Hello,

I have a question that came up in our last RTL campaign. We stopped playing at the end of a dungeon level 1. The rules say to count how many cards are in discard and wrote that down, then pull out that many next time. My OL argues that this is neither fair, nor easiest, when he could simply put the discard pile in the OL box. What do you think?

I see an advantage later in the campaign as the OL, when he purchases treachery as a chance to get those cards back into play.

Why Does the rules say to do this and why would you not simply put the cards away so that the deck remains the same?

Since I am only playing RtL these days, if we stop in the middle of a dungeon, I save the state of the OL deck. I take three pieces of paper labeled "Draw", "Discard" and "Hand" and wrap up each part of the deck and then wrap the whole pack up. On restart I reshuffle the Draw portion to demonstrate that the deck is not stacked. I do this because I think it is the fairest method to make sure the same cards do not come up again on the next level. (i.e. If Crushing Blow is in the discard, it is unfair for that to be shuffled in and available on the next level when we restart.) This is the most logical way for me to play since you are really just pausing the game. I can see why they tried to simplify the rules or come up with a method that would always work.

Of course, this would be hard to do if you are playing multiple campaigns at once (probably unlikely) or you want to play a normal one shot dungeon.

Bravo McWilley said:

The RAW say to do exactly what you did.

I've had it work both to my advantage and my disadvantage before. For example, one time I shuffled the OL deck and discarded 12 cards. 6 of them were Spawns, and 4 of those were the best ones in the game.

Bravo McWilley said:

As Big Remy says, it can work both ways and is random.

The reason why it is done this way? So you are not locked out of playing a normal Descent game during the whole time you have a RtL campaign going.

I don't think it is a big deal to save the cards or not save the cards frankly. I have a games room that I can leave my RtL campaign set up in (I use a homemade oversize bloodbowl field as a base for the dungeons and can thus easily move the game to a side table when wanting the main table for a miniatures wargame), so unless I have packed he game away to take out, my cards just stay in the piles they were in before anyway.