Hi,

I'm playing the original game, with no expansions, and while at first I thought that the role of the overlord was boring, by the 3 and 4th map the game started to get really fun!

However, I still seem to be lacking any good way of stopping my heroes once they get rolling, It seems if they can get past the first 2 rooms, they become close to unstopable!

I'm wondering if I'm missing some key rules or something?

This becomes overwhelimingly true in 4 player games, where if they open 2 treasure chests, they have 8-16 pieces of gear to trade between each other.

At this point they can become so strong that any of them can solo my strongest unit, and as a team, they just roll through the dungeon.

Has anyone else noticed this? Or do I focus too much on trying to kill them early, and leave my self weak for the mid game?

-sb

I had the same experience with my first game. I really don't have an answer either. I mean I got a few suggestions, but the players were really powerful compared to the monsters after they get a few chests.

Once they got a gold chest, they destroyed the boss room before my turn as the OL. I bought Well of Darkness; it is supposed to balance the game out for the OL.

The best balance for the late game is Treachery. Treachery makes the first part of the game murder for the players, and the late game just a little bit harder. Gold treasure got you down? Crushing blow it. Player's shrugging off your traps? play the extra trapmaster you picked up. It also allows you to spawn a lot of the better monsters that aren't included in the basic deck, which is nice because you usually don't see them unless you picked a quest heavy with them. Even then, it'd stink to have a troll themed dungeon but can't spawn troll reinforcements.

What expansion is treachery in?

I should say that my heroes are finding the begging of a game challenging enough, on map 3 of vanilla descent I was able to wipe them 3 times in a row in the first room (not counting the start room).

It's the mid-late game that is a walk, I've heard that the expansions actually make the game easier for the heroes, is this true?

If so what expansions?

Also, I'd like to hear your suggestions for making the game harder for more people, it doesn't seem to scale well.

The best Idea I've had is that the number of conquest tokens lost when the OL empties their deck should be equal to the number of players in the game, that way it's not so hard on 2 players (who have it rough!) and harder on 4 players (who seem to walk through the game)

Any other ideas? Or is this one unbalanced for some reason?

-sb

Back in the day, I tried many, many things to try and make the balance of the game scale "properly" with the number of Heroes.

None of it really worked all that well. Adding extra Heroes is just too big of a difference to come up with anything super-elegant. Eventually, I decided the easiest thing was just to always use 4 Heroes (even if you don't have 4 players - in fact, I actually like the game best with 3 players, 1 being overlord and 2 "controlling" 2 heroes each - although really of course everyone has input on every hero's move).

That said, yes, the later areas particularly of the original JitD maps are generally very easy. This is kind of a pacing "flaw" with Descent in general. The maps from the Well of Darkness expansion, which include the addition of treachery (which is useful, but it's actually the maps themselves that account for the true difficulty), are much, much tougher on the Heroes for the most part. Otherwise, you should give Map 7: The Black Blade from the original quest book a try if your Heroes are really finding things too easy...

Im a newer player, and our group has done around 6 games so far, over the first three maps. Except quest 1, the OL has won every time. Although the last game came down to the wire with the OL winning because I flipped the OL deck just before they killed the last named monster. My group thinks the game is favoring the OL. With the limited maps we've played, I've been able to guard the treasures pretty well and spawn as much as possible. I've been able to dent the heros by playing combination attacks in one round, like dark charm, timelyspawning, and using as many traps as possible (with trap master). i think once they start reducing their trips to town and start advancing faster, maybe using a runner they will start tipping the scale. but so far ive been able to deter them enough that time ends up on the OL side.

I'll give that map a try, thanks for the tip!

Cheers,

SB

To answers the question about what expansions do what:

Well of Darkness introduces treachery.

Alter of Despair really ups the treachery power and has the every so cool corrupted glyphs which an OL can have a lot of fun with.

Both Well and Altar introduce a lot of more interesting equipment, including cursed items that are a lot more powerful but add 1 to the conquest tokens lost when the OL kills the player who has them equiped. Also the town item list gets a nice boost, adding a blast weapon and stun weapon at low damage and high surge costs but it added a lot of variety. Also a few reprints, new ranged items, better armor for non-melee people, and a couple of cool potions (only 1 is used in Road to Legend but its very useful).

Road to Legend is a completely different play style, and all it adds to the game is a campaign element which is much better than the one printed in the basic set. If your players want a more epic and ongoing character development I recommend this one. It doesn't change much in what the characters or OL do in a basic dungeon but makes the dungeons flow together and paces the progression of the players better from one dungeon to the next. For anyone who thinks this is interesting, I agree with you completely but be warned: they spread out the progression the players spend a lot more time with 1 starting skill (that's right. 1 of the 3 they'd have normally started with) and progress slowly from that but its intentional and if you finish a whole campaign you'll see that its still balanced.

Temple of Ice is the one people complain about making it too easy for the heroes. The treacher was weak, the monsters were kinda weak, and the players had a shovel full of power poured down their pants. It introduced feat cards, they're kinda like free overlord cards the players have a few of and can play for big effects. There also were new heroes with abilities people complain are overpowered (see the thread about how the ghost character with her 1 VP cost for dying is broken).

The Temple making it too easy for heroes goes like this: "the heroes keep losing early in the dungeon!" "Well as soon as they get a silver treasure it all turns around and becomes too easy for them!" "Feat cards help us surive longer and make it possible to get past the first part of the dungeon!" "And then make you even more powerful during the second part so now the OL loses twice as fast"

The really bollucks thing is that with feats it just increases the pressure on the OL to kill the players sooner, and so when the OL doesn't hold back and pulls every trick in his book to kill the players sooner that'll just make the fight go on longer.

I'm Neostrider, and its been great. *cue panning out tv show music*

So just to be specific I have to problems I'm trying to address,

Sometimes I play with a grp of 4 heroes, and the game just gets very easy, very fast for them.

But mostly I play with a grp of 2 heroes, and they just get rocked early, then roll over me if they ever make it to the mid game.

I guess the problem is that the game either doesn't scale well or it isn't balanced for the early game, or maybe I'm a crappy OL.

@NeoStrider:

So I think we will be moving to RTL after we've burnt out on the one off version of the game. For the most part we enjoy different characters and traits every game, and don't want to be stuck with just one trait for more than an hour!

So, what expansion do you recommend to maximize the difficulty of the late game?

I understand it's not temple of ice, should we go with Well or Alter next?

Or does this just need a custom rule to fix?

@The_immortal:

What did you try to do to make the game difficulty scale for 4 players that didn't work, because I'm still going to try, did anything show promise?

I read something about adding extra pieces or not placing the whole map down, or not showing things out of line of sight...

But i don't want to do anything high maintance, anything that involves changing the maps, or anything that they have to trust me for, like me placing things in the dark..

-SB

Just for the record, it's actually Tomb of Ice, not "Temple."

I have the impression that the Altar of Despair boosts the overlord's power more than the Well of Darkness, but I haven't actually played with AoD yet, so that's just based on looking through the cards and such.

I am currently developing a rebalanced version of Descent ("The Enduring Evil") with new monster stats, items, skills, overlord cards, and quests. That should address the player scaling issue (among other things). It's coming along quite well, but I'm not done yet.

I did recently have one idea for a "quick fix" to make the scaling work better in normal Descent, but as I'm putting my energy into developing Enduring Evil, I haven't had time to try it out or even think about it too hard, so it may very well be a horrible idea. But if you really just want raw ideas to try out, the concept is to keep the heroes' wealth constant across different numbers of players:

• The game works normally with 3 heroes.
• With 2 heroes, each hero starts with 450 gold, instead of 300. With 4 heroes, each starts with 225 gold.
• Coin piles give each hero 150 gold in a 2-hero game and 75 gold in a 4-hero game.
• Coins from chests scale similarly--with 2 heroes, give 50% more per hero, with 4 heroes, give 25% less.
• For each treasure the heroes receive from a chest, in a 2-hero game, the heroes may choose one player to receive two treasures instead of one; in a 4-hero game, the heroes must choose one player to receive no treasure. (If you get multiple treasures from the same chest, you don't have to choose the same player for each one.)
• In a 2-hero game, each hero is permitted to drink up to 2 potions per turn, instead of 1. They can also equip 6 potions instead of 3, and can carry 4 items in their backpacks instead of 3.
• In a 2-hero game, each hero starts with 1 additional skill (they choose the type). In a 4-hero game, each hero receives one less skill to start the game (choose which type to lose before drawing).

This is a hack, in the sense that it would be much more logical to keep the wealth-per-hero constant and simply require the heroes to spend more actions to accomplish a goal in larger games--that's what Enduring Evil is doing--but that's much more complicated. Also, this is really only conceptually The Right Thing To Do if the effectiveness of a hero's actions is directly proportional to his wealth, which is very unlikely to be true.

Bottom line, the chances that this will turn Descent into a beautiful and elegantly balanced game are essentially nil; the best you could reasonably hope for is "heroes get a boost when they're weak and a nerf when they're strong." But if you just want a pool of ideas to consider, there's one.

That was exactly what I was looking for.

A boost to low player games, and a hinderence to higher player games, plus you slow down the item hoarding in a 4 player game..

Not sure why you think your idea isn't going to work , I'll test it out this weekend!

GL on your mod!

Is there a thread somewhere that talks about it that I missed?

Cheers,

SB