So here's my first homemade hero (sorry FFG for the image).

The idea behind her was a mad necromancer getting into the "hero" world, probably for some dark reason including ponies and orange juice...anyway here she is! let some comments

At 4 fatigue + 5 spd, she's a good runner-mage. With necromancy, she's already overwhelming and her handicap of 2 skill cards is balanced back by this. So the 4 magic traits would be another overpowered feature of hers. 3 Conquest value is just nice for her though. Interesting ideas, but I would feel that this character has too much luck involved. Will not be very fun for players who enjoy strategy because the luck factor here is pretty high. Imagine someone constantly rolls 2 blanks on black dice.

She is an interesting character indeed! Might even use her on my next campaign!

I like the power dice ability, it's original and probably well-balanced considering the odds of rolling a blank. I suspect that that ability AND necromancy AND 4 magic traits naturally might be a bit much, put all together. I realize she's short a skill, but is that really enough for all three of these things?

I will defer to those with more experience making homebrew characters, though.

Steve-O said:

She looks like she was made in my editor, and she's slightly (but noticably) below the point cap (341/360 BP). That's not enough left over for a significant upgrade, though she could get 1 die each in melee and ranged to end up at 359 BP.

Don't overlook the conquest value. Having a high conquest value relative to your defenses is a significant penalty. People trying out my editor tend to make high-conquest heroes to get extra build points, but I think they tend to end up underpowered, if anything. In my first playtest game with heroes made under my editor, the players all made high-conquest heroes, and it hurt them pretty bad.

I priced that ability (Wild Strikes) cheaply (15 BP), but after using it in a game, I think that's still overpriced. It should maybe even have negative cost; overkilling a monster doesn't make up for failing to kill another one, and there's a high probability (40%) of rolling no blanks at all even with 5 power dice, so you can never count on it working. I currently believe the only circumstance in which it might be worth it is when your weapon converts surges into AoE, or maybe if you're fighting a single ridiculously tough monster.

It'd be interesting to try out a Wild Strikes hero that goes around Aiming with a Sunburst, though.

i like this special ability and am interested if when you upgrade from black to silver or gold the damage/range/surges should be increased as well.

over all i like this idea for a hero, and think it would play well.

Dwome said:

Undefined. I don't play advanced campaigns; the abilities in my editor are all designed for vanilla, wherein there are no silver or gold dice available, so the question doesn't arise. You're welcome to try to extend the abilities into an advanced campaign, of course, but in general there is no particular way they are "supposed" to work.

Though in this particular case, the obvious thing to do would be to multiply the results by 2 for a silver die and by 3 for a gold die, since that's exactly what silver and gold upgrades normally do.

Antistone, would you be particularly annoyed if we opened a topic about how to apply some of the abilities you designed for your editor to the AC?

I'm a big user of your editor (I designed more than 150 characters using it or my personal variant) and for some abilities it's obvious that questions arise when you have to apply them to AC.

If we can open such topic, I'm sure everybody would appreciate if you helped us out with your opinions, since you're pretty nice designer, even though you're not an AC lover.

Of course you're welcome to have such a discussion, though I would urge you to remember that just because you find an extension that makes sense doesn't mean that heroes using that extension are somehow magically balanced for an advanced campaign. There's a lot of other things you'd need to do to make a complete AC version of the editor.

Thanks for the permission, Antistione, right now I'm busy with work, but as soon as I have a little time I'll surely open the tread. I'm fully aware of the balance problems, that's why I'm opening a tread on the matter, in order to discuss things and find reasonable solutions. Besides, I believe Descent isn't inteded to be a fully balanced game (the original characters already demonstrate it) and that random choose between heroes is a fundamental balance element.