Are there any rules for allowing heroes to choose their own skill cards instead of just receiving them at random? If not, I was contemplating houseruling that if heroes wanted to choose a skill card, they could choose one card, then they would randomly receive their second card, but they wouldn't get a third skill card. Also, they wouldn't be allowed to trade the second card for something else. Thoughts?

Skills vary enormously in power.

I suspect that 1 chosen skill + 1 random skill will generally be better than 3 random skills. Even if you picked a trade-off where the random skills were generally better, it would probably still be in the group's interest to have one or two people choose skills to make sure that you got the really broken ones.

Is there a specific reason you want to let people choose skills? If people are getting skills they're really unhappy with, you could try removing particularly despised skills from the deck, or giving more than one redraw.

Me and my friends were just wondering if it was possible, that's all.

Well, I do not think it would be advisible without first rebalancing the skills--at least not if your players are prone to min/maxing.

Anything is possible, you can do what you want. Choose heroes, choose skills, etc.

Part of the nature and problem with Descent is that with the random mix, you can get something amazingly (broken) good, or something really not good at all.

Some of the quests (if not all) in WoD are apparently ludicrously hard. Maybe playing these with choices of hero and skills might help, but then you would get people picking the same ones each time

My biggest complaint about Descent is the emphasis on blind luck at the beginning: drawing heroes and skills semi-randomly.

I make my own dungeons and design them to be very monster-heavy.

What I do is allow the players to choose their own heroes and one skill card from a deck their hero normally has access to. Then they draw the other two skills randomly but may not trade them back in.

Yes, I see a lot of Bear Tattoo and Spiritwalker, but I actually see a good variety of skills. I certainly don't see anyone choosing Mata and Kata or Bardic Lore, but there are quite a lot of very good skills to choose from within each deck. But the way I design my dungeons the heroes are allowed to use their mind for strategy instead of depending on blind luck.

You'd likely enjoy how things are handled in Road to Legend (the campaign system) Heroes only start with one skill, but it's chosen from the three random ones drawn. After that, they can spend experience and money to train for a new skill, which is chosen by the hero. The catch is that certain skills are only available in certain towns, so the party will have to travel to a city if they want something in particular.

As for having a choice of skill in the base game, I would have to agree that 1 chosen + 1 random is much better than 3 random, as certain skill/character combinations as well as certain skill/player combinations are deadly. If anything, I would say that 1 chosen = 3 random.

Alternately, you could give them a bigger initial draw (i.e. 4-5 cards instead of 3) and have them discard down to 2. How many extra draws would work out to being worth getting one less skill though... I really wouldn't know.