Just curious now that Tomb of Ice has been out for awhile how well everything balances out (including all of the treachery, Feat Cards, etc....)

The zealots on this forum will often tell you that the game is perfectly balanced all the time, exactly 50/50 in Overlord/Heroes success, and if your experience isn't congruent to that, then you're playing the game wrong. So... you can believe that.

Reality is a little different. The expansions basically give 2 things to the heroes– better heroes, and Feat cards. (Treasure and Skill cards are about even in power with those in the base game.) With only a few exceptions, the Altar of Despair and Tomb of Ice heroes are tremendous improvements on the JitD choices. Feat cards are consistent pokes at the Overlord, but most of them are pretty tame.

The Overlord, on the other hand, gets a plethora of powerful spawn cards added with the expansions, most of which are significantly more powerful than JitD spawns.

It should be noted that there are no Skill cards added in TOI, although this particular deficiency is somewhat evened out by the lack of useful Treachery cards.

The net result is that because all the game components are a bit more powerful, the gameplay is more uneven, and more susceptible to being quickly swung one way or the other. For example, if the Overlord draws Danger! early, he's likely going to be able to play a power card very soon. If he doesn't draw any of those powerful expansion cards, it'll probably go the other way.

In conclusion, adding TOI to your collection will probably put the heroes in better shape than they would be without it. The components are also a lot of fun to play with. Assuming equal skill levels, and an earnest desire to win, the OL will probably prevail ~60% of the time.

Titeman said:

Probably slightly better than without it - the OL got a bigger boost from WoD and AoD than the heroes did, and the quests were much harder too. ToI is generally a boost for the heroes, bringing things back to a relatively even keel. That is looking at things as a whole though, not at individual games or groups.

I mostly play ACs though, so that's where my experience is coming from.

On the whole, I think it all works together well. The Feats are a very good addition which (loosely) balance out the Treachery.

In terms of the larger number of Spawn cards in the deck from expansions, I would really recommend the Advanced Campaign Reinforcement rule which is perfectly useable in regular games and which helps stem the additional number of Spawn cards in the deck. (Basically each spawn after the first per area costs 15 threat extra to play. See page 17 of the advanced campaign rules )

Perhaps a way of thinking about the expasions and balance is that they give you options so that if you're not finding a perfect 50/50 balance, you can adjust it. We wouldn't play a JitD quest with feats, unless perhaps we also wanted to try it with only two heroes and no Treachery. We certainly wouldn't play a WoD quest without feats, the Reinforcement Marker and most of a day to kill.

Other features such as skills, heroes and treasure don't significantly affect balance especially since they are random anyway. The JitD Fighting skills are still probably among the best.

phelanward said:

I don't know about exactly 50/50, but our group doesn't have any concerns about one side being more powerful than the other. The Overlord wins sometimes, the heroes win other times. Everyone at our table is satisfied that both sides have a fair chance at victory, that's all I'm saying. I say this without having used ToI yet - the last time we played vanilla it was prior to ToI and we never bothered trying to include it in the campaign games we played since.

I agree both AoD and WoD were big boosts for the OL, and I agree ToI looks like a big boost to the heroes, but in my experience it's not a question of enumerating what each side gets. Each new expansion throws one side or the other for a loop, but then tactics evolve and everything comes back to roughly even (based on our playing experience.) It is for this reason that I maintain the game is well-balanced as is and often question those who say that one side or the other ALWAYS wins in their games.

I'm not saying that I've sat down and crunched numbers to mathematically prove it's exactly even, but when we play both sides go all out and the win ratio is roughly fair. Maybe we're somehow beating the odds or subconsciously passing on the truly killer tactics, but we all have fun without needing to make house rules to "fix" anything. As long as we continue to have fun, I'm not too worried about how the odds shake out.

I don't object to the idea of house rules in general, but considering the number of illogical rules in Descent, I do worry about people re-writing half the book to "make sense" and then coming on here to complain about how the game is broken without bothering to think maybe it's their changes that broke it. If we can play by RAW and see a fairly even distribution of wins, I don't see why others can't do the same thing. If people want to make house rules to keep things fun I say go nuts, just make sure you know what you're changing and why so that you can change it back (or further) if it doesn't work out like you thought.

The concept of "game balance" is highly subjective. Some people think balance means each player has an exactly even statistical chance of victory, others think it means all players have fun while playing. I'm sure there are a few who think it means "I can put the game box on the tip of a pool cue and it won't fall over." As far as I'm concerned the game is balanced fine as is, nor do I expect that anything will change when we finally add ToI into the mix. Other people may feel differently, though, depending on what they consider "game balance" to mean.