Our heroes can't win Descent. We get murdered a couple rooms into every quest. Our Overlord isn't trying hard and he's killing heroes with ease. So far we've played the first 3 quests in the basic game (the last one twice because we died so quickly). We've read the rules several times, downloaded FAQ's and errata. All of us players are very experienced gamers. No tactic we try works.

1. What advice do you have for players to win Descent?

2. Is there some commonly-misunderstood rule that gets heroes killed?

You've lost the first quest? That's the easiest in the game, poor old Narthak gets beaten up so much, a spoof mission was created in the Quest Compendium.

As for general advice, make sure you're using Fatigue, a lot. That sometimes takes new players a while to get used to, using Fatigue to move you around the board. A common tactic, declare a Battle action, then use Fatigue to move to one monster, kill it, then Fatigue to drink a Vitality Potion and move up to a second monster and kill it.

The game is very forgiving for beginning Overlords (there's not much in the way of tactics he has to learn) but much more difficult for beginning heroes (lots of tactics to learn/master). Play the first mission until the heroes win. It should really become *very* easy.

-shnar

well the only thing i can think of right now is, that descent does not work good with fewer than 4 heroes, so play 4 heroes, and that sould resolve your problems if that is the case... besides that there are many things you can be missing, just tell every player, that they should read the rules individually , so then you might figure what you misinterpreted or missed .

Last night we played quest 3, Problems of Life and Death. We died in Area 1. We started over.

We opened the door to Area 3 with 10 conquest tokens, and all three heroes died. The overlord did this by spawning 5 monsters behind us in Areas 1 & 2.

We can't keep characters alive. The overlord constantly runs past the melee types and kills the wizard with standard monsters. The wizard had 12 health and 1 armor. Two beastmen can easily kill him. What are we supposed to do?

We've read the rules. Everybody's read the rules. We're used to reading rules. Is there one that's commonly misunderstood or poorly worded?

We've learned a couple basic things. I opened a door at the end of a turn because I had some extra movement. That apparently is a catastrophic mistake in Descent. What else?

Heroes depend a lot on their special abilities and skills, so make the best of them. Fatigue is essential as well for extra movement and adding power dice to your attack. Knowing when to use orders is no less important.

I know what you mean though. It's not easy at all to play with the heroes; you constantly need to keep moving to outpace the overlord's spawning ability.Getting trasure chests should be your first priority. These will award your party with better equipment. Activating glyphs is also very important. Not only do they get you conquest, but if one of the heroes dies, he'll be able to respawn closer to where the action is. A lagging hero is a liability to the party and an easy target for the overlord. Make sure to move your heroes in a way that will get yout the largest line of sight coverage, as this will greatly decrease the effectiveness of the OL's spawns.

And definitely play with a party of four heroes; if you're short of players, have someone control two.

I also pretty much suck with the heroes, though I draw characters in random, which might not be the best way to create a balanced party.

• The scaling rules don't work. You should find things considerably easier with more heroes than with less.
• Descent combat is very deadly, so kill monsters before they kill you. Open new areas at the start of a round (not the end), use fatigue so you can attack twice (battle), and abuse any skills that give you extra attacks. Most monsters should die in one hit; if you're one or two damage short, spend fatigue for extra power dice to finish them off. It's not uncommon for heroes to kill all monsters in a room on the round they open it.
• Get high-damage weapons; yellow dice are mostly range. If using the base game, melee heroes should have a Sword or an Axe, magic heroes should usually get Immolation, and in the rare circumstance that a ranged hero doesn't get a Crossbow, it's probably because he wants double shields or an Axe - the Bow is amazingly bad. Heroes with 1 die in melee and 2 dice in another trait sometimes start with an Axe, because it's relatively inexpensive and does so much damage.
• Vitality potions are really, really good - to the point that you should rarely bother with healing potions. Some people suggest that every hero should drink a vitality potion on the first turn of every quest. Don't forget to save your last fatigue for drinking a potion, when appropriate.
• You don't need to kill all the monsters before looting the room. Getting the glyph and/or chest first is a common tactic. It may be useful to have some heroes waiting in town so they can teleport in once the next glyph is activated.
• You can give an item to an adjacent hero for 1 movement point; give items to the heroes that can use them best.
• Try to move through the dungeon as quickly and efficiently as possible; every turn you delay gives the overlord more resources with which to kill you.
• Spawns are very powerful, especially against smaller parties. Watch your lines of sight to make it harder for the overlord to spawn close to you (especially your weaker heroes) - the biggest threat is beastman war party, so particularly try to get LOS coverage within 5 spaces.
• If the overlord spawns slow monsters behind you, don't backtrack, just run away.
• Aim sucks; you should essentially never use it. Dodge is highly situational; the best defense is usually a good offense.

Some relatively common rule errors that might favor the overlord:

• Coin piles give 100 coins to each hero, not just the hero that picks them up.
• Chests give coins and treasures to each hero, not just the hero that opens them. For example, "2 copper treasures, 100 coins" means that each hero draws 2 copper treasure cards and gets 100 coins.
• Maximum 1 spawn card per turn.
• Monsters can't open doors to unrevealed areas, and can only spawn in revealed areas.
• If you're using the basic campaign rules from the front of the quest guide...well, first of all, you probably shouldn't, but secondly, lots of people seem to misread those rules and think either that the overlord gets that bonus every turn (he doesn't; only at the start of the game) or that the bonus cards are per hero (they're not; only the threat is). That's a relatively common misreading that can make the overlord ridiculously overpowered.

"We opened the door to Area 3 with 10 conquest tokens, and all three heroes died. The overlord did this by spawning 5 monsters behind us in Areas 1 & 2."

"Maximum 1 spawn card per turn."

Aaaagh! There it is. He spawned Beastmen War Party and Sorcerer Circle behind us.

Yea, it's impossible to play with the overlord being able to spawn more monsters than you can potentially kill

Use Rest and Guard orders; these help a lot.

Protect your weakest characters; keep them away from potential spawn zones.

Upon ending a hero's movement, try to position him so that monsters don't reach him;calculate the distance between the hero and the nearest monsters so you'll be out of range of their attack. This is easier accomplished against melee-attacking creatures.

No, its still possible to get overwhelmed by monsters if the heroes choose to push into the dungeon rather than deal with monsters as they pop up.

Use Guard to protect your softer targets.

Always get rid of Master Monsters as fast as possible.

Use cover with your soft Heroes so any ranged Monsters going after them will have to move almost into melee.

Never park a soft Hero next to a melee Hero, Dark Charm is bad.

Never take treasure until the room is clear. Also Encounter tokens are there for a reason, use them.

Zergonapal said:

This is astonishingly bad advice!

There is some risk on collecting treasure, but the reward is invariably much greater (especially with silver or gold chests). The advantages and bonuses from better equipment will almost always make clearing the room much much easier.

Two key points, one reiterating what other people have mentioned, the other surprisingly not mentioned yet (I think) but one of the basic precepts of Descent. The two are related I guess...

1. You don't have to kill all the monsters. The heroes' purpose is not to 'clear' the dungeon (which after all will respawn very quickly), it is to achieve the object, which is usually kill the named Leader. Cut of the head of he snake and the rest die with it (usually).
You do need to kill some of the monsters, to 'clear the way' and to prevent them killing you - the best defense really is a good offense (which does not mean that defense should be neglected).

2. Descent is a Race. It is not just a dungeon crawl. The heroes have a fixed amount of resources (cash. potions, chests, CT). The OL has a fixed amount of resources (starting monsters), but also a steadily increasing amount of resources (cards and threat, which include newly spawned monsters).
So the longer the heroes take to get where they are going, the more resources they have to contend with. The faster they go, the less opposition they have. Naturally, this needs to be balanced with defensive considerations, but overall, speed is the key.
Consider for example, a 'runner' hero (like Aurim for example, 5M, 5F but crap at combat). If he is lucky enough to draw Acrobat or Telekinesis then he can move through obstructiosn, or move obstructions out of his way. If he were to declare a Run action, and have a fatigue potion to drink, he gains 10MP from the Run and up to 9MP from fatigue->potion-refill->use refilled fatigue (would be 10 but must spend 1 to drink the potion). With that many movement points (Swift, Skilled or Tiger Tattoo will add another 4 MP each if he is lucky enough to draw them) he can frequently sprint through the monsters, loot a chest (all the other heroes get better!) and find the next glyph, activate it and escape to town. It might well then pay for most of the other heroes (especially the slow ones) to simply go to town on that first turn, as they can come out the advanced glyph next turn, saving them a lot of movement.

There is a long post in this thread (1st page near the bottom) on BGG where I wrote out some play-by play examples for people struggling with Advanced Campaigns. You won't be able to follow them directly without the AC maps etc, and the monsters (and some heroes) may be a unfamiliar to you without the expansions they come from (although this site may have information on some of those things you don't recognise). However they will gve your hero players some idea of what they can be doing. In vanilla terms these are very weak heroes as they only have 1skill!

Already have seen said, but, playing with 4 heroes it almost a MUST . If you are only 2 people playing as Heroes take 2 each etc...

Also as a small tip, try to go near obstacles, as some traps cant be used if you are adjacent to em.

Almost all of the advice above from other posters is sensible. I would stress, speed is absolutely vital. Wasting time picking up every last gold pile, killing every last monster, and opening every last chest is a very common mistake new heroes make.

One spawn per turn is an important rule- you should definitely remember this.

As a general rule, it is often quite reasonable for the overlord to be killing one hero per turn (certainly if you can limit losses to a hero every *two* turns, you're probably doing quite well); however, you should be gaining more conquest tokens than you lose each turn, certainly in quest 1 or 3. If you're not, you're not proceeding through the dungeon fast enough.

You may find this post of mine somewhat helpful: it features a playthrough of quest 1 with 2 heroes, which the heroes still won reasonably handily. Note we did make at least one rules error ourselves:

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/513562/back-to-the-beginning-into-the-dark-again-

If he keeps winning, try pickin your own heroes... usually a nice tank,wiz,rogue,archer types do well.....and always use gaurds, dont ever get in a bottle neck an always always... use potions to ease the hurt!!!......

Ignore helhounds unless you have nothing better to do. Yes, they can hit a lot of heroes (potentially, depending on where you position your heroes) and have high-enough Pierce they practically ignore armor, but they do a max of 3 damage, with something like a 25% chance of doing 0 damage and a 33% chance of doing 1 damage. That just is not a threat.

Also, rather illogically, generally bigger monsters are less of a threat. This is because they move slower, so have a harder time getting to your heroes. There are exceptions to this (like Trolls and Manticores)

I was torn to shreds by hellhound leaders in one of the Road to Legend dungeons. Fire and Ice was the name, I think. Then again, they had improved special abilities. ANd a bunch of razorwings to back them up.

By the way, about hellhounds: do masters have Burn? It doesn't say so on the monster's reference card. Because I recall the level description for the aforementioned dungeon said that one of the leaders' attack inflicted two burn tokens instead of one . Could be an error, I guess. I just want to make sure.

zealot12 said:

Yes, it is an error.

It seems likely that this level was designed using a very old base Descent set from pre-release. Given hellhounds have a breath attack, are hell hounds and the breath attack looks like fire, they probably originally had the Burn ability.
There is plenty of evidence of things that changed in the 'final' published first edition of Descent. See if you can find the Slime reference for example (pg12), or check the mistake in the combat example where a beastman hits Jaes (pg11).

I believe most players simply ignore the 'instead of one' part. It is, after all, unnecessary text in the first place.

In general, some of the weaker monsters in vanilla descent can become real powerhouses when upgraded in vanilla. Those with pierce usually get regular pierce bonuses as well and increased dice.
Manticores and hellhounds are quite ridiculously weak in vanilla, often failing to do even a single wound, but once they have a green dice or two and pierce 3-4 (from upgrading) they can really start to dish out some punishment!

Thanks. We have yet to try and play vanilla Descent with upgraded monsters from RTL, although we do use the copper version of razorwings, which makes them more of a menace