I know the general wisdom in these types of games is that hero parties be made up of characters of various types that compliment each other, i.e., a typical party might consist of a warrior, a thief, a ranger and a mage, with maybe the occasional cleric type thrown in for good measure. I was wondering if anyone her has tried themed parties with Descent (either 1E or 2E), like say mostly warrior types or maybe all orcish types, a group of magic users, that kinda thing. (I had in mind 3 dwarves with either a ranger or mage with healing skills to round it out) Have you done this and how did it work out for you? Good idea, bad idea? What do you think?

Making a party of all orcs or something like that would probably work just fine. With the Conversion Kit, I'm pretty sure you can find enough of any race for that sort of thing (barring the more exotic races like Hybrids and Minotaurs, of course. =P) In general, any kind of theme that doesn't rely on mechanics would probably work equally well.

Making a party of all Warriors, or something like that which depends on limitng your game mechanical choices might not work out so well. It might be okay or it might not, depending on what exactly the theme is and how easily your OL can counter it. It might be barrels of fun, if your group is is composed of people who just enjoy playing out weird combos and seeing how it goes, but it would almost certainly mess with the general performance of the party in game.

Long story short, how good an idea it is really depends on the people you're playing with.

We tried several parties like

1. All Damage Dealers, withou priest - problem is that in first enc they got some damage anyway, and if they got enough damage in second they will fall and dont rise. They just stand up and fall down… Sometimes they can kill all monsters and win, but in some quests they dont have time to do this or reinforsement is near them - they died and loose

2. All tanks/surv/healers - too slow

3. All quick movers - fast but sometimes you need to kill and they cant, becouse if they stop - they will die

At all we find important roles:

1. tank

2. healer

3. loot picker/money maker

4. damage dealer

5. runner

6. area attacker(blact or similar)

7. tactical (stun/immobilise and other effects)

Usually every quest needs 2-4 roles to complete it, and if you dont have one of the roles its become really hard to win quest. So mixed party is really better, but all DD or all runners - very interesting gameplay.

Only one weak point - even counting that 4 heroes gets all roles(usually) that is weaker then 3 heroes because of overpowdering OL. (+minion to big monster is really more then +1 hero)