I obviously mean from the GM's perspective, I personally hated the first edition for that reason as the overlord you had to pull all the tricks out just to have an even chance.

is there any news on this?

Lilikin said:

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. As far as I can tell, you're saying "you had to play your best in order to win". What is wrong with this?

Additionally, most people complain that it was the OL who was overpowered and the heroes didn't stand a chance in most scenarios. Unless you were just playing the first couple of scenarios over and over again…?

I don't want it to be a cake walk for both sides!!!! I love when I have to think my a$$ off every turn

Can't wait for this **** game, it's everything I want in a fantasy board game and more!

Bleached Lizard said:

Some scenarios were a cakewalk for the heroes, others were really really hard and a single mistake could doom them (see scenario 7 with the Soul Reaper from the base game), even with the full complement of 4 heroes.

Some easy scenarios were more balanced with only a couple of heroes, too easy for more (1, 3, 6).

Some scenarios had a really hard early game for the heroes (scenarios 2 and 4), if they managed to get past the first room or two the OL was done, yet there was still hours of (boring) play left in the game.

And then of course there was the luck of the character and ability draw. If your 3 abilities were useful for your character and complemented each other well, the heroes were already off to a better start.

I believe that the game developers wanted to make this game as balanced as possible for both sides. I feel that as long as you have a good player to be the OL then everything should be just fine if you want a hard game. I know that my group picked the biggest jerk to be our OL. You can never be soft as the OL player. No mercy, no glory.

My perspective from looking at the previews is that the balance in second ed is going to be very much dependent on the scenarios themselves.

Primary reasons for this thought:

1) No spawn cards. How much the OL will be able to swarm the hero's is going to be entirely dependent on the scenario. (Although this does also make it sound like traps and events will play a bigger role in hero harassment)

2) No obvious win condition with Player kills (such as was the conquest points in 1ed). Combo'd with number 1 above, it's hard to imagine being able to swarm enough monsters in to keep all hero's KO'd at the same time (especially with 4 hero's), although this is entirely conjecture. So it appears that win conditions are also going to be entirely dependent on the scenario.

With so much dependent on the scenario, it's easy to imagine a situation in which the scenario objectives themselves are either radically in the OL favor or radically in the Player favor.

But really, this isn't so different from 1st ed, with some scenarios being significantly in the OL favor and some in the heroes.

I'm definitely looking forward to designing my own scenarios. Come on support page rules!

I'm wondering about treasure cards. Are there still going to be leveled cards? In 1ed once the heroes got gold, as the monsters didn't level, all my little baddies got slaughtered. And with the campaign part as heroes gain exp/levels/skills what does the OL get? Do monsters level up? We all know that a high level hero can destroy several lower level monsters.

ilikegames said:

The OL can add more powerful cards to his deck, a bit like treachery in 1E. Also, his monsters level up after the interlude.

Bleached Lizard said:

One step levelling up (at the interlude) isn't, sadly, as good as what came in RtL and the Copper/Silver/Gold/Diamond grading.

There actually doens't seem to be anywhere NEAR the amount of customisation as existed in the AC in 1Ed. Are we assuming that the campaigns are designed to be significantly shorter?

I think they will be shorter, yes. The current rumour is that a campaign is comprised of six quests (two encounters each), plus the interlude and finale.

Bleached Lizard said:

I think it might be more like 11 quests + interlude(s?) + finale; while the first quest only has a single part (First Blood), every other quest is a 2-parter. Apparently the interludes are longer quests such as we might remember from the first edition (not campaign play) "and two possible interludes (longer maps that divide the narrative at its halfway point)".

"A pad of these campaign tracking sheets is included with Second Edition,
allowing players to record the winning team for each quest. In addition to
determining what the next quest will be, this record helps establish other, more
subtle narrative factors throughout the campaign." www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp

If you look at the picture of the campaign pad included in the game "The Shadow Rune" www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/descent-second-ed/news/preview-1/sheet-DJ01-questpad-2.png , there are 5 main quests, each with 2 smaller quests underneath. I figure one of the two smaller quests is played after each main quest according to who won the previous scenario, i.e. if the heroes won, play the left-hand quest, if the OL won, play the right-hand quest. So for example, say the OL wins "A Fat Goblin", the next quest played would be "The Frozen Spire".

So a campaign will most likely be roughly a dozen quests in length, or enough for 3 months of weekly gaming (or less if you play more than a quest per evening). Still lots of gaming.

Columbob said:

Yes, I know all of this, and in fact agree with you. However, there is a rumour that a French distributor of the game has had a chance to play it and has released info that only three of the quests are played before the interlude, and three after.

However, I have a bet on this that involves me eating various parts of my body, so I certainly hope that you are right!

Maybe some quests will need to be skipped for some reason or other.

There might be some parts where one of sides wins you get to extra quest but other way you dont get extra quest. For example heroes need to get artifact from dungeon and when failed some goblin comes and takes its and you need to get him. In this case if heroes wins you skip quest automaticly cause you dont need to chase goblin but if OL wins you have to get it.

I just realized that all 37 maps included in the game appear on that same campaign pad.

Sausageman said:

That depends on your perspective. From what I can tell in 2e, there's only one major source of progression for heroes, namely, the class cards they can buy with XP. On the surface that would seem to be less than skill cards, power dice, fatigue and health from the 1e campaign.

On the other hand, 1e progression for all it's "options" was very one dimensional. Most heroes had only one attack trait that was worthwhile advancing, even those few heroes who could choose between two or all three traits would generally be best advised to pick one and go whole hog into that trait. Health and fatigue were very restricted (three options to choose one OR the other throughout the campaign.) That left only skills as a serious progression with any kind of choice involved. At least the campaign made skill collection non-random, otherwise there would've been no serious progression choices to make.

2e has only the class deck (that we've seen so far), but that class deck appears to be composed of several "small skills" if you will, that allow the hero to focus on one of several combo paths. Knights (already a class choice made) can apparently focus on protecting friends versus dealing damage, or presumably mixing and matching the two paths to find a middle road of your own. I also wouldn't be at all surprised if there were a handful of class cards in the mix that do nothing more than provide a raw boost to this attribute or that, effectively making a parallel for the purchase of power dice.

Just because all the character advancement options come from one deck of cards doesn't necessarily mean the options are limited. And depending on how many such cards a hero can expect to purchase over the course of the campaign, it may well be possible to continue advancing the hero above and beyond that game. Even if the campaign in the box is relatively short, I have little doubt that there will be expansions and fan-made campaigns to keep going with.

Lilikin said:

you sure you were playing Descent? i cannot remember a single time when the OL was ever in a bad position to not utterly crush the heroes. Hell, they had to add a mechanic later just to help with this problem when the campaign system was introduced.

Baenre said:

In my experience, the OL is usually able to crush the heroes easily for the first part of a quest (pre-silver gear), and generally finds it impossible to defeat them for the latter part of the quest (after they get gold gear.) If your OL seemed to win too easily, it was likely because he had no qualms about crushing the heroes early.

I do hope the game remains a competitive challenge for both teams, but my hope for 2e is that it will remain evenly challenging throughout. So that both OL and Heroes can do their best and both stand a roughly even chance of winning at any point during a given quest. Only time will tell how well or how poorly that pans out with 2e, however.

Steve-O said:

Many quests in WoD didn't even have gold chests. I think following the feedback from the base game where the heroes could find loot galore and easily walk over the OL, they cut back a lot and some of those WoD quests are probably the hardest in the game.