefull, even if dome mechanics already exists in the game so you can avoid rolling the mighty X

I think with some tweaking, this could be a neat mechanic. If you wanted, you could adjust the mechanic to work within existing token frameworks. For example, instead of "despair", heroes could gain fortune and OL could gain threat. If additional effects of the tokens are desired, they can be added. However, totally up to you (of course) how you want to implement it.

About X rolls: what about using a surge to trasform the X in a 0 range/damage?

51 minutes ago, tibia said:

About X rolls: what about using a surge to trasform the X in a 0 range/damage?

This goes against the rules, since the X should be treated as if the attack was miss, the only exception is the surge use for range, so would be at the same time ?

I think the only case where the X should have a rule is on feat

22 hours ago, rugal said:

This goes against the rules, since the X should be treated as if the attack was miss, the only exception is the surge use for range, so would be at the same time ?

I think the only case where the X should have a rule is on feat

Mmm ... it seems to me that all the thread is a "variation of the rules". Mine proposal seems simpler, but I don't know how much it is imbalancing (maybe 2 surges?). In any case it should be considered "similar" to "surge-for-range".

9 minutes ago, tibia said:

Mmm ... it seems to me that all the thread is a "variation of the rules". Mine proposal seems simpler, but I don't know how much it is imbalancing (maybe 2 surges?). In any case it should be considered "similar" to "surge-for-range".

Desesperation token idea looks like better to me

On 11/24/2020 at 12:57 PM, rugal said:

Desesperation token idea looks like better to me

Have you motivations to share?

33 minutes ago, tibia said:

Have you motivations to share?

Rolling some X on some actions is frustrating, but it is some kind of fun and part of the game.

But, if you are a hero, and it is not so rare, but you can miss you 2 actions by rolling X (or dealing no damages, but in that case, you can still spend surges, and usually do some minor things), so, if, for example, for each X you roll, you gain a desesperation token and 3 of them can allow you to reroll the X until you roll no X can avoid horrible situation where heroes cannot play at all since they do too much X to play (when you are around 1 X on every 3 roll, the game is almost set)

BUT

there is many ways already to avoid X is you are a hero
1 - classes or heroes (Reynhart, Skirmisher, Monk)
2 - items (golden mask, etc) but alas those are act 2 items so you may never see those
3 - Fortune tokens (but they do not exists using the app)

On the other hand, the overlord too has some tools
1 - overlord card
2 - plot deck
3 - monster abilites

But like Zaltyre said before, finally, using an already existing thing is easier, so, maybe, for each 3 X rolled (whetever the side), heroes and overlord may receives a threat token can be part of a balance rule.