There's a lot of different things being discussed in this topic but I thought I´d share some of my reactions/thoughts, in no particular order. Descent is a heavy game with a lot of rules, and requires a lot of involvement from the players, the overlord especially. The role of overlord naturally falls on to the player having most knowledge about the game, since the parallel to a game master is easy to draw at first glance. Another thing is that the owner of the game tends to be the first person reading the rules, thus by extension the overlord is generally the game owner at least for the first played campaign. Adding then the fact that the overlord needs preparation time with the game components more than hero players do, so if one person is taking the game home then the role of overlord generally falls on to that person. It's certainly possible to deal with it in a lot of different ways, but I was just talking from a very general perspective. But I think it is vital to the game experience that the role of the OL is given to a person you can trust, AND a person that is reasonable in terms of making concessions and feeding discussions with valuable input. Anything else than that can lead to tensions. We´ve experienced that and it could turn quite bad very quickly. We have been discussing about the future of the game multiple times, but my position about it can be summarized to keeping the game as it is and maybe play with a couple of house rules on top of that to address the few things that I personally find problematic. Whitewing said he would try to pick the next quests randomly, which was my exact thought (although I haven't tried that yet). I think this idea is strictly better than letting the losing side decide of the next quest, and it even allows for playing quests neither side would have picked otherwise. Now I wish one could build a lot more around it, like letting the game decide based on several factors instead of making it plain random, but this is where you cross the line in terms of how much change you want to port into the game. My view about the rules/FAQs is that I would gladly pay for getting errata:ed cards instead of having to refer to countless pages of text. Then I also agree that the grouping by expansion name is not intuitive to me to be able to find the information in a timely manner. Then we can blame the game all we want, pointing to these niche situations where rules clash and the correct interpretation is hard to establish, but the truth is that we can also easily accept the fact the game will inevitably have a few holes, and that maybe 80% of these situiations can be solved by common sense or normal communication between players. A good chunk of the the remaining 20% would either require some reasearch, or just some good soul willing to let the one interpretation temporarily prevail over the other just to keep the game flow until a definitive answer can be found. I think complexity in D2Ed is at the correct level. More complexity would have impacted the game flow too much. For many players, time is an issue and designing a game probably implies trying to find the right balance between play time and how much game elements can be packed within that time frame. I think they did more than alright with Descent, moreover the additional content has practically not increased platytime in a significant manner, bar of course the setup/planning time. But there are a lot of very streamlined games that I do enjoy a lot so to me the size of the rulesbook or the amount of different actions a game proposes is not a real indicator of how good a game is. The D&D adventure games series is extremely simple for instance, but the fun is more geared towards other things than selecting something to do among a dozen different things. There are still decisions to be made and a good amount of strategy.

Thanks Zaltyre. I honestly think it would be fair for both sides to have a campaign progression rewarding their actions and intelligent plays rather than just a victory in a quest. But like I suggested, we could well keep the part where the victor is designated based on the quest objectives and gets his/her reward, but maybe the losing side may have done something in the quest that affects the rest of the campaign. This way it would feel like both sides have a chance of affecting the campaign regardless of being victorious or not. I would also scratch the whole "pick the next quest" mechanism. It really does more damage than good. I wouldn't make everything linear and still keep branches in the campaign, but have the game decide which one to take when time comes, again based on campaign progression and differences balance-wise between the sides. Arcadia Quest sometimes allows one player to unlock something during a quest, and in a future quest only that player would have access to a room filled with treasures. This could apply here too. I mean, there are tons of possibilities for introducing campaign interaction in that game. For instance, you could have this "secret room" (or whatever) in a Rumor quest that is particulary difficult for the heroes. They could still choose to run this quest because of the reward, but the Overlord could use this possibility to catch up and set more traps for the future.

I am of the opinion that both sides are very well balanced when you look at the whole picture. Some quests will inevitably lean towards one side but you have to live with that (and select/avoid said quest if need be) considering the half billion combinations heroes/monsters/skills/OL cards/whatnot there are in the game. However, with this said, I also share the thought that the number one thing Descent may be missing is an intelligent way to maintain balance through campaign play. Not only steamrolling really kills the experience, but the way the campaign winner is declared brings up a lot of deception. It's not that you never get to experience a true epic ending in a campaign, but more often than not it comes down to a lucky dice roll and a cheap win. I don't think the way this has been designed is necessarly wrong or poor, but in practice we have found that the climax you get when starting the Finale often ends abruptly and I think that's a shame. I would rather patch 2Ed than creating a 3Ed. Not because it is broken, but because it could be improved to fill these holes. LoS and other things are tiny things in comparison. Like many have said, nobody prevents people from playing with house rules to alter these parts of the gameplay after all. Make your own dices or produce a new set of monster cards etc. Possibilities are numerous. What would we get as a 3Ed anyway? Game is more than fine and allows for a lot of future content. Release more settings and monsters and that will sustain sales for this game. I´ve been away from D2E for a few months now (only keeping an eye on the forums) but I totally intend to come back to it. I wouldn't be able to say this about many other campaign-based games I´ve played. I even got enough of Pandemic Legacy which mind you is probably the game of the year. Next year I´ll also be trying out Gloomhaven and I hope to be able to get my playgroup getting D2E to the table, Heirs of Blood in particular. We need a pause between cheap campaign wins and the next campaign, for obvious reasons. So yeah, coming back to that "patch" of mine, here is the scope I´d consider if I had the power to decide anything: - Address steamrolling. Proposal: Keep rewards, but implement a mechanism filling a % of the gap between the two sides when difference has become abyssmal. Otherwise players lose interest very quickly and it's a no brainer understanding why. - Re-design campaign end. Proposal: I would setup a series of objectives to meet during the campaign. Make the "slaying the big boss/killing all heroes" during the FInale one of them. Gain points for each objective you have fulfilled, and rank both sides' progression to add up to that total. The winner is the side with the most points in the end. - Refine plot deck usage with regards to fortune tokens. Proposal: remove fortune tokens. - Refine rumors. Proposal: with the introduction of objectives, rumors could be made more interesting to both sides.

Same here, I got a reply directly after I posted yesterday =) I also have no complains, as I´m happy to get answers at all, which is not the case with every game publisher on the market these days. This being said I don't quite understand why FFG only has Kara for answering questions (Nathan used to be in the picture before), She's absolutely entitled to be on leave but why wouldn't FFG then assign some other person to answer queries while she is not available?

Yes it's been quite bad over the past couple of months.

This is an extract of hideousprime's profile on AM: [...] As for what I enjoy doing in the evening, I like watching a good movie with some good company, or sitting in a rocking chair drinking a glass of wine, reading a nice book [...] [...] I enjoy playing a board game (for the non-initiated Monopoly is a board game) featuring some dudes fighting in a cave over a lady who is not even nice, and gain some gold so we can buy boots to walk over lava. One player is generally despised by all others but we´re having great fun. To make it cozy, we play this on a ping pong table unfolded in the basement every night, talking loud and with heavy drinking involved. We fart all night singing war chants and then we swing these golf clubs to reproduce the epic fights we´re having in that game, then once we´re all done I am usually very sour and tired [...]

Many dates so far?

I think the best way to get a game group going is to start with your close relatives and friends. For instance if you have some job mates and use to go out with them once in a while to get a drink in town, play some sport, bowling or whatever, then you could suggest this as the next activity and see how people react. I´ve had poker nights in the past, XBOX nights, etc. As you expose people to what you like, you get them to talk about their affinity to it and start seeing common interests. But the thing is that you can hardly get a game like Descent going straight off the bat, you need to see if people are interested in board gaming in general, because if they´re not then they will absolutely hate it. Otherwise what I said seems to work, I´ve had some friends once telling me how much they used to play D&D (the roleplayging game) in their youth, and it lead to me suggesting playing the adventure board games. They could instantly relate to it even though they had near to zero experience with heavier board games (that are not Monopoly or Risk). To some extent these D&D games were our "gateway" game (it's really not technically due to complexity) and we could play a ton of other games as people's interest in the hobby grew. You need to start "somewhere" and be patient. If you´re lucky to know at least one person who would be interested in forming a group, stick to that core (the two of you) and have both invite one friend each, and see how well it fares with 4 people. Have everything set conveniently for everybody, if it's easier for people to get to the place the session takes place etc then they will show up. Ultimately what people want is a break from real life for a couple of hours. You don't need to be a hardcore board game fan to play board games, but hardcore board gamers (e.g. the people in the hobby) also need to respect that and be tolerant. Sadly I think going to a blind date with a game association has very little chance to give you anything. It "should" be the best way to get a group going but it's not, at least in that corner of the world I live in. You said it: people aren't interested in playing Descent. they want MTG or wargames. You can go to stores and stick your name exactly like a drummer would ask for a band to play in. That rarely pays off, but why not doing it in case you´re lucky. There is the occasional game association where people play Descent and some other similar games. But they tend to be overcrowded, it's not difficult to get to play games but you may find the feel of a real group lacking. If you´re an extravert then you can give a try. I personally prefer to stick to a group I meet with regularly but it is a matter of taste.

That's funny because I used that same card in one of my latest campaigns to prevent my already overgeared heroes from getting even more ridiculous gear, as they found the chest in every single quest. It was probably a decisive card in that regard, but at the same time using it prevented me from purchasing other interesting cards from the Zacharath plot deck, so the heroes somehow avoided other kinds of danger.

I obviously try to make everything enjoyable to everybody, otherwise nobody would ever come back or play with me, but you have to realize the game has its share of tension and that's by design. It is the result of the 1 versus many competition. In my experience with board games, it tends to be more tense this way compared to playing full competitive, mainly because the game has to be assymetric. Assymetricity means players can blame the game for being unfair between the players, some players have a problem with that when they lose. But I would make a distinction between playing with completely new - or inexperienced in the genra - players, and playing with your regular group where strategy games often hit the table. In the first case playing the Overlord is a blessing, because it is a more difficult role to play than the hero role, and you basically have the power to adapt the toughness of the game to how the heroes fare. Sick OL-combos apart, I wouldn't dumb my plays down too much even in that situation (which means web traps are still fired of, monsters still attack etc), however you can be more verbal globally about the game and try to help as much as possible so the hero players get to understand the game and make better decisions. When I introduce this game to my daughter that's the way I will be playing with her. Talking and thinking loud about your strategies is a really good way to decrease in-game tension. Since the information is all open, it makes the game for an enjoyable experience for everybody, and people review their win/loss together, instead of keeping information secret. In the other case, my view is that at the end of the day your players should be acknoledging the fact Descent is a game about competitivity. I really think holding cards too long for no reason or skipping monster actions just to keep the game "even" is crippling the experience of the Overlord player. At worst you give this to the heroes, they take it, and then they steamroll you all over for the rest of the campaign. You really want to avoid that. But like I said elsewhere on the forums, you can always pick a different monster group or explore new plot decks or OL classes. I don't pick Zachy all the time for instance. I have been digging into the Unkindness class lately and that's also a specialization that makes me (the OL) weak against certain strategies, as opposed to picking the best possible path for me. It makes yourself explore the whole D2E content and I think it's a good thing.

Pretty story aside, my hero players' interpretation of the Overlord is some dude trying to destroy their fun at the only biweekly break they have in their tight work schedule, bribing them with crisps and booze, and try to bend the rules in his favor claiming that the designer team itself has send personal replies to rules question.

Don't worry, I´m also playing for fun, but the role of the Overlord is special as you are basically on your own, and competitivty is what keeps the game interesting in my opinion. There is nothing worse than one side crushing the other side game after game. I guess people are differeny in essence, but I love to prepare my quests beforehand, I like the mathematical game, and I also enjoy the strategy involved in choosing monsters and thinning down my deck. Once fully prepared, you can tone down your playstyle as much as you want to cope with a weaker party, for instance. I have found myseklf giving some piece of advice in-game just because it felt normal to highlight something everybody could benefit from. It also makes for an open and less tense environment. People can have a good time even if they lose. Mind you, if you are on a winning spree, nothing prevents you from choosing a different monster group just because you´d want to try this one out. You´re taking a risk by not making the optimal choice for the quest, but it also gives you testing grounds for further hero bashing later on in the campaign If your heroes try their best to meet their quest objectives then you should probably too. I mean, that might sound obvious to say, but the game is designed to give theoritically the same odds on both sides, then good decisions and a bit of luck will make the odds go your way.

The Overlord is not physically represented on the map, but it is the rampant evil that is omnipresent in the world. You can feel it already during the Travel Phase when obscure events take place, resulting in fatigue or conditions being dealt. You can feel that evil when monsters are granted dark powers all of a sudden, inhuman strength and speed. Heroes are turning against their friends in a moment of madness, and dark spells wrap the hero party in shadows. Doubt and fear are instilled in the heroes heart. That is the works of the Overlord in the dark places of the world. Sometimes these powers come at a price, sacrifices are made in the ranks of monsters, to serve the greater good. Lieutenants channel that dark magic, but they are all but puppets in the hands of the overlord. The Overlord is growing stronger and stronger, and time is precious so the heroes do not get lost in that darkness. The Overlord is actually the entity linking all of these campaigns together. You never get rid of him, it comes back when summoned by his minions.

My opinion is that you are missing a key strategy element of the game by choosing monster groups the way you do. Maybe your method works thematically, but I find it horribly restrictive and ultimately helping out the heroes in general. I strongly recommend you spend some time carefully choosing your open groups. If your heroes players are as good as mine you won't regret that preparation time. To give you an indication, I spend more time choosing my open groups than choosing my OL deck. You can also force yourself (the OL) to play with custom blue dices with extra weight on the cross symbol, you can also say that you can only reinforce a monster if a hero player says the words "hypothetically speaking" during your own turn, or double the number of objective tokens the OL needs to win a quest every time you reinforce a large monster. Joke aside, nobody will ever prevent you from playing the game with these kinds of rulebook hack & slash restrictions as long as you and your playgroup are having fun. But since you posted this to the community, I can give my opinion which is that such house rule will with no doubt obliterate game balance in a way that is harsher and more painful than playing Silent Hill in hardcore mode without flashlight. This is like bringing a bazooka to a game of dominos. And I must say there is no way I'd ever come along with such decision even if beer was offered on the table. This is nuts, man. Parts of me admire you for trying to soften the role of the overlord and maybe meet a weak hero party in the middle as part of a compromise, but I am vehemently against the idea to destroy a game just so somebody can have a **** at it. For what it's worth, I find that the reinforcement rules are just FINE in that game and I have zero idea what the grounds of this criticism are. For me it's entirely baseless. I can get frustrated in that game for at least a million other reasons, but that doesn't imply the game is broken. If IA has better rules then good for IA I suppose. I find that reinforcements are always dreaded by the heroes because the baddies are coming at them, the Overlord needs to refuel his attack line because 4 heroes have 8+ attacks per turn, etc. It also allows you to populate deserted areas of the map and facilitate access to objective etc. That to me sounds like a VERY interesting mechanism for a game like this. EDIT: Thread is actually about an "unhappy playgroup" and I think it all comes down to it. If you feel there is unbalance in the game then changing the rules (in such drastic way) would be the last thing I´d consider, because what it implies is that you are NEVER going to get balance back again since you have to break a fundamental mechanism of the rules to make something else even. What you need to do (and I´ve been through that before so I know by experience) is to increase knowledge and awareness of the players that are falling behind. Drag them up to your level, emphasize on the important strategical aspects, what choices are good and which ones are bad, things to be careful about etc. Gradually you will feel that both sides get evened up, and ultimately you will see how much of a disaster dissing a OL card for free is for you - if you ever want to play this game at competitive level (if you´re just here as a GM and do random crazy things then sure, you don't even need OL cards in that case)

I honestly don't know, this game seems to have a lot of popularity, yet I have no idea how well it sells. With the release of the last expansion I think the game has too much going on if you play with all add-on rules from all expansions. I didn't like Foul Play for many reasons, but one of these reasons was that it really added a thick layer of restrictions to an already long game and I even questioned the sheer "fun" these should supposively give you in exchange of that time/complexity. Then to each his own, but I was far from being impressed. I think there is room for releasing new teams, but: - New abilities means none of the older teams have them, unless they release more players or more staff/team upgrades, which sounds more like a patch to me than anything else, and can potentially break balance between the teams. Vampires for instance really got the shaft when they released Foul Play. - Given the contents of the two expansions, there wouldn't be just the three new teams without a set of additional rules global to the game, which again I think would start to make the game really cumbersome. To be fair, I think there is also room for additional rules that would be fun for everybody, but not rules that require you to go into technical details as for the timing of your actions, or anything preventing you from playing your cards as you want. I feel like 3 hours + for a game like this with 5 players is too much.

Glad to hear there are some items left in that deck that I (as the Overlord) need to worry about

Do they just say the name "Alric Farrow" without the "Sir"? There is no litteral translation anyway, because the English "Sir" or "Lord" (not sure about "Lady") refers to a particular class system in the UK. But I would have thought it didn't have any importance when used to qualify characters in a fantasy world. At worst they could have used the same words as they are very likely in the French dictionary as well. Otherwise any feodal title would have made the cut in my reckoning.

I don´t think that is strictly true. If the stalker would posses "Heart Seeker", he would be able to attack the target without LOS. But of course he would still need to meet the range requirements to hit. Is this an item? Otherwise yes this is what I meant by "unless stated otherwise on the skill card". skill or item card.

LoS is always required for any type of attack, unless it is stated otherwise on the skill card.

Playmats have been discussed in the past on these forums, and while they would be very nice indeed, I´m still questionning their practicality. Since BBTM is a game where you pile up a ton of cards on each side of a pitch, and each of these need to be visible, AND can be either set horizontally or vertically, it makes it difficult to design a playmat that can cope with this. I´m for playmats, but I´m sceptical as for FFG's capability to come up with something good.

I would also point out that the progression curve between heroes and OL is very asymetric. While both sides can save up XP to get better cards later in the campaign, it is very rare in my experience that not a single hero chooses to spend XP between two quests. As Whitewing pointed out, there are so many excellent 1XP skill cards for all classes, so my hero players tend to farm those early in the campaign to speed up their progression and chance of success. The 2/3XP skills are generally obtained once these key 1XP skills have been cashed in. Furthermore, heroes get gold and again it is quite uncommon that no purchase is made between two quests. My point being that the heroes can consistentlty advance on their progression curve quest after quest, they get stronger, while the OL, well, is stuck with low tier 1XP cards and needs to invest in these before he/she can unlock higher tier ones. In my personal experience I tend to go for the highest impact 1XP card first (web trap normally even if I hate having to do this campaign after campaign) just to give him/herself the slighest chance to keep up. Otherwise you save up, which means your deck hasn't been improved at all. Plot cards can also be purchased but they need tons of threats, and even then you need even more threat to fuel them (normally), which further helps the heroes (!), so yeah as I pointed out in one of my very long posts regarding these and rumor quests, they are more than often dead cards if any good at all. I don't know what the conclusion of all that is, I think it entirely comes down to how the heroes pick their skills and then trying to pick open groups to exploit their weaknesses and hope to draw these better OL cards, which happen to be Basic cards during the whole campaign. I cannot speak for all overlords here, but I never get to purchase these 3XP cards because it would expose me too much, flexibility has always been the better choice rather than specializing, assuming you are facing a rather balanced group of heroes. So the conclusion is that if you set aside luck in the game (yeah that's a stretch), your overall chances of success for playing the overlord heavily depend on your heroes taking their opportunities and making good choices. If they do that (like my heroes do now that they know the game well), the odds are in fact very much against you. That's where you need to make effective purchases just to try to keep up, select your quests and open groups very carefully, and hope luck will kick in in your favor. That's my perception of playing the Overlord in this game currently.

Hi there, These special rules are intended for Heirs of Blood exclusively. So you cannot officially port them to any other campaign, unless of course you and your playgroup agree to do so, which would make it a house rule. I don't know if these rules can help balancing out 2-players games in other campaigns than HoB. It may be that it does, so I´d encourage you to try them out and let us know. After all 2-heroes games are quite broken in this game. But you can't use these rules officially in any other campaign. Note that I champion the use of 4-heroes in a game with 3 players. You should really play two heroes per hero player whenever you can. It's not only the fact it's more balanced, but it's also the variety in your actions is huge in comparison. It makes up for richer game experience. Two heroes is a bit dull in my opinion.

The card doesn't say you gain a surge, it says that you can use a surge to gain +3 damage. So if you get no surge on the dice roll then you cannot use this ability.

Some elements of clarification from FFG:

Thanks Rugal This one is giving me a headache. One can say the target is already removed from the map straight after damage has been dealt. The problem is, though, is that the OL has to declare how the surges will be spent and that would probably be prior to knowing if the hero is KO or not. Even if dices have been rolled I guess there can still be effects which would help mitigating the damage, like an item you can exhaust after dices have been rolled to give you more defense. So in practice, before surges are spent you can see the attack deals enough damage to kill the hero. If Hunt cannot trigger on a hero token then this extra surge cannot be spent (OL cards aside). Then the hero exhausts his shield and survives. Can the OL retroactively spend the surge to perform Hunt, then, since it suddenly would have become legal again? Can you say "I spend that surge on Hunt if you survive, otherwise I´ll go trigger Flurry to get an extra attack on a second hero"? I guess not? Sounds like a bad situation for the OL. When does Knockback apply? The effect doesn't say "after this attack resolves" like Hunt does. Can the OL in that case have the hero die three spaces away from the Ynfernael Hulk? Thematically you could throw the corpse away, couldn't you?