just got through playin honor amongst theifs first act. is it a legal move for the ol just to pile his open group which was the new plauge worms and two withcers on the exit tile to prevent any heros standing on the exit to guess the code. seems like to me that its a cheap move to make and really ruins the idea of having an enjoyable game asits hard enough to find the pecies for the code lock with volcrix reavers popping out aswell. any input you guys have is much appreciated

I don't have the quest book at hand, but yes, that rather seems a legal move.

Just as it is legal for the players to have a runemaster with Exploding Rune or a spiritspeaker with Shared Pain and wipe out huddling monsters in two attacks.

Don't pull punches on your heroes, I can absolutely guarantee you that you don't need to.

your still not guaranteed two hit kills with anyone its a luck based dice roll plus you have to have a spiritspeaker and rune master to do that and you need the exploding rune in which time from the starting quest to honor amognst theifs you are not likely to have. Due to the fact that was the first act played after the start mission. Nvm ill send the question to ffg seen as no one seems to know about ot.

First off, I think it's a bit unfair that you had your question up for all of 12 minutes before giving up and going right to FFG (if indeed you do that). The forums aren't always instantaneous, and for what it's worth, you got a good answer to your question quite quickly.

Having the book out in front of me, the idea of the OL placing monsters on the Exit to deter code guessing seems perfectly legal within the encounter. Whether you think it's cheap or bad sportsmanship is of course within your right, but remember this is a competitive game: the OL is actively trying to win . Why wouldn't they do what they thought was necessary? As a mostly OL player, I think this is pretty ingenious, and will have to give it a try upon our next run through Labyrinth of Ruin, if we take the Raythen route (my heroes like Scout characters so Serena seems to be the better choice so as to have some healing capability).

Your reasoning for why the encounter can be difficult is quite sound: it's early in the campaign. Heroes might not be as well equipped as they'd like to be. But for the OL, that's his/her time to shine until the heroes hit that point of the power curve where they can quite easily massacre anything put in front of the heroes. Yes, there's a lot of chance and luck involved, but there's just as much for the OL.

I'm a hero player in my current campaign, so here's how I would have approached Honor Among Thieves, encounter 1: Jain Fairwood blow her feat to fly at the open group on the Rocky Path. If the open group are large, such as merriods, plague worms (which you mentioned), golems, etc. try to at least wound something. Get Beast Master Syndrael as close as possible, and within another turn, a wounded monster could easily go down with her Skinning Knife. If the open group is a bunch of smaller guys (such as the witchers), Jain may well kill one off on her own. In this hypothetical game I still have two heroes actively looking for blue objective tokens, and the open group can't reinforce, so in 2-3 turns this OL strategy could very well not be so grand. Even if it takes, say, 4-5 turns to kill the open group, at least you have heroes exactly where they need to be to dive onto the exit and start guessing the lock.

Of course, your hero group probably looks nothing like this, but the point is you have options . I like to play recklessly so that supposed plan might not form to your play style, but the option was there, so I took it.

That was a lot of thinking for something I'd completely gloss over normally. In summation, I don't think your OL was being that unfair; the exact premise of this game is trying to outdo the opposing side, and your heroes got outdone. Better luck next time!

your still not guaranteed two hit kills with anyone its a luck based dice roll plus you have to have a spiritspeaker and rune master to do that and you need the exploding rune in which time from the starting quest to honor amognst theifs you are not likely to have. Due to the fact that was the first act played after the start mission. Nvm ill send the question to ffg seen as no one seems to know about ot.

What do you want us to tell you? There's nothing to know. Monsters can move wherever the OL wants.

And Exploding Rune costs 1 XP. It's true not every party will have a runemaster, but if they have and he doesn't buy that skill right out of the prelude he's nuts.

By the way, my players horribly failed this quest by turning 4 objectives in the first round without clearing out any monsters. They got sliced by reavers and I had both the witchers and worms groups charge right at the, to finish them off. If they had been cautious and turned their objectives two at a time, there would have been plenty of time to gather 3 clues, massacre the reavers and any monster in their way to the exit and gues the lock in one go.

I havent actually messaged anyone about anything I have no problem with blocking im over it now was more pissed off at the time and I did start this at 3:40 in the morning. Yea after getting other peoples point of view it wasnt an illegal move and after all its supposed to be fun but with a table off people that had no fun and put the game away and didnt want to ever play it again I thought id ask spent alot of money on it and it seems lame that they specifically ruled you cant block the ol from spawing but he can stop you from moving to quest objectives. my point is there has to be a bit off fairness for both sides. In a misson were the ol could get reinforcements on the exit you should be able to block him off from getting those bit you cant that should be a viable tactic for heros to I get what you guys are saying but none of you seem to see the contradictions the rules make between themselves both sides should have the ability to run interference on the others ability to re-enforce or make it to the objective if you thonk standing on the exit tile is fair to the heros playing it. When I played ol I had no problem winning almost every encounter without resorting to standing on exits why I dont see it as being a fair tactic if your on the exit for more than one turn you should be off the board as ot is the exit. Im over it now anyways we lost and the game has been shelfed as no one wants to play with the current ol so yea thankd for the clarification but probably wont need it as no one will play now anyways.

Well, your players need to develop some skin. If you played a more traditional game ther ewould have been one winner and a table of losers anyway right? And descent gives a more than fair competition, the heroes can clean the map from monsters in a few turns - provided they stop to think and coordinate.

And besides goblin witchers reinforce on the waterfall tile. One you jave cleaned up the rocky paht good you cna just snipe them as they spawn.

Well our ol spawned them on the rocky path so ill need to check if that is were they spawn or not im just saying that as par for a game that both sides are tryibg to win both should be equally allowed to use blocking tactics then aswell people that we are playing with are more used to arkham im only asking as off the annoying fb messages I keep getting asking if the ol cheated but its done with now ol has won so thats that and thanks for clearing up the confusion.

found out why it was so hard our ol aparently mis-read were his re-enrorcements went so that would be why it got so cluttered so fast down in that corner my ranting on the exit blocking is now over thanks for all the info input into the issue.

Yup. You'll find that most initial complaints come from a misunderstanding of one rule or another. Not that there aren't other valid complaints, but almost everybody's first one (especially of the variety "X is overpowered") usually is fixed once they re-read the rules or have something pointed out to them.

The big problem is that when they make the complaint, they don't tell the full story (you only mentioned the OL stacking up on the exit, not that you felt the quest made it too easy to do so because of reinforcement rules), so it's often difficult to really point things out. And don't take it hard, it happens a lot. Descent has a lot of rules that interact with each other in a variety of ways and few people realize WHERE they made a mistake until it's been pointed out, so it's often hard to realize just exactly where the problem was and it doesn't initially appear to make sense to spill the entire game log in a question post.

As for balance concerns, it almost always boils down to specific quest mechanics and occasionally some specific hero / monster combos. Remember that the game is designed to be played in campaign mode, so you'll have lots of different quests to try, and choosing which quest is next is part of the strategy.