Hey guys, I'd like your thoughts. A bunch of buddies and I are going though the original campaign of Descent and we just completed The Cardinal's Plight with me being the overlord and the 4 of them heroes. They won the intro and A Fat Goblin but I succeeded in Castle Daerion and The Cardinal's Plight. In Castle Daerion I won by pure luck, I succeeded in the very first search token and just railed Sir Palimon but in The Cardinal's Plight I succeeded in raising 2 zombies before before the heroes defeated Sir Marrick Farrow and advancing to encounter 2. I'd like to hear from the community their thought on The Cardinal's Plight and future quests, it seemed like the heroes were behind the 8-ball right at the beginning - they have to find the key to access the door and fight the zombies but while they're looking my zombies just wreck the cardinal. Even with just 1 master zombie and 2 basic zombies I just pound him into the ground. Now, the heroes knew they could activate the altar to heal the cardinal but were my rolls just particularly hot on attacking him of do some quests just favor the overlord and others favor the heroes?

I'm concerned cause my group of buddies take the game in stride and know we're just having fun but I don't want them getting discouraged.

Thanks in advance!

Lobaine said:

What do you mean by pure luck? There is little that has to do with luck for the OL in Daerion, unless you're talking about not rolling Xs to kill the villagers.

Lobaine said:

Daerion and Plight are IMO (4 campaigns almost completed) the most OL-favoured Act I quests. That said, all four campaigns (2 completed, two with one quest to go) have all been handy OL wins (2-hero, 2x 3-hero and 4-hero campaigns), with 2 and 4 heroes, the OL won every quest but First Blood and in the two 3-hero campaigns, in one (completed) heroes won the first two quests after First Blood, nothing afterwards, in the second, only won First Blood. Most seem to see 2-hero as heavily favouring the OL, 3-hero as slightly hero favoured and 4-hero either balanced or OL-favoured, but for my take, OL is favoured no matter what the number of heroes, especially if he plays to win (and not like an impartial DM/GM).

Well I got three zombies+the master attacking, and the players still won handily (and just killed farrow and got all search tokens).

And I even attacked the cardinal dude with other monsters than zombies due to forgetting the rules.

There's a lot of die rolls in that mission, so it can easily go either way imo.

The thing about scenario-based games is that they tend to have a lot of scenario-specific rules. This means that the balance of the game can be quite swingy depending on the rules for each quest. Overall, I think that Descent 2E is well balanced, but there are certainly some quests that favour the Overlord and others that favour the heroes. I don't think that's a bad thing, it's just the way things are.

The other thing to keep in mind, especially if you've just begun playing the game, is that the heroes often have a harder learning curve than the OL. They have to learn how to make full use of all the options available to them in order to perform effectively, particularly how to make proper use of fatigue (that's huge.) So it's not terribly surprising to hear that the heroes lost Cardinal's Plight and/or Castle Daerion if everyone was a newbie to the game. Given time to learn the ropes, they'd probably perform better next time.

We're into Act II in the campaign and loving it. It feels well balanced to me. Almost every scenario has come down to the wire and could have gone either way. Heroes won Cardinal's Plight but lost Daerion in our campaign. Daerion was the only one where it felt like they didn't have a chance - not enough time to reach the lord and save him. But this was their first quest too - had they done it later, it may have gone differently, so I think some of it depends on order and how tough the heroes are.

If heroes and overlord are playing well, the game feels completely balanced to me. (Note, I've only played with full complement of 4 heroes.)

I run through three campaigns (all with 4 heroes). Overall victory for heroes 2/3. I tried to work all quests (including the expansion quests) into the three run throughts, so sometimes a choice was made on not having done it before as opposed to strictly winning. In the two campaigns the heroes won they were 7-4 (wins) and 6-5 (wins), in the overlord victory it was 8-3 wins (which included heroes LOSING first blood through some of the most atrocious rolling you've ever seen). For the first half of the campaign, Castle Daerion is impossible as far as I am concerned with an OL who knows how to play, Cardinal's plight is very difficult, Masquerade Ball is probably fairly balance & is almost solely determined by one roll of the dice at the end of the first encounter, Death on a Wing is the easiest for heroes, and a fat goblin is pretty sure for heroes too. I find it unfortunate that the first stage of the campaign seems to be determined solely by who is picking quests and choosing a quest solely based on difficulty as opposed to rewards. Second half of the campaign seems pretty balanced to me. Overall I think the conversion kit adds some real nasty tactis for the overlord to make most scenarios very difficult (flying creatures so exit can't be blocked in Masquerade Ball, drop two giants directly in front of the heroes on a fat goblin encounter one so they can't move, etc. etc.). I am hoping the next campaign has better balance.

Finished my third campaign yesterday, Berserker, Spiritspeaker and Wildlander as the heroes, they won First Blood, then not even any of the Encounters after that. Thanks to a miss on the first turn in E1 of the Finale (Man Who Would Be King), even Stunned Splig didn't die and managed to run off. Or more to the point, survived, allowing me to get that master Shadow Dragon into play, who then Fire Breathed the heroes twice for 10 dmg each time . With the same deal turn 1 of E2, killing off the heroes.

Mostly I was doing my damage from the Warlord cards, Frenzy + Blood Rage on the master SD with Fire Breath is a potential 40 dmg to the heroes in a turn! Not to mention heroes wasting a full turn wiping out a group, only for Reinforce to plop them right back, with Bloodlust drawing 3+1 cards for defeating a hero. Actually thinking about trying the next campaign without any Warlord cards (probably run Lair of the Wyrm mini-campaign) and see how it goes.

OP, are you certain you played the zombies right? On our first run-through, I was OL and whacked the cardinal really fast too. It was only after some dispirited forum research by the heroes that we realised that my monsters could only attack once per turn, rather than the two we had all assumed. This had a) ruined their chances of saving the cardinal, and b) made me somewhat ridiculously overpowered in general.