Me and my group have been playing Descent first edition frequently for quite some years (vanilla and campaign) , and i consider myself as an experienced Descent player And we Love descent first edition.. I own evey single piece of descent first edition that ever came out… So i was really hyped to get my hands on D2…

But descent second edition, its just horrible… first of all they took pretty much all the good parts from descent 1 and threw them away, just to make a simpler more comercial game suitable for kids.. The OL has no summon cards or summoning options, no threat tokens to make a resorce managing plan, no relevant traps or tricks… he just places monsters in an areas he is told… then reinforces monsters on the same space he is told every turn… ( probably the same monster over and over again)… The ol cards… most of them do nothing, and even if they do it has no relevance since it does not really matter if a hero get knocked out…(unlike in D1)…

Heroes.. Well instead of having tons of different heroes, skills and shop items and potions and treasure items like in D1 they made classes in D2 (8 of them to be exact)… So it basically comes down to 1 hero always having the same class (since one class is always better than the other one)… and so the same set of items… Then they took the best part of the game from the hero perspective.. orders; they threw that away and only left rest that is boaring, since the OL has no way to interfear with it unlike D1.

The new line of sight … cant even really coment that, now you can basically see behing mosters… if you go 1 space sideways… even if you are lets say in a 10 space coridor 10 spaces away from a monster that is behind another monster you can still trace line of sight to both monsters … Why didnt they just remove line of sight then, would make more sence…

Stun… stun a bos every turn and he cant do a thing … Boaring

All ranged monsters throw the same dice… same goes to melee… boaring

Quests have close to zero replay walue..

So many things are decided at random, even winners of acts…

I could go on and on …

The only 2 good things in descent second editon are: large monster movement, and that there is no city for the heroes to hide …

There were many rule issues in D1 and sea of blood was not even worth buying but Descent second edition now this is the biggest disappointment from FFG i have seen so far… This really should be a diferrent game like runeQuest or something not Descent …

svarun said:

If this is not a Troll post, it is an incredible homage to one…

svarun said:

In Descent 1 our Heroplayers always took the same shopitems. So there is no diference for me… That was boring.

I'm interested in how big your play sample with 2.0 is. After several plays, and indeed after just reading the rules and seeing the previews, I was pretty sure that people that love 1.0 would not care much for 2.0. Both games feel like they are built off the same system, but they do different things. 1.0 attempts to capture the progression of an epic RPG campaign within the context of each individual quest. 2.0's epic format spreads that out across an entire quest, with the Shadow Rune spanning 9 total quests. In order to capture those two progressions, 2.0 has to be very different from 1.0.

I do think your statements about the character classes being somewhat worthless is interesting, at least from the standpoint of being different from 1.0. My recollection is that most people could agree on what the "best" or most effective hero combos were in 1.0. 2.0, with some significant and varied plays, people don't seem to be in agreement at all. In fact, if anything is to be taken from the various comments posted on 2.0, the game is fairly well balanced and even, with many close games, but blowouts on both sides as well. Often you get all three options within the same campaign using the same hero mix.

I do miss spawn cards…but there's nothing in 2.0 preventing the addition of spawn cards in the future. I do prefer the goal oriented quests of 2.0, and I despised the portal/town aspect of 1.0. I think the sweet spot for me would be a mix of 1.0 and 2.0, with 1.0's longer dungeons/encounters using 2.0's rules and mechanics being more of what I would enjoy.

The only boring aspect of 2.0 for me is <basic> gameplay. At this level the game is so stripped down that the heroes feel very 1 dimensional. But play with even just the 3xp/150 gold start and there's a slew of build choices. And that's the fun part for me, putting together a style of play that's all for me, and then throwing it at the dungeon and making it work. Or sometimes not, as things go.

But either way I feel 2.0 has a MUCH better format for "choices" and strategy on the hero end of things. As for the OL, I will never complain about having fewer tokens to mess around with. You might see managing a resources like Threat as a perk, I see it as an unnecessary hassle. It speeds up the pace of a dungeon run without taking away the core aspects of what is fun: Fighting things and looting goodies. And maybe saving some people or something.

Although that does bring us to the 'treasure' aspect of D2. It feels pretty underwhelming, I'll admit that freely. I mean the items are all there in their fancy decks, but you aren't in the dungeon to get them. You're there to do whatever else that isn't getting loot. 1.0 was a love-hate relationship. The game was so unbalanced depending on the randomness of treasure chests, and I get that they needed to fix that problem. But I seriously think it could have been a bit more interesting than "don't give them items, just random potions, unless their REEEALLY lucky. Then give them 1 (not 1 per person) random thing". This is my only real gripe; not having the satisfaction of pretending to open a chest and pull out shiny objects.

That aside, I haven't had the time to play campaign style. Looking forward to seeing if saving up cash across multiple dungeons has the right kind of feel to make me forget I'm not just finding cool stuff laying around some musty old cave.

I find it hard to take people that complain about D2 seriously when measuring it against D1

In my group I buy and GM all the games and I can't stand not being ABLE to win which D1 was a one way road( but rarely to legend!)!

Thus it got very little playtime because I found it boring, and hated GMing it!!

Haven't played D2 enough to make a full review and I am very sure it isn't perfect for everyone but personally I am thumbs up so far!

svarun said:

1) A figure cannot have the same condition more than once.
2) Stun consumes one action, not a figure's whole turn.

Sorry if this is troll-feeding.

I just kinda hope that if he hates the game so much, he'll have no reason to post on the forum, and there won't be any chance that I run across more of his complaining.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't D1 about spreading heroes across the map so as to have line of sight everywhere so the OL can't spawn new monsters? How on earth was that fun? At least in this one, the heroes are grouped together and work together.

I do feel D2 can be vanilla at first, but the beauty is in the experience and development of heroes and OL over time. My gaming group didn't appreciate it as much after the intro quest but appreciated it more when they did fat goblin and saw there were rewards and choices which carryover from quest to quest.

RagePeon said:

svarun said:

Original Dungeons & Dragons, in three paperback pamphlets, was the only good version. All those later editions were just money grabs by TSR, WotC, or whoever owns it now -- Disney? Rupert Murdoch? al-Qaeda?

And Batman! Everything in the last 40 years is just a bunch of no talent hacks trying to milk the franchise.

I learned five card draw -- how can they even call all that other stuff Poker! Texas Hold'em? Please!

Oops, sorry there weren't more mispellings in that rant. You kids get off my lawn!

Triu said:

Haha, I think I can make that work, my imagination is pretty good. "Say, what is this item here? Exactly what I wanted? AWESOME!"

OP, thanks for posting exactly what my opinion of D2 is.

I agree with every point you made (except your mistake on how Stun works).

D2 feels like a Toy'R'Us game compared to D1.

MasterBeastman said:

Yes. WE KNOW.

radiskull said:

Was this done in Chester Cheetah's voice?

MasterBeastman said:

Great, now I no longer have to play Candyland with my nieces, nephews, and younger cousins! I can just drop by TRU and pick up a copy of D2E, or chess, and start right in with those. When they get a couple of years older, we can switch to an old Avalon Hill game like Gettysburg .

Yes i was wrong about the stun but that is only due to the poorly written text on the card…

I don t understand why you consider my post trolling i just shared my opinion, and i explained why that is so …

The other argument i think is worth mentioning is that in the D2 forum i see no know names from people that contributed most to D1 FAQ and that speaks on my behalf … Go figure why that is so …

Clearly D2 has a different audience than D1…even though you may call D1 unbalanced it did not matter that much in my experience … it was more about making the right play in the given situation with the resources you had at the time, and the thing was tha game gave you loads of options … and i think the more you really understood the game the more balanced it became, because you got to understand where the real threats were…

And don t be to smart on me if you have not played D1

svarun said:

You have some valid criticisms of the game, many of which have been echoed by other players. I had more of an issue with your tone and presentation, rather than specific points you made.

I have not played the original Descent, but I have been playing board and card games for over 40 years, and role playing games on and off since the ‘70s. I picked up this game because it seemed to be a good hybrid of my interests. I can understand that fans of the original version may disagree with the design changes that FFG decided to make. Keeping the same name is a pretty obvious marketing ploy, but it doesn’t seem like FFG tried to hide the fact that this was a major revision. This is not just a reprint with cleaned up rules.

svarun said:

Many people have no problem with the text on this card. It is easy to misread, but made sense to me when I read it closely. Language is an imperfect tool, especially when trying to balance clarity and brevity.

@ Triu

Gettysburg was awesome! W00t

@ many other people (to include the OP)

Descent 1st Ed was the mainstay of my gaming night for several years and I can say with a certainty that we loved it. I can also say with a certainty that I am well versed in 1st Ed. We played every expansion and ran one shot quests and season long campaigns. By the time we put the dice down almost every game piece had factory ink worn thin. As much as I reserve a place of honor for Descent 1st Ed, I am frimly of the position that it is/was a VASTLY flawed game. It had a great theme and huge doses of satisfying strategical decision making to be sure. But the mechanics of the game, to me, seemed always to vaguely fight against the fun. Threat management wasn't very difficult, nor often meaningful, but just a token slog. The spawning mechanic, though fun at first, became just another annoying factor that drew out hero turns to the far reaches of space/time. The quests were uninspired for the most part and the glyphs of transport were one of several game mechanics that killed what little immersion/believability the game had. I GREATLY enjoyed Descent 1st Ed, but….

Descent 2nd Ed is in my opinion far superior. It is just more fun. Choices are more meaningful, heroes can fill roles with far greater effect, the quests are actually interesting, the sculpts are not done by 7 year olds, reinforcing is much more believable, there are attribute tests, abilities are more intuitive and fun, the tiles look cooler, the defense dice are more like Heroquest (which is always a good thing), and my monster/hero collection is even bigger than it was before! Strategically, the game is just as deep as 1st Ed, just less clunky. The only drawback is that having just been released, 2nd Ed is not nearly as "rich" as 1st Ed was with all of the expansion stuff thrown in. Though there is already one of those on the way. Which, by the way, I must mention I am very pleased with. I like the idea of a small expansion with numerous additions to enhance the game. Plus, with only a few models, I will not have to go into seclusion in the West wing for a month to paint them.

Yeah. I agree, Gethisburgh was a great (and one of the first - a granddaddy of our hobby) AH game.

Regarding the complaint of the TO, well I hope that we never play in a one group. My taste what a good game should consist of is totally different than his. Descent 2nd edition has

-better and deeper tactics,

-plays faster and has

-better components.

Its vastly superior in every aspect to clunky and unbalanced 1st edition.

superklaus said:

When Descent 2 was announced, I preordered it immediately, for the two following reasons :

- much more simple rules

- fast playing time

I have enough other games which drag players throught the half or the night.

I am still waiting for the game (I preoredered the French version, due to come out in september), but all I have seen (read the English rulebook, looked at the demonstration videos on BGG, scanned different forums with diverse reviews) leaves me with a very positive expectation.

Saying that the game is "horrible" is quite over the top - even though I could understand that a previous Descent 1 player may not appreciate 2nd ed (but there are quite a lot of D1 players who definitely expressed that they will joyfuly switch to D2 too).

svarun said:

Any negativity about D2 is crushed immediately on these forums. Take it from me, I was here day 1 complaining about the lack of tactics and the broken rules. Even within this thread people have complained about me posting . Now I just "troll" by once or twice a week to see if anybody has realized how much this game sucks. I was wondering why they took down the D1 forums, but I think you figured it out - us D1 players have our game and FFG no longer makes games that cater to our playstyle (at least not ones called Descent haha).

My group and I have a very deep understanding of D1 and that's why we enjoy it so much - it was fairly balanced (RtL anyway) and very crunchy, the exact opposite of D2. Yeah, it took a long time to play it but that was one of the things my group liked about it, even though we all have "real life jobs".

It still boggles my mind how people can find the decision making in D2 to have any depth whatsoever. It further boggles my mind that people play D2 for its immersion. D1 and D2 are board games, not RPGs. They don't have immersion because they're not supposed to.

MasterBeastman said:

I wouldn't call the decisions in D1 deep. It was more puzzle solving, and since the objectives in most quests were all the same, it became boring very quicly for me. I like problem solving, but not the same problem over and over again. D2's varied objectives show the strength that was always in the system, v1 and v2, but the quests rarely made use of 1.0.

And if immersion is not supposed to be in either game, or boardgames at all, then why have any theme at all? Why not just have hero tokens and monster tokens? Why bother naming them, or having different kinds of monsters? If immersion isn't a part of the game, then FFG has wasted an awful lot of effort and money in putting immersive elements like neat figures, cool tiles, and all the art that's been created for the game. Every single one of those things is an immersive element.

MasterBeastman said:

Disagreeing with your opinion is not "crushing" … if FFG were deleting all negative posts, or censoring them in some other way, I would consider that "crushing".

MasterBeastman said:

I'm glad you gave the game mechanics a fair chance before you made up your mind.

Triu said:

My use of the word crushing is allowed and intended. There have been two responses to me in this thread alone that add nothing to the conversation but whose sole intent was to shush me because I agreed with the OP.

Further, I had my copy of D2 at 6pm Saturday of the preview event. I played the game all that night (having read the rules many times prior to the session). By the second quest we played we had already housruled that monsters couldn't double move. The Overlord still won every encounter by simply not fighting the heroes. We felt like that ruined the spirit of Descent. So I was here Monday complaining about it.

Also, replace the word "Immersion" with the word "theme" and you're describing Descent. A big part of what I like about Descent is its fantasy theme. At no point, however, did I feel like I was in the world of Terrinoth and that something bad would happen if I didn't stop the Overlord. That would be immersion.