Meh Descent Quests

I've got around 25 quests of Descent in my set (JttD, WoD and AoD) along with RtL which we barely play as nobody has the time to commit to a campaign and dear lord are some of these quests are just plain slow and tedious.

You'll get lucky if you pick a quest that is so horribly imbalanced that the overlord wins in 30 minutes or so, at least you won't be trudging along a boring quest for a good 4-5 hours just going through the motions.

Take for example this Altar of Despair quest we played, Hold the Line. Heroes defend the temple against waves and waves of monsters. It starts out ok enough, but when you get to the end, dear lord it just bogs down as the heroes have barely enough firepower to slog through the monsters and they just end up being surrounded and they have to claw their way out. Sounds exciting.. Not. And there's this whole thing with altars that cast some fire spell that torches all the monsters... It doesn't kill them. It deals a little damage and you have to put burn tokens or some such on the monsters - in short a whole lot of bookkeeping to little effect. They should've just made the altars pop everything.

No idea if anybody tested this quest. If they did they would've realized that nobody wants to keep track of the life totals of 10 different monsters and put 2 burn tokens on each of them. Absolutely horrid.

This has got to be the worst Descent session I've ever had, and we've had some real downers. We should've just played Arkham.

Haven't played that one. Honestly, I have probably only played 1/5 of the Descent quests published. This official quest on FFG's Web site is pretty good, it's very fast paced and not too tough for the heroes

www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/d.../descentthechase.pdf

I also like the one from Well of Darkness where the dungeon collapses and you remove a tile from the board each turn.

kookoobah wrote:

This has got to be the worst Descent session I've ever had, and we've had some real downers. We should've just played DOOM.

Fixed.

I just played the collapsing cavern one last weekend. The 1st time we died becuse we tried to kill the withc and wasted too much time. This time was dicey too but anti climactic at the end becuse the overlord had thrown everything he had at us earlier.

Good mish.

Steve"Descenter"Avery

Stephen Avery wrote:

This time was dicey too but anti climactic at the end becuse the overlord had thrown everything he had at us earlier. We should've just played DOOM.

Fixed.

Kookoobah, you pretty much outlined my main beefs with DESCENT. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great game and when it's on and poppin' it can be a tremendously fun experience.

However, like you said about tracking all the monster stuff, the game butts RIGHT up against what I think is the acceptable level of overhead for a game to have and still be any fun. There is a SHITLOAD of stuff to track in the game, and when the quests add more, it gets ridiculous and cumbersome.

And I think the pace and length of the game is completely off...4-5 hours for a single dungeon quest is WAY too long. The first time I played it Robert Martin was on board and his impression was "It took us two hours to open a door". Which is very true. The game is highly tactical, which is fine, but it feels a lot of times like you're slogging through molasses. It helps a lot when everybody knows the game and is ready to move decisively on their turn. When everybody plays that whole "if I do this and you do that" game, it becomes incredibly boring. Coordination is fine, but I've played at tables where the party calculates EVERYTHING they do. The game starts to suck.

I've only played maybe six or seven of the quests the game ships with, but most of them have been pretty good. The "Thing in the Pit" one is probably my favorite.

Stephen Avery wrote:

This time was dicey too but anti climactic at the end becuse the overlord had thrown everything he had at us earlier. We should've just played again.

Fixed.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the different designers come up with for quests in the new book, as there are some good quests done by users on the FFG web site (that chase quest is one of them).

Michael Barnes wrote:

Kookoobah, you pretty much outlined my main beefs with DESCENT. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great game and when it's on and poppin' it can be a tremendously fun experience.

However, like you said about tracking all the monster stuff, the game butts RIGHT up against what I think is the acceptable level of overhead for a game to have and still be any fun. There is a SHITLOAD of stuff to track in the game, and when the quests add more, it gets ridiculous and cumbersome.

And I think the pace and length of the game is completely off...4-5 hours for a single dungeon quest is WAY too long. The first time I played it Robert Martin was on board and his impression was "It took us two hours to open a door". Which is very true. The game is highly tactical, which is fine, but it feels a lot of times like you're slogging through molasses. It helps a lot when everybody knows the game and is ready to move decisively on their turn. When everybody plays that whole "if I do this and you do that" game, it becomes incredibly boring. Coordination is fine, but I've played at tables where the party calculates EVERYTHING they do. The game starts to suck.

I've only played maybe six or seven of the quests the game ships with, but most of them have been pretty good. The "Thing in the Pit" one is probably my favorite.

I've never felt like there's too much stuff to keep track of (except heroes forgetting what skills they have). But yeah, when the party of heroes spends 20 mins maximizing one turn, it totally bogs down.

There are just a few too many problems with Descent.

1. The basic game quests are pretty well balanced. Well of Darkness and Altar of Despair are brutally hard.

2. Monster spawns are entirely too frequent. The cheapest cards are spawns, and the sanest tactic is to pile up spawns to hit the adventurers in a wave. Once they start to fall behind, the adventure is essentially over. There is only a small amount of killing bandwidthin a starting party to deal with the spawns. If they get trapped behind that curve--or hit a dead end--they are dead.

Road to Legend contains a potential fix for much of this. You only get one spawn per level. (More only if you pay a pretty hefty Threat tax.)The three level dungeons each with a couple of nifty extra rules are vastly more interesting than the normal quests.

And a three level dungeon fits nicely in a 3 hour timeframe.

I just wish we had a reproduceable way to use those levels to create balanced mini-dungeons.

3. Warhammer Quest does still have a thing or two on Descent because: spawns are rarer. And any decent fighter can take out a TON of basic minion level things in one go with sweep attacks.

Road to Legend contains a potential fix for much of this. You only get one spawn per level. (More only if you pay a pretty hefty Threat tax.)The three level dungeons each with a couple of nifty extra rules are vastly more interesting than the normal quests.

Yeah, you can use this rule in playing non-RTL. What does stink is as an Overlord, I get bored too just spawning monsters over and over and dragging the game out. But time is one of the Overlord's greatest weapons to winning the game. The longer you can postpone the heroes the better chance you have of killing them.

The key for the heroes is to KEEP MOVING.

Man, Arkham can be just as fiddly as Descent. What is so hard about the record keeping in this? They give you tokens to keep track of everything for Christ's sake. It's not like you have to use a pencil. If you're not using two big plano boxes to organize your tokens you've fucked yourself that's true.

I'm towards the end of finishing Hold the Line and it's one of my favorites so far. It's refreshing to just camp out without having to push constantly. Yeah,it was a bit disappointing that you only get two burns from the altars. This would have been more helpful if it were 3 per shot. Still, anything helps on this one. I don't expect to win, but I'm going out with staffs blazing.

Wins as heroes are really earned in this game and are very satisfying ones for the most part. I just assumed it was designed that way and never worried about it. If it were easy for the heroes it would be fucking boring. I think it depends on your attitude on approach. Once you get it in your skull that it's not a cake-walk it might be more enjoyable.

I won't argue that game length is a definate issue. Descent could definately use some shorter and easier quests. I'm fortunate to have a space to leave the game out and continue when we want to. If this weren't the case I would be pretty frustrated as we would never finish. I was hoping the quest compendium would fill some of the gaps but it's sounding like more giant-sized dungeons. Maybe not, but if so I think it would be a mistake on FFG's part.

If they released more newbie friendly + shorter scenarios things would be awesome.

Hex Sinister wrote:

I won't argue that game length is a definate issue. Descent could definately use some shorter and easier quests. I'm fortunate to have a space to leave the game out and continue when we want to. If this weren't the case I would be pretty frustrated as we would never finish. I was hoping the quest compendium would fill some of the gaps but it's sounding like more giant-sized dungeons. Maybe not, but if so I think it would be a mistake on FFG's part.

If they released more newbie friendly + shorter scenarios things would be awesome.

Yeah shorter quests would be great. I really thought RTL would rectify the whole game length issue, by basically breaking the game into smaller parts, but for some reason it doesn't work. And the RTL dungeons are really bland compared to the Descent quests.

See, the whole "now you can play DESCENT in an hour!" thing that RTL kind of implied was bullshit. It takes just as long as ever- hell, campaigns are what, 80 hours or something like that? It's just broken up over more sessions and they give you some forms to fill out to "save" your game.

I still think RTL is fucking brilliant, one of the best expansions ever. But what it is and what it does is sort of deceptive. In some ways, it takes away from the main game (namely the more intricate dungeons ideas and the ability to play a complete game in an evening). Its greatness though, is something that I think is only going to really be experienced by groups that play DESCENT almost exclusively. I thought that it would be a way that we could play a 2-3 hour game one night, put it away, and then a couple of weeks later pick it up. That doesn't really work. Setting up and breaking down the game for a single dungeon or wilderness encounter is a pain in the fucking ass. Plus, you have to run it like a weekly campaign session and practically relgiously to get the most out of it and make it to the end.

As far as ARKHAM being just as fiddly and bookkeeping-heavy- you're right, it is. In fact, it's moreso. I think that's FFG's biggest weakness- the games tend to have a huge amount of administrative overhead. Part of it is because their themes and game concepts are kind of propped up by having TONS of cards, various tracks, and chits for every other keyword in the rulebook. That's not a problem except when there's ONE card out of 1000 that needs to be tracked or there's a single counter that an entire section of rules and administration process covers.

Hex Sinister wrote:

Man, Arkham can be just as fiddly as Descent. What is so hard about the record keeping in this? They give you tokens to keep track of everything for Christ's sake. It's not like you have to use a pencil. If you're not using two big plano boxes to organize your tokens you've fucked yourself that's true.

I have to disagree. Tracking monster health is tedious in Descent and I only realized this because of the altars in this mission. When one of the heroes activated it, I had to put a dice beside each monster to record its life (how else was I supposed to remember all of them) and 2 burn tokens on each of 10 monsters that I had to roll for when my turn came. Absolutely horrid. At least in Arkham, you never have to keep track of monster life and Descent is all about killing monsters.

I must say that in general, I agree that Arkham is worse than Descent in this aspect, but in this mission, I was actually wishing the altars would just kill my monsters so that I didn't have to do any of that.

I guess the worst part is, you have to spend 3-5 hours on each mission to see if it works or not. Meh.