Can the heroes use fatigue to get extra power dice to help remove web or burn tokens? We could not find anything saying yes or no in the rules.

honKYkat73 said:

No.

You are allowed to use fatigue to add power dice to an attack, or to gain a MP. Removing tokens is neither of these things.

In general, rules don't tell you everything you can't do. So not finding anything saying you can't do something is, well, meaningless. There is also nothing in the rules that says you can't use tacical nukes either...

+1 to everything Corbon said. One major item he didn't mention, though, is that Fatigue is also used to activate many skills and hero abilities. Regarding the original question, note that Sahla can spend 2 fatigue to simply remove a token, without even rolling power dice.

Note however that web tokens are removed differently; you roll a total of the hero's melee trait dice+1. So if a webbed hero has one power die in his melee trait, he'll roll two black power dice , discarding one web token for each surge he gets.

zealot12 that is only so in the advanced campaign play

Is it? Having two rule sets can be confusing, Any particular reason why they made this distinction in the advanced campaign?

Because they love people being confused. If they didn't, they would have released a proper set of rules that wouldn't leave any room for doubts - and please don't tell me it can't be done. They issue errata after errata, and it's just ridicolous how amateurish it comes out. They should hire a proper rule writer and not just ask Kevin one question per year, and even then deliver it as ambiguously as possible.

FFG make great games, but the way they deliver rules is only worthy of some random street hustler explaining to you why he won't cut your throat if you spit up your wallet, or a retarded 4 year old asking you to clean his poo.

And also, if Kevin is such a great community guy, why doesn't he take an hour or two to clear all this nonsense? Probably he's too busy spending the 200$ he earned with Descent on some Thai hookers and 1% pure cocain. I almost pity the poor guy ...

Back to the issue - because Kevin spent 5 minutes with the advanced campaign, he probably figured it needed some rebalancing. So he did. Rebalance. Great. Thanks, Kevin.

I wonder why do people even bother asking questions, when obviously no one knows the answer ...

zealot12 said:

There are a bunch of abilities that appear to be arbitrarily different in the advanced campaign, which no official word as to why. Tomb of Ice (released after Road to Legend) printed the original versions, rather than the versions from RtL, so they're generally assumed to be intended to apply only in the extended campaign...on the other hand, one of the RtL changes was to add ranks to the Aura ability, and they gave Shiver a ranked version of Aura (even though the ToI rules don't define Aura as having ranks).

Other changes include:

• Defining ranks for Command
• Defining ranks for Reach
• Changing Ironskin to protect against all attacks that affect multiple spaces, instead of only Blast, Bolt, and Breath

zealot12 said:

I remember a lot of discussion back before RtL came out where people were suggesting this (the AC version) as a house rule that was "more realistic." Since the entire concept of the Advanced Camapign was designed to appease fans who wanted a more continuous game experience, I suspect this rule was changed as a nod to the fans (even though not all of us really cared in this particular case.)

TheWorld said:

... Wow. Okay then.

I agree that Descent's rules are a mess that just get bigger and messier with each expansion, although I'm not willing to follow your spiral into coccaine-ranting slander territory. =)

At this point I don't think they can do much to clean up Descent's rules short of releasing a whole new, revised and re-written rulebook to cover everything. Working within the constraints of existing game components - not to mention all the cards and quests with their own rules text on them - would probably make such a new rulebook a logistical nightmare. The best they can do is continually update the errata. Not that I'm saying that makes it all okay, mind you. As I said, I do agree with the basic principle of your statement, I'm just not sure what they can really do at this point to fix things. Releasing a new edition of Descent would give them the best opportunity to clean things up, but it would also probably alienate a large portion of the fan base who've already spent upwards of $300+ on all the kit this game has.

However, though it may be too late for Descent, FFG's newer games have shown a marked improvement in clarity and structure. I'm sure nit-pickers could still find fault (and will) but still, much better than previous games. I was particularly impressed with the Runewars rulebook, for example. That's the most recent FFG game I've purchased, so I can really only hope they've been keeping up that level of quality for future releases.

Steve-O said:

Though that begs the question: why don't new expansions for Descent get the same high-quality rules?

James McMurray said:

Because whatever they write in the expansion has to (at least theoretically) work with what's been written before, and what's been written before is neither clear nor precise. At least that's my theory. They try to make the new stuff as clean as possible, but without sitting down and completely rewriting the existing rules, it's hard to make sure all your bases are covered.

This effect is worsened by the fact that they can't (practically speaking anyway) alter the rules text on all the cards. All these treasures and OL cards and whatnot from the base game need to be compatible with whatever gets added in an expansion. Even if they sat down and rewrote all the rules in the rulebooks from all the expansions in one place, breaking it up into vanilla and AC, they'd still have to work around the original cards.

Don't get me wrong, I love Descent as much as the next guy. I apply generous doses of "the spirit of the rule" and " uncommon sense" (because I know how well the common variety goes over around here) and in doing so me and my friends manage to have loads of fun wading through this truly epic game. We do have fun with it, but there's no denying the rules are a mess, and barring a new edition I don't think they'll ever be able to untangle them completely.

Newer expansion sets, especially Sea of Blood, have massive rules problems that have absolutely nothing to do with past material.

Descent is highly modular in nature, so it does seem like many facets of gameplay were thrown together on the whim over a cup of morning coffee.E.g.,hey, dark relics sound cool, let's add those. And what about ship combat? Yea, sure, why the hell not, let's throw that in as well. Everything goes! The game is simply not rigidly structured to account for the many issues that arise.Still, it's fun all the same, and if something feels counter-intuitive, you can always house-rule it to better suit your needs.Or make up your own scenarios.

Don't misunderstand me, it's most definitely fun. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't. I just think someone high up at FFG realized how well Descent has been selling despite its rules, and figured there's no reason to fix what ain't broken, and that they could put that effort towards new product without a large devoted fan base. So we get crap like SoB's sea encounters, which sound great on the box but turn out to usually be a waste of time.

What's wrong with the SoB encounters? We've only done 2 of them, but even in Copper with a relatively weak ship, our players have all had fun and think the mechanics are fine (though they would have liked the ability to turn the ship)...

-shnar

shnar said:

It seems you are the outlier.

Non-ship encounters have been pretty bad (boring) for us, but ship vs ship has been a total joke both times. The heroes simply sailed off the side ASAP (turn 2 and turn 1) because they were totally outclassed (one was an ambush with the enemy ship starting across the T and the other simply a much better ship with better cannons and decent crew).

It takes a long time and much effort to set up the big map, because we usually play in a smaller space (big enough, but a lot of room is taken up by hero stuff (hero sheets, tokens, cards, skills, weapons etc), by OL stuff (draw pile, discard pile, threat tokens, monster cards, rulebook, Avatar card, upgrade cards, treasure deck etc) and by the little boxes we use for wounds/fatigue/cash, effect tokens and potions, terrain, etc etc), not to mention the main game board.

We're lucky, we have this massive table at my office that we play on, so have plenty of room. The encounter we had was a Green one, so while the heroes were the weaker group when comparing ships, they were able to hold their own, focused on killing the leader (which stopped the spawning) who was only a copper master beastman with a little extra, and then cleared out the rest of the beastmen and won.

I'm sure there will be worse encounters out there, but this first one went well and we're looking forward to our next one

-shnar

Corbon said:

Same experience here, anecdote time.

First week out at sea (3rd week in game), roll an encounter. Get attacked by a six cannon ship crewed with beastmen. The Revenge has 25 Wounds and one cannon. The other ship is the Despair (Galley, 3 Dragonfire, 3 Runeblast cannons - crewed by a master Ogre and beastmen), additionally the overlord is Captain Bones and he buffs ships. We take one look at this and attempt to flee, putting everything we have into trying to stop the opposing cannons firing, dodging to avoid being shot at and jamming the ship a hard to port.

Because our "wheelman" has only 2 in melee (which isn't uncommon) every turn the Ogre (rolling 4 dice) keeps pace with us. Shelling us with 1.5 cannons a turn for a lot of the encounter. We only escaped the map alive because the OL player made a few positioning mistakes and miscalculated the distance on the final turn - which resulted in his own ship sailing off the edge of the map.

We were darn lucky that the ship was crewed by melee creatures because the Revenge escaped with just 8 wounds left and Tethrys nearly died (3 wounds). If we'd been up against any magic or ranged monsters, or if the OL had stopped firing at squares with Dodging heroes in, or he'd rolled better than average for a wheel roll (or any number of other things that were likely but didn't happen) then that encounter would have most likely ended with a TPK. That's not what you expect for the first encounter at sea.

Worst of all, this joke of an encounter took the better part of an hour and both hero players hated every moment of it. It really soured the rest of the session for us.

So I think you can count me amongst the 'Sea of Blood Encounters Suck' contingent.

Styfen said:

You can use fatigue to man the captain's wheel. He should have dumped all of his fatigue the first turn and then let other people do the same on following turns if that wasn't enough to get you off the map. It still would have been a pointless and boring encounter, but at least it wouldn't have taken so long.

James McMurray said:

You can use fatigue to man the captain's wheel. He should have dumped all of his fatigue the first turn and then let other people do the same on following turns if that wasn't enough to get you off the map. It still would have been a pointless and boring encounter, but at least it wouldn't have taken so long.

But never mind, we're taking Elven Sails plus both ship upgrades so we can flee encounters faster asap.

On our first encounter, the only ship upgrade they had was Elven sails. Still the one canon, though Runemaster Thron is in the group (helps that he can just port over, waste the leader on the first turn). The ships started close together, so they were all within range and even melee combat in the first turn (swinging over). The attitude of the heroes might have helped, that they were gonna waste the badguys or go down trying.

We'll have to try a few more and see how it feels...

-shnar

Runemaster Thorn definitely helps. With him around, assuming he can one-shot a leader, there's little to fear from almost any encounter that doesn't have two bosses.

shnar said:

Sounds like it was 'Drums at Sea' which is one of the two easiest ship encounters and the only one that is green trails only. I only rate Rub-a-Dub-Dub as being an easier ship encounter.

Speaking of sea encounters I was running the numbers on the encounter deck.

I've split them up into four categories - the beneficial (of which there is only one card for green/yellow (Merchant Ship) and one for red (Ancient Mariner). Bad non-combat (Becalmed, The Tempest, The Albatross) and then Combat against a ship and without an opposing ship.

There's a few interesting things to notice.

Green Trails

Non-Combat
Merchant: 7.14
Bad: 21.43

Combat
No Ship: 21.43
Ship: 50

Yellow Trails

Non-Combat
Merchant Ship: 5.56
Bad: 16.67

Combat
No Ship: 22.22
Ship: 55.56

Red Trails

Non-Combat
Mariner: 6.67
Bad: 20.00

Combat
No Ship: 26.67
Ship: 46.67

But of course, once you've drawn the Albatross it's dead, gone from the deck for the rest of the campaign, so that alters the odds as follows.

No Albatross

Green Trails

Non-Combat
Merchant: 7.69
Bad: 15.38

Combat
No Ship: 23.08
Ship: 53.85

Yellow Trails

Non-Combat
Merchant Ship: 5.88
Bad: 11.76

Combat
No Ship: 23.53
Ship: 58.82

Red Trails

Non-Combat
Mariner: 7.14
Bad: 14.29

Combat
No Ship: 28.57
Ship: 50.00

(Someone may want to double check those odds, I'm never 100% confident when I run odds as I have mild dyscalculia).

Notes: The tier 4 encounters mostly in yellow/red with just Tsunami (Dragon) appearing in red only. The Demon even appears with his own ship, fortunately it's crewed with Hellhounds as well as skeletons and hellhounds can't man the guns. The Giant and Dragon come solo, but only the Giant can actually damage the revenge.

Personally I think non-ship combats are preferable to ship ones and a lot of the no ship encounters are relatively easy, apart from the two solo tier 4s the other no ship combats are against Bane Spiders, Manticores and Razorwings. I've tested those a bit and they tend to favour the heroes.

On the ship encounter front, until you have a well equipped Revenge you're going to be outclassed a lot of the time, the easiest ships are The Red Death, The Black Galley, The Barnacle, The Anaconda (it's only a sloop with 3 naga crew) and The Twilight (it only has cold steel cannons and a single dark priest on board.)

On the whole heroes are best off avoiding the yellow trails and sticking to either red or green ones if you have a choice. They offer better odds of getting the one good card and having combats against non-ships. (Though of course you're less likely to have an encounter on a yellow trail than a red one - but I don't like the idea of a deck with 10 ships in it personally, I prefer the 7 of the other two...)

If you're interested the creature split of the encounters is as follows:

5 Beasts (4 of those without ships, 1 with)

4 Eldrich (all ship)

2 Humanoid with a single Eldritch crewmember (and no way to reinforce for more - so basically humanoid ships with a slight boost)

4 Humanoid (3 with ships)

Colourwise the split is:

Green: 5 Humanoid Encounters/3 Beast/ 2 Eldritch

Yellow & Red: 5 Humanoid/4 Beast/4 Eldritch (with a slightly different mix of cards for beasts)

It looks like FFG attempted to keep the number of Eldritch encounters lower than the other two.

Please don't hesitate to correct any of my counting/maths if it is out. I've tried to double check it all, but as I mentioned I might have slipped somewhere and missed it.

James McMurray said:

QFT

Sea of Blood is without a doubt the most disappointing FFG product I have ever bought. Though the components were of their usual quality and I felt I got a good value for my money, the rules are a complete joke. Anyone who doesn't believe me should go read the rules for Tentacles and then tell me how to actually play with them without just making up large amounts of rules. And dare I even mention the reeking pile of crap that is the Quest Compendium (talk about good ideas being very poorly implemented)?

I do agree with Steve-O that Runewars had a great set of well-written and balanced rules (it's components intially disappointed me for its high cost, but it's game play soon won me over). I also agree that the only real way that they will ever "fix" Descent is with a 2nd edition or a revised rulebook. I'd obviously prefer a revised rulebook since it'd be a lot cheaper and I could keep using all the stuff I've purchased, yet I honestly wouldn't be opposed to a 2nd edition either, providing it was done right.

Trying to fix the gigantic FAQ will never happen. It is so huge and so flawed in so many places it would take a lot of work to clear it all up and would have zero profit for FFG if they did. I'm just hoping that they annouce next year a 2nd edition of Descent or a new and improved rulebook, either of which I'd plunk down the cash for (well, maybe after holding off just a bit to hear a little about it, to make sure it isn't the Quest Compendium all over again).

Yet somehow I get the sinking feeling that all we are going to get is another poorly made expansion. They'll probably just crank 1 out a year alternating between vanilla and AC until their sales totally peter down to nothing. Maybe then they'll come out with a new rule set or 2nd edition, I just hope it is much, much sooner.

Oh, and lest I sound like too much a naysayer or a hater, yes I agree Descent is an amazing game and I love to play it .

Kartigan said:

Yeah, last time we heard an official word from Kevin (a couple years ago) he said they had absolutely no plans for or intention of making a second edition at that time. I'm sure the logistics of starting over from scratch with something this big would be a nightmare (literally and metaphorically) so I can understand that position. I would also want to hold off a couple months and see what it's really like before buying, and I'm sure that attitude doesn't exactly encourage FFG to take the plunge either. But if it happened, I would be intrigued, to say the least.

And yeah, as long as they can continue getting sales out of 1e expansions, I agree they probably won't be looking that particular gift horse in the mouth. Kinda makes me wish I could stop myself from buying them, actually (I tried to avoid SoB, oh how I tried. In the end, the idea of having nautical kit for a Descent/D&D hybrid game proved too tempting.)