As far as I can tell this works like this:

1. You declare your Ready action.
2. You place an Aim order token next to your figure.
3. You make an attack.
4. You remove the Aim order token.
5. Your turn ends.

Did I miss anything? It seems to me that the Aim token never persists in any useful fashion: You remove the token when your next turn starts, but you can't combine order tokens so you can't also take the Guard order. This means you need to use the token before your turn ends. And doing anything other than taking an attack means you lose the token.

-K

Not quite. You only lose the Aim order if certain things happen.

1, You spend the Aim token to make an Aimed attack.
2, You move one or more spaces.
3, You re-equip your items.
4, You suffer one or more wounds.

Unless any of those things happen, you will keep your Aim order. So, in theory you could start the game and declare a ready action, place the Aim order and not do anything all game.

However, doing that would mean a very dull game for that hero. Haha

As Jonny said, the Aim order is not removed at the start of the hero's next turn like other orders are. That said, it is also true that the Aim order is useless for 99% of situations you're likely to find yourself in. In any situation where a hero might consider using Aim, a Battle action will do the same and more besides.

Not to throw too much into the ring here, but, while Aim is mostly worse than Battle, it does get a lot better with RtL, specifically with Power potions, since that one big attack missing can be very frustrating. With base JitD, however, two battle attacks are usually better.

OK, thanks. I was wondering why they didn't just make an Aimed Attack action part of the standard actions, i.e. a single aimed attack instead of a Battle action.

So I could have the hero take a Ready action: move up to a door, take an Aim order counter and wait. Then, when the door opens and reveals some targets he can attack.

-K

kjakan said:

Yes, and after opening the gate, you could declare a battle action with the first attack aimed

kjakan said:

Just to make sure we're clear: you could only make this attack "when the door opens" if your hero opened the door himself. If you did this and then waited for another hero to open the door, you would not be able to attack until your next turn, which means any "targets" revealed will have a shot at you first (and any wounds you take will cause the Aim order to go away.) Aim does not allow you to make an attack outside your normal turn sequence, that's what Guard is for.

gran_orco said:

Very true. Aim is very useful if you can declare it on one turn and keep it until your next turn to use. The key part of that phrase, of course, is "if you can keep it until your next turn." You'll lose the Aim order (to no avail) if your hero takes a wound or is forced to move from his current position, so a canny OL will try to ping it off the hero when he tries this.

Aim is very weak. It's probably the worst of the four order types- Dodge is also fairly weak, but at least useful occasionally.

There is at least one circumstance in vanilla Descent in which you definitely do want to use Aim, and that's fighting the demon boss in The Black Blade. It has fear and very high armour, and can only be damaged by soulbiter. You basically have to roll 4 surges to deal any significant damage to it and that's pretty unlikely without Aim, so you actually kill it quicker with Aimed attack than battling. But this sort of thing happens very rarely.

We play with a house rule that Aim orders are not discarded when used. They're still lost due to damage or if the hero moves, but you can stand there all game making Aimed attack off one Aim order if neither of these things happens. They're still a little on the weak side, I think, but at least useable.

I desagree. Aim isn't that weak like you are speaking. I'd say it is more specific then others.

It has its own role. Noone compares rest and run. Why than compare aim and battle?

In advance campain (Road to Legend) aim is a very usefull order. I cannot imagine kiliing dungeon level bosses without it.

There are some more situations in which you can use aim:

1. Shades. Especially when they block movement in tight coridor or stand on the glyph or on the chest.

2. Monsters that must be killed for sure. It could be powerful monsters like master dark priest or ape. And it could be monsters with cummulative HP + armor near at the maximum ability of the weapon.

Lets calculate when aimed attack better than double attack. Lets us presume we have a sorcerer standing on the chest. It has cummulative 7 hits (5 hp + 2 armor). Your charachter has 2 black dice for range attack and the crossbow in the hand. Your average damage without skills is 5. With 1 power dice added aimed attack will give us 97.2% chances to kill (1/6 * 1/6 = 1/36 to miss or 35/36 to hit) without played dodge by OL and 83.3% to kill with dodge card. As for the battle you need to hit both 2 times. Yes you will do 10 damage what would be enough to kill (5-2) + (5-2) = 6 damage > 5 HP. But if you need to hit both times it is two times to go through chanses to miss: 1/6 + 1/6 = 1/3. So it will be only 66.7% chances to kill without dodge card and only 50% with card.

Feel the difference?

volanchik said:

Rest and Run do entirely different things. Aim and Battle are both related to attack rolls, therefore there is a basis for comparison. More specifically, Aim and Battle can both result in the same dice being rolled twice.

volanchik said:

I don't think anyone here has refuted the idea that Aim results in a greater chance of hitting the target. What we do refute is the idea that said single attack is more valuable than two separate attacks, especially considering that most of the time you need to spend two turns setting up for an Aimed attack. I said earlier that Battle is more valuable than Aim 99% of the time, and I stand by that. The one situation you describe (the case where a single monster NEEDS to be killed in one shot) is the 1% where Aim is better. Having played Descent since shortly after its initial release, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen heroes THAT desperate to take out a single monster in one shot. If you want to construct scenarios specifically designed to make Aim useful, yeah, they do exist. The primary point here is that they don't happen that often in actual play.

As for RtL bosses, I admit I haven't played as much RtL as I have vanilla, but I think it's safe to say we've played each individual dungeon level at least once. I don't recall any of the bosses being that hard for the heroes to kill that they needed to stoop as low as using Aim to do it.

From our experience I don't remember at least 1 case when a hero set aim at 1 turn and used it on another. Our OL just hit the hero with order with one of his minions just to know what order is there. Rest, aim and guard should be descarded with 1 wound taken. Dungeon levels don't have lotsof areas, so no cases when a hero sets aim infront of closed door to make aimed attack on heroes next turn. Mostly we play rlt and there are several cases in wich I as a hero want to use aim. First of all it is dungeon level bosses. With average 25-30 hits and 3-5 armor it is quite hard to kill boss without power potion with shop items or early bronze. Even in full bronze every time we try to kill boss we use power potion. Sure we want not to miss with power potion, and without dodge card we can even raise a damage a little bit. Speaking about dodge, for the middle second level of a dungeon OL has this card for sure because of 3 of them in a deck. So, every dungeon level in wich we decided to kill boss and not to skip it, we use aim. Every hero who attaks. And that is more than those 1% you are speaking.

Second. Don't know about other OLs, but ours don't let us anything for free. On every chest, on every glyhp there are mosters. I won't be constructing scenarios, i'll just remember some of them.

1. Heroes are at the middle between starting glyph and one unactivated on the map. On his turn OL killed one hero (main damager) and stunned another, and put his monster on the glyph. On heroes turn we decidec that our better try would be to kill a monster on the glyph, so killed hero could immediately take action and not run from the start. One hero could aim + attack, second run to the glyph. Yes I count this situation as Need to kill for sure.

2. Main attaker (melee) just killed in the corner boss that was injured before and try to hide or run away from heroes. Trying to save tome time in turns to regroup (or sometimes regen for mana) with other summon or just to take more turns for heroes to clean the dungeon level for more cards and mana to start with on the second lvl. On his turn OL spawned 2 shades and blocked that melee atacker in the corner. That hero cannot attack shades by themselves, and only 2 other heroes could free him (range user and magic user), but one of him on the other side of a dungeon, and second one has his average damage power just on the line of shades HP to kill it. If the hero won't kill a shade in 1 turn, he will recieve 2 shots from shades back on 1-st OL turn, and all hero's party will waste 1 turn to go thurther. Same thing on the next turn. With every next turn there are more chanses to have a dodge card in OL's hand.

3. Every time we want to kill monster for sure. If we have 1 monster to kill and it not a target "for sure" then it move + attack, not battle. If we don't need to move hero then atack + guard, becuase it case of killing mob in first shot better to hit smth on guard, if mob not killed on first shot heroes could kill it on OL's turn. Actually see only one idea why better to use battle instead of aimed attack for single target: maximum possible damage isn't enough to kill a mob, but 2 average attack will do the job. As for case we have multilple targets aim and battle are not comparable.

So if we are speaking of single target we use aimed attack more often than 1% of the times (understanding that monsters HP+armor is about between average and maximum possible heroes damage).

As for vanilla, I admit, we didn't use aim too often. But we started to play descent from vanilla. And now more expirienced in game we play RLT. May be if we start vanilla again we will use aim more often, but not sure.

volanchik said:

BTW, orders are not hidden from the OL. Nothing in the rules suggests that they are to be placed face down or otherwise obfuscated after they have been placed.

volanchik said:

If that's the way your group plays then fair enough. We don't go easy on one another either, and yet the heroes manage to get through most situations without even thinking about using Aim. Then again, we don't split up the party such that heroes can get cornered on the opposite side of the dungeon from their friends, we keep LoS covered so spawns can't pop up and kill one random hero, and our main damage dealers are either ranged and stay the heck away from monsters or they're tanks with enough armor to soak a couple hits at any given moment.