Our group just finished up a campaign in Road to Legend and we ran into a few problems with potions.

In the final dungeon our overlord knew that he would not get his overlord deck for the final fight. He knew that he would have only his dragon. He realized that the only way for him to win the fight was to have us be nearly dead when the fight began. He proceeded to attack us just enough to bring us to near-death.

There was absolutely nothing we could do about this because for some reason the temple, when we need it most, has closed it's doors to us. So we could not go back to town to heal. The only way we would ever heal is if the overlord would kill us, but he would not take the final blow against us.

We had to resort to healing potions to try and heal back up enough to hopefully not get trounced in the final battle. With the limitation of only healing 3 wounds per healing potion, it took us several turns. By this time everyone had at least a +1 health upgrade from a rumor.

My question, why are healing potions not more effective as the campaign goes from copper to silver to gold. Should they not be able to heal more effectively and be viable the entire campaign? We realized the ineffectiveness of potions starting way back in silver, but we never had a problem with the overlord wanting to kill us until the final dungeon.

The healing potion thing combined with the irritatingly, laughable final battle really put a sour taste is our mouths. Why is it that the battle that means the most, the final one, the overlord is stripped off all benefits and skills of actually being an overlord.

We thought about this and proposed that the next campaign we will have the following values for healing potions

Copper - 3

Silver - 4

Gold - 5

Our original thought was a 3-5-7 spread, but we thought that might be a little much. Let me know what you all think.

DavidG55311 said:

You do have the option of killing each other. I don't like it, but if the OL is going to deliberately dodge the rules in some way then there is no reason you can't counter-dodge.

You do also get a large wound boost when the Avatar fight begins, so it is not a critically winning tactic for the OL anyway.

DavidG55311 said:

Because if the heroes actually get to confront him at his keep, he has already lost! They've beaten all the plots and minions and traps and mighty powers that he commands already and there is just his own personal physical prowess left.
In game terms the OL has already has at least one, probably two chances to win. He could of seiged Tamalir - he failed. He could have completed his plot - he failed (unless BvB plot, which is designed to weaken the heroes and reduce their overall power before a final battle).
For the heroes, having beaten all the plots and minions and traps and Lts etc of the OL, they have already done 95% of their work. THey only have the last little stretch to go...
LoTR would have been a fairly forgettable story if Frodo and Sam were caught and killed at the gates of Mount Doom.

But it is badly marketed by FFG.

DavidG55311 said:

I can tell you from personal experience that 6W for a healing potion (in 2 player Enduring Evil) is quite extraordinarily powerful. And that is when the heroes only have their starting, natural Wound levels.

I don't understand your logic. The heroes trounced the OL in the final battle, yet you want to give them even more benefits? Just how easily do you want them to win?

Even with the tactic the OL adopted, he had no chance, because when the final battle begins, the heroes gain +1 wounds for every 2 conquest they gained in the final keep; so they should never be close to death at the start of the fight. Your heroes didn't even need the potions.

The final battles are indeed very easy for the heroes in Road to Legend. There are however reasons as for why it is so: 1) the OL can win before, while the heroes cannot. To have a game that is overall balanced, the final fight needs to be much easier for the heroes than for the OL. 2) This is more of an emotional reason: having played a campaign for so long, it is "better" for the greater number of players, that is for the heroes, to have a satisfying end, i.e. to win. Also, in an epic campaign, it can be argued that it is "better" that the good side wins (what would we think of The Lord of the Rings if Sauron prevailed at the end? )

Overall, it seems to me that in Road to Legend, there are more or less as many campaigns that are lost by the heroes (usually by concession) as campaigns they win.

If you want a more difficult final battle, try Sea of Blood, which however is so difficult you probably won't even get there: I don't know of a single group of heroes who prevailed yet!

Ispher said:

I don't see anything in the OP's post saying the heroes trounced the OL. It is implied that they won, but only after spending several turns drinking healing potions to counteract the OL's tactic of leaving them near death and refusing to kill them. As I understand it, the OP's main complaint is that it's somewhat annoying to have to pause for several turns and drink potions if that's the only avenue the OL leaves you to prepare for a balanced fight.

I agree with the rest of your post, if the game gets as far as the final battle, the heroes have basically already earned the right to win the campaign so it's not entirely wrong that the final battle be easy. That's not what the OP was talking about though.

In response to the OP: I've never known healing potions to be worth buying in this game, vanilla or campaign. The heroes in our games basically just ignore them and focus on worthwhile potions (vitality and - in AC - power.) If your group wants to house rule healing potions in some way to make them juicier then I say go nuts. You may end up breaking other aspects of the game by making it too easy for the heroes to heal in general, so just watch out for that.

If your OL's motivation for this dickmove was that he doesn't get any cards, you could also try letting him have cards. Leave the town open the heroes and fight it out without any restrictions. That may wildly alter the odds on the final battle, but at least it would only affect the final battle and not the rest of the game.

Or you could go with Corbon's suggestion of killing each other to heal. Dramatic? No. Legal? Yes.

Steve-O said:

DavidG55311 hints at it:

DavidG55311 said:

Besides, he described his final battle in another thread:

DavidG55311 said:

The atmosphere must have been quite sour at the end of the game (maybe because of the OL's tactics), otherwise I don't know why the final battle was not fought out, as the OL still had a tiny, tiny chance (probably less than 1 in a million, but still, why not take it?) chance of winning the game if the 3 remaining heroes rolled nothing but Xs until the end of the battle. It would have taken them only 10 more minutes or so.

I've never made it to the final battle as the Overlord(always getting a map victory instead), but why is the Overlord at such a disadvantage? He's one against four, and his damage output is lower, but he gets the first turn, he can declare Battle and each Avatar has its own special attack environment and abilities (the Spider Queen has her Web strands, the Beastman Lord ahs his shadow clones, etc.) Or does none of that really help eventually?

zealot12 said:

His damage output is much lower.
The heroes have a lot of skills that can give them extra boosts.
The heroes usually have gold weapons and bonus dice, giving them 20-30 damage per attack.
They have fatigue, which is critical - they really can battle often, yet the OL almost never can because the heroes shouldn't be silly enough to end next to him if he is melee, or in LOS/range if he is not.
The heroes have potions available - fatigue, invisibility, combat boosts...
Basically, between skills like Knight, Rapid Fire Quick Casting etc and fatigue, the heroes will usually have more than 8 attacks per turn and the OL rarely more than 1. And they generally do about double the damage per attack....

We've had two, both non-events.
The Dragon Avatar starts at the far end of a large room - basically he can't get near enough in his first turn, let alone 2nd turn, to do much, so the initiative is completely with the heroes, not the Dragon. Admittedly I'd put all the OL resources into Tamalir raze strategy, actually getting 4 dice (twice with 2 dice IIRC) for razing but never rolling a surge, and Tamalir would have had a guaranteed fall next turn (Dar Hilzernod) if I'd managed to draw a 'Lost' encounter with Big Trouble, or if their mage didn't just make it out of the encounter that did follow (vs Diamond Manticores) by a single space thanks to the flying gold item. So my Dragon Avatar had like, 1upgrade and was just toast. We played it out, and I had BvB (the heroes runner was the traitor :-( ) but the Dragon only managed one attack the entire time.
The other was the Titan and my heroes had the Gold Knockback weapon (protected from CB by feats), which meant that the Titan only got the very first attack in IIRC, and then no more in the game - Titan gets hammered back into the rear corner. Titan runs forward (or readies forward with a dodge). 3 heroes hammer away at the Titan and the last bashes him back to the corner again. Rinse, repeat, until the bloody pile of rags in the corner doesn't get up. The Titan was reasonably well prepared too.

Perhaps the potions are not what I have a problem with. Perhaps it is the fact that the last battle isn't intended as a fair fight, only a conclusion.

Our group was very opposed to burning Tamalir to the ground. We didn't see how a team of heroes could even stop the assault even if we wanted to. To us the point of the entire campaign was to get together week after week and just dungeon crawl. Then we discovered along the way all these things that just didn't work, burn Tamalir down, game over, start again. Or he weak avatar final battle.

Sounds like we shouldn't play Road to Legend anymore and always play Sea of Blood. Although, it sounds like nobody has finished a campaign of that.

So is Sea of Blood that much better? Should we switch and never go back?

SOB has it's own problems. It's also new and the heroes need to think differently to have a shot at winning. Since you have RtL, maybe just a few house rules are needed.

1) You don't like the Tamalir raze strategy so you could always restrict it somehow. An option presented here on the forums quite often before is that the overlord needs to raze 4 other cities before he can try to raze Tamalir. This a variant of the SOB rules that state the overlord wins if 5 cities are razed. Another option my group almost implemented was that any lieutenant that attacks or is attacked on Tamalir only gets half the overlord's treachery to spend (round down).

2) Use the SOB rules for the final avatar fight which are based on the conquest over the entire campaign instead of just the Final Keep. Also, the heroes only get +1 wound per 4 conquest and the overlord get +2 per conquest. This was supposed to address the avatar fight problem, but it's still questionable how well that works since no one has posted about those yet.

3) Don't know if it was a problem or concern, but many people have sworn by the Divine Favor rules. Implementing those into RtL seems to keep things a bit more even conquest wise at least.

As an overlord in a SOB campaign, I'll state that I've noticed the dungeon levels added in SOB are smaller on average than their RtL counterparts. The heroes go through them as quickly as Gold level heroes did in RtL, and we're still in copper. The only exception is the Island levels, which are just huge, but nearly impossible to spawn in places that would be useful. Though I'll admit we've only gone through 8 of the dungeon levels and 1 island, so that's a rather small sample. My heroes also realized that the blitz strategy won't work very well in this campaign since lieutenants can get from city to city rather quickly. Time is much more constrained in SOB than RtL.

That's the way we've been playing: raze 4 other cities before besieging Tamalir.

Also, the one-sidedness of the heroes' victory during final battle can easily be removed by house-ruling the following:

Any hero that dies while exploring the Overlord's Keep(any of its five levels, or if that proves to be too difficult, just the last one), stays dead. I haven't playtested this, but what do you think?

zealot12 said:

I was going to answer that the OL just needs to play a powerful treachery card like Dance of the Monkey God and the heroes are toast, but then I realized your idea could indeed be excellent if there is just one little change: start the final dungeon level as if it was the final fight. It would mean that at the beginning of the final dungeon level:

1) The heroes get their hit point bonuses for the conquest they collected in the 4 previous levels (so they shouldn't die too fast);

2) The OL removes his deck of cards and his power cards from the game (so no keeping a card like Animate Weapons or Dance of the Monkey God).

The final level is then played out with only the monsters that are already there, which shouldn't make it too hard for the heroes (no spawns, no traps...), but which would allow the OL to wound the heroes before the final battle, and maybe even kill one, making the final encounter with the Avatar a little more even.

Yea, that sounds good.Someone should playtest that and see how it goes. The game should be fair for each side, and applying the restrictions of final battle on both the heroes and the OL during the last level seems like a good way to balance things out.

Hmm...with absolutely no threat or cards for the overlord, the heroes could take unlimited time.

They would be able to go as slow as possible and use all range to destroy anything in their way.

Depending on party make-up, I could see a hero party reaching the boss without taking a wound.

Thanks for the replies as well.

Our overlord has been interested in Sea of Blood since we finished up the campaign.

Just a side note, Kevin Wilson said at one time that the healing potions were modeled after the Doom health packs which give 3 wound tokens back to the marine. In Doom, health is a lot harder to lose and therefore much more precious as a resource to the player than in Descent. Kevin stated that modding the game to allow Descent Healing Potions to restore 4 wounds instead of 3 is a good change.

We tried playing like that in one Advanced Campaign, but the potions were so rarely used even then that we've since forgotten about it and gone back to the official 3-wounds-per-health-potion.

-shnar

DavidG55311 said:

Well, this can be remedied by removing treachery use from the last level of the keep. So the overlord does get access to his Overlord deck and does get threat, but is barred from using overpowered instant killers like Dance of the Monkey God.

Oh, and another thing to skew the game in the OL's favor: remove the reinforcement marker in the last level. After all, this is the overlord's base of operations. Why shouldn't he get unlimited support here?

So, to sum up,in the last level of the keep:

1)remove treachery to avoid abuse of instant killers.

2(remove spawning limit(reinforcement marker).

3)trade heroes' accumulated conquest for extra wounds at the beginning of the level.

4) any hero that dies on this level is removed from the game.(even prior to final battle)

Obviously, some tweaking and playtesting is required, but I'm sure playing around with these options and adding your own will finally balance things out a bit.