I'm a fairly new player to Descent (our Overlord is new as well) and we've been attempting to play however it seems every time we do, no matter with who, all of the players (including myself) end up getting fed up with how cheap it seems to be. I figured I'd ask here to see if I could get some answers on if this is right or if we're doing something wrong:

1. We pick random heroes usually. It tends to end up that one or two of us get a "squishy" character: one with low armor and low hit points. The overlord constantly likes to march right past our "tanks" and simply farm our weak characters for exp. It seems like it'd almost be better for us to just stay in town at times. What gives?

2. We were playing tonight and ended up fighting against a giant. This giant had 24 hp, 7 armor, sweep, reach, all the goodies. It could also throw rocks that would instantly kill you unless you got a blank on the black die (only if the rock landed on you however otherwise you took a red die in damage). This was the first dungeon we had been in. With stock items, none of us could hurt it! (2 black + 1 red + 1 green on the melee characters = 8 damage so we could whittle it down). Our only option would be to fatigue ourselves for dice, hope for a near max roll, and whittle it down while suffering massive deaths. The overlord ended up with close to 30 exp before we called it quits. What's up with this?

3. Our overlord seems to like to be relatively cheap at the end of dungeons. We'll have cleared out all the monsters painstakingly; however once most of us are out, he'll drop monsters/traps on the last person and just gang up on them to kill them/delay them to build up threat for the next level. This is -extremely- frustrating. Is this right?

It looks sounds like you are playing the Advanced Campaign without having learned the necessary skills by playing the core game.

As many a poster on this forum will tell you, that is a recipe for a very disheartning experience, so much so that there have been people who have simply shelved the game rather than keep trying.

Others will say it better than I, but it is very important to play a number of adventures in the core game first in order to understand the mechanics and premise of the game before embarking on the Advanced Campaign offered by RTL and SOB.

This isn't a comment about intelligence or gaming ability, it is merely a comment about experience with the gaming engine of Descent itself.

I have no doubt that Corbin, Steve-O or James M. will be along to comment shortly and they have a fair amount of experience explaining the particulars of this type of situation.

FloppyDingo said:

The only thing you're doing wrong (in my personal opinion) is playing the advanced campaign without having learned the basic game first. Descent is not an "RPG board game." It is not a story-based adventure and there is absolutely no promise that the heroes will win in the end. (There's not even a "probably will win.") Descent is a highly tactical, no holds barred battle between good and evil. Cheap tactics exist on either side and unless the Overlord is willing to throw the game by not playing his best, those tactics WILL get used.

If you want to understand Descent for what it is, which I think will greatly help you to see the design intent and thus enjoy playing, I would recommend you play the vanilla quests included with the base game for a while. Rotate OLs from quest to quest. Since they're all more or less one-shots, don't be afraid to skip a dungeon you don't like, but play through them all to get the hang of dungeoneering in Descent.

FloppyDingo said:

Perfectly valid tactic. Happens all the time if the heroes leave a window of opportunity. In the smaller dungeons used by the Advanced Campaign it's that much harder to stop it from happening, too. You need to learn how to block LoS to the squishies and how to use your guard orders and other abilities to forcefully stop monsters from getting to the easy prey.

After you've got that down, you can also experiment with using the squishy as bait to slaughter monsters foolish enough to advance for the kill. This will usually result in the squishy getting killed, mind you, but sometimes it's worth it to draw certain targets closer to the tanks.

FloppyDingo said:

This is one of the harder dungeon levels for heroes who aren't yet well-geared. The rules for the advanced campaign outline the option of "fleeing the dungeon" and this is one example of when it would have been a good idea to do so. There are other dungeons to explore. Your ultimate goal in the advanced campaign is NOT to clear out every dungeon you come across. It is to build your strength and prevent the Overlord from conquering the world. If you find a particular dungeon is too hard to make progress through, you clear the heck out and go someplace else. Ideally before giving the OL 30-odd CT from your pathetic attempts to hurt the big bad boss.

This is one of the key things to understand about the advanced campaign. The dungeon game is fuel for the fire, the real meat of the AC is on the Overland map. Which cities have been razed? Where are the OL's LTs? How close are we to the next rumour (and what is its reward)? Etc.

FloppyDingo said:

This is a rookie mistake. You don't leave the dungeon unless EVERYONE can leave before the OL's next turn. If you foolishly clear out and leave one guy behind, he can and will (and SHOULD) get slaughtered for it. No holds barred, cover your ass or it's going to get beat.

"But he's using traps! It's still our turn!" If you play the vanilla game for a while, you'll learn how to deal with this. Generally you make sure the last man out can take a couple pit traps to the face and still escape, just in case.

If my responses seem overly hostile, I apologize. I'm not trying to insult you or scare you away from this game. What I am trying to do is make a point. Descent is a harsh game. There's very little margin for error (especially for the heroes - the OL can afford to make a couple mistakes.) The first couple quests in the base game are particularly easy on the heroes and then things ramp up slowly until Quest 5 or so (that one seems to be coming up a lot lately as a "really hard dungeon.") It gives you time to learn the game. Time that you need, BTW, since Descent's game play is significantly different from what a lot of new players expect. The Advanced Campaign has no training wheels. It takes the hardest aspects of the vanilla game, makes them harder and then throws you in the deep end. If you start your very first game playing AC, it's no small wonder you're feeling overwhelmed.

FloppyDingo said:

I take from your questions that you are playing Road to Legend, not basic (vanilla) Descent.

1. This is wrong. In RtL, each hero players draws 3 heroes and chooses one. Rules p. 8: Each hero player draws three hero sheets at random and chooses one of them to play for the duration of the Advanced Campaign. The players may confer with each other while choosing.

2. This is part of the game design. At the beginning of an Advanced Campaign, a few dungeon levels, namely those that feature one of the 3 biggest monsters of the game as leaders (Giants, Dragons and Demons), are not winnable by heroes without heavy casualties. In that case, smart heroes flee to retain their chances of winning the campaign; not so smart heroes throw their victory chances away by hard-headedly fighting their way through... Which seems to be what you did.

Think of it this way: in most fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings, heroes suffer setbacks, losses, and sometimes have to flee. Heck, Frodo is fleeing from Sauron's evil forces during the whole book! How do heroes prevail in the end anyway? By always doing the smart thing. And sometimes, the smart thing to do is to flee.

3. Your OL plays it right. However, you seem to be playing poorly your level exits. Here are a few tips to prevent this from happening. a) Always have all the team leave the level in the same turn. b) remember that some heroes may also leave by returning to town; only one hero has to enter the portal. c) Have the weakest heroes leave the level first. d) have the heroes closest to the portal leave the level last.

Good luck in your future campaigns!

I showed these replies to the guy running as OL and he said that we'd be more frustrated by the vanilla quests than we are by the AC. He says AC is easier.

The reasons he gave are:

1. He can spawn monsters constantly in the quests and not in the AC because he has a spawn counter. He doesn't have to spend 15 threat. He can spawn all the spawn cards he gets pretty much instantly.

2. Conquest Pool: Once we die enough we're done. Instead of losing a town we're done, it's us dieing and with how much we die...

So what gives?

I forgot a question he had: In AC, if he goes through the OL deck, does he take 2 conquest points from us? Or is that only for quests.

FloppyDingo said:

That's actually a reason that vanilla is easier, not harder. In the advanced campaign, you have to worry about long-term management of resources; you need to decide when it's better to run from a dungeon and how to invest your XP, and if you mess up, instead of simply losing, you end up fighting at a severe disadvantage (potentially) for a really, really long time. That's far more opportunity to mess up and far more time spent paying for it when you do.

But the bottom line is that there's way too many hidden variables for your conclusion based on reading the rules to hold up against the insights of experienced players. A lot of the variation in difficulty comes from the design of the specific quest or dungeon, not from the basic rules. And there are a ton of rules differences you didn't mention, such as the fact that heroes start with more skills, or that they can teleport to town at the end of a turn for 1 movement point instead of needing to spend their entire turn doing it.

If you're really concerned about the spawning thing, you can put some house rule limitation on how often spawns can be played. Some people actually use the reinforcement maker from RtL in vanilla, and refresh it for free each time a new area is revealed. But you might want to just try the game first.

FloppyDingo said:

I haven't played the RTL rules yet, only the base game. I'm fairly certain that he can not spawn all his spawn cards instantly. The limit is one per turn.

And there is no penalty to losing in the base game, you just play again.

If what you want to do is play the advanced campaign that is fine, but also, that means you will be learning both the basic rules and the advanced rules at the same time, and Descent is hard enough as it is to stack your deck that much against yourself. Keep playing, re-read the rules after every game, and develop some strategy. Also, never forget that the OL is a rat bastard, and that he is trying to kill you, and that turn-about is fair play.

FloppyDingo said:

It's three conquest for cycling the deck and in the AC he earns that conquest rather than taking it from the heroes.

I just spotted something weird in the answers. Either we have been playing it wrong or he is wrong. Can you flee a dungeon while 1 guy is in the portal and the others in the town? As i see it you can't since the portal sends to the next level and the glyph to tamalir so i fail to see how you do that.

and to quote the guy "3. Your OL plays it right. However, you seem to be playing poorly your level exits. Here are a few tips to prevent this from happening. a) Always have all the team leave the level in the same turn. b) remember that some heroes may also leave by returning to town; only one hero has to enter the portal. c) Have the weakest heroes leave the level first. d) have the heroes closest to the portal leave the level last."

The b part is either complete wrong since nothing in the book or rule says about using the portal as a glyph or i am missing something.

FloppyDingo said:

I think your OL player has secretly replaced the meaning of the word "easier" with "the way that I personally want to play." That's fine and dandy, mind you, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I think you'd pick up the game faster and enjoy it more if you started at the beginning and worked your way up, though. That's my opinion.

To address the points he cited:

1. It is true that the OL can spawn every turn in vanilla as long as he has the threat, but that's actually a useful obstacle to have in front of you. Learning how to manage a constant stream of monsters will help you deal with the more limited numbers in AC dungeons. Also, despite what your OL player might like you to believe, he won't always have Spawn cards in his hand to use, even if he wants to. Finally, it has been suggested as a house rule that you could use the Spawn marker from RtL in vanilla dungeons if you wanted to, flipping it up for free every time a new area is revealed. I haven't tried this house rule myself, but it seems to have won critical acclaim from those who have.

2. It's true that the CT pool is finite in vanilla and the heroes lose when it runs out. But it's also true that playing a single vanilla dungeon takes 4 hours, give or take, while playing a single AC campaign takes a few months at 4 hours per week. Yes it ends faster, win, lose or draw, but that only allows you to see a greater variety of heroes and skills in action over a shorter period of time. It allows you to make mistakes without completely screwing yourself for an extended period of time, and in so doing, to learn how to succeed. Besides which, IIRC, you said you quit after the first dungeon level when the OL gained 30 CT. You still lost and the game still ended quickly. The only difference is you made it through about 5% of the advanced campaign before giving up because it was hopeless. Had you been playing a vanilla dungeon for a similar amount of time, even if you lost as a result of running out of CT, you probably would have made it through 70-80% of the dungeon level. And you would have lost fair and square instead of giving up out of despair, which I have to believe would have left a better taste in your mouth.

I'm going to take a shot in the dark here and say that the real reason your OL player doesn't want to run vanilla is because the fact that the heroes lose everything at the end of each dungeon frustrates him. He wants a continuing adventure. That's understandable. Heck, the Advanced Campaign expansions arose from overwhelming fan outcry for exactly that concept. But if you keep going in blind it's going to take a lot of false starts before you have a real challenging, exciting game under your belts.

The "reasons" he chose to give you seem like they were picked specifically to frighten you away from playing vanilla more than because they were valid reasons. I'm sure he feels strongly about not playing vanilla, but I don't think he's being entirely honest about why. What's more, if I understand the situation correctly, he's decided to discard the vanilla game without even playing it. That's more than just arrogant, that's throwing away a sizable portion of the game. 3 of the 5 current expansions for Descent are predominantly vanilla material. There's a lot of good quest ideas in there you guys will never get to see if you insist on playing AC all the time. I will agree that the Advanced Campaign is a lot of fun and it addresses a few shortfalls of the vanilla experience, however, vanilla is a lot of fun, too. The advanced campaign might be better (subject to personal opinion) but that doesn't mean that vanilla is bad . Just accept that it's a one-shot dungeon and your heroes won't progress beyond killing the boss, after that it's all gravy.

If your OL absolutely refuses to play vanilla, then at least see if he'll agree to rotate the OL player from one campaign to the next. Understanding the OL's abilities and limitations will only help the whole group to play better. I expect it will take longer to figure things out this way, but it's better than one player racking up countless easy wins while the heroes fumble around in the dark and either fail to stop the OL or give up because they're losing too badly.

Drglord said:

You are correct that the party cannot flee if someone has gone through the portal. In order to flee, everyone must leave through a glyph. There are, however, two things you appear to be missing:

1) the person who you're quoting wasn't talking about fleeing a dungeon specifically, he was just talking about exiting the level safely. Whether you're fleeing or advancing, these suggestions apply (except the portal thing, of course.)

2) the heroes always get the first turn on a new dungeon level, so even if they "accidentally" sent one or more heroes through the portal when they actually wanted to flee, they can just use their first turn to flee from the starting glyph on the next level. It ends up being mechanically the same, so I (as OL) probably wouldn't even bother setting up the next level if the heroes informed me of this mistaken intent. I might burn a card off the top of the dungeon deck, but that's about it.

No it's not the same cause we have situations where we had 1 or 2 guys pass the portal and even though we decided to flee we could not until everyone passed the portal and we had half the guys in the portal and half in the town. He is specifically saying that you can do something with at least one guy in the portal which is wrong you can't advance to the next level and you can't flee. So this line i fail to see what he means

"b) remember that some heroes may also leave by returning to town; only one hero has to enter the portal."

Just clarify what he means by that. In which situation only 1 hero must enter the portal? Cause i fail to see any situation a single hero in the portal will do anything.

FloppyDingo said:

I thought it was 3 CT for cycling the deck, and yes he still gets that CT in the advanced campaign.

Drglord said:

This is incorrect. The dungeon level ends as soon as (a) all heroes have left the dungeon and (b) at least one hero has gone through the portal. Even if all but one hero left by returning to town, as soon as the dungeon is devoid of heroes and at least one hero is through the portal, the first dungeon level ends and the next is drawn.

If everyone has left by returning to town (nobody went into the portal yet) then the dungeon level does NOT end. The heroes may at this time declare they are fleeing and not coming back, or they may neglect to do so and continue with this dungeon level whenever they're ready to come back. (The OL still gets turns while they're gone, of course, so waiting a long time would be a bad idea.)

That was what i was talking it seems we were in error and handicapped our party. Will keep in mind. I find it weird that one guy through the portal and 3 in the town mean you can move to the next level. I read it again but it does say that so it is okay one more error to fix for next time.