I have at least one that I think is pretty cool. Definitely a tank

K'nat Tosuc the Unstoppable (Minotaur)

Wounds 20; Fatigue 4; Armor 1; Speed 4; Conquest 4

Dice: 2 Melee, 1 Ranged

Skills: 1 Fighting, 1 Subterfuge, 1 Wizardry

Ability - Scout 1st tier: Regain 2 Fatigue when declaring a Run action

What do you think?

Not actually a tank. This character seems destined to be a high-HP runner character.

I'd assume that your hero is a conquest 4 one.

I only have JiTD and WoD, and I wanted a sneaky mage, so using the standard generator:

Kerrick Marker, Human, 4 conquest points

Life 16, Fatigue 3, Armor 1, Speed 3

Power Dice - 3 Magic

Skills - 2 subterfuge, 1 Knowledge

Ability - Master - 2 power dice in melee, range or magic

Depending on the skills drawn, I throw the 2 dice at range or magic, but there's no reason he wouldn't be good for melee if you put the 2 dice in that from the start instead - particularly if you drew movement skills.

What do you mean by "good?"

If you want stuff that's balanced and interesting to play, you might well be better off making up your own stuff rather than following the custom hero rules, though they're a decent starting point.

If you mean as powerful as possible while following the custom hero rules, then you're not even close.

lol... okay... for 'good' read 'adequate'. I like the character because it's reasonably versatile.

There is a modified Create Your Own Hero sheet on BGG . I've used it once before but found that it tended to produce some very broken characters at times if you are not careful.

I've made some people, but not played with them much. I would love to see in an official expansion:

A melee Hero with Bash

A melee Hero with Leap

No Bash, please! While there's a good chance a Troll's attack will not be aimed, a Hero can always Aim. Brokenness ensues.

Xandria said:

Er...aiming means that you're using up a full action per attack, rather than a half-action. That may still often be a good idea if you're using Bash, but I'm not sure the result is brokenness...

Comparing an Axe with Bash to an Axe with 3 black dice, and considering that you can choose to Aim or not, the Bash option looks like it's only better against master ogres, master naga, giants, dragons, demons, golems, master blood apes, master deep elves, trolls, chaos beasts, master wendigoes, and master ice wyrms...so, more or less tier 3 masters and tier 4 monsters (list changes slightly depending on number of heroes in the game). Which, interestingly, is a proper subset of the cases in which it's worth aiming the bash attack...

And that's with a shop axe; if you're using better weapons against the powerful monsters, I bet that Bash does worse.

Not sure how it looks with RtL monster stats, but compared to heroes rolling silver and gold dice...

Of course, putting either Bash or Leap on a hero would be a Bad Idea unless some of the details of those abilities were clarified, first. There have been forum debates about whether it's ever possible to get silver/gold dice on a Bash attack and what you can do after a Leap if you don't make an attack roll and so forth--those are relatively minor issues right now because they hardly ever come up, but give those abilities to a hero and they're suddenly really important.

Though on further reflection, free surges from off-hand bonuses might break Bash, so maybe you'd have to limit it to two-handed weapons or something...

(Sorry for double-post, I'm afraid that if I edit the first post it'll break the quote tag.)

Antistone said:

I don't think I understand...how is Bash not superior regardless of the weapon you have? And sure, aiming for a Bash attack takes a full turn, but I'd say that's a fair tradeoff for a potential maximum damage of 21, pierce 6 while using just an Axe (assuming you can add all power dice). If you can't add all power dice, a 3 black dice hero will have a maximum of 16, pierce 4. At copper level, right out of the gate.

SkittlesAreYum said:

Because if you make a Bash attack, then any blank you roll on a power die causes your attack to miss, whereas if you make a normal attack, then you get to roll your normal power dice and a blank has no effect.

Bash attacks have vastly higher maximum damage, but they're also much less likely to actually hit, and most monsters are likely to die within one or two attacks anyway.

Aiming to get increased damage is actually almost never a good trade-off, because if the monster would've died from a single normal attack anyway, then the bonus damage is worth precisely nothing, and monsters in Descent tend to be really easy to kill. Not all of them, but most of them.

Some I made, will post more later.

Heroes with Bash would be totally brutal with Ranged weapons, since there are multiple ways to have every attack be an aimed attack if you're a ranged character.

Those are some pretty inetersting characters.

What did you use to make the cards look just like the ones from the game?

I'm sorry to say that I don't really like any of those heroes...

Athenia: If she uses a staff, she's fairly good--her ability is powerful, but it's also kind of insulting, since it's anti-synergistic with the normal advantage of using a staff (i.e. being able to wear heavy armor, which also limits your speed)--unless that's supposed to be added after the reduction from armor (speed changes are a confusing mechanic in Descent). If she doesn't get a staff, she's decent offensively, but she hurts her team significantly by hemhoraging conquest. Only about one quarter of magical weapons are staves, so she's likely to be stuck using a shop weapon or forfeiting her special ability. Regardless, heroes that are overpowered with favorable treasure draws and sucky the rest of the time are not really interesting to play, they just increase the luck dependence in the game.

Rix Blackblade: The names of the skill types are combat, subterfuge, and wizardry, not melee, agility, and magic, and even apart from that, that ability is worded in a needlessly confusing way. "Rix Blackblade starts the game with one skill of a type of his choice" was all you needed to say. This hero is also really weak. Being able to use whatever type of weapon you happen to draw is nice, but it's not remotely worth sacrificing 2 skills, 1 fatigue, 1 trait die, and actually having a hero ability compared to the archetypical specialist.

Driam, Bounty Hunter: The term is "master," not "elite." The gold from his ability is very similar to the Pickpocket skill (AoD), and the +1 damage approximately makes up for missing a black die if he draws a bow, so I guess this is the poor man's Silhouette. That may be appropriate in terms of power, as Silhouette is pretty good, but being very similar to and noticably worse than an official hero is problematic.

Fade Leafstrider: Rolling 2 red dice on an attack is a dubious privilege and annoying to anyone that didn't buy an extra dice set, but this ends up being rather a lot of bonus damage in the cases where it's actually worth it. A sword off-hand and 1 fatigue is now worth about 5-6 bonus damage? Too much complication, too situational.

Minxa, Dark Dealer: Her ability creates annoying and ambiguous logistics problems (you have to keep track of which items were ever "owned" by another hero, whatever that means), and varies dramatically in usefulness depending on the quest. It's always massively better in the early game than the late game. Regardless of the specifics, though, making a hero ridiculously powerful and then compensating by doubling her conquest value is not a good idea.

Talia: Quite powerful, though maybe not unplayably powerful. Definitely better than almost all official heroes, though. Ability is worded wierdly and somewhat ambiguously; I'm not sure whether the health loss can be mitigated by cloaks, Ghost Armor, etc. Name is too similar to an official hero.

I used a hero creator program I found. I think I got it off the boardgamegeek.com entry for Descent. Here are a few more dudes I made. Well I appreciate the feedback Antistone, I'll keep testing them and make changes, but feel free to make changes too! I only have vanilla Descent but I'll check on existing characters. Since I only have vanilla Descent, I have no idea if any expansions break or overpower these heroes so feel free to let me know.

The idea with Minxa was that I didn't want the whole party passing Minxa the loot just so she could sell it at a higher price. I might just toss the whole boosted money thing all together. Also I think your right on Rix. Maybe I'll change all his traits to 3 power dice? My idea was that the loss of wounds for Talia's power can't be prevented by armor, abilities, etc. I may have to reword it. Also I just gave her a goofy name, that's an easy fix though!

OK, look, you need to figure out some way to describe abilities more clearly. I have no idea what some of those are supposed to do. Using standard terminology would probably help quite a bit.

Hrm, yeah I would certainly like to. I'm more familiar with D&D and Magic: the Gathering, so I'm using wording that they would use. But if I can figure out how to make it in Descent jargon I'll work on that. But hey it's free, so what do you expect?

Well, Descent has no precedent for "spending" wounds (compare to Red Scorpion's hero ability), it has no defined meaning for "replace one action," and it's the "breath template," not the "fire template" (and an attack using the breath template has the Breath ability).

I suspect that Raylena and Crank and Klank have actual editing errors in their abilities, too.

I can suggest ways of phrasing things if you want, but I have to understand what the intent is in order to do that.

And if you want help editing or balancing stuff, it might be better to focus on just a couple heroes at first, rather than working with 10 at once. Once you pick up some conventions and rules-of-thumb, you can probably do most of the work on the remaining heroes without help.

Ah it is good to see the custom heroes have returned to the forums. I rather enjoy creating heroes and have created quiet a few. Most have been played at one time or another in my games with varying degrees of success, but as a whole I have not found any that have tilted the balance of the game much, although a few have rather technical powers which may be confusing or harder to manage for newer players. The ones in the following link were personal creations or my own variations on other's creations. I have some newer ones and a few geared more towards RTL that I will post at a later time. You can save the pdf file by right clicking and selecting save as...

http://thehighforest.brinkster.net/All%20Characters.pdf

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