I will start my first AC tomorrow with friends and own Vanilly, RtL, AoD and ToI only. Now I've read repeatedly that power potions are considered to be invaluable in Lt encounters. Power potions are the ones that come with WoD (5 power dice for the next attack), right? Seven questions:

1) Why are 5 black dice instead of (usually or at least in the beginning) 3 so much better than e.g. the effect of a fatigue potion? Fatigue also lets you add dice if you can spare it ...

2) Why would power potions be especially important in Lt encounters (and less in dungeons)? What's the difference?

3) Which dice are taken (always 5 black dice or the silver or gold dice the hero might have anyway + black dice until they add up to a maximum of 5 power dice)?

4) Once a hero has purchased 2 additional dice via training (and had 3 right from the start) power potions do not make any sense at all? If this is true, heroes should rather purchase dice of the next level instead of additional black dice, so the power potion could still add some black dice, I guess? Or do I get sth. completely wrong here?

5) Would you recommend to use the tokens of the AoD potions (invulnerability, which is excluded from RtL - why, actually?) as power potions and play with them as a replacement for an obviously important WoD feature?

6) Are there any other WoD mechanics which would be nice to have and could easily be improvised? I will finally buy the expansion anyway, but not tomorrow, unfortunately.

7) What are your experiences with the invisibility potions from ToI? In Vanilla and AoD quests we only used them if we didn't have anything better to do (resp. to take ), they never were considered as essential. Does RtL change anything about that?

Thank you

I'm only going to offer a few comments rather than answer all the questions posted.

In Road to Legend power potions are treated differently than in Vanilla Descent. Rather than max. the hero to five power dice, a power potion instead provides the hero with five 'boosts' to his power dice. Each 'boost' is the equivalent of either adding a black power die up to a maximum of five or upgrading an existing die to its next power level (ie Black-> Silver=1 boost, Silver->=1 boost).

The general consensus is that you will generally roll less than the maximum of five dice in order to give yourself a chance to increase the damage if necessary by adding dice (and boosts) with fatigue once you have gotten past armour. If you roll all five dice you have no chance to add dice via fatigue at a later point in time.

While power potions do have their uses in dungeons, in Lt. battles they are quite invaluable as the ability to greatly increase your damage is often a necessity in order to kill a Lt. before they can escape.

I can't really speak to Invisibility potions having never used them in play.

I also can't speak to including power potions in a game without all the other components from that same expansion also being brought into play. To me that screams of unfairness and potential balance issues. But without the actual components and such laid out for me I couldn't say for sure.

kalev said:

"If you can spare it" is the important part of that sentence. Besides which, a power potion can be used in addition to fatigue.

kalev said:

They're useful in both, it's just that LT fights are where you really want to bring your A game, since the LT is stronger than other monsters and usually defeating him plays a significant blow to the OL. While you generally want to have power potions in a dungeon, you really want to have them in an LT fight. That's all.

kalev said:

As written in vanilla, it would just cap out your 5 power dice, which is mostly overkill for the reasons you stated - ideally you're going to be using a hero with 3 natural trait dice in his chosen attack category, so the power potion only really adds two dice and negates the use of fatigue. This is why power potions are not popular in vanilla.

In AC, however, it has been stated that anything which adds "black" dice from the older expansions instead provides "die upgrades" which can be used to add a die OR to upgrade to Silver or Gold. This means the power potion is suddenly quite useful, as all 5 die upgrades can be applied (at least until later in the Gold Level) and there's usually room left for fatigue if you want it. Now that power potions can reliably provide their full intended effect, they are much more desirable.

kalev said:

I think they were dropped because +10 armor in a Copper dungeon could make it much harder for the OL to kill anyone. I'm not saying it's necessarily unbalanced, but someone at FFG apparently thought so. Using them as power potions instead sounds like a perfectly reasonable house rule to me.

kalev said:

I don't think anything about the AC would fundamentally change the usefulness of invisibility potions.

1) Why are 5 black dice instead of (usually or at least in the beginning) 3 so much better than e.g. the effect of a fatigue potion? Fatigue also lets you add dice if you can spare it ...

You don't want 5 black dice, just 4 at the most. The reason is that you can't do any upgrades after you roll if you already have 5 power dice.

2) Why would power potions be especially important in Lt encounters (and less in dungeons)? What's the difference?

Because lieutenants are how the OL wins the game, so killing them is key.

3) Which dice are taken (always 5 black dice or the silver or gold dice the hero might have anyway + black dice until they add up to a maximum of 5 power dice)?

I don't understand the question.

4) Once a hero has purchased 2 additional dice via training (and had 3 right from the start) power potions do not make any sense at all? If this is true, heroes should rather purchase dice of the next level instead of additional black dice, so the power potion could still add some black dice, I guess? Or do I get sth. completely wrong here?

Read the FAQ before playing.

5) Would you recommend to use the tokens of the AoD potions (invulnerability, which is excluded from RtL - why, actually?) as power potions and play with them as a replacement for an obviously important WoD feature?

I recommend no replacement. Just use the rules as written.

6) Are there any other WoD mechanics which would be nice to have and could easily be improvised? I will finally buy the expansion anyway, but not tomorrow, unfortunately.

If you can't use the entire set, don't use any of it.

7) What are your experiences with the invisibility potions from ToI? In Vanilla and AoD quests we only used them if we didn't have anything better to do (resp. to take ), they never were considered as essential. Does RtL change anything about that?

We used them a couple of times, mostly just because we were curious about them. IMO you can completely ignore them and you're fine.

Thanks a lot for your answers, got it.

Another issue: We started our first RtL campaign yesterday, played five weeks if I am not mistaken and noticed only afterwards (this morning) that we made two big mistakes:

1) We threw only one black die per treasure chest instead of four.

2) We misunderstood the market function of Riverwatch. Instead of discarding and redrawing only treasure cards (those which give you gold and pots normally) we drew new item cards endlessly after shopping one or two (and then continued shopping and again drew new cards etc.) until we did not desire any more copper items that week (and were nearly broke as well). We found this endless flow of copper items weird but did not find anything in the rules or FAQ to clarify Riverwatch until I checked the forum today and found some official answers which obviously didn't make it into the FAQ. Well, that was too late.

Question now is: How "broken" is our fresh campaign already due to these mistakes?

The first mistake seems to be in favour of the OL, at least I thought so. But then it came to my mind that by throwing only one die we reduced our chance to get a copper item and thus increased our odds to get 1 CT per chest a lot, which in fact was what happened: 1 CT per chest. We finished one dungeon (all three levels) with 5 chests in total plus some bone heaps and got more CT this way than we were most likely supposed to get. We currently have 34 CT (no hero spent XP yet) and lots of copper stuff, the OL has 35 CT and bought 1 treachery, one Farrow Brother and one other Avatar upgrade (he is the Sorcerer King, Ascension plot).

The Riverwatch mistake was undoubtedly in favour of the heroes, but there is no way to fix it now, we do not even remember how much money we spent exactly since we also sold some stuff. It was too big a shopping orgy to trace everything back and undo it.

So what would you say, shall we go on and grant the OL some kind of compensation? Or just go on as things are now? Or restart? I know by reading some campaign reports that copper, especially the beginning, is often the crucial part of the AC, so I thought I'd better ask some experienced players how to deal with our situation before spending another 80+ hours on that particular campaign.

If there's absolutely no way to determine which items were bought from the store you should definitely restart. Copper is definitely the most crucial part of the game for the Overlord and having an accidentally super-buffed group of heroes at that time is probably going to be a huge hit to his ability to win.