Yes I read the reach thing with the off-hand bonus with raised eyebrows. I'm sure I've seen a 1 handed magic attack, and a nasty one at that - I think its in RtL. I figure if a hero wants to carry a weapon rather than a shield in the off hand when they are a range or magic attacker, and have the hands to do it, they might as well get some benefit from it. Unless they re-equip, they have to live with the absence of the shield during the OL's turn.

steverey said:

I agree with Antistone, and to the best of my knowledge there are no one handed magic weapons. All the staffs and runes are two handed.

KAGE13 said:

Last game we played it was close to 3-to-1 until Gold level. Then we just rocked the OL once we got gold weapons. Throughout the game we didn't get any Talimar upgrades (probably a mistake; only our second RtL game) and not everyone *bought* three skills (remember you get a free skill or dice upgrade from Fool's Rapids). The OL had all upgrades except for his two most expensive treachery (monster) and one of the worthless avatar upgrades (a generic one, forgot which). He also had Obsidian Shackles, so he had to spend a lot of XP for the plot.

Looking back at our reports, my character ended with:
3 skills, two of which were free (starting skill and Fool's Rapids): Knight, Unmovable, and Weapon Mastery
3 fatigue upgrades
2 black dice, 1 silver dice, 2 gold dice

The silver/gold dice and one fatigue upgrade weren't purchased until Gold level. I used Longspear along with two melee damage Others for a flat +5 damage. I was averaging ~31 damage per attack easily. And I had *four* attacks, with Knight + Unmovable's free guard order.

We annihilated his avatar (Great Wyrm). It died in two turns + a final guard order on the OL's turn. The reason? He didn't use Crushing Blow enough. Longspear just raped his poor Dragon with Fear 5 (or 6?). He was easily clobbering us until Gold level, and then he fell behind due to our superior damage output. Sometimes we killed everything in the dungeon before his turn. All but the mage would fatigue into position and battle the masters, and our Spiritwalking mage would destroy all remainders with Word of Vaal. We would literally go some dungeons without even getting attacked.

Without Crushing Blow or an early Tamilar raze he stood no chance.

Big Remy said:

I'm happy to retract the idea that an ohh-hand can apply to a melee or range attack. I should be more consistent when applying theme.

On the matter of one-handed magic, the star of kellos, a gold treasure from ToI is a one handed rune weapon dealing a magic attack of 1 white, 2 green and 1 yellow die. negates the undying ability for 6 spaces around you and has a 1 surge cost for 1 damage or 1 range. But what's the mage gonna do with that other hand? use a shield I guess.

Another matter - is there a standard ruling for exchanging stuff in the dungeon? I allow it to happen only if the passive hero in the exchange has enough fatigue to pay as if they were doing a 'give' of their own, which would be 1 only if the item(s) were equipped and not armor, 3 (the give + a mid-turn re-quip) if one or more items were coming from the backpack or you're taking off armor to give to someone else. These are the same move costs I charge on the active hero.

Now the reason that comes up is because I dislike the way opening a chest magically materialises items in everyone's hands wherever they are. If that's what the players want, then they have to accept the random draw of the cards, drawing 1 unseen for each treasure at the start of their turns. Otherwise, opening the chest reveals all its contents at once, but the heroes each have to go to the chest or convince the opener to carry stuff for them for a later exchange.

You mean apart from the RAW for exhanging items? Not that I know of, those have always been sufficient for me.

A lot of your changes are based on thematics aren't they?

steverey said:

That's rather brutal...what do you do if a hero's maximum fatigue is less than 3? They're just not allowed to trade armor?

This is something that I have missed. When can heroes freely exchange stuff with each other at no cost?

heroes may trade items freely in RtL as long as they're not currently in a quest.

And the rules for exchanging in a dungeon with cost are much less harsh than your proposal. One movement point gives any item in your possession (equipped, armor, or otherwise) to any adjacent hero. The receiving hero can equip it (un-equipping other items if necessary) or put it into his backpack, and can drop items if necessary to make space, and doesn't have to pay any cost in any case.

Antistone said:

I'm sure I read somewhere that there was only a 'give' cost described in the rules. A cost of 1 to exchange anything anyway with an adjacent hero seems odd given that it costs 2 to do it with yourself.

I said "give." There is no way to take an item from another hero during your own turn.

Re-equipping costs 2 movement points, but that allows you to change any number of equipped items, and you get a free re-equip at the start of every turn, so charging a re-equip cost because you want to transport an item is quite harsh. And the rules allow you to immediately equip (for free) any item you receive from any source at any time for any reason, so to do otherwise for item transfers would be inconsistent.

Antistone said:

Thanks, I wasn't aware of of the free re-equip when you receive something - I guess it had to be there for the miraculous appearance of items when a chest is opened.

So if I understand the rules as they are correctly:

You can give an item to another hero if that hero is adjacent, for a cost of 1 movement point, and it doesn't matter that you are holding it, wearing it or have it in your pack. The receiver can rearrange his/her gear accordingly at no cost even if they have a readied order without interrupting their concentration (oops being thematic again). BUT the receiver cannot hand off anything to the giving hero at this time. This 'give' does not allow the hero to re-equip - so if Varikas hands over the armor off his back, he'll be standing there in his armor 2 undies until the start of his next turn, unless he pays an additional 2 movement to re-equip the armor he happens to have in his pack.

Antistone said:

Speaking of house rules, we house-ruled this so any hero can give OR take an item from another hero for one movement point. Otherwise it just gets pointlessly frustrating trying to exchange items between two heroes.

steverey said:

That's essentially correct. Couple more details:

• You can't re-arrange all your equipment when you receive an item; you can only de-equip the minimum number of items to allow you to equip the new item (moving them to your backpack) or put the new item in your backpack, and then discard items from your backpack if you're over your limit. You can't equip anything new except the item you are currently receiving--so if you were using a two-handed weapon and you receive a one-handed one, you can immediately equip the one-hander, but you can't also equip a shield from your backpack.
• Changing your equipped items always causes you to lose an Aim order. You probably don't care, because Aim orders are virtually worthless anyway, but that is an actual rule. Causing heroes to lose Guard orders as well might be a reasonable house rule, but it's not in the official book.

SkittlesAreYum said:

Your house rule makes it easier to do certain arguably abusive cycles, like having all the heroes attack with a single weapon in the same round, or all use the Boots of Speed...

Of course, that sort of thing is possible to do even under the normal rules, just pointing out that this makes it easier...

steverey said:

In keeping then with the recent discussion, but still being thematic, I'd amend the above house rule to:

Give cost is 1, and the passive hero can 'give back' at the same time for a cost of 1 fatigue. The items given can be equipped and the existing items that interfere with equipping can be de-equipped or dropped depending on the hero's backpack capacity. A hero receiving goods (even coins) who has an aim order ready would lose it. A receiving hero with a Guard or Dodge order would lose it only while the 'give' is happening (i.e. that 1 movement point of the active hero's). If the OL can lay something down at that instant then the Guard or Dodge would not apply, but I don't know that there is a card the OL could use to do it.

In the event that the heroes want to choose treasures (and they usually do), opening a chest makes the content available only to the hero that visits it, who can equip the appropriate number of items from the chest for free, and de-equip as required to accomodate the new toys. Each hero would have to visit the chest to do so, or negotiate with the hero already there to carry the stuff over (again assuming capacity in the backpack to do it). I'd extend this then to coins, and the hero visiting the pile would get the lot, to distribute later. This would all make a game in which the players were being competitive rather more contentious, but then they'd probably opt for the magic act in that case, and take their chances with individually drawing treasure cards.

Actually, trading coins is not normally allowed, and that actually has some fairly important strategic ramifications, so I'd advise against changing it unless it's fairly important to you.

Antistone said:

You're quite right - it opens the door to super powering a hero if they hand all the coin over to one, so I'll come up with some other explanation for how credit accrues within the dungeon than actual coins being passed around.

That leads me to yet another personal corruption (i.e. house rule) that we use - when the players choose treasures, they get one more in total for each treasure found, i.e. 5 if there are 4 heroes and 1 treasure is in the chest, 10 if there are 4 heroes and 2 treasures are in the chest. The heroes identify which ones they want, though if they pick a coin + potion card they HAVE to take the drawn card. The heroes therefore generally get better treasures, but to balance that... they can't buy them in town. (waits for the screams). The ones they didn't pick are shuffled back in.

What is thematically consistent about not being about to buy treasure like items in town or the ability of a hero to choose from many items in a treasure chest to what suits them personally.

IMO, the heroes are lucky to be getting treasure, so they shouldn't get to choose what is in there (even if it is from a limited selection). If they don't like what they got, they are welcome to trade it to another player or sell it in town to buy what they can find while shopping. The current system isn't broken. I don't see why you're fixing this. But if it's more fun for you...go for it.

Antistone said:

I'm not sure I'd call it broken, since everyone has to be close enough to each other they're probably losing something strategically. We've never had an occasion where anyone even wanted to do that.

One house rule we use now is to give everyone two half actions rather than declaring the action at the beginning of the turn. The exception to this is for heroes intending to use a skill based on a declared action (Knight, battlecry, etc). It makes Grey Kerr useless, but it helped balance the game for us (we play 3 players all expansions + overlord). With only 3 heroes, they never had a chance of winning when declaring their actions up front.

Our group currently rules that heroes may exchange at no cost while in Town together...mostly because we rarely have more than one hero in Town at a time...unless a shopping expedition was called, and those get dangerous - we know the horror that can occur when everyone suddenly heads for town...and the OL suddenly has no hero LOS to worry about for spawning.

So basically, our heroes pay for their free exchange with the possibility (well, almost certainty) of a nasty surprise waiting when they get back, not to mention the hassle of getting to a glyph, entering town, and then waiting until your next turn to get back into the dungeon

And in regard to Webs, I believe that there should be a method for a hero to help free the webbed one...I've known the frustration of sitting in a web as the power die rolls everything but surges for the next several turns. I like the idea of 'attacking' the web to destroy it, but I think that it would work better thematically if a hero adjacent to the webbed figure can spend 1 (or 2) movement points to roll a power die again...basically spending time trying to weaken or pull the web and free the trapped target. I agree with the theory that a fire-based AoE attack should also damage the web...and the person trapped inside. A melee attack sounds like the web is being struck...and if I, personally, in real life, am ever encased in a web, I would most definitly not want people swinging sharp/heavy/dangerous things at me.

Daemnor said:

In our group, there only been one time that a hero has been webbed for more than one turn, and that was the time I more than made up for the odds of all the others. Ended up left behind (despite being the only tank in a 4-hero party) and didn't break free for 15 turns (I had good enough armor, the OL didn't even bother spawning stuff back there to try to kill me and instead focused on the rest of the group).

I'd think using the Prolonged Action mechanic that is now in the game would make sense. I could see it being Melee (4), Melee/Range/Magic (9), or something like Melee (3) but failure adds a web token to the person performing it.

As for house rules, we've made quite a few really, and have just learned browsing these boards that several other rules we've been doing are incorrect (like we play up to 5 heroes per adventure, not counting the Overlord as far as the stat levels of the creatures). Few of our intentional rules actually concern gameplay of one dungeon, but instead tried to create some sort of balance adn fun in the progression between maps (we've not played RtL or ToI).

1) All beings on a given team may take the parts of their turns in any order. So a tank can open the door, move out of the way to create a line of sight for the ranged/magic guys to attack through, and then do his attack after they attack. Doesn't really impact strategy much in most situations, but does prevent the 10 minute planning sessions at the start of each round before anyone moves, and then the re-planning sessions when something doesn't go as planned; so it moves the game faster. There are some limitations, like bonuses from things like Command is based on where everything was when the attack was rolled (no moving a Command character to boost damage by one after it is rolled)

2) Heroes can retroactively tweak how they did what they did, but the total turn must still be legal (and by extension, we don't really worry about declaring your actions at the start of your turn). By this, I mean a melee fighter can move forward two spaces and attack, miss the attack, and then opt to spend 2 fatigue for the movement they already did in order to regain that action and use it for another attack. This also help with keeping the game moving, but does have more of an impact on gameplay than #1.

3) Surges do not generate threat for the Overlord (aside from through Dark Prayer). We felt this was far too powerful for the Overlord, who most of the time has a decent advantage inherently.

4a) If the Heroes win, the Overlord gains a level (as per the chart I think was in the original map book) for the next dungeon, the heroes sell all their potions and gear, and can spend it on Power Dice and Ability Cards. We are still playtesting if the leftover money after that is wasted, or if that becomes the heroes starting money for the next dungeon.

4b) If the Overlord wins, the heroes lose all their money (before then selling their gear), then can buy Power Dice/Ability Cards, and get leveled up as far as "starting" cash for the next dungeon per the chart mentioned earlier. Each hero also then get a free Ability card drawn at random from the player's choice of the type that is not the character's primary style (which is a bit of an issue for a few of the heroes).

(So overall, the heroes always get more powerful, but at a slow pace. The Overlord gains no additional power if he wins, but gets a dramatic power boost if he/she loses.)

5) We bounce between random character selection and choosing your character, but we usually go with just choosing (so people who are in the mood to tank don't get stuck with something they don't feel like playing, and no one gets stuck with one of the total garbage characters [which in our opinion includes most of the archer/thief types]). After drawing your starting skill cards at random, you may if you wish discard one of your choice and replace it with another card of the same type.

6) Character Abilities and Power Dice are tracked on paper. This gets around the rather limited number of markers for purchased Power Dice. This also allows for the recycling of Abilities. When you gain an Ability Card, it is noted on the paper, then shuffled back into the stack (at character creation, the cards are not put back until after the character has drawn all his/her Ability Cards). This allows multiple heroes to draw the same card. If the card cannot be useful to multiple heroes and one already has it (such as familiars or Bardic Lore), the most recent draw of that card can redraw. If a Heroes draws an ability card they already have, they have the choice of redrawing or keeping the dupicate for a double effect.

Rajamic said:

That game hardly resembles Descent.