Hello Decent Forum folks! I have a question for you that I cant seem to find in any of the rulebooks or FAQs for the game.

If a Hero buys an extra skill card, (no upward limit in the base game, doesnt appear to be one until Road to Legend which caps at 5) does that hero have 4 ACTIVE skill cards, or 3 active and he/she can choose which 3? There is no real clarification on this. Everything else seems to just stack, so the theory is that it just stacks, but having 4 active skills just seems ungodly crazily too powerful. (bear in mind I always get stuck playing the Overlord, so I hate the heroes to begin with with thier stupid goody-two-shoes attitudes, while they STEAL from me!!!)

Having another skill is good, but it costs a thousand coins. That's a lot of money, and there are a lot of other things you could do with it.

Remember that heroes cannot give each other coins, and a hero loses half of his coins each time he dies, so saving up that much is pretty tough (especially if the overlord is paying attention and targeting heroes with a lot of cash on hand).

Antistone speaks the truth. I rarely see the hero players in our vanilla games buying new skills, because doing so means they need to neglect other options (like treasures or training tokens) to save up 1000gp. Add to that the fact that new skills are drawn at random and we generally agree that it's not usually worthwhile. While it's true that there are some really good skills in there, it's also true that there's a lot of crap and mediocre stuff. More often than not, drawing a high level treasure (as high as you can at the time) is more cost-effective. At least it if sucks you can sell it back to reclaim half the money you spent.

Yes, I agree, 1000 gold is alot, but the reason I am having a problem with it is; The back of the base game has a set of Campaign rules. These say that the players keep teh same character, the only thing that transfers with them is the skills they have. After a couple of dungeons, everyone will have an extra skill or two, which would make all subsequent dungeons non-challenging for them since they will start the individual dungeon well ahead of the power curve the dungeons were designed around.

Slinthas said:

First, actually acquiring 1000 coins isn;t that easy, so no, after a couple of dungeons not many heroes will actually have extra skills.

Second, check carefully whether it says something like 'original skills' - I have no idea, just saying to check, because paraphrasing is common and often gets people into trouble.

Third, the 'campaign' rules are a hack tacked on to the end. They don't work well, they are not at all thought out and FFG understood this well enough to actually bring out proper campaign expansions in RtL and SoB. Simple, genuine advice - don't use them at all.
You'll actually find that you get a lot more out of the game by starting each quest from scratch. New hero draw, new skills, everything. You'll learn much more about varied tactics, be forced to use good and bad (or not so good) heroes and different skills, spread the results around a bit (OL will win more often with a weaker hero party and lose more often with a stronger hero party) and have to be inventive.
When you have played a bit, done most of the basic quests, and some from each expansion you are using, then you can progress to the Advanced Campaigns which add a significant campaign overview and change the basic game a bit, giving a real developmental feel and a lot more strategic purpose than 'wipe out all the monsters and steal the loot'. But the ACs are advanced and groups who go in without much varied Descent experience usually make poor decisions (due to inexperience and not understanding things) and can have a consequently painfully one-sided campaign experience.

Slinthas said:

The basic campaign rules only keep the 3 original skills they drew when they started, additional skills bought are turfed between quests just like everything else. Although the heroes do get progressively more and more money off the bat, which may lead to a fourth skill showing up sooner in later quests. They still have to deal with the same issues of random draw and money often better spent elsewhere, though.

That said, I agree with Corbon that the basic campaign was tacked on and isn't really worth using. It doesn't add much of anything to the experience of the game, and everyone who wanted a campaign seems to agree that those rules don't do the trick anyway. Hence the invention of the Advanced Campaign expansions.

In fact, base campaign rules don't see much use, since it is very difficult that the same party survives many quests in a row, without a single defeat by the Overlord. This assumes that the maps are 100% unknown to the Hero players.

The only case where I applied the campaign rules was between quest 8 and 9; they're connected by a small storyline and the first is quite easy, so we could beat it and proceed to the next with the same Heroes. We thought this was fine, in some way.

Our 3 Hero party lost after a promising start in quest 9; took the wrong turn, cleaned the room with the big monsters at a high cost (the death of 5 CT Lindel) and then lost miserably against a horde of critters led by a Master Bane Spider that webbed both Lindel (in a pit!) and the party tank (Trenloe). Astarra could not break the monster lines until the next glyph and we lost because the OL depleted his deck. The party wasn't very strong indeed, we managed to do quite well considering the skills we had (except Astarra, no Hero had decent skills, except Lindel that could have cycled his crappy Aura and perhaps even Ambidextrous and never wanted to). Having Lindel in a 3 Hero party is more of a hindrance than a bonus. He needs to be protected because the OL strives to bring him down early on. If the people who should protect him are only Astarra (a non offensive runner) and Trenloe (below average tank) the task can be cumbersome. Without Boggs the Rat we would have lost in the first area.