I thought I knew the rule about weapons and items that have more than one surge ability, one on top of the other such as Surge: +1 damage, Surge: +1 Range. I always thought it was obvious that you can choose either/or since there are some items that have both inside the same surge cost line, but I find myself doubting that since it was brought to my attention the absurdity of that in terms of the weapon Dragon's Breath in addition to there not being stated clearly in any rule book.

Dragon's Breath has the ability Burn as well as the surge costs of 1 Surge: +1 damage, and 2 Surge: +1 Burn token. My player didn't understand this as damage from a weapon that has burn automatically creates a burn token to be placed. And since its cheaper to simply use the Surge: +1 damage he'd get a burn token anyway, causing the second surge option to be pointless.

So my question is: Do both take place at once or do you actually choose? Because if you do choose what's the deal with this rune?

You choose. That's pretty clear based on both the rules and various precedents, whatever this one particular weapon does.

As for the Dragon's Breath, the surge option allowed you to place more than one Burn token with a single attack, so you could theoretically choose to spend 2 surges on an additional Burn token rather than +2 damage because the Burn token has a chance to cause more than 2 damage if the target continues burning long enough.

However, the theoretical average damage per Burn token is only 2, the actual average is less than that because monsters can't continue burning for a million turns in actual games, and damage now is generally better than damage later, so taking the Burn option is blatantly stupid in virtually any situation. You could cut the surge cost in half, and the damage would still probably be better most of the time.

So the surge abilities on the weapon are badly balanced--probably because some designer read or calculated that the theoretical average damage per Burn token was 2 and didn't think any further than that--but that doesn't mean that you get them both.

Neocount Maeth said:

Against a monster with high armor, an additional burn token may be a better choice to spend 2 surges than to spend it on 2 damage. If the 2 damage won't inflict any damage, a chance of damage (that may last over several turns) may do well.

Surges on dice are spent. In this case, if you earned 3 surges on the roll, you can either inflict one burn token (since the weapon has that already) and +3 damage, or two burn tokens and + 1 damage.

Antistone said:

I respectfully disagree on this point. Against a high armor monster, throwing extra Burn tokens on it is better than blowing surges in order to get past armor and do one damage. At least with the Burn token, you have the decent chance of being able to do multiple turns of Burn damage. No of course it won't last forever, but I'll take constantly stacking Burn tokens and easy damage on a high armor monster over nickle and diming it to death.

Big Remy said:

Me too. The Antistone's math is right, but math doesn't always tell the whole story. Sometimes Burn tokens are more use than a point or two of damage here or there (assuming you can even get that). Not often, but sometimes.

It is also sometimes useful to have a monster die in the monster's turn, rather than the heroes (though risky). Maybe because the monster occupies a difficult to prevent spawning location, maybe because of a special effect (there is a boss, or two I think, in RtL who comes back at the start of the OL's turn if he is dead).

Appreciated. Thanks again.

I'm guessing this must be an RtL thing, because in normal Descent, it looks like it should be quite rare that this weapon fails to penetrate armor--let alone fails by a large enough margin that spending surges on Burn is likely to do more damage.

Weird corner cases do exist where the Burn is better, I admit. I'm just skeptical of its usefulness in anything resembling a typical situation--and of course I'm not taking RtL into account because I've never played it.

Antistone said:

Heh, yeah. As we have discussed when disagreeing on the odd thing before, RtL does have much higher armour (and wound) values floating around for monsters. And once you play RtL, you rarely go back to normal Descent...

So RtL players tend to default think of RtL gameplay since usually thats all they've played (Descent wise) for quite a long time. My/our bad, and sorry, but it will happen again.

OTOH, the Silver breath rune is WYY (Breath, Burn, ~ = damge, ~~ = Burn) so with say 3 trait dice, is entirely capable of coming up with only 2-3 actual damage and 3-4 surges which could be damage or 1/2 Burn markers - which will, even in Base Descent, struggle to get through a Named Monster or a Master Giant/Naga/Troll/Ogre/Demon/Golem (all Armour 5+) for more than a point or two of damage.
Piling 3-6 Burn markers per turn (and escalating) might well be more useful than doing 2-4 points of damage (and 1-2 Burn markers) per turn, since the actual ratio of surges for wounds and surges for Burn markers is about the same (given the first few surges might well be spent getting through armour).

Our intuitions are further confused by the fact that I'm now spending most of my Descent time playtesting The Enduring Evil, which has an entirely different set of weapon and monster stats, and more monsters had their armor go down than up (though all of them had their wounds go up). Enduring Evil has a shop weapon that adds a Burn token for 2 surges, and it's the cheapest magic weapon available. Of course, most of the bosses also remove effects on a power enhancement rather than a surge...

But anyway, to address your examples:

I'd almost always prefer to do X damage than X Burn, because the Burn doesn't even have a chance of being better unless the monster survives to two more OL turns, and once I start attacking a monster, I hardly ever expect it to survive that long.

Also, Golems don't count for your example, because Ironskin grants immunity to Burn, and Demons only make the list if you conflate armor and Fear--which is normally reasonable, but in this case it greatly reduces the odds that you have the option to spend surges on Burn at all.

So your scenario assumes a rare, strong monster (unlikely to be prioritized by the AoE attacker), below-average damage, and above-average surges all at once; I'm prepared to call that a special case. And even if you are hitting such a monster with such a roll, there's a good chance that you're also hitting 3 beastmen or something and that it's more important to make sure that they die than inflict a little more damage on the one strong monster that the melee hero is going to be focusing on.

There is one situation that you have not considered yet when burn tokens would be very nice: dark charm. Burn tokens on heroes are nasty. If you dark charm Landric and get 3-5 burn tokens on several heroes, that would be a lot of fun. Since burn and bleed do their damage at the start of the heroes turn, if they get killed by it their turn immidiately ends, wasting a whole round for them before they can respawn. There are few greater pleasures to be had as an OL.