Started playing my first game of Road to Legend as the overlord yesterday and played through one dungeon.

Perhaps I am doing it wrong, but it immediately feels like the players are going to trounce me in experience points and conquest tokens. At the end of one dungeon on the first week, the score is like this. Heroes Conquest, 15, Overlord Conquest, 4.

Aside from the one conquest token I started the game with, I managed to kill a single 3 point hero in the three levels of the dungeon. On the other hand, it feels like the heroes are awarded conquest by the bucketload, +3 conquest for activating a glyph, +2 conquest per leader, +4 conquest per dungeon leader, +1 conquest on stray chests...

Kahai said:

Upgrade one of your monster categories to silver as soon as you can. That will make a difference. Eldritch is popular, but the other two categories can be good depending on your Avatar and play style.

Have you played much vanilla Descent before jumping into RtL? Don't pull any punches on the heroes, if you don't hurt them now, you won't get the chance later. Drop traps to slow them down, spawn near the mage and tear him apart if they leave a hole in their LOS, etc, etc. Descent is a highly competitive game if you want to have a chance of winning as OL. Don't try to make things "exciting" but ultimately allow the heroes to progress. Do everything in your power to kill them. Kill them a lot.

Also, don't forget your LTs. If you can't beat the heroes in the dungeons then maybe try for a Tamalir raze. Burn the world above while they wander around in the dungeons below.

I guess I do have a habit of pulling my punches sometimes, a habit which I guess carried on from my time as a D&D dungeonmaster. As for my Descent experience, I've played through about three vanilla dungeons before buying the RtL expansion (players and myself were getting frustrated with earnt treasure vanishing)

Kahai said:

Generally you are likely to struggle in the first level, break about even in teh second level and punish them if they try the 3rd. Generally.

But a good hero party played well can make life very difficult for the OL until you get that first Silver monster upgrade, especially if they draw easy levels and run away at the right time.

It is possible you could be doing some things wrong. Common mistakes for new OLs are:
- The reinforcement 'eyes' are reset for free each level.
- You keep your threat and cards between levels - the text on pg17 is screwed up in that the section is called dungeon level, but half of it is actually covering only the first level. In between levels you keep the same hand of cards left over from the previous level and all accumulated threat and do not reshuffle the deck.

Get and read the FAQ as well.