I love Descent an awful lot. On the other hand I do not like Road to Legend. I so rarely get to play Descent that if I tried to make it a campaign-style game, we wouldn't finish for over a year. So RtL doesn't fit my needs.

I know that Sea of Blood is made to be a campaign style addition to Descent. For that reason, I decided never to buy it. I only now considered though it doesn't have any plastic, it may have treasures or some other interesting bits that I could use in non-campaign Descent.

So there is my question: What does SoB contain that would be nice for non-campaign Descent?

Scottwick said:

Virtually nothing.

From the Descent rulebook (available elsewhere on this site):
3 Double-sided Map Pieces - 2 Intersection Pieces (the third is a portal only applicable to advanced campaigns)
38 Prop Markers - 1 Whirlpool/Cavern Entrance Marker
- 6 Tree/Shrub Markers
- 1 Cage/Pipe Organ Marker
- 4 Barrel/Statue Markers
(none of which are any use unless designing your own quests.)
8 Bleed Tokens
4 Money Tokens (probably no use as IIRC they are the 2500 coins)
18 Wound Tokens
2 Familiar Markers (see skills below)
Some new skills, including the familiars (to replace skills not used in SoB).
It would be possible to play vanilla using the SoB skills but probably not advisable. At least 2.5 involve sea battles and the balance mix on several is outstandingly bad (Runner, several of the Marks)

IMO none of the above items add anything to a vanilla game. The bleed and wound tokens are the only things really useable in a normal quest and you should have plenty of those already. A few extra things are useable if you are creating your own quests, like the extra map pieces (and for that matter the island map) and props. Many of the skills could be simply added to existing skill decks, though I believe that some balance factors will need to be addressed (eg there are more bonus damage range skills, but rapid fire is not used in SoB, nor Skilled in any Advanced campaign, so combining Dead Eye (+2damage Range and cannot be dodged) with skilled and Rapid Fire would be a very very nasty combo - not that other nasty combos aren't already available) purely aside from the overly powerful skills already mentioned.

I imagine the silver/gold dice and the health/fatigue upgrade tokens could also be incorporated into vanilla with some very slight house ruling, but I doubt they'd add much, and the dice can be purchased separately if you really care.

Antistone said:

I would consider allowing silver and gold dice into vanilla as a major or significant rule change, not a minor house rule. That 5 (black) power dice limit is rather fundamental and quite critical once you start getting silver and gold weaponry.
With effectively unlimited potions (relative to the Advance campaigns at least) it is trivially easy to add 10-12 (3 base + 5 power pot + 2-4 fatigue) power dice to a single attack every couple of turns, which can be enough to take out even quest bosses with single shots quite often. Vanilla simply isn't designed with that sort of capability in mind.

Corbon said:

It'd be a pretty simple change to bump up the price of fatigue potions in order to reduce the supply, though. And you could certainly use upgraded monster stats from the campaign to make the silver/gold dice less overpowered.

Making this balanced would definitely require some work, but the basic concepts are actually very simple.

Hey, the little dungeon levels might be useful, since you can play the game in a reasonable amount of time. Easier to rope people into a one-hour game and like potato chips, you can do more than one.

mahkra said:

Any individual change you make is a simple change. But making several changes and then delicately rebalancing them is not simple. At all.

Repricing potions, in order to reduce supply, because those potions can make massive differences in the attack balances, is not simple. You need to consider both fatigue and power potions. You need to consider how many such potions are available in the individual quest. You need to consider that fatigue potions have other uses as well and factor that into your limitation plan. You need to consider the treasure availability and the monster capabilities.

Anything you do that requires changing monster stats significantly is a major change. It has extreme implications in a divergent variety of situations - one-shot kills (which monster types, how reliably, which attack types, AoE), max damage of attacks (tough/large monsters that simply can't be harmed by too many attacks/weapons), ratio of attack damage (does that tough monster take 300 average attacks to kill or 10 average attacks to kill or 1 big attack, or three big attacks or 30 big attacks). Note also that the divergency of situations just got a lot wider due to the original change (adding silver and gold dice)

And once you change those things, what else do those changes affect. It becomes an ever spiralling network...

Calling the basic concepts simple is ridiculously misleading.

Adding silver and gold dice into vanillla descent is a major change because it radically affects the balance of interactions between heroes and monsters, which is one of the core engines. Furthermore it can affect that core engine by over one hundred percent in achievable situations (eg Bow, BY Pierce1, max damage 2(B)+1(Y)+5(bbbbb)=8P1 becomes 2(B)+1(Y)+14(3trait+1trait upgrade+5 power pot+5fatigue)=17P1 or average damage 5P1ish becomes 11P1ish)

Try asking Antistone, because he redesigned the game from the ground up because that was easier (I am sure) than trying to 'rebalance' it.

'Simple' changes are things which make a small change to a minor part of a less critical game engine and are restricted to that minor change only. Like just changing the cost to swig a potion to 2MP, or potion prices to 75 coins.

I still maintain that adding silver/gold dice wouldn't be that big of a deal, because 5 dice is usually more than adequate to one-shot a non-boss monster. It might matter for bosses, but that's generally only one enemy in the quest, and since the boss usually ends the quest, you don't really care about the exact number of attacks, only the number of rounds , which is still very often one. The cases where the silver/gold dice would help the most are when you're using an underpowered weapon or a power potion, both of which are situations where a buff is probably entirely warranted.

It's been a while since I played vanilla, but I don't remember being blocked by the 5 dice limit very often; maybe once per quest?

I wouldn't seriously recommend buying silver/gold dice just for vanilla, though.

I said simple, not easy. I did not mean to suggest that it would not significantly change the game or that it would be a trivial matter to keep the game balanced.