I've recently started a Descent JITD game using Christopher Park's ideas for speed and balance as a basis. You can find his stuff here:

http://www.christophermpark.com/descent.php

There are a few changes to those rules that I am trying out:

The OL starts with 5 threat and 2 cards. and I'm limiting the OL's hand to 4 cards and keeping the single spawn per area rule from Christopher's work.

The OL can use 5 threat to declare an interrupt action (either move or attack) for any monster on the board in a new area when it is first revealed, one interrupt action per monster if the OL is spending up bigtime.

As per Christopher's rules, the OL can use 2 surges for 1 damage or range, or 2 surges for 2 life recovered.

It doesn't seem logical to me that a single hero can open a chest while there are monsters about, and suddenly the scabbards and packs of each hero where-ever they are are filled with good cheer, so if there is a monster loose in the area (by which I mean could actually get to the chest) then only the hero who opened it gets an item. The players all draw their cards (and 1 extra) and decide who's going to get what and which one whill be shuffled back in, but only the player who opened it can TAKE the item. The other items are still in the chest waiting for the other heroes to pick them up.

If no monster can get to the chest then any trap effects are resolved, the players divvy up the loot and have a town trip.

I'm toying with the idea that the curses within chests are not extra threats, instead they add power dice to each and every monster's attack from that point on. So if the chest had 2 curses, then all monsters from that point have 2 power dice extra (NOT per hero). With the ability to use surges for healing, range or damage as well as for threat, the OL has more options and the more chests opened, the more powerful the monsters get.

And on the sticky question of breaking a web, I'm having them resolve the webs one at a time, and the first failure binds them, whilst still using the RtL rule that melee power dice count. So a hero with 1 dice in melee would roll 2 power dice for the 1st web token, and having broken that, roll 2 dice for the second, and failing, be unable to even roll for the 3rd web token in that round.

I didn't really leave that as a question to be answered did I... ah well it was late.

The question is, what rule variants have people tried that they feel worked, and am I tipping things too far the OL's way? The player's advantages under these rules are that they have greater selection of up front skills, and greater selection of treasure items. The overlord has more things to spend threat on but less cards to do it with.

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steverey said:

Didn't read everything, but this caught my eye. Let me try to put this in context...

There's a power card in the overlord deck called DOOM!. This power card allows all monsters to roll 1 extra power die on all attacks for the rest of the game--so, basically what you're suggesting a curse could do.

The DOOM! card costs 20 threat to play, but there's also an opportunity cost of 5 threat because you could have discarded it, so the actual cost to put DOOM! in play is 25 threat.

Under standard rules, the value of a curse varies depending on the number of players, but the maximum possible value is 4 threat. That's...quite a bit less.

Additionally, stacking up this effect several times increases its power, because:

• the more damage the attack already does, the less likely that the extra damage from the new black die will be absorbed by armor
• killing the heroes more often means that they waste more time coming back from town, thus giving you extra attacks, threat, and cards
• rolling more dice per attack means more surges per attack, which means it's easier to pair them off, and you don't waste as many
• you've made extra black dice more valuable already, by providing more options for spending surges

I'm sure there are people who will argue that DOOM! is overpriced, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that it's 8-10 times as expensive as it should be. This change would be a really, really big boost to the overlord. Also, it's entirely possible to accumulate more than 5 curses in a single quest, so you might run out of dice.

Thanks for the analysis. The intent is to create better play balance of course, not to overcharge the overlord. One problem with increasing the effect of a curse is the random nature of when it applies. It would be most unfortunate if the 1st chest the heroes opened had 2 curses in it...

Perhaps a simple way to reduce the dominance of heroes in the later game is to simply have less chests and to remove the option to buy treasures in town. Their money would be spent on skills and training instead. The sorcerors will be sooo disappointed to miss out on the extra dice though...

Another possibility is to give the monsters exactly the same play actions as a hero, allowing them to place aim, guard and dodge orders, with perhaps the rest order allowing recovery of a single lifepoint.