Road to Legend says you have to have 4 heroes to play. How do you handle this if you don't have the same players week after week? Lets say for the sake of argument you always have 1 playing over lord but say one week you have 2 other players? Then the following week you get a few more people to come over and you now have a full house, one player per hero. Say this lasts for a few weeks but then the next two weeks its just you (the over lord) and only 1 player playing all the heroes.

So after looking at these examples do you handle this? Do new players play NEW heroes? If so how do you balance them out. If not how do you not loose a sense of story and cohesive adventuring? Since different players may be playing the same heroes you don't get to PERSONALLY customize your hero. How does your group handle this?

If it is the same five players (overlord and four hero players) over the entire campaign, then when one or two show up let them play their heroes and the missing players heroes, have them all choose the four hero characters at the start and just have others take their place.

If it is more than just five players, with alternating ones coming in during different weeks, and if you want it to run an RtL campaign properly then as a group they should choose four heroes that they play when there is a full house, having the other ones that show up when there isn't a full house play them in their place. Maybe make sure they are all there for the final overlord avatar battle, maybe for all Lt battles. Have the other hero players learn each others characters so they can fill in the gaps when you are missing players.

Bringing in different heroes, or new heroes creates all types of problems, the hero party is weaker, it isn't constant making it harder for them to work together as a group (knowing how others can move in your party makes strategy far easier). If you want to put in the extra effort you could make this work, but it would require that your hero players know their characters back to front and general gameplay back to front. And simply, if you aren't there to play your hero, you can't complain if the player who took you over did or used anything you had picked up. Since this is a game of the Hero "party" vs. the Overlord (key word being party), they should all understand that none of them is really out for themselves.

Otherwise can't help you. I have six gamers, but one decided not to play sitting out on game nights when we play Descent, and joining us in other card and board games that do have more than six players (this was by choice not by force, she wanted a few extra weekends to herself and she had no interest in learning the complications of Descent).

You sound like you're used to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. Such RPGs are fundamentally unfair games, where it doesn't particularly matter how strong the PCs are or how well they play, because the DM is effectively letting them win, by picking and choosing challenges he believes they can consistently overcome.

But don't let the multi-session format of RtL fool you: a Road to Legend campaign is not a TTRPG, or even a series of separate board games, it's a single gigantic tactical board game where both sides follow hard rules and try to win. The fact that it's split into sessions is no different than if you decided to leave a game of Arkham Horror set up while everyone takes a break to eat dinner and then continue the game afterwards.

Thus, having players drop in or out has just about every complication that you would have if you wanted players to drop in or out during a single play session of a shorter board game. You can kind of fake it (depending on the game), but if someone wants to have the full game experience, they need to be present for the full game (even if that game lasts 80 hours). And if that seems like an unreasonably long time to get 100% of your players to sit at the same table...well, that's just one of the reasons that I decided not to buy Road to Legend.

What would you do if you were half-way through a normal Descent quest and a player wanted to leave or join? You might redistribute control of the heroes somehow among the new set of people at the table. You might suggest that a new player wait for the next game, or that a leaving player should try not to join a game unless he expects to finish it, so as not to disrupt the experience for everyone else. You might try to fudge the rules to add a new character with "about the right" equipment, or delete a character and play with the rules for fewer heroes from that point onwards, but both of those can lead to significant balance issues and unfairness, especially if you're not familiar enough with the game to foresee all the repercussions of the changes you're introducing.

You have basically the same set of options with the same pros and cons when you're playing a campaign; the game just lasts a lot longer.

Keaggan said:

Personally, if I didn't have a consistent group of players who could commit to a regular schedule and keep it, I wouldn't start playing Road to Legend, or Sea of Blood. Those expansions are very long and very involved by design. If players are jumping in and out, not showing up every week, etc, they aren't going to maintain a consistent strategy. This means the Overlord player (presumably constant) will have a strong advantage. If any of the many and varied hero players to sub in are newbies, that will only compound the problem, not to mention extend an already very long game by forcing you to re-explain the rules every week.

If I were in that situation, I would stick to Vanilla quests, where a single group of players can play a whole game in a single night.

If, for some absurd reason, I were to contemplate running a game of RtL in the situation you describe, I would at the very least keep the hero group static. Draw 4 heroes and set them up at the beginning of the game, as the rules describe. Keep those four heroes, no matter who's actually controlling them in a given week. If you don't have four hero players, double up or run the extras by communal vote. A game like this is going to be complicated enough juggling so many people without mixing up the game itself at the same time.