It seems to me that if you raise the heroes' starting Conquest by a high enough amount, most quests could become balanced with 3 and even 2 heroes.

The quests of the base game, at least, seem winnable to me if the heroes' starting Conquest, instead of the usual 5, would be something like 10 for three heroes and 20 for two heroes.

The numbers are just pulled off the top of my head so they might be (way?) too high or too low, and it most probably depends on the quest, but couldn't the principle work?

Usually, when we are only 3 or 4 players, we play something else than Descent, but next time I'll suggest to my group we try it out. Especially with 2 heroes, I'm quite curious as to how much additional starting Conquest would be needed to make games balanced.

I've suggested something along these lines before, and it works whenever someone is concerned about *any* balance issue, not just # players. Don't quit the game when the heroes get to zero CT; keep playing and then record the final CT value at the end. Use that number as a baseline, and try to beat the number on the next game. After you've played a quest a few times, you should find a reasonable CT value for your group.

EDIT: I'm not sure any CT value would work for a 2-hero game, because the OL can often spawn monsters faster than the heroes can kill them, so the OL can halt progress entirely and keep the heroes from ever finishing the quest. And I think an appropriate CT value would probably vary from quest to quest, as the lost actions from the missing hero will be amplified in a longer game.

Giving more or less conquest is often a reasonable system for handicapping, but only to a point; some games are decided by how many hits the heroes take in the process of completing an objective, but some are decided mostly by "big picture" strategic issues, like whether the heroes get bogged down in one area or whether they have a strong enough weapon to get through a monster's armor. The heroes will probably eventually power through if you give them enough conquest, but if they lose 15 conquest in one area, it still probably feels like a loss - and a long and tedious one, at that.

My homebrew variant, The Enduring Evil, has improved player scaling (mostly by changing monsters' stats so that they take proportionally more attacks to bring down in larger games). You could try that, if you want, but it doesn't contain any sort of "simple fix" that could be used without making the full conversion.

A variant I've thought of, and I think would be simple, would be to reduce the number of monsters the heros fight when playing a 2 or 3 hero game. My thoughts were:

3 hero: Reduce the # of monsters on each spawn card by 1, overlord's choice if it matters

2 hero: same as 3, also take 2 monsters in each area and remove them, overlord's choice.

Doom did a similar scaling thing but did it when marines were added. This would just be doing the opposite. Never tested it as I've always been able to play with 4 heros and my Descent stuff stays at a friend's house because he has more room to play it. I thought it could work though as it reduces the number of monsters and the damage output of the overlord. Both of which are the main issues when he can spawn more often because of hero reduced LOS.

Solairflaire said:

This is really not a bad idea, as it would address the problem mahkra mentioned.

A better solution than what I came up with. And if it is still is too difficult, one can always boost the starting Conquest by a couple of points.

Solairflaire said:

From a high-level perspective, reducing the overlord's damage output is not actually a goal. Small parties of heroes have just as much conquest as large parties, and the individual heroes are just as hard to kill (generally speaking), so the overlord needs the same total damage output in order to win. It's temping to say that a half-size party should fight half as many monsters, but that's just not true: they should fight a group of monsters that can be killed in half as many attacks, but still has the same damage output as the ones the larger party fights.

Of course, the overlord gets increased damage from monsters that live longer, so theoretically there's some compromise point where you reduce the number of monsters they have to kill, but not by as much as the hero's attack power has been reduced, then you also reduce the overlord's total damage output by just the right amount of make up the difference and keep the overall difficulty balanced, even though fights now last longer.

But that's an enormously complicated proposition: fights lasting longer not only means that monsters survive to make more attacks, but also that the overlord has more time to collect threat and cards, and it alters the balance of consumable items (like potions), which are a significant part of the heroes' strength. That's a lot of variables with subtle and complex interactions. I don't know how you could even hope to find the correct balance point except by lengthy trial and error, and it could very well change depending on which quest you're playing or which expansions you're using.

Looking at the details of your proposal, there's a few more things that concern me:

First off, you should know that some expansion spawn cards only spawn 1 monster, so reducing the number of monsters by 1 makes those cards unusable. It's also going to hurt the "spawn 2 normal monster" cards a LOT more than the "spawn 2 normals and a master" cards - and the latter are already generally considered better. So at a minimum, you're seriously distorting the relative power of different cards, even if the overlord's "overall" power still comes out right. You should probably at least say that the overlord loses the strongest monster (or "heroes' choice") from the card, so that we're comparing 1 normal tier 2 vs. 2 normal tier 1, instead of 1 normal and 1 master tier 1.

Secondly, quests have a variable number of variable-size areas, and individual monsters vary a lot in power, so simply removing 2 monsters per area of the overlord's choice is probably going to have a very big impact on some quests and a very small impact on others. I'd have to look through all the quests to get a good estimate for how big an impact this would have, but I bet you'll find you're losing razorwings in some areas and sorcerers in others, maybe even nagas or manticores in some.

Thirdly, it's kind of wonky. Why is it that going from 2 heroes to 3 only affects preplaced monsters and not spawns, but going from 3 heroes to 4 only affects spawns and not preplaced monsters? It makes things simpler, I suppose, but that's the kind of thing that can skew tactics at different game sizes if you're not careful.

Firstly, I see I switched things from what I meant. It was supposed to be:

3 hero: Take 2 monsters in each area and and remove them, overlord's choice. Named Monsters cannot be removed.

2 hero: same as 3 hero, also reduce # of monsters on each spawn card by one, overlord's choice.

Another thing about this. Use the 5 player monster cards. Individual hero damage output doesn't change, so the monster stats shouldn't really, in my opinion anywya.

As I said, it's never been tested and it was a thought. I suppose both ways could work depending on the group or quest really. But that's rather subjective.

The reasons I settled on this one are that 2 heros get bogged down way too easily by spawns. 3 heros can usually have one hero continue forward even if there is a spawn. 2 really can't. Not effectively anyway. This also helps with the fact that 2 heros can't cover LOS effectively. 3 can prevent most spawns in a majority of quests. There are exceptions where 4 heros can't cover LOS really at all in some quests, but that's part of that quest's design. You can't balance for every quest in the game since their individual balance varies wildly.

The reduction in monsters in each area is there to help (albeit not a lot I don't think) with the heros reduced number of actions. Most heros can't use AoE attacks so the reduced number of actions becomes a severe hindrance. This allows them to get into the room so they can accomplish something. I know there are a couple quests (quest 3 in base book) where the Overlord will end up with no activatable monsters in the new area with this. I don't see it as a problem, but some could.

Damage Output:

The heros don't have as many collective wounds to go through when you reduce the number of heros. A group of all 8 wound heros in a 4 player game have 32 wounds total. in a 2 player game, that's the best they can achieve. 4 heros can position people in places so that they can protect heros that are low on wounds so the damage gets spread around. This is a major tactic and the heros can better manipulate when they would lose conquest. 2 or 3 heros can't do this nearly as much (2 probably can't do it all really). Overall damage output by the overlord must come down then when there are fewer heros. Note that I don't think individual monster or trap damage should be reduced. Only the total damage an Overlord can do in one session. Reducing a monster's damage output could make it entirely ineffective and make it worthless, which would be very bad. I don't think you were arguing this last point, but I figure it should be said anyway.

Concerns:

1) As I said before, the main reason for reducing the effectiveness of the spawn cards was for the 2 hero game. About the expansion cards with 1 monster on them (I think the only one automatically put into the deck is the Medusa one). Just remove them from the deck then or don't spend the Treachery on them. They wouldn't do anything anymore. Changing the relative power of the spawn cards will happen, it can't be helped. Even just making it so that the 2 sorcerer spawn become 1 master sorcerer changes it's power drastically. The heros choosing which monster to remove hadn't occurred to me. It's probably a better idea. Though I will say the Overlord does still need to be able to kill heros and the Masters are more capable of doing that (in most cases). Damage output can't be reduced too much. The heros choosing could do just that.

2) It would be impossible to balance every quest. The only way to do that would be to completely remake the game (which you did). Losing big monsters in some areas will happen. They usually appear later in a quest anyway when the heros could one shot them before they could go anyway, so is it really a big deal? In quest 4, it's possible to lose 2 Master monsters with Undying in 2 different rooms. Yes it's a drastic power difference, but it'll happen. Different quests will be affected differently. As I said, it's untested. Without actual testing for each quest, I don't think anybody can accurately say how things will turn out. One thing I thought of, was that the last room usually has two big monsters and the boss. Removing the two big monster could make the boss battle even easier, especially in a 3 player game. It may be better to have only 1 monster removed in the 3 hero game and 2 in the 2 hero game.

3) What I originally put down even I view as wonky. I was going for simple because I like to start with simple solutions first and work my way to more complex if it's necessary. It's how I like to operate. Playing with only 2 or 3 heros as opposed to 4 will change the tactics completely anyway. This may, or may not, help alleviate some of the major problems playing with a reduced number of heros brings to the table.

Solairflaire said:

Larger parties do get some advantage if they can distribute damage, but that advantage is a LOT smaller than you're making it sound, because a hero's max wounds are counted more than once when they die and get resurrected. Taking a hero with 12 wounds worth 3 conquest as a baseline, assuming the heroes get a total of 24 conquest during the quest, a party of 4 heroes that distributes damage perfectly loses after they suffer 129 wounds, while a party of 2 heroes loses after they suffer 107 wounds. That gives the double-size party a 20% advantage, not a 100% advantage. Max wounds become even less important if you use healing. And assuming perfect damage distribution is wildly unrealistic; in my experience, you'd be hard-pressed to extract even half of that theoretical advantage (and you're expending resources to control positioning, etc. in order to get it).

And if we're going to get into this level of detail, there are many other effects you should consider, several of which favor small parties. Against smaller parties, monsters are more likely to find themselves with no one to attack (possibly because all the nearby heroes have already been killed on the current turn), and end up wasting damage potential that could have been used effectively if there were more heroes around to attack. Monsters with area attacks can realistically expect to hit more targets on average when there are more targets to hit.

And monsters do get some choice over which targets they attack - there's likely to be a greater disparity between the toughest hero and the squishiest hero in a large game, simply because there's more chances to pick a squishy hero, and your odds of drawing armor treasures for every hero are drastically reduced.

There are a LOT of subtle issues that can make things easier or harder when you change the number of players, but the fact that the party's collective max wounds is higher is a rather small one.

Moreover, individual heroes' max wounds vary a lot already - two parties of the same size can have their collective maximum wounds vary by a factor of 2 just based on hero selection. The same advantage the party of 4 has over the party of 2, heroes with 16 wounds and worth 4 conquest have over heroes with 8 wounds and worth 2 conquest (and they don't need to jump through nearly as many hoops to exploit it). Do you have house rules to make similar reductions to the overlord's damage output based on which characters the heroes happen to draw? If the party's collective max wounds is such a big issue, I think the game is already sunk, before we even consider scaling issues.

One of the best ways to prevent a vanilla game from getting bogged down is to use the Advanced Campaign 'Reinforcement Marker' (Each area, any spawn after the first costs +15 threat). In a two hero game 15 threat is a lot.

In fact if you really wanted to make things easier for a two hero game, giving the overlord only one card per turn would make a real difference, if only for threat values.

Antistone said:

I fully agree with all of these remarks, but I just wanted to work out something where 2 (and, to a lesser extent, 3) heroes have a chance, versus almost no chance with the current rules. Balancing the game with absolute scientific precision would be too time-consuming to me.

I had the idea of playing a couple of games with 2 heroes for some quests with infinite Conquest at disposal, and then take the average Conquest lost for each quest and make that the starting Conquest for that specific quest, but unfortunately I won't have time for that. I'll have to content myself with some of the ideas given here and work out something with that.

Thank you all!

Ispher said:

Just out of curiosity, is there a particular reason you want to play with 2 or 3 heroes so badly rather than just dividing up 4 heroes among however many hero players you have? Always playing with 4 seems like the easiest solution to the scaling problem to me (ie: ignore it.) Scaling up is a harder pickle for those who find themselves with too many players, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for you.

Steve-O said:

It would indeed be easier to play with 4 heroes all the time. However, I prefer the concept of playing an adventure as one hero in another world. Maybe it's because I played some AD&D in my youth.

After reading Solairflaire's monster reduction ideas for scaling, I also realize that it could address the main complaint my group has for vanilla Descent, which is that it takes too long: less heroes and less monsters should shorten the game, as there are less figures to activate. This is why I want to try it out going the monster reduction route.

Of course the best way would simply be to create a custom-made quest for 2 heroes. Has it been done, by the way? In the Quest Compendium maybe?

Ispher said:

Fair enough. Well, be sure to let us know how it works out with the system you've devised here. I don't think our group would want to drop heroes even if there was a proven system for it, but I do enjoy reading about ways to modify games - especially ways that don't upset the delicate balance of something like Descent.

Ispher said:

Not that I'm aware of. I don't own the Compendium myself, but I get the impression that all of its dungeons are supposed to be "bigger and better!" than the quests in the core/expansion booklets. I would be surprised if any of them was specially designed for less than 4 heroes. You might check out BGG's file section though, and the fan quest database (if that's still around) as there might be a gem or two in the rough there.

Edit: Does this forum have some kind of script that looks for words like "drop" and removes them? I know it doesn't censor swearing, but it's uncanny how many times I've proof-read my posts to find the word "drop" missing. =P

I've noticed the forum stripping out doubled hyphens (-). But only in initial posts, not when you edit a post and put them in. This software is insane.

Making quests specifically for small parties is an idea I've seen discussed before, and there are probably some out there, but the thing you need to keep in mind is that, with no house rules, the overlord can come very close to immobilizing two heroes only using cards, even if the quest itself is just a bunch of empty rooms.

If they don't have AoE, a beastman war party or skeleton patrol takes a party of 2 heroes an average of 3.6 attacks to kill (almost an entire round), assuming that every roll that doesn't include an X is an instant kill and that they never need to waste movement to get into position for an attack. That's basically an entire round of hero actions, just to deal with a spawn card. And the overlord gets enough threat (on average) to do that every single turn - the only thing stopping him is that there aren't enough spawn cards in the deck to play one every turn, at least in the base game (I haven't checked how close he can get with expansions and treachery).

Now sure, that leaves the heroes 0.4 half-actions to actually make progress each turn, and not all spawn cards spawn 3 monsters (though kobolds and some treachery cards spawn more), but that's perilously close to the edge where the heroes might lose even if the quest itself doesn't do anything at all to hurt or hinder them. So writing a quest that's balanced for 2 heroes with no house rules could be..."challenging".

Antistone said:

Again a good analysis. In a custom-made quest for two heroes, one might indeed 1) need a houserule that the OL draws only 1 card a turn (if one doesn't want to mess with the number of monsters appearing on the spawn cards); 2) limit the number of monsters already in the dungeon to something like two or three per area (except in the last room where monsters can be more numerous); and 3) limit the amount of Treachery the OL can spend on spawns, or even ban spawn Treachery altogether (a Kobold Horde, if spawned in front of them, would indeed delay 2 heroes without a blast weapon forever).

Another possibility would be to set up as many monsters as in usual quests, but to simply remove all spawn cards from the OL's deck (and the Gusts of Wind). The OL would then just play with the monsters on the map, and with Power cards, Traps and Events. It probably would feel like something is missing, but at least the heroes couldn't get stuck.

All my thoughts and questions on this subject were for naught, at least in the short term: we finally were 5 players for our 3rd vanilla Descent session with me as the OL.

I chose quest 6 of the base game, The Eternal Guardian, as I wanted a not too difficult quest for a team of not very experienced players (they won quest 1 with lots of advice from me, then lost quest 2 without advice).

As it happens, I'm not a very experienced OL either: I forgot to put the Eternal Guardian in play at the end of my first turn, remembering his existence only after turn 4 or 5, when the heroes already had opened the first silver chest and entered area 2! I wanted an easy quest, but maybe not that easy...

Fortunately I had a Charge to catch up a little, so my oversleeping Eternal Guardian was able to reach them 4 turns later as they were entering area 3. Still, they had gone up to 16 conquest before I killed my first hero, so it seemed to me I was just playing to entertain them on their way to victory...

However, they started missing then. A lot. An X roll here, another one there, a double X on a crucial blast battle... While I was rolling well. They had found the Blade and killed the Eternal Guardian quite easily, and they had so many conquest that maybe they started caring too little about not dying. In the 2 rounds before the last, I reduced their conquest from 12 to 3 with four hero kills, but in the last turn, it seemed my Demon boss was doomed. He had already taken 5 wounds and had 1 burn token remaining, and was facing 3 battle attacks from 3 heroes (one being too far away)...

...And he survived with 2 health left! Landrec double Xed again, Mordrog hit twice out 3 (Knight skill), and, as the last attacker, Grey Ker ditched the Wishing Ring to get himself the Scythe of Reaping, and went on rolling no X on both of his battle attacks with 8 dice each... But got only 2 surges in the first attack and 1 in the second, thus not overcoming my Demon's Fear 3!

The next turn the Demon went to 1 health because of his Burn token, and with the help of a couple of remaining monsters, proceeded to kill the hapless Grey Ker and thus reduce the heroes' conquest to 0! They were tearing their hair out and banging their heads against the table... But all agreed that despite my dumb mistake at the beginning, it had ended being an amazing game!

One thing is sure: never again will they take their victory for granted in Descent!

Ispher said:

A friend of mine actually did that, in an insidiously simple design (I'll try and explain it as best I can remember). 2 straight pieces (6 long I think) connected by 4 corners and 2 2X2 sections into a loop. Entrance in the middle of one of the long spaces and a door on each end. At the end of each end of the other long piece is a rune door, with the rune to open each directly in front of the opposite rune door, and a Copper chest. Behind the rune doors is a stairwell that both characters must reach for a victory. Monster density is about normal compared to official quests

The reason it works out pretty well is because ,as something so small and with so few corners, the heroes can restrict the OL's ability to spawn with just a little tactical manuvering. But they can't completely cover everything without losing a lot of offensive potential, and they are force to backtrack some