I've played a half dozen descent games, and I'm lovin' it! I have a couple questions though:

1. Why do demons, dragons and manticores have wings if they can't fly? Would it be so terrible to give them the fly ability? Or to lop off their wings?

2. Do any experienced players actually play versatile characters (who start with two or less points in any one trait), rather than always choosing focussed characters (who start with three points in one trait)? Like D&D, Descent seems to reward focus rather than versatility. When making home brew characters, I'm thinking of giving versatile characters two points in two skills. Is this a horrible idea?

3. Is there any official game errata?

4. Is the game overwhelmingly weighted in the heroes' favor, or am I a horrible overlord? (I'm lucky if I manage more than one hero kill during a quest.)

Thanks!

Tequila Sunrise said:

This is the home-brew section, for discussing player-designed stuff - new heroes and houserules etc.
Only your Q2 is vaguely suitable for posting in this section, post the rest in the main Descent Forum, not the Homegrews sub-forum.

That said...
1. Because they do actually have wings and can fly. They can't fly inside dungeons because their wings don't have space to unfurl. In later expansions (Advanced Camapigns) there are outdoor encounters and islands with dungeons where these monster get Soar ability and also Fly ability.

2. Yes, though the 1/1/1 trait heroes are generally very weak (Zyla from ToI excepted). Focus is better, but abilities and stats can be more important.
It is not a horrible idea to give heroes multiple 2 dice traits. Search on BGG for Antistone's hero generator program. He has done some serious breakdown of 'values' for stats, skills, traits and abilities. Multiple multi-dice traits are possible in that, even 3 or more dice in every trait (though any such hero would be heavily penalised in stats, skills and abilities). Even FFG's own make-your-own-hero allowed that, and in fact costed 2 sets of 2 dice the same as 1 set of 3 dice (personally I think it is slightly weaker than that but it is not much difference really.

3. Yes, quite a bit. Check out the support page . There are pdf's of all the rules (but not quest guides) and the FAQ, which contains a lot of errata as well as Q&A

4. Once you play with the FAQ it is a fairly balanced game overall, but depends heavily on the quest and the draw of heroes and skills. The first 3 quests though are meant to be easy for the heroes.
Also, never play with only 2 heroes. The scaling rules simply don't work. SOme people think 3 heroes is ok, others 4 being optimum. Certainly there is a considerable difference in difficulty based on the number of heroes

1. Because that's what the card says. Who knows? They all have the Soar ability for outdoor encounters in the extended campaign ( Road to Legend / Sea of Blood expansions). Giving them Fly probably wouldn't significantly change anything, though it's possible there are some specific quests where it would be important. I actually could've sworn that dragons had Fly ...

2. Focused traits are better than distributed traits; that's got pretty much universal agreement. That's certainly not the only consideration in evaluating how powerful a hero is, but it is a point in their favor. Point-buy systems for creating homebrew heroes (including FFG's official one, which I don't recommend using) generally charge more for focused traits, so heroes with distributed traits can buy other advantages. The hero editor I designed would let you get 2 dice each in 2 traits for slightly less than 3 dice in one trait, and doesn't even charge you that much extra if you want to have 2 dice in all 3 traits.

As for always choosing the heroes with focused dice, most people seem to play with randomly-chosen heroes, or give each player their pick from a random set of 3 (unless they're deliberately handicapping the overlord), so they don't necessarily get a choice in the matter. Heroes with focused dice tend to be rated more highly, but some of the best heroes (such as Varikas the Dead, Nanok of the Blade, or Okaluk and Rakash) have split dice and are good for other reasons.

3. Yes, tons of errata (some may already be in your rulebook if you got a recent printing, though). The FAQ/errata can be downloaded from the Descent Support Page .

4. The first couple of quests are overwhelmingly in the heroes' favor. They get harder. It also makes a big difference how many heroes you play with; larger parties have an easier time. The game is almost unplayable with 2 heroes; 3 is generally considered a good number for most of the base game quests, though some people will tell you to play with 4, and pretty much everyone insists on parties of 4 for the expansion quests.

Corbon said:

I didn't want to post two threads. IME, home brewers can answer both general and home brew questions intelligently, while non-home brewers tend to answer home brew questions with knee-jerk rules recitations. And voila, you and Antistone have already proven the former statement correct!

Tequila Sunrise said:

1: Demons, Dragons, and Manticores in the standard rules don't need to fly, since they can already move over Pits, Water, and Rubble unimpeded (Unless it's large chunks of such). But yes, they can fly in RtL/SoB, as a few people have already answered.

2: Personally, I like versatile characters. You might not deal so much damage with a weapon compared to the focussed people, but anything that's pulled from the treasure chests you can put to good use.

3: Already answered by like 3 people XD

4: In almost every game we've played, the Overlord has won (Mostly 3-person, but a few 4-person here and there) Though we've yet to do the first three quests.

Tadask Nezerull said:

This is false. At least, it's definitely false under the original rules, and people generally argue that it's false under the most recent FAQ ruling, though the FAQ ruling is so poorly-written it's hard to be sure.

Water and rubble block movement. You can't move into them without Fly , regardless of the sizes involved.

Large figures can ignore small pits, though.

Edit: Crap! what did you do the the forum software!

Tequila Sunrise said:

Nope. I don't do homebrew (just hang out here and comment, for interest's sake), just knee-jerk rules recitations. My reply would not have changed one iota (barring the first line) if you'd posted where it should be.

And I am sure Antistone would also have replied in the main section, as would quite a few more sensible non-homebrewers.

*Facepalm* My bad, Anti-Stone's right. Was sleepy when I wrote that