I have been playing Descent for a while now, but I just started a Road to Legend campaign by myself (I know I need to get a life.) Anyway, I am wondering if everyone has found that it is extremely hard to get treasure. I have played through a total of 5 dungeon levels and checked the market every week, but so far I have drawn 2 treasures from the chests in dungeons and mostly nothing good from the market. My question is how to set up the treasure decks. Do most of you shuffle the deck every week, or do you shuffle every time there is a draw for treasure (i.e. market, chests)? I admit that I have been shuffling every time they check, but I am thinking that you should do it once a week. I started thinking about this when I read the special abilities of towns (i.e. draw until you find a rune; draw until you find an other; draw until you find a sword, armor, or shield). How would a deck get exhausted? I guess if you had a bag of holding you could, in essence, have every single treasure card in the deck, barring, of course, the cache cards, which would then cause the deck to become exhausted. I may be making a big deal out of nothing, but I await all of your replies with clammy anticipation.

PastorJK said:

I seem to have the same problem, exacerbated by getting bad hero draws and ending up with a party missing one attack type (which them takes up at least 50% of the equipment appearing in Markets...)

However, statistically it isn't that hard.

You might find it useful to upgrade Tamalir's market fairly quickly.

You are doing it right. The odds of rolling 1 blank on 4 power dice is approximately 50%.

Assuming 1 chest per level, you have done 5 levels and found 2 treasures, so thats not too bad. The fact that you have drawn bad stuff at the market is just unlucky.

I shuffle the cards each time and then fan them out for the players to pick. I do this with pretty much everything - dungeon levels, feat cards, etc. Just find it adds a nice touch rather than me drawing. Note I do not do this with the Overlord deck - only for cards which the players actually see.

It's mostly luck of the dice and luck of the draw. The heroes in my campaign are swimming in treasure and we're only a little past halfway in copper. Of course, rolling four blanks on one treasure chest roll helped them a bunch.

It is not as hard as you might think. There are 31 coppers treasures in RTL (JITD, WOD, AOD), ignoring the treasure cache. Of these four are armor, and two are shields, and seven other cards. Obviously all of these could be equipped at one time. After that the remaining 19 are weapons. So figure at least 4 weapons equipped, with a couple of extra in the backpacks to deal with soaring creatures and you are down to 12-14 treasures. The next step is to assume that the hero's went to a dungeon, and visited the shops in a fully upgraded tamalir (5 items). This leaves only 7-9 treasures available, and by the point we are looking at this, the chances are the hero's will have the bag of holding. Presto, the remaing treasures just got much thinner. Now there are probably 3-5 treasures remaing and you can run into this just from the treasure chests on some decent rolls. Of course the hero's are possibly quite happy at all the treasure caches that they will be drawing at this point.

Brian

It all comes down to your luck. In the campaign I'm currently playing, my poor heroes have been through six complete dungeons and have only rolled a total of three treasures. One of these was one of the healing crystal things. Twice when checking the market at Tamalir they have ended up drawing two treasure caches (shortages) and several othe times (including the wandering merchant encounter) they have drawn at least one.

Needless to say they've been having a rough time of things in some respects. I keep encouraging them to invest a small handful of experience towards market upgrades at Tamalir, but they refuse to see the benefit.

I'm tempted to house-rule it and say that if no treasures are rolled on a chest, they can sacrifice two (maybe three?) of their dice for a treasure draw, in which case they wouldn't get the conquest point for not rolling a treasure.

My Heros, went to the town that issued 5 tresausres In the market each week, got geared up fast

That's how the rulebook says you're supposed to do it, shuffle each time you draw. But we find that sometimes a little boring, seeing too many treasures come up time and time again, and so end up only suffling the deck between sessions (i.e. after we put the game away and next time we meet, we shuffle most of the decks). This gives a *little* variety...

-shnar