Descent and D&D

[MerricB]

Battlelore is great. I got my first two games in on Friday (as my D&D group went in to watch fireworks on Australia Day). Good game. Fast play - we got in 2 games in the 90 minutes it took them to visit the fireworks, after which we resumed the Age of Worms. Days of Wonder is a superior board-game company.

Runebound 2e uses 2d10 rather than d20, so changes the difficulty of various challenges. (Less random). They also added a couple of cards you could use to interfere with other people's movement, but as those cards then go to those people and can be used on you, I've never seen them played. Mike - how many people do you play with?

I like Arkham Horror quite a bit - mostly as a solo game, actually. I bought both it and Battlelore last weekend, although my friends have had AH for a year or more.

The new Talisman forums are here:
http://forum.blackindustries.com/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=12
(The new Talisman game is not Warhammer-based).

I do know about the D&D Board Game, but it
(a) doesn't use anything resembling D&D rules and
(b) isn't widely available.

Cheers!

 

[bento]

Bento - what quest were you playing?
Quest 1 from the main set is considerably easier then the other quests.
Don't know if there are any easy quests in the Well of Darkness expansion - the first one with the collapsing dungeon isn't easy.

I OLed Quest 1 twice. After the first time (we were reading the rules the same time we were playing) I re-read the rules in one setting, finding we had made several mistakes. The second time I was running it for five players.

It was the second time where I really focused on trying to take any of the players out. Between the difficulty of moving around in the third room, (large critters & small spaces) and the players knowing how to locate themselves to be the most effective, it was a cake walk for them. This is despite my attempt to play as many spawn cards as I could get in my hand!

My big complaint with Descent is the dice allocation for the monsters compared to the players. It's just too weak.

I have asked for Runebound 2nd ed for my upcoming birthday, as I think I may enjoy this more. I read some great reviews and found out that you can play it solo.

 

[Livia]

With regards to Descent, you also don't carry anything over between games do you? That is another major difference between it and D&D.

No, but the expansion (I can't remember which one, I think it's Well of Darkness) does add campaign rules to keep developing the same characters through it.


I agree that it can be tough for the Overlord to win.

I've had times when the players opened the door to the final room, and I've setup the contents. It has something like, a dragon, an ogre, a giant, some giant spiders, plus some of my cards let me spawn extra creatures, so there's also four beastman. And one of the characters happened to find an ice storm spell. Player 1 opens the door, player 2 attacks twice with the spell and the overlord player doesn't even get a turn -- the room is empty.

If you want to kill the players, you have to be killer from the get-go. Beastmen are absolutely deadly to a starting out party. Get a few of them, add some traps and you've won ... and then you spent 40 minutes setting up, choosing characters, starting equipment etc, only to kill the players and take all their conquest* away in 10-20 minutes.

So usually you don't want to kill them right off because you actually want to play as well.
But if you don't kill them early, and they reach a silver or gold chest, good luck in ever killing them, unless you have only two heroes, you have little chance, and even two heroes with gold treasure are tough to take down, when they're killing Master Daemons with one hit.

Altar of Zul, another expansion, adds cursed items and dark relics the overlord can use on the players to assist things.

*conquest is the 'lives' of the game -- the heroes get a certain amount of conquest to start with, and they can gain more throughout the dungeon. Each hero is worth a certain amount, and if killed reduces that amount from the total. If conquest reaches 0, the Overlord wins. Heroes can otherwise 'respawn' in town.

All in all, I think Doom, which was the first incarnation of the same system, sci-fi themed obviously, is the better game. Oh it has it's problems, but many of said problems are fixed in the expansion, and it plays much quicker in my experience.

 

[MerricB]

All in all, I think Doom, which was the first incarnation of the same system, sci-fi themed obviously, is the better game. Oh it has it's problems, but many of said problems are fixed in the expansion, and it plays much quicker in my experience.

Funny, I seem to remember the buzz was that Descent fixed a lot of the problems with Doom...

Certainly, it has a problem with the challenges not scaling properly with the players getting more powerful; in part due the fairly static nature of the Overlord deck.

Cheers!

 

[Thanee]

Well, I like Warhammer Quest (pretty old game of a similar style; and by far and wide the best one I have seen so far).

Bye
Thanee

 

[Livia]

Funny, I seem to remember the buzz was that Descent fixed a lot of the problems with Doom...

Yes. And the majority of things that Descent fixed, ended up in the Doom expansion

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

It's funny.

My D&D group plays Descent and Runebound rather frequently, especially over the past couple months (while we've been on a D&D hiatus due to scheduling issues).

Like Merric and others noted, they are long games.

After our last Descent game, however, we came to a conclusion. The reason that we were taking so long is that we were trying to play it like D&D.

What's one of the cardinal rules of D&D adventuring? Never leave a living monster behind you. So, as we went around, playing through our Descent adventures, we'd make absolutely certain that we'd wiped out the OL's monsters, that we'd covered all our sightlines to prevent him from spawning any more, etc.

The trick is, in Descent, individual monsters aren't that tough. They're much, much, much more limited than your foes in a basic D&D game. That kobold you ignored in the first room can't run ahead and warn his tribe, setting a deadly ambush with traps, pitfalls, caltrops, and hordes of Kobold Sor 1s and War 1s.

That lone kobold behind you is, for most intents and purposes, wasted spawn points. If he wants to hurt you, then he needs to come running up to you, and any but the weakest adventurer can easily take him in single combat, so who cares?

And, even then, if the kobold punks your wounded, no-defense wizard ... he's only worth 2 or 3 points to the Overlord. In most games, he'd need to kill you a dozen times over to seriously endanger your chances of beating the dungeon.

In short, I think if our group got further away from the D&D mindset, and more into the Diablo mindset, when playing Descent, we'd play a lot faster and probably have a lot more fun.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Descent is an interesting game, but, ultimately, it seems fatally flawed in comparison to its predecessors, WH Quest and the two boardgames going by the name Heroquest. FWIW, Runebound and especially Talisman occupy, in my mind, a totally different design space than these 'dungeon games' - they're much closer to traditional board games with only a fantasy theme to separate them.

Descent is much more complicated than the Milton Bradley version of Heroquest and somewhat more complicated - and much, much slower - than the Games Workshop version of Heroquest (which I'll call by its US title, Advanced Heroquest, for clarity) and Warhammer Quest.

Personally, I think the US/Milton Bradley version of Heroquest was the best in the genre; it took what this type of game does well (players vs. GM using streamlined but still tactical rules) and took it to the max. You could play it cold without anyone but Zargon (the GM/Overlord) ever reading the rules, and the rules weren't any longer than those of, say, Monopoly.

Advanced Heroquest was slowed somewhat by its more complicated rules and its use of charts instead of cards. Cards have become ubiquitous in modern board games for a reason; they're much faster and more convenient in play than any other option, at least if well-templated (MB's Heroquest cards were). The rulebook for Advanced Heroquest is the size of a small RPG's instead of a large boardgame's. My other problem with it was, at least in the premade (anti-skaven) scenarios that come with the game, it throws a lot more mooks at the PCs to whittle down their HP. Another source of slowdown? The floor tiles instead of a board with doors placed on it. But, I'm not sure this is all that bad because unlike most of the other complications, it does offer new and interesting functionality.

Warhammer Quest is actually probably more complex than Advanced Heroquest, and has the same buckets o mooks problem with its premade scenarios. But, it's a much faster game because it has cards and cleaner design work. It keeps the floor tiles, the advancement rules and a fair amount of added complexity but speeds it up with better game design. I can see calling WHQ better than MB's Heroquest, although I would personally disagree. Both are very well done.

Descent uses cards. So, that speeds it up probably 20%-30% over what it would be with charts, maybe more. It's scary to think where it would be with charts! A lot of little things are timesinks in Descent (this is a problem with D&D at times, too - it's not any one thing, it's the combination of many small things), especially, I suppose, with inexperienced players. Maybe if I played it enough to be as familiar with it as I am with d20, it would run faster... but a dungeon-crawling board game should *not* require the level of rules mastery a crunchy RPG does.

 

[Thanee]

The biggest selling point of WHQ to me is its ability to work as a purely cooperative game with no GM/opponent other than the game itself. And it works really well that way.

Bye
Thanee

 

[MerricB]

The biggest selling point of WHQ to me is its ability to work as a purely cooperative game with no GM/opponent other than the game itself. And it works really well that way.

Absolutely.

There are good games that are co-operative vs traitor/enemy/DM, but it's a hard act to pull off.

Cheers!