First Question:

I am a new player to Descent (original JitD) and am looking for clarification to the limit of potions available for purchase. I am sure the potions that can be acquired are limited by the number of potion tokens available in the game much like the limit of shop items and their respective cards.

I (OL) was playing with some friends (heroes) and they bought all of the tokens (health potions specifically) since they were taking a beating. They insisted on buying more potions than there were tokens available and to just substitute some web tokens for health potions. I stated that the items were limited to the cards and tokens available... They then proceeded to complain. This is the same group I play Heroquest with, which really had no limit to the amount of potions that could be collected since items were written on a character sheet and not represented with a token/card. I let them do it this once until I could get clarification. It didn't have a huge impact on the game as I killed them and collected all the conquest tokens before they reached the the last room of the first quest.

I am hoping to avoid this situation the next game with some clarification from others who have played. Any help is appreciated and thanks!

Second Question:

Regarding the completion of a quest where the heroes are basically restarted (save for the skill cards drawn): Has anyone tried playing through to the next quest while keeping all items/gold attained from the previous quest?

Again, the group I played with didn't like the rule even though it was stated in the campaign/quest book. They wanted to institute a 'House Rule' and keep all items/gold from quest to quest while taking into consideration the limit of items that can be carried. This is another throw back to Heroquest where the heroes could keep the items from previous quests. I am afraid that this will break the gameplay mechanics and give the heroes too much of an edge over the OL and all his minions.

I realize this game isn't Heroquest, but the group I play with seems to be stuck in a somewhat nostalgic gaming mindset and want to play this game as a Heroquest expansion and not play it as the way it was intended. Again, any help is greatly appreciated and thanks for your time:)

First Question: To the best of my knowledge, uou are limited to the tokens that come with the game, no substituting other tokens for potions.

Second Question: It will horribly, horrbily break the game if you allow your Heroes to carry over their gold and treasures into the next Quest. Starting the next Quest with Gold level weapons would give the Heroes an insane advantage. The Quest Rules for vanilla Descent are not very robust, which is why Road to Legend exists.

Vanilla Descent is really a bunch of one shot dungeons put together with slight bonuses to the Heroes and OL.

If your Heroes don't like it, I suggest you guys go read the rules for Road to Legend and then pick the game up after playing through some of the JitD quests.

Thanks for the clarification! I love Descent and am planning on buying the expansions for it. I understand some elements from the expansions can be implemented into the core game. Maybe that will make everyone happy. Again, thanks for the reply. It was most helpful!

Everything from the expansions can be played with the core game. Road to Legend is the only one that you technically don't need the other expansions for, but they make it better.

If you are playing vanilla Descent IMO it's much more fun to draw new heroes and skills for each quest than play the same ones over and over again using the weak rules in JitD for a campaign. This way you get to see several different hero parties and skill combos and how they work together.