DESCENT Descending Hot

D&D 4e was the total nail in the coffin for Descent for me. D&D 3x is a different beast (though I still would much rather play it than Descent), but it didn't have the same tactical focus and ease of set up as Descent did so there at least felt like there was something unique to be had in Descent. Yet when 4e dropped it was clear that for a very slight bit more overhead you could have a vastly deeper experience. The delves are everything Descent offers with the added benefit of allowing you to think as outside the box as you want and build up things to a much more interesting degree, but with the quick start rules and pregen characters playing through a prewritten delve, it was just as much rules work/prep time as Descent.

For a campaign, why the fuck would you put so much time into Descent when you could play a real RPG campaign with all the added stuff you want (or just cut out what you don't).

Descent is bullshit.

Yeah, it's a big, sprawling mess, and it's just way too slow. I bought it primarily because I knew my girls would like to paint the minis, and they did, but it was just a ridiculous effort/reward ratio. Unlike, say, Arkham Horror (I know, different kind of game entirely, but...still in the "big adventure" category in my head) which is also massive, but you can finish in a couple hours. Descent is just not a game for people with "normal" time parameters.

That's really the heart of it, Matt. DESCENT reduces or even cuts out all of the narrative, story, and character of an RPG campaign and replaces it all with administration, resource management, numbers, positioning, and collaborative optimization. It could be that DESCENT points out the failure of the "RPG on a board" idea.

Or does it? MAGIC REALM did that just fine...

Descent is a great box of toys just looking for a way out of the 1980s.

Seriously, I like everything about that game, except for the way it plays. It's a slog, and I can think of about ten long games I'd rather play ahead of it. It ought to be fun, but it moves at an Avalon Hill pace.

Too bad, because if we were still in the 1980s, I'd be all over this game. For all its flaws, it's still better than Dark Tower.

I think that something like Magic Realm is in a different class of game, Descent is really just a tactical minis game. MR is more like a real RPG in that it is an adventure.

The failing is that if you want to focus on tactical minis based dungeon crawling you can do it faster/easier or deeper and more engaging than anything offered in Descent. It doesn't really fill any need as it tries to be light enough for the light players yet deep enough for the serious players and ends up failing both.

I just don't care about Dungeon Crawls anymore. We played the hell out of Descent when it came out. Then 4th edition D&D came out, like Loter said, and I reallized I don't want to play either. They both suck and feel the same to me.

Wait, suck is the wrong word. If I was 14 again Descent may be the best boardgame of all time. It is perfect for that time and place.

D&D 4E made D&D feel dull. Every character is the same... exactly the same. It's too balanced, like Euro D&D or something. I'd rather play the basic box set and make elves and dwarves classes again.

I think that boardgaming has to move past the Dungeon Crawl and somewhere new. There has to be a new and interesting way to present this material. Our copy of Descent gathers dust and my D&D 4E books are only good for campfires. No one is interested in Dungeon Crawling boardgames in our group (although they play D&D 4E without me and my borther who are sick of it).

That's true, MAGIC REALM is a very different kind of game...the point is that DESCENT completely fails as an "RPG on a board"...it's the same kind of screwed up definition of "RPG" that has lead most video gamers to think that an RPG is a game where futz around micromanaging statistics.

There are good dungeon crawls, JJ...INCURSION and FORLORN: HOPE are ultimately in this genre and they're terrific games. The key difference is that neither gets out into the weeds in terms of component density, difficulty of play, and optimizaiton.

It's funny because a couple of years ago when NIN-GONOST came out they were billing that as a hardcore tactical miniatures game in a dungeon setting. It was actually more complex than DESCENT, there was more detail in terms of what you could do. Yet it wasn't as bulky and slow as DESCENT.

The more I think about it though, the more I realize that DUNGEONQUEST is probably the perfect DC game. It has every element of a good one, but it's easy to play, an hour long, and it captures everything. Each game creates a narrative so there is a story. Even the blow-by-blow combat in the original version tells a story. But it doesn't need 500 cards, piles of chits, tons of plastic monsters, and all that other crap to get to where it's going.

I LOVED Descent. We nearly played nothing but Descent a few years ago, it was our favorite game. Then we played through an entire campaign, and though it started to drag at the end, we all have lots of good memories of that campaign. That said, we'd played a ton of Descent and were done with it for a while.

A couple weeks ago, one of the players in that campaign really wanted to start a new campaign, and even offered to be the Overlord this time so I could actually be a hero in Descent for the very first time. We played the first scenario (this is with a 50% different group). Holy shit, I can't believe that I hated so much a game that I had loved so much. I don't know what changed, other than that Siege of the Citadel made me sick of dungeon crawls. I never want to do tactical positioning ever again. And btw, Siege of the Citadel encourages the same bullshit: any game (including MC:SotC) in which standing one square to your left can make the CALCULABLE difference between kicking ass and getting slaughtered is a game I don't want to play anymore.

I was glad to see the final paragraph because that is what I was thinking before I started reading the article. Descent really laid the groundwork for many of the titles coming out --- maybe even influenced D&D 4E to some degree. And, I am much happier with a hobby that laments the passing of a game that was considered unrivaled, even if just for a fleeting moment, then one that doesn't build upon its weaknesses. Personally, I don't want to still be playing the same style of dungeon crawl for 6 or more years; it is nice to see evolution and improvement.

And, I agree whole-heartedly with your final suggestion. I would love to see a streamlined version of the rules or other games that allowed you to incorporate all (or some, your choosing) of the minis/elements of Descent. A great opportunity for FFG, I would think

4e is awesome and I totally vehemently disagree with your assessment. How high level did you ever get?

Also, dungeon crawling is awesome. Most games just kinda suck at it.

DESCENT was, and is, a very, very important game that will remain influential and looked at for a long time to come. I definitely think that the D&D4E team had their eye on it when they were cooking up that pie, and I don't know that it's really possible to design a dungeon crawl in a post-DESCENT environment without thinking about it and what it does and doesn't do.

It's interesting because I think we're starting to see some of the really important games from 2003 or so on through around 2005 start to slip away from us. A GAME OF THRONES would be another one that is fading, yet it's another game that is really significant. Even WAR OF THE RING seems more and more remote, more and more antiquated as time goes on. We may be seeing the winnowing out of the games that had a particular time and place from the really timeless, evergreen classics like TI3 and ARKHAM HORROR. Both games that remain best in class, unlike DESCENT.

I think a 2nd edition of DESCENT could be great if Mr. Wilson and company figure out a way to get the pacing, length, and administrative burden under control. There's a ton of fat that could be cut away without much loss, since all you'd be removing is mechanics and not theme, atmosphere, or narrative elements.

For me the problem with Descent is what I call "James Cameron's 'The Abyss' - Syndrome." Just like The Abyss Descent does so many things right, nice design, it fun to customize characters, I think the lightning bolt system works well, etc.

But like "The Abyss" there are just too many good ideas. Underwater aliens? Neat. Crazy Navy SEALs? Awesome. Experimental underwater research station threatened by hurricane? Okay. Ed Harris' relationship with his ex-wife? Why?

Descent does the same thing, it feels like the designers never stopped to ask why a mechanic is included, it’s just there because it looks neat on paper. Why are their three kinds of largely identical attacks? What is the point of the familiars? Why are half the bad guy cards boring or useless?

For the same reason "The Abyss’" ending goes on 20 minutes to long, to many good ideas and nobody asking how they could be streamlined to create a better product.

I think the key failing of Descent (which I do enjoy playing maybe once a year or so) is that it is essentially a game about killing monsters by rolling dice. I mean, that is the game's chief object, it's entire point. That's very simple, but it is not a simple game. It has that unfortunate FFG tendency to throw tons of mechanics at a streamlined concept.

Arkham Horror has just as many rules, but it never feels as burdensome. I think that may be because AH feels like it's earned it's endless reams of rules with it's scope and theme. It's a more epic game, and while you kill plenty of monsters, that's not the point of the game. I've never played Magic Realm, but I imagine it's a similar deal.

Let' be honest here guys: if we were all still the young, single, endless free time having, fools we were X years ago Descent would be the shit. I'm not saying I disagree with you Mike, I'm just saying that, if anything, the general sentiment towards Descent displayed on F:AT is more indicative of the fact that gamers interested AT are getting older.

Older, and thus have more of life's sweet little deadweights holding them down. Jobs, spouses, kids, girlfriends, X payments, all get in the way of those 20 some odd hour sessions that used to be really fucking common not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far, far away.

It also points to the fact that, as we've discussed ad infinitum, that there is practically no younger generation of AT gamers to pass the torch to. What was the median age of FATties on that "how old are you thread"? 36? Considering that that this site represents pretty true picture of the age demographic of AT players, I think it's pretty solid evidence pointing towards the aging gamer phenomenon.*

* I realize that there are plenty of AT gamers out there that are older, have no kids, spouses, or payments of any kind 'cause they still live in mommy and daddy's basement, and shower once a month. Those are not the people represented on this site and thus not the ones I'm referring to. BZ

I think A Game of Thrones has sold more copies at my LGS in the last year than it ever has.

Descent blows.

Crap JJ-- you stole my thunder!

I dunno, I think that photo looks bad ass, and it's photos like that that made me buy into Descent in the first place. It looks sick. "I just know I'm gonna love this" I said to myself, and even bought the 2nd and 3rd expansions without playing through all the base scenarios let alone the 1st expansion. I really, really wanted this to be a hit, but I just couldn't seem to make it work. It simply isn't enough fun to warrant that kind of a time commitment when there was so much other stuff we could be playing. When I suggested the campaign my buddy said "fuck the dumb shit, let's just play Call of Cthulhu or D&D." Descent hasn't seen the light of day since.

Now I'm sure if I played this with Kevin Wilson or a handfull of seasoned Descent pros at the event center, I'd have a different exerience, but as much as I would like it to Descent as it is doesn't meet my gaming needs. Dorn, however looks pretty cool, and I'd probably try to track it down if these two new D&D titles and the revamped Dungeonquest weren't imminent.

I don't know Billy, I get about six hours of gaming in a week. That's plenty of time to play DESCENT, but it is never asked for and we always choose something else over it. Most of the people I play with game at least that much or more, so I'm not so sure it's a time issue or anything like that. The thing is, most kids these days have so much going on and so many things to do I'd almost be inclined to think that adults are more prone to have time to commit to the game.

It has that unfortunate FFG tendency to throw tons of mechanics at a streamlined concept.

John's comments about THE ABYSS echo what you're saying here, and I agree with the sentiment. In fact, I think over the years since FFG came onto the scene it's become more and more apparent that a part of the so-called "FFG style" is over-elaboration of simple gameplay concepts. And in their more recent titles, it's become even more egregious to the point of interfering with the quality or fun of their games. HORUS HERESY, once again, is the sore thumb reference point.

DESCENT is about rolling dice and killing monsters. But it's also about walking, opening doors, avoiding traps, and opening treasure chests. None of that needs the amount of cards, rules, and other components to work successfully, nor does it need as many different mechanics and function as are on display in the game. It's over-elaborated, overworked, and over-designed.

Ironically, it's almost the exact same problem that Avalon Hill wound up with once Don Greenwood started piling on complexity for complexity's sake.

Let' be honest here guys: if we were all still the young, single, endless free time having, fools we were X years ago Descent would be the shit.

Not true. I still happily play 8 hour D&D sessions and other long games with my time. Descent is just shit and always was. All it's best ideas were in Doom (or other crawlers before). It just added a bunch of bullshit. I agree that it was influential, but in the same way the The Monkeys were influential to rock.

I'm not sure how similar it is to this, but I remember someone on this site (maybe Juniper?) comparing a game like Goa to one of those 20-minute Dream Theater songs, pointless noodling and irritating displays of virtuosity without ever being an actual song. A lot of people came down pretty hard on Euros for that very quality, and it looks like we're starting to kind of see the same thing with FFG.

Don't be dissing WAR OF THE RING. That's just...crazy talk.

Yeah, I don't think I'd be playing DESCENT at that age/time in my life unless it was the only game of its type I was aware of. We'd be doing the D&D sessions like what Loter mentions and playing games like SotC, SPACE CRUSADE, DOOM, and other good dungeon crawls that don't bury you in gaming flab.

It's important to point out that DESCENT was _not_ innovative other than in its production quality. Like Loter says, its best material was in DOOM (or HEROQUEST for that matter). But its significance is more of a cultural impact variety, its influence and proliferation are what made it important. It's definitely not the inception point for any new ideas or gameplay concepts, that's for sure.

I actually loved my first several games of Descent, but I feel the same way. I wrote a retrospective review of it over on TOS.

A game that could be played in less than 2 hours but packs as much interesting decisions and monster smashing as a 4-6 hour game of Descent is the kind of thing I'd like to see.

I know you get plenty of game time in Mike-- but how much of that game time is ever spent playing one game to death?

I'm totally fucking jealous by the way. You suck.

Not often, although one of my groups almost exclusively wants to play games they've played before. The other involves Frank Branham, so the same game never hits the table twice.

DESCENT isn't worth playing to death. DUNE, CIVILIZATION, COSMIC ENCOUNTER, and TI3 are worth playing to death.

QFT. I try to get in a "Cosmic Encounter" night at least once a month, where we play 2-3 games in a row. It's almost always my favorite game night of the month.

I have the attention span of a hummerbird on crack but Descent is one game that I'll happily sit down and play for four hours. It does have its faults (as illumineted herein) but there are only a few other games on the market that have the same payoff for tactical minis in an adventure setting.

It could use a serious streamlining though.

Steve"I still like Decent"Avery

OK, someone needs to do "or do one again": the top 5 or 10 dungeon crawl list.

My personal criteria: player interaction and game tension.

You're dead on the money, Michael. Descent is nothing more than a bloated version of what they thought made Heroquest so fun. It's unwieldy at best, takes forever and a day to play, and the payoff is having to count chits until your pubes turn grey. Terrible, terrible game. I'd take Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citidel 100 times before one more play of Descent in any of its iterations, or better yet, D&D Fantasy Adventure Boardgame. Shit, I'd almost play that fucking waste of paper, Munchkin Quest before Descent. What an epic failure. Sad, too, because I loves me some Dungeon Crawls.

But what is it in particular about DESCENT that gives you a bigger payoff than D&D4E or even just the D&D miniatures game (which is actually pretty good)? What is it that makes it any better than MAGE KNIGHT DUNGEONS, for that matter?

I just don't see a valid ROI when, like I said, it takes four hours of game to depict ten minutes (or less) of action.

Dave, I don't know what I'd list as best dungeon crawls because really, there aren't that many good ones. And you'd have to include the "fringe" ones like SPACE HULK to get up to five, even.

These are reasons why the new D&D board games _need_ to succeed.

Sometimes more is too much. I remember craving more for Heroquest.

The whole Overlord part stinks. DM's or GM's never tried to kill off the parties while rpg'ing so it feels a little odd in a crawl. I enjoyed playing the GM in Heroquest without playing against everyone else.

It's the GM's job to pace the game so it doesn't run long or get boring. If the "GM" is spending time trying to maximize his move then things start to drag. I felt this way about Doom - the game just runs counter to the GM in me.

"It has that unfortunate FFG tendency to throw tons of mechanics at a streamlined concept."

I think the best example of this is the "The Outskirts" in Arkham Horror. It’s a rule designed to solve the problem of too many monsters on the board at once while also penalizing the players for not eliminating them. But instead of finding ways to reduce the monsters FFG added another rule which requires players to keep track of the number of monsters on the board and the number of monsters in the outskirts.

This then requires them to use another component, “the Terror Track” to track their progress in eliminating the monsters. This in turn requires players to remove cards and play banned markers as it rises.

I refuse to believe there isn't a more elegant solution to this problem.

So who else is stoked about the Dark Sun campaign out this week?

I enjoyed Descent every time we played, but we had lots of beer. I also never owned it myself. It's a little like wanting to ride in a boat. You don't need a boat, you need a friend who has a boat.

I can't deny everything that was said here. It is laborious, slow and often dry. But we had fun with it, and it felt tense every time.

If I had the green, I would take you up on that sale offer.

I'm bored by the generic dungeon crawl concept for now. Too many of them try really hard to be a fun but lite version of D&D, but D&D itself is quite complex. So every game struggles to find the right balance of fun and complexity, and inevitably lands too far on either end of the spectrum. I expect to hear complaints soon enough about Castle Ravenloft being too lightweight and bland. Meanwhile D&D 4E is still a little heavy for the boardgame market it was aimed at. All of these standard dungeon crawls tend to obsess over capturing the feel of D&D instead of bringing any fresh, creative concepts to the table.

The "fringe" dungeon crawls like Space Hulk tend to be better because they bring something new to the mix, inspired by different source material. Space Hulk has overwatch, the timer, and a quick, clean combat system. Asteroid has robots instead of monsters, and mixes in a bit of hacking and programming, at least thematically. Betrayal at House on the Hill has massive replay value from the modular map tiles and the 50 scenarios. The Vesuvius Incident has an interesting and cinematic way of addressing the pacing of the action in the game. Kung Fu 2100 has the only combat system that I've seen that conveys the feel of a fast-paced martial arts fight, and a novel method of dealing with damage.

I'm with Steve. I still like Descent, even if it can be cumbersome. We don't play it that often anymore, as we've been trying out some more recent releases (FFG and others), but I could still imagine sitting down to try out one of the scenarios we never got to, 4 hours or not. While there's more theme involved in AH, that system is just as cumbersome, especially if you play with all of the expansions like we like to do. I'm the official 'bookkeeper' for AH, as I'm the one tasked with keeping up with all of the condition checks, card draws, and other details that make the game what it is. It's occasionally laborious, but I still like both games.

I think one of the problems with Descent is the one that's glaringly apparent in Doom: the Invader/Overlord has far more ways to win than the Marines/Heroes. I don't mean in official "how to win" ways, but simply in the availability of resources and methods. I sold my copy of Doom after a dozen games of it when it became starkly apparent that there was no way for the Marines to win if the Invader player wasn't functionally retarded. No. Way. The Overlord has had similar moments during the expansion of Descent. A good OL will almost always beat an average-to-good Hero group, simply because of the versatility of the OL's offense. That's what creates a lot of the time bloat in the game itself: every move by the Heroes has to be a good one or they'll pay horribly in Conquest tokens for any mistake that they make. Of course, since there are dice involved, it doesn't always have to be user error that brings down the group, either.

The game slows down when Heroes have to carefully consider their every step. If the OL wasn't as powerful as he is, I think you'd find that the game speeds up somewhat, because only serious injury would be waiting around each corner, instead of outright death. We've adopted a couple house rules to restrain the OL a bit (like allowing Heroes to dip into the negative in Conquest tokens and still win if they finish with a positive balance) and that seems to make our games more worthwhile.

Drake, you've got a DUST up for trade don't you? We can talk turkey if you're ready to jive. I'll negotiate with terrorists.

Hey, just for fun I went to BGG to see what my comment was for DESCENT. This is from 2005:

A game that wants so badly to be great that it's depressing to watch it fall so short. It is indeed like a pumped-up, more complex version of Heroscape but with an exaggerated playtime and about 30% too many bells and whistles. It's probably a better game than DOOM in the long run, but it's functionally the same thing with more window dressing. I'd rather play the D&D board game or Mutant Chronicles for this sort of the game. I was disappointed in the overall lack of atmosphere or story and I found that toward the last quarter of every game I've played that everyone's interest and enthusiam tends to wane as it turns into a hack-and-slash slog to finish the scenario. It isn't bad at all, really, just bloated and more boring than it ought to be given all the awesome components and some neat mechanical ideas. If you're the overlord, say everything in a Bill Cosby voice and the game is HILARIOUS.

Wow, I was writing about how bloated FFG games were five years ago...

You aren't totally off the hook, Barnes. You did say that Descent was one of the five "gateway games" for video gamers. Points also deducted for using the term "gateway games."
http://www.gameshark.com/entertainment/features/329/p_0/Cracked-LCD-11.htm

This restraint in having to pay 15 conquest to spawn more monsters in RtL, which helps balance the game out to some degree (and speed it up).

I did, and I think it probably is actually still good for that. As in, if you've never played other dungeon crawls and don't know any better. And it does compare favorably to JRPGs and DIABLO in certain ways. It's interesting too that when that column was written, DESCENT was still sort of the BDCOC then. And that was also during the period when I was playing more actively.

"Gateway games"...I'm so ashamed...

4e is awesome and I totally vehemently disagree with your assessment. How high level did you ever get?

1 and only derailment. I promise.

6th, it should have been good by then. I got really sick of it feeling all the same. In old D&D (any edition except 4th) the power levels swayed as you leveled up. At first we all knew that the figther/barbarian was supreme and by the time 10th came along the mage was obviously the most powerfull but in between there were all kinds of dynamic changes in the party. The "strength" (not the stat) wasn't important it was how you played it. It just happened that the power level changes helped move the game along and created party relationships that changed as the levels increased. The disparity in power was part of the game and the way we related to one another.

No one cared that it wasn't balanced, they played rogues anyway. The new edition seems to think this was a problem. It wasn't.

Even my old RPG group doesn't play 4E now, they play pathfinder (3.75 I guess). It's still a fine RPG but the character is missing now and I miss it. I miss playing underpowerd and overpowered characters and the charm that was there before. Some things don't need fixes.

I will admit though that for the youngin's I teach it was a great way to get them into paper and pencil games because of the WoW similaritites. Since this game came out the number of students playing RPG's (not video game ones) has increased significantly. That's a good thing in my mind.

Well, instead of "dungeon crawls", maybe it would be much better to to do top 10 adventure games.

Mythgardia isn't a crawl per se, but it was some of the most fun I've had in years regarding back and forth game play.

Of the few crawls I've played, I think issues some designers have with the dungeon crawl format is they try to force the flow of game play; Cutthroat Caverns seems a perfect example to me. Also, the format itself is so constrained it can create the same game over and over (grab stuff, kill things, maybe as a "twist" kill each other.)

I've never played Descent, but the consensus seems to be the game is made too complicated for what it is. To a lesser degree, Dungeon Twister may fall into that category. I wanted to have fun, but Robo Rally mixed with a dungeon crawl didn't work for me.

I would still happily play Descent (and even more happily play Warhammer Quest. In fact, we really should do a round of Warhammer Quest.)

The problem with both of those games is wandering monsters. This is the worst idea to ever hit any RPG (in any format: See Final Fantasy and random battles.) It is just injecting useless battles to keep people from exploring. Sure, the idea is to put just a touch of time tension and keep people moving. But invariably, it just bogs the game down.

The spawns were a little out of control in WQ. In Descent, they are off the charts. (In fact in WQ, I prefer to run that as a GM'd game. That way you can manually pace the spawns to vary the pacing.

Curiously, I think that Descent could be helped with a delve book. Just a short campaign book and card deck with random and fixed short levels in the style of the campaign dungeon levels. Shorter setup, play for an hour or two and be done. I've yet to try Sea of Blood, but this seems the direction they were going. Did they fail?

That said, we should perhaps try a D&D 4e delve. It has a lot in common with Descent. The system is actually a little more compelling and easier in some ways, but battles take nearly as long. The problem with 4e is that about 6th level, the battles take progressively longer, and it starts to turn into a slog. However, the Delve book is basically a collection of setpiece multi-stage combats each designed for an evening. Quite fun as a diversion.

As a side topic a buddy of mine bought a complete WQ-- with expansions
Great minds must think alike Frank 'cause I'm trying to set up a game in two weeks.

I still enjoy busting out Descent. My group doesn't have trouble with AP and we can squeaze big map out in 3-4 hours. I just picked up DOOM+ Exp off Browncoat and I think my group is gonna dig it.

But I'll readily concede that there are many better games available for the same investment in time.

I need to get my hands on Dorn.

A good OL will almost always beat an average-to-good Hero group, simply because of the versatility of the OL's offense. That's what creates a lot of the time bloat in the game itself: every move by the Heroes has to be a good one or they'll pay horribly in Conquest tokens for any mistake that they make.

That is so true, Jackwraith. It's all tension and precision for the heroes but all coasting for the Overlord. He never has to protect his monsters at all, they're all fodder and there's plenty more to come. The Overlord concept sounds really cool but the balance is wretched. I can't think of a single time as Overlord that I've had to play really hard because I could actually lose. I've always wondered how they playtested this thing. It's out of whack. The monster spawning is another cool concept that essentially backfires and makes the game really sloggy. I like combat tactics and statty crap but there is something about Descent that just isn't right.

Really, this game should have been built from the ground up as a total Co-Op somehow. It makes me sad to say it but it really needs a re-design from the ground up.

Fuck Descent. It was never good, and any influence it had on later designs has been in a bad direction.

But it's not even that, really. Tactical minis games have things like cover, facing, prone characters, different modes of attack, etc. If it's a tactical minis game, then getting attacked from behind, or being flanked by two attackers should, you know, make a goddamn difference, and attacks of opportunity shouldn't be a fucking special ability.

Descent is really just a numbers game. It's all about budgeting fatigue points, optimizing your kit, counting spaces, spending your money wisely, and other crap that has SFA all to do with tactical combat. The "surge" system is just a stupid parlor trick used to make a shallow combat system look like more than it is. They're just modifiers. It's the same damn thing D&D was doing for years, only instead of rolling one die for a target number, adding some modifiers, and rolling again for damage, you roll eight dice. Then, you have to count two or three different values, re-roll dice, and divy up your surges among powers that are, in most cases, not functionally different from one another.

It's not the same thing at all. Necessary or not, the complexity in those old AH/SPI games wasn't there just for the sake of it. They were going for verisimilitude, even if the situations the games covered were over-the-top ridiculous. ASL may not be "realistic," but the Kindling Availability table isn't in there just for the sake of giving you another table to roll on. It's consistent with the game's internal logic.

FFG's problem is that they pile on complexity for the sake of building Swiss Army Knife systems, which they can then take and plug into whatever game they want later on. There's no theme or narrative in them because they're basically just mechanics for the sake of it, no different than any run-of-the-mill Euro.

I'm glad you brought up Nin-Gonost. That game was chromed up the wazoo, to the point of having a friggin' velocity table to track how fast an arrow moves relative to its target, and it still isn't as much of a pain in the ass to manage as Descent is. Also, it can be on and off the table in a hour.

That game, like HeroQuest before it, took D&D, and worked backwards from there, attempting to condense the big, sprawling ruleset into a simpler, more digestible package. Instead of doing taking a big, comprehensive system and zeroing in on one particular aspect of it like those two, Descent went straight to HeroQuest and tried to build upwards. Essentially, it's trying to squeeze maximum fidelity out of a picture that's a copy of a copy.

I think that's really FFG's biggest problem; they just keep taking the simplest of the old hobby games and giving them steroids, when they should be looking at how they could modernize designs that came from a more simulative, RPG/wargame standpoint.

You guys are all nuts. I'm the guy DESCENT is for. I don't actually like RPGs. Call it my limited imagination, but i don't like running or playing RPGs to any degree. I have done it, but it's just not my thing. That doesn't mean I don't want to sling arrows at ogres and shit. I want to , but don't make forsooth my through things--that shit makes me crazy. I know folks that don't like DIABLO because it's not RPG enough--maybe that's why I love it so.

DESCENT is pretty and fun. If you want a big stack of Magic cards for your oh-so-hated DESCENT games, let me know!

Interesting that you should bring M:tG into this, jeb. I've been thinking for a long time that a lot of these modern board games, especially the "toolbox" ones, are built for people who were weaned on CCGs. That is to say, people who enjoy mucking about with collecting, keywords, optimization, and all that other mathematical bullshit typical of collectible games.

So you don't like them then? Maybe we're different people. That's weird. I bet you're correct though, to some degree. Magic, and CCGs in general showed up in 1995 and took money away from board game companies. Lots and lots and lots of money. What's odd about a game company chasing money? I happen to have some and want to give it to them if they can deliver. I think they did a good job with DESCENT. Give it here.

HeroQuest and WQ were and are still awesome. The pacing is the key to a dungeon crawl board game and as much as I've longed for Descent, and tried to convince myself that I needed to buy and play it, when I did play Descent I found it just so damn painfully slow. Agonizingly slow. And what is with the infinite spawning monsters? It seems that Descent aimed to be the Diablo board game but they couldn't pony up enough to pay for the license... Now there is some crazy talk going on here however, when anyone suggests that pile called Munchkin Quest over this... But I'll let it slide for now because I'm such a nice guy.

"Life's sweet little deadweights." Nice one, Billy. That's going in my personal phrase book.

Thank you for tearing Descent a new asshole.

The first (and only) time I played it, I said the same thing.

FOUR hours
THREE rooms
ONE monkey

Despite being a big fan of DOOM, or more likely because of that, I still haven't played Descent.

Bah...kind of bullshit (at least for me anyway). I like M:tG because of the possibility of building a purely unique deck and exploiting various card combos where your opponent will be taken aback and wonder why they didn't think of that. How a "keyword" is mathematical at all is beyond me....it does assume that you are within a consistent gaming system and is just used for shorthand. Nothing they weren't doing with THACO 30 years ago. Dungeon Twister is much more mathematical/geometrical (and a better game, IMO) than anything that Descent offers up.

Like Jeb, I don't have the time to devote to creating a whole RPG environment that is rich in theme and rewarding to players where we can build characterisitcs and personalities of adventurers for years at a time. Descent fails in that it is short on theme. But, the campaign system really alleviates a lot of these problems...the dungeons are smaller, the Overlord has less power, not as many spawns...on and on. It doesn't change the main problems of the game (which I think is ability bloat), but it does stop some of the "it is so slow" complaints.

I should really write a little how to on 4e and the delves. Seriously, Descent is the same level of overhead for a vastly inferior end result. Hopefully Ravenloft will make an easier transition for people who seem to think that to play D&D you have to do it a certain way or use everything the game has available. If you can handle Descent, you can just as easily run through 4e delves with prebuilt characters, yet it plays way better and if you are interested in adding something more here or there, the system is there for it when you want it.

To JJ, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one then since I feel pretty much the opposite of you. One of the biggest flaws of older editions of D&D, especially 3x, was how there was really only a few level window where all the classes were interesting. Early on spellcasters were totally fucking boring, you'd cast your couple of spells for the day and then resort to plunking off sling bullets and doing jack shit the rest of the time. But once you got up past 10th or so, there was literally no reason to have any melee characters. A single decently put together druid could take on 20 10th level fighters and easily win. Where is the fun in that? I get what you are saying with the flavor aspect and the ROLE playing, but all that is still just as available in 4e only now when it's time to shred some dudes, no matter what level or class you are, you have something interesting to do from a mechanical standpoint.

Yeah, I meant to say combos in that post as well. Descent's equipment cards are like a tiny little deck building subgame. I know that's the point of collectible games, and that's what people like about them, but I check out when the game becomes more about the prep than the play. Mathematical probably isn't the right word, systematic is closer to what I'm getting at. Descent, like collectible games, is about manipulating the system.

Dungeon Twister gets into that area a bit, but though there are a few stick-on keyword abilities, like flying, magic user, whatever, the characters and items have unique effects. This character does this thing, and nobody else can do it, as opposed to the collectible model where you have an assortment of basic abilities that just get assigned to characters in different combinations.

Less a derailment then before. This applies to both 4E and DC's in general.

To ML, I agree with what you wrote but I would change the language you used "where all the classes were interesting" to "where all the classes were powerfull". Powerfull, contributing to combat, is not the same thing as interesting.

Actually this might be a problem with games in general. A number of people seem to think that they want balance in their games, and more to the point, they want to feel as usefull as the other players in each and every given situation. But when we focus so much on the tactics, or the game then we loose some of the play. To me, this is a shame. Now in a Euro game or abstract strategy game that makes sense. I want to win. My brain is bigger... etc.

But with a dungeon crawl I want a fun story and a good time. Sometimes a good time means my character sucks and he is really getting the run around. Sometimes it means he dies in a funny way... Actually, in RPG's that's alot more then sometimes. In a dungeon crawl I want fun, not tactics, not math, and certainly not balance (or, over-balance). 4E's combat draaaaaggggs on so much that after a four hour session I don't remember getting the chance to role-play. I fought for too long. Sure, we could.. but the combat takes too much time. It's too... exact.

This problem exists in Descent too. Everything is worked out to the nth degree and as a result some of the life is sucked out. It's too bad though because I do love Descent. I just don't play it.

I think that gives a lot more credit to Descent than should be. The combos are fairly obvious....just put the best shit on your character. Same with the OL, the card combos are somewhat limited. These limitations are what make it predictable of heros peaking into a room and then slowly trying to pick off monsters....if there were more combos and more potential for a greater variance, the optimization component would likely be widdled away because it would be too difficult to think about. In this case, the # of abilities don't dictate the potential for interaction --- the game was underdesigned in my opinion; instead, more complexity in the interaction of items would have led to more variability in play and approach. The exhausting part is counting up all your surges, etc --- which I agree with you in your previous post, is just a way to put a veneer of fancy on an otherwise simple combat system.

While I think that there might be some influence of CCGs on boardgames, I think it is limited. FFG and their game "system" seems to be all trickle down from WOW: The Boardgame. There is a lot about Descent that is pretty damn similar; however, and surprisingly so, it plays faster than WOW: TBG.

JJ, I think you should come play some 4e with me sometime. I captain a fast and wild ship. Combat isn't super quick, but it goes along pretty fast. I usually run con slot mods that are designed for under 4 hours in a good bit less time, and these are much more involved than a game of descent. Same amount of combats, but with a good deal of added in story type stuff or non combat encounters.

Ultimately, yes it is, but getting the entire party kitted out optimally is a rigamarole, especially in the beginning, when there's a limited stock of weapons to go around and everyone wants the same thing. Every time you draw treasure, you have to spend a turn trading your weapons so everyone has the thing that matches their traits. Then, you get into those discussions where one guy wants thinks he should get this particular weapon because he gets a free surge if he moves three spaces before an attack, even though he only rolls 2 black dice to your 3, but the other guy argues that since he has a higher fatigue rating, he'll get to roll more black dice in the long run anyway, shit like that.

Yeah, it's not hard to figure out, but it's also boring as hell and winds up being a big part of the game.

And WoW:TBG is all about fiddling with your equipment to squeeze the maximum damage potential out your combos. No, it's not as strategic or open as building an M:tG deck, but it feels a hell of a lot more like doing that than exploring or adventuring.

I don't think Descent needs more complex interplay or synergy between the cards. It needs rules for coming up with more interesting situations than "square room full of monsters," "square room full of stronger monsters," "collapsing square room full of monsters," "square room full of statues that turn into monsters," etc.

I can see the point of some of the criticisims here but honestly, I smell some group-think.

Personally I thought Decent was a good attempt at the dungeoncrawl game, but fell a little short. (Overly long playtime, unbalanced scenarios, etc) When they added a campaign system in Road to Legend it made Decent worth playing and fixed most of my major issues with the game. It may not be the best dungeoncrawler ever but we have a lot of fun with it. So I'm not ready to throw it under the bus just yet.

-Will

Ultimately, I agree that RtL fixed a lot of the problems. I have yet to try Sea of Blood yet, but I know there were a few tweaks from RtL....mainly, I think to balance out the rate of increase in power between OL and heroes. In RtL (at least in the two campaigns we played), the OL fell we behind in terms of staying strong enough to impede the heroes with anything, especially monsters.

As far as "equipment fiddling", I do think that it is like WoW: TBG; however, I think that is much more a descendent of the computer game then a CCG.

I've never tried DESCENT, but Road to Legend looks really, really sweet.

And from what I've read about standard DESCENT, it seems to me like it's very much a Diablo dungeon crawl - that game is all about optimization. When I played it the first time, I had maxed out on level, but my wizard simply could not kill off Diablo. Why? Because I hadn't optimized my skill choices, but just took what I thought looked cool at the moment. And while I agree that I don't want that from a board game (I hated WoW: TBG), I think that the very thing a lot of you guys dislike about the game is precisely what eg. hardcore Diablo players would want from it.

I played D&D for years. I love the story, the excitement of the battles and the options to operate in the world. I also loved having my character grow and what came with it. But, I just don't care about the dice or the modifiers. I don't want to have to make a million checks. The question is can my character do it? If yes, then does he succeed? The DM should make the decision and we all move on (1/3 of the time the DM is ignoring dice rolls anyway to move the story where they want).

Descent was exactly what I didn't want. It is all dice and rules and none of the freeform play that I loved from D&D.

I loved peaking into a room with Ogres eating at a table and releasing a bunch of chickens to distract them, or sneaking in and climbing up a tapestry to take a pot shot at them with acid or fire. Now you are involved, and the battle has a story.

In Descent you run to the treasure, then you properly dispatch your enemies based on the optimal use of your weapons.

The other thing about RPGs is that you care about your character, here you can die and it doesn't matter to the story.

Can we mention how you teleport back to the city and come back again for the battle?

Matt - please do a writeup on the 4E delves. I'd love to give 4E a go in a little bite-sized chunk.

At this point, I'm not even sure what a 'dungeon crawl' is, or what it's supposed to be. If your only is aim is to level up and kill shit, wouldn't it be easier to play a videogame?

The brilliant thing about D&D is that its level of complexity scales perfectly to your tastes. If you want to go rules-heavy and worry about encumbrance, spell components, which rings are on which fingers, and rolling on a million tables to determine critical hit locations, go for it! If you're the kind of DM that doesn't give a shit about any of that, great! D&D still loves you. (I, too, am an "I make the rules!" die-fudging DM. Thank God for the DM's screen.)

MJ is bang-on about Descent being a numbers game. Descent encourages min/maxing because the goal of the game is _to win_. The only to way advance your character is to kill shit and grab loot, and you only have a limited number of ways to fight shit on top of that, so it's easy and necessary for the players to optimize the bejeezus out of everything because otherwise, how are they going to beat the Overlord?

In an RPG, the goal can be whatever you want it to be (and normally, the goal is "to have fun.") If your idea of "fun" is leveling up with a spreadsheet, go nuts. If you want to spend your fighter's skill points on Knowledge (Norse Mythology) because as a child he'd constantly sneak away from his chores so he could read about Odin and Loki in the local bookshop, you shouldn't be fucking penalized for that, and if your DM isn't a total asshole, you won't be.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. To handle situations that don't involve bashing bad-guys' brains in, players need more options than "hit it with my biggest sword" and "teleport back to town." Descent does not support this style of play, and if the designers were to retool the Descent system to include rules for non-combat interaction, BAM! You'd have D&D 4e.

Whether you're more 4e or 3.x/Pathfinder person really depends on what you want out of the experience. I think 4e sucks and I hate it, because it's been designed for and marketed to power-gaming MMORPG'ers, but if you're looking for a richly detailed tactical mini's game that gives you more choices than hit/run and actually rewards the time you put in, it's leaps and bounds better than fucking Descent.

After much thought (as well as reading these comments) I have decided to sell my entire Descent Game collection- base game and 4 expansions- all still in shrink wrap (check Ebay soon!). I have too few brain cells after years of "non-mainstream" entertainment to really fathom all the stuff going on in these boxes. I will stick to the new Ravenloft when it comes out. That looks like something I can grasp.

You all do know Descent is not a RPG right? Nor is ANY dungeoncrawler boardgame ever released. They may have been inspired by RPGs, but dungeoncrawlers offer a very different gaming experience. If you're seeking for the complete open-ended nature of an RPG campaign, then you need to go play one. The closest a boardgame ever got to playing like an RPG was Magic Realm. Even as brilliant as that game was, it's degree of open ended gameplay falls far short of a true pen and paper RPG. So if we're going to discuss Descent's merits and faults, fine. It has some on each side of the equation. But this "Descent sucks because it isn't as much fun as D&D" argument is bullshit. That's like me buying a Ferrari and bitching that it's ability to tow a trailer is ass.

-Will

Delves are actually kind of easy:

Wizards did a big book of them, tailored for levels 1-30. Each delve consists of 3-5 encounters.
An encounter in D&D4e is either a combat, or a skill challenge (traps and tricks).

Each encounter gets 1-2 pages. Here is where the love is. Instead of cards to mix up the combats and spawns, the encounter is scripted. There might be reinforcements if you make too much noise, or a pit trap, or a partially collapsing room. They really went to some effort to make each combat have at least one twist. Also, you really don't know what the monsters can do--there are quite a few surprises.

With D&D, each character has access to perhaps 30-40 attacks (different for each class), and there are a couple hundred monsters. This is before you get into magical weapons and the like. Powers are divided into Always, Per Encounter, and Per Day. You have to take a long rest to recharge the Per Day powers.
You also receive Healing surges, which allow you to skip an attack to heal up a bit or heal fully between combats. (A lot of the fakiness of 4e centers around 6 hour long rests. You really need to do them every 2-3 encounters.)

To create a lvl 1-3 character, Wizards has a downloadable free tool that can whip one up in a few seconds and print it out along with cards to keep track of your powers. This gets longer if you want to crawl through and specify your powers and tweak things. (For a $10/month sub, they provide the version that can deal with all character levels as well as a bunch of online magazines.)

With the D&D mini's don't you have to buy a shitload of blind packages? Descent does have plenty of figs in a box.

Now if WotC can pump out several of these boardgames then you can easily crossover, unless I'm missing something on the D&D figs.

Will is right though these are two different animals. Any comparisons would have to be made against the new boardgame line once it is released.

JJ, I think you should come play some 4e with me sometime.

If it's possible. Then gladly. Like I said, I still enjoy it, but that's coming from a guy who has the 2nd printing of the AD&D DM's guide cover tatooed on his back.

Frank, those Delves sound a little like what they attempted with DungeonQuest (although more refined and a little more complex, since that was back in 2nd Ed.) to introduce new players.

I haven't played Descent much with adults (we go for Doom instead), but my kids just love Descent. I haven't regretted my Descent purchase - including, over the years, all of the expansions - for a second.

I'm with Will (Bulwyf)! He nails it. Complaining that DESCENT is not "D&D enough" is a straw man. There are complaints that the game is too (sigh) fiddly, and those are valid. It's a hassle to set up and can be a slog to play if everyone tries to think everything through. but it scrathes my dungeon crawler itch in the best way: with tons of cool dudes, a little magic, little traps and cool tiles. Love it.

Bulwyf (why do I always read that name as Bullywug?) - completely agree with your sentiments. It's not D&D, so if someone is playing it expecting D&D, they're going to be disappointed.

Jon Jacob - 2nd edition? Really? You didn't want the classic Efreet staring back at whomever? Still, that is a kick ass tramp stamp ;D .

I still find Descent fun, but I wouldn't want to play it as my only dungeon crawler. The D&D Adventure game is perfect for a lightweight crawler(enough that I don't really have any interest in Ravenloft), I've got Hybrid for my weird (but oh so pretty) French dungeon crawler, and Descent for the heavyweight players vs. the OL.

I remember dungeon crawling in D&D. There's just so much you can do, even in an RPG. I don't think RPG vs. board game matters, I think it's the confined space of a dungeon or cave that sometimes stymies creativity that makes a great game difficult for a crawl.

Jeb, if we ever end up in the same place at the same time, we'll have to break out my D&D Fantasy Advenure set. Once you've played that, you pretty much abandon all other fantasy dungeon crawlers, more or less. I like Warhammer Quest, but for ease of play, ease of learning, and NOT getting arbitrarily killed, D&D FABG is still the best-in-class.

I'm with Michael, if Ravenloft is in the vein of D&D FABG, we'll forget Descent as a long-past remnant of what bloated games in the '00s used to be like. It will be the absoute pinnacle of market cannibalization because nobody will ever buy Descent again.

One thing that I always wondered about Descent was, who asked for it? I mean, what was the crux behind FFGs decision to add bloat to the combat of dungeoncrawls? From our table, length and complexity were added to the wrong end of the game.

HQ had very quick combat, and was a very easy system to learn and house rule. We always added stuff to the narrative side of the games, but left the combat quick and easy. This made it more 'rpg-lite' like.

When AHQ (my fav dungeoncrawl) and WHQ came out, they added, real character generation (AHQ) places to store your money - and events affecting your money while away (AHQ), hiring npcs (AHQ), traveling to and from the dungeon events(WHQ), Leveling (both), Various town areas to shop (WHQ), town events (WHQ), shop items being 'in stock or not' (WHQ),etc. These additions were _awesome_. Sure, they were simply random rolls on tables, but they gave the characters a story with little extra upkeep or time requirement.

Descent did away with all of that, and focused solely on combat. And not even meaningful combat at that, but mainly unnecessary random encounters like Frank pointed out with all the spawning. Trips to town had nothing to do with any kind of narrative, but a quick teleport to min/max some numbers.

Having my Bretonnian Knight getting 'Mighty Worrior' tattooed across his back was more colorful than any thing I ever did in Descent.

This is also my only fear so far with the WotC crawls. I'm all for the quick combat, but would _love_ to have some character generation or a bit of flavor between adventures in the campaign system of the second set.

You know, the one thing that I think FFG did right with Descent, in a roundabout way, was to link all of the characters of Runebound, Descent, and after the fact, Runewars so that if you have a "fave" you can play the same characters throughout all of the worlds. That was pretty slick, IMO, and as close to a persistent character as I've seen in boardgames.

"One thing that I always wondered about Descent was, who asked for it? I mean, what was the crux behind FFGs decision to add bloat to the combat of dungeoncrawls?"

Don't forget that Descent is a reimplementation of Doom - a system which a lot of people liked, but felt could be improved. Also, the relocation of Doom into a fantasy setting surely guaranteed many more dollars in sales.

Descent definitely added a few improvements to Doom: no ammo (although ammo issues added tension to Doom), fatigue (to spend on extra movement), feat cards, the opportunity to be eaten alive and tear out a monster's stomach, etc. Also, Road to Legend's tweaks strengthened the game quite a bit.

A few of Descent's "improvements" went in the wrong direction, however, including (1) extended playtime and (2) the switch from Doom's division-based armor/damage system to a subtraction-based armor/damage system. The subtraction-based system means that, at some point, the heroes become one-shot killing machines - something that never really happens in Doom.

One other Descent comment:

People complain about Descent's playtime - and rightfully so - but the best approach is to play once a day for a few hours. Just let it sit out, play a few more hours the next day, and repeat as necessary until the game is over. Again, this isn't the best approach for adults. But for families with kids it works great. I've played 90% of my Descent games this way.

And really, is there that much more bloat in Descent compared to Arkham Horror? I'd play Descent over AH any day.

Right. I completely understand that. My question wasn't clear. What I meant was, when making a new dungeoncrawl who thought a way to improve the genre was to make the combats more frequent (multiple times in the same room or hall) and more fiddly? It seemed that crawlers in the 90's were adding more role-play-lite elements and Descent totally shifted gears by removing those and making it a combat only affair.

A tangent, but this is another system I can't stand. I'm in the minority on this, but I feel AH is way too much work for little pay-off. It's more game management than game playing. Pass. Also, I'm sick of everyone hootin' and hollarin' about how 'cool' it is to have the shotgun wielding nun on a motorcycle. Really? This reference comes up anyone talks about who cool the game is. It's like the Rat Catcher with 'small ferocious dog' in referring to WFRP. Yes it's in there, but it hardly ever comes up in play.

I wish FFG would quit releasing games that are 15% shy of awesome.

I agree with Jeb. I love Descent precisely because it is a lot closer to a tactical minis game than an RPG. I don't demand realism and I don't like co-op games (meaning no competition with any other player). Descent does take a long time; it's pretty much a weekend-only game. There are shorter games that can do many of the things I like about Descent. But even the length of the game is part of what makes it great for me. It just feels EPIC.

Also, hero players need to keep moving. When I see comments about how "the overlord always wins" and "four hours to open one door" those concepts are totally tied together. You cannot and should not kill every monster in the room and sometimes you just need to run as fast as you can. It gives the heroes a much better chance at winning, and makes the game go much faster.

You may still not like it, or think it has been outshined. But I think it succeeds at what it tries to be. Saying D&D is better feels like criticizing an apple for not being an orange.

So you're saying it should be more of a running battle than a stand-and-fight scenario?

My bitch about Descent is that it, like Arkham Horror, puts too much emphasis on upkeep/bookkeeping. There's too much shit to keep track of, and the method to do so is simply cumbersome. I think if they had character sheets and pencils within that I'd be a little less resistant to ever playing it again.

I am working on a game design now and I wrestled with the bit-count pariah for a week or so before finally coming to terms with the fact that for a game with a lot of shit to track, little cubes or chits are the least attractive way to do it. I'm going to simply put the character sheet on the web, allow people to print and download it, and just use little boxes that people can tickmark/erase to keep track because having 200+ bits in a box for a four player game seems insane to me. And that's what kills me the most about Descent....chit overload.

IMO, the best games are those that have a level of complexity that is understandable, playable, and not too cumbersome while minimizing the amount of bookkeeping. Chit counts are nice for FFG, I'm sure, because it helps justify the big price tag, but games that have less stuff to keep track of while maintaining a level of complexity that is engaging and challenging are the ones that I am most drawn to.

OK, there's a big problem when a game has to be played a certain way to be good. That means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design. And in this discussion, I see time and time again "the players have to do X" where X is something like "Keep moving", "only play it a little bit at a time" or "the players have to run past the monsters". This means that there is a problem with the design that it falls on the end user to correct through certain play styles or practices. This is the sign of a design that does not work correctly.

The pace is screwed up and the game does not satisfy either as a dungeon crawl or as a tactical miniatures game. Maybe you're OK with the problems, but it's definitely not a realism or simulation issue, because the game does anything but simulate what it purports to depict. Like I said, it takes four hours to represent ten minutes worth of time.

I think if they had character sheets and pencils within that I'd be a little less resistant to ever playing it again.

BTW- this is just another example of how modern gamers are a bunch of cowardly, bitchy pussies. They're afraid to touch pencils and paper because they've gotten spoiled rotten by having all these stupid fucking counters to track everything. All you need is little pad of character sheets and you make hashmarks for life. You don't need 200 god damned heart shaped counters for this.

I think using chits or counters to keep track of things can be very useful and intuitive, but there comes a time when there is too many. Descent definitely hits thats "too much" level. The chit count alone can make this game a pain in the butt to set up and necessitates the use of bags/boxes to pre-sort things to make the game playable in a reasonable amount of time. I really love this game and the plethora of neet models that come with it. Say what you will about minis, but to me they are a large part of what make Descent great. The play time though is fairly prohibitive, and doing a dungeon crawl with DnD 4e rules and the Descent components certainly feels more attractive at atimes.

Guys, I'm just curious...we still like games, don't we?

I'm also the guy Descent was designed for. I don't have the stomach or patience for RPGs anymore.

There's also something to the CCG comparison. I am an old CCGer. I like the customization bit. I like the tactics. I like the minis. I like the multitude of adventures.

Every last one of us would have had a nerdgasm if this had come out when we were fifteen. We're talking play every weekend with your pals in giant marathon sessions. Fortunately for me, I still can remember what that feeling is like. And Descent is awesome because of it. But I guess we have collectively turned on it, so like Runebound, I guess I'll just have to enjoy it despite the 'conventional' wisdom.

"Guys, I'm just curious...we still like games, don't we?"

Video games, yes.

OK, there's a big problem when a game has to be played a certain way to be good. That means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design.

This is an odd statement. I occasionally feel like every game I own has to be approached/played in a particular way to be enjoyable. Settlers can be ruined with the wrong group, Shogun can be dull with certain people, and RPG's are extraodinarily effected by who you're playing with and how you approach it. FFG games scream out for house ruling and modification for a certain groups play styles.

Now, I'm with you, I could never play Descent again and not mind it but when someone goes on about why they enjoy it and how you have to play it to get that full enjoyment. I assume they've done the leg work and recognize that playing the game with them may be an entirely different exercise. That's a huge part of hobby gaming (or was until Euro's came along), modifying existing designs to fit the group better. It shows passion for the product and I think that's a good thing. No, we can't thank Kevin Wilson for that, but we can thank him for creating the community in the first place.

I'm a sabbath observant Jew, so I won't write anything on Friday night / Saturday--the whole chit thing is a pretty big deal in my house. ;)

The downsides of "I'll just put that character sheet online," are that not everyone is online, and online is not forever. If you are online, maybe you don't have a printer. There's a lot of ways for this to backfire. To me, the game of YAHTZEE is basically that scorepad. I have fucking scads of dice--I don't need anyone to put five dice in a box, maybe toss a cup in there and charge me $12. I need that scorepad. If you make that scorepad hard to get--you're going to lose customers.

What's the box going to say: Internet access required? Are you going to give people, say, ten character sheets and put a link in the manual for the rest? A link they'll have to type? A link that belongs to some domain you're not going to want to be paying for in 10 years? There's a lot of business downside to this.

Ken B.'s comment really nailed what I think about DESCENT. It's so fucking awesome. Look at that thing! Sorry for my failed imagination, but the map tiles are better than graph paper. I agree that there may be better dungeon crawler games out there, but 1) Who has the patience to figure this out? There'a a million of them--just read these comments and 2) Just because DESCENT isn't the best doesn't make it bad. I feel like you guys haven't played a bad game in so long you forgot what it's like. That said, check out NEW ENGLAND in this week's Math Trade!

I occasionally feel like every game I own has to be approached/played in a particular way to be enjoyable. Settlers can be ruined with the wrong group, Shogun can be dull with certain people, and RPG's are extraodinarily effected by who you're playing with and how you approach it. FFG games scream out for house ruling and modification for a certain groups play styles.

You're kind of getting at a different issue than what I'm raising. I definitely agree that group dynamics and player personalities are critical to _any_ game succeeding or failing on the table. What I'm arguing is that if there is a list of "ways you are supposed to play this game" then there is something or several somethings wrong with the design. I'm sorry, but I don't buy a $100 board game plus expansions at $50 a pop to design my own game and come up with my ways it's supposed to be played. If we're going to put the designer's name as the author of a game, then they (along with the publisher)are accountable for the ultimate success or failure of the design. If it requires certain parameters to work, then it fails as a design and also as a consumer product.

What it comes down to is that even people that like DESCENT seem to do so only conditionally.

ZING!

C'mon now, Mikey Barnes. You KNOW if you sat down at my Descent table you'd have the hot damndest time of your life.

BTW- this is just another example of how modern gamers are a bunch of cowardly, bitchy pussies. They're afraid to touch pencils and paper because they've gotten spoiled rotten by having all these stupid fucking counters to track everything. All you need is little pad of character sheets and you make hashmarks for life. You don't need 200 god damned heart shaped counters for this.

Leader 1. The Italians are not afraid.

Is Descent possible solo? As usual, I am saying this because I live in the ass end of nowhere. If it is, I'll buy Barnes' set in a heart beat.

Mr. Moto emailed me about it last night...if it falls through, I'll let you know.

I call bullshit. All games require this. All Descent has to have is not everyone dumbass getting out a piece of string to trace line of sight. Fuck me, just say "Can he seem him?" Answer: "Probably, roll the dice". I can drag any game down into non-enjoyable. The OL not being a douche is also a requirement.....and anyway, aren't we all the authors of games now ;)

And the heart counters are so dreamy.....

And, Advanced HeroQuest and Warhammer Quest suffered from the same bullshit everyone complains about with Descent. The old, beat on the monster in the doorway trick. Or just leave the area so you don't have to fight the monsters (e.g., run). Likely these are the Achilles' Heel of dungeoncrawls (especially elaborate ones).

I call bullshit on you. Not all games require that the players do certain things outside of the rules to be good. When it gets to the point where folks are saying "well, you just don't get it" or "you're not playing it right by following the rules and the intent of the game", then there again, it tells me that something doesn't work in the design at a fundamental level and the players are supposed to "fix" it by playing in certain ways.

That's like saying "Well, ISHTAR is actually a really good movie if you watch on a thursday night under a waxing moon and only while eating a bag of Al Capp's hot fries...THEN it's great."

How many one vs. the rest games can be broken by "not playing the right way"?

Is FoD a fun game if Dracula runs and hides and doesn't try and ambush the players? Does that make Fury a bad game?

If the players don't fuck each other over in Cutthroat Caverns, that game is boring as hell. But when they start backstabbing it gets interesting.

Isabelle Adjani... that's why Ishtar is great.

But truly, if a group of players have a game that they love and I don't like and they swear upside down and sideways that the way they play it better. I'll give it a shot. It doesn't mean the game is better then I thought, it just means that they've improved it and kudos to them for doing so.

But it does mean that the system, the bits (especially the bits), and the design in general inspired a lot of work. That, too, is a sign of great design work. When a game call to you like that. I can't deny the power of these effects.

Because design goes beyond just the rulebook.

Drat...Calling Bullshit on Bullshit -- you have successfully parried my initial salvo. But, I will not be so easily dissuaded.

Most groups, fall into a "this is how we like to play" routine. Our group is usually light on the analysis, for example. Running through and avoiding monsters is most definitely within the general purview of the rules; whilst the OL not spawning many monsters is not (so I agree with you there). I have found, though, that I like the game more when I play more event and trap cards versus more monster cards.....especially in the campaign mode. I think it gives it more narrative. However, I am sure there are groups that just like to slog through monster battles (I imagine this is what kids like more) --- both ways to play the OL are legitimate paths to victory. So, by saying that you may like it more if you follow this alternative strategy is not "Bending the rules" or "stepping outside the design"....it s just a helpful suggestion. Perhaps you have played a non-monster oriented OL and did not like it.....no big deal.

A point I do agree on is that the administrative overhead can be exhausting. I would like some easily copied character sheets and an OL sheet -- no chits for any conditions, just check boxes.

And, those hot fries are delicious and odd at the same time, somewhat mindblowing.

I would argue that:
- Arkham Horror or Tales of the Arabian Nights, if people read the text in a monotone, unexcited voice, is not fun
- Cosmic Encounter, when everyone invites everyone else to ally on the defense and therefore drags the game on for extra hours, is not fun
- Magic, between two newbies who don't attack each other because they're terrified of losing a creature so the game stalls out, is not fun
- Dune, where everyone attacks constantly and is always losing their guys and has no defensive position eventually leading the game into a random crapshoot ending, is not fun

So I third the call on Barnes' complete bullshit that if a game needs to be played in a certain way to be fun it's not a good game. CE, Magic, and Dune, in particular, as noted above, those ways to play that make the game suckier are also the ways that make you more likely to lose the game, just like in Descent where taking the extra godawful amount of time to clear the room instead of run run running is both more likely to get you killed as well as more likely to make the game suck.

It's ANDY Capp's Hot Fries. Sheesh. Serious credibility problem there.

OK, there's a big problem when a game has to be played a certain way to be good. That means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design.

&

What it comes down to is that even people that like DESCENT seem to do so only conditionally.

I agree, and I think the first comment is being misinterpreted. There's always the guy who suggests a movie or a band , and upon hearing that you didn't like it says "dude, you gotta be baked to reallly get into it." and that sucks. It means the product can't stand on it's own, and that's fundamentally wrong, which sets up the second comment. Just replace the words 'Descent' and 'Game' with 'The Stoned Age' and 'String Cheese Incident' and you can see what I mean. This is the problem, not the folks you're playing with.

@ Sisteray
I was a bike messenger and amateur racer for years, so I snapped up Leader 1 when it came out thinking some of my old cycling buddies (some of whom play games regularly) would be up for it. Hasn't happened yet. Is it any good?

Whoops, looks like you made the same point I did but with Ishtar MB.

I think that this angle about how to play a game is worthy of its own topic. On the one hand, I think that allowing players diverse strategies is generally a good thing. On the other hand, I think that it's okay for certain themes to restrict play to a certain style. For example, Battlestar Galactica should be a game about paranoia and conspiracy, and it does seem to weaken the game experience when the Cylon players out themselves early in the game.

Yeah, I mean, if all games come down to what you do at the table to make them fun even if they're not written a certain way then there's no point in writing articles about them, talking about them, assessing them as consumer products, or even discussing the merits or demerits of them. All game criticism is completely invalid because "if you play it this way" it's good. All games are good "if you play it this way". In fact, designers should just stop writing rules and publishers should just ship boxes of plastic monsters with dungeon tiles and let YOU come up with the game and how it should be played. The arguments I'm hearing for DESCENT under all of these conditions make me wonder why you guys can't have just as much fun playing Tiddlywinks or AGRICOLA...I mean, I'm sure there's certain conditions where those games would be awesome to you. But does that make them good games? If I have to take a sheet of acid to "get" the music of the Grateful Dead does that make them a good band? Or are they just a shitty, cut rate blues rock band until you have an agent that breaks down your critical and aesthetic filter?

There are two levels of games authorship- what the designer does and what we do with it. Both have to work for the game to succeed. If what the designer did isn't enough and we have to pick up the slack or if the game has to be played conditionally, then there is something wrong with it at its written level.

[/i]Battlestar Galactica should be a game about paranoia and conspiracy, and it does seem to weaken the game experience when the Cylon players out themselves early in the game.

Man does it ever. This game is VERY fussy when it comes to how you play. But the thing is that sure, Mike's right to a certain degree, but I do think that it's worth trying the other side. If a certain band or game is more fun drunk or stoned then I may be willing to get into that state and try it out. The thing is that these states (I like how some people are comparing playing a certain way to be stoned... big difference, but I'll roll) don't just "break down your critical and aesthetic filter" they change the way you see the world. Some things may be less accptable in this state, some things more. I don't think it's good to live that way but occasionally it can be an eye opener.

I learned many things about myself while drunk that my sober self could never admit.

shit, backwards. The italics should be normal and vice versa...

How did this article get over 100 replies? Its not a Top 10 list.

If I have to take a sheet of acid to "get" the music of the Grateful Dead does that make them a good band?

I forgot to mention that my kids and I routinely shoot heroin before we play Descent. Was that not clear?

We don't feel like killing many monsters with this contextual enhancement, though. We mostly just fall in pits or teleport back to town for a quick nap to help sleep it off.

I doubt it. HQ came out when I was 16 or 17, so close enough. If both of these games were on the shelf at the same time, HQ would have been our chosen game, hands down. In fact, we did those marathon sessions of HQ. Then AHQ.

To me Descent took the dungeoncrawling genre about 5 steps in the wrong direction.

??
I don't recall anyone complaining about the 'conga-line of death' in dungeoncrawls. Sure, it in all of them, but when it takes 45 minutes to resolve each combat that conga-line becomes a sludge. That tactic never was bothersome because the Quest games moved at a good clip. Descent does not.

Michael --

The problem is that you are building a critique about "how people are enjoying it" when how they enjoy it is actually part of the designer's rule system. Running from monsters is a viable strategy. The OL playing more traps and events is a viable strategy. It isn't like people made "house rules" to make this possible. The fact that you are so rigid in acknowledging that there may be other strategies that are more fun (I pointed ours out because our groups seem similar, not prone to over-analysis) makes you look unreasonably stubborn in the face of what....for all intents and purposes....looks to be a well-reasoned argument.

And, I am not an ardent defender of Descent. There is a ton about that game that could be better. The chit-explosion is too much, the set-up time can be frustrating, the combat would probably be better if it was a big skill x skill table with "to-hit" numbers like in Titan, and there are elements of the design that which can be frustrating. And, having an OL that just lines up monsters is one of those....that is why I imagine it takes 3 hours to get through 4 rooms. And, yes, playing with someone like that can be frustrating. But, luckily, that is not the only way to play --- and, with Descent, there is a distinction to be made because it was obviously designed to be played in a variety of ways (hence the custimizing of the OL Deck with expansions).

It is kind of like MtG. A good, classic control deck (hell, think back to a good Stasis deck) can suck all the fun out of playing the game. That doesn't mean that Magic is only conditionally enjoyed. It means that there are ways to play a game within the design space (I hate saying shit like that) that do make the game better, and overall, this is likely going to be a function of the make-up of the group. As Shellhead pointed out, sometimes a good strategy when a Cylon in BS is to intentionally reveal yourself and take advantage of the additional powers....does this make the game conditionally fun? Should they have included a rule that said you only can intentionally reveal yourself after a certain point? And, yes, Agricola is conditionally fun with the "AT expansion" that varies weather conditions. Tiddlywinks is fun if you bet (or are 5) -- but those are different than your complaint about the "slowness of Descent". The former is based on expansions or completely outside the ruleset, the latter is based on your group's dynamics.

I'm with Barnes on this. The rules define the game. If outing yourself early as a cylon screws up BSG (as a game AND an experience), then the rules should create penalties or some disincentive to do so. (It's best if this emerges organically from the core system instead of an "EXCEPTION: you can't do X before turn 10" kind of approach.) Not that there can't be great games where there's some kind of "social contract" at work, but I think it is a flaw if the game allows for degeneracy. Most of us work around it, but tighter designs don't even allow it to happen.

but tighter designs don't even allow it to happen.

Sure, but tighter designs can close you in. House ruling a Euro game is very difficult because they design them too tight.

Like the M-16 compared to the AK-47. The MK-16 was too tight a design and didn't allow for things to go wrong like a bit of dirt clogging up the action or something where as the robust AK-47 could handle that kind of thing. Some games need tobe desinged to be loose. I still don't like Descent that much, but I'm not big on dungeon crawls anyway (more then two player anyhow). I think I just got sick of that game format.

I agree, waddball (although the protests he has over some of Descent is a choice within the rules, but not the only one). However, we don't see the same "hardline" stance against BSG for allowing such a degenerate result -- in fact, it is often lauded as a favorite. The desire to objectively criticize games within the box and as the designer intended them should be applied equally across games; otherwise, the high-minded act of being critical at a deeper level starts to fall apart undre inconsistencies.

I am happy with: BSG has shortcoming because the game can be degenerate when the Cylon declares on Turn 1; likewise, Descent has a major flaw if the OL spawns monsters repeatedly. Both are legitimate criticisms of a design flaw.

However, it is a stretch to say: If you don't reveal yourself early or you don't spawn monsters repeatedly, the game is conditionally fun. Because, it is the flipside of the coin. No game is designed perfectly. So, every game is conditionally fun or every game is above criticism. The argument is presented as though Descent fatal flaw is that it is conditionally fun....but, upon closer inspection, that argumen is specious at best.

Hypocrisy is a "flaw" too, eh? I think we're all conditionally right. :)

Good points there, but I do think it's worth, at least with these examples, distinguishing between bad play and bad players. I don't hold much against a game if it's fragile (that is, where bad play ruins the experience), but I do if good/reasonable play does. I don't believe a T1 reveal is good play for a Cylon, but I admit I haven't played enough to know. I'm pretty sure that spawn spamming is reasonable play in Descent, so to me it's worse on that ground.

I think BSG is a prime example of a game that is horribly flawed, but when it works, it works fantastically (which is why still I own it and the expansion). There are many games of BSG that hit the sweet spot that allows for me to forgive the times where it just didn't work. It's a brittle system that's heavily reliant on abstract set collecting as the game's spine and when the theme isn't effectively covering up the system, you see how unattractive the skeleton is. I think it is the fault of the developers, BSG could easily have been a better game, but the developers didn't want to take the extra 6 months to a year to get the design in tight working order (a standard problem with most FF games). (Imagine the AK-47 that jams on itself).

I think Descent is a good design but could have used more development. They probably could have streamlined it a bit or could have added more story but FF has to publish games and their perpetual mindset is that you fix things in the expansions. This leads to what I think is lazier development, and sometimes changes are too significant to fix in an expansion. For me Descent screams of "good enough" design. Does it accomplish what we set out to do? Yes, well then lets move on.

That said, it does accomplish exactly what it set out to do. I feel if you want what the game offers, you aren't left wanting; you just have to accept all the effluvia that comes with it.

I feel that the biggest issue is that there is a huge paradigm shift in the needs of the modern player. SPI games that last 14 hours just don't cut it these days. We are spoiled by lean designs that are playable in an evening. So in order to convey a real narrative a game has to make mechanical shortcuts. Modern designers need to create simple vehicles to shuttle the narrative. These rules need to be digestible by players that are gathered together to play a game for their first time, taught by a guy that is reading the rules thoroughly for the first time. So all designs need to make cuts. Sometimes these cuts and shortcuts reveal too much bone and connective tissue and you are removed from the grander form.

To make things worse design is demanded to be in a constant state of growth, so in order to justify a game designers feel compelled to also be innovative. I feel that Descent really feels the weight of all of these things. People come to it with both the narrative expectation that you would give an 80s design and the demand for clean, elegant innovation. It's a hard row to hoe.

Speaking of BSG, it seems like nobody here at F:AT is playing it anymore. I didn't like what I was hearing about the expansion. It sounded like a sloppy mess that generally skewed the game even further in favor of the Cylons. Is that true? And is that why nobody is playing anymore?

jay718 said:
I was a bike messenger and amateur racer for years, so I snapped up Leader 1 when it came out thinking some of my old cycling buddies (some of whom play games regularly) would be up for it. Hasn't happened yet. Is it any good?

I think it is a solid racing game that is far easier to play than it is to learn. I really enjoy it. My only gripe is that the penalty for cracking your bike in the mountains is too harsh and too lucky and for a game that has little luck for as good of a game as you can play your games can easily be lost on a couple bad die rolls. Next time I play it I'll play where you take x2 damage rather than x3 damage in the mountains and that should give dramatic tension without just eliminating you from the game.

I don't get this line of reasoning at all.
You are saying if there are "ways you are supposed to play" that it's a design flaw.

If you are playing Cosmic Encounter and you are Loser, it would be foolish to play the 40 (in most cases). There's no RULE that says you can't, nor should there be. Playing a high card when you win by playing a low card is just poor strategy, not a design flaw.
That's what I'm talking about with moving quickly through rooms. It's a good strategy, albeit one that may not be as immediately apparent as in the Cosmic Encounter example.

If you play Cosmic Encounter with someone too dumb to realize that the Loser should (generally) be playing low cards, that's not a design flaw, even though there is "a way you have to play to make it fun."

If you add rules to regulate the players into playing well, there's not much game anymore. You have to, as a game designer, allow for poor player choices, even if those choices being made makes the game not as fun. Descent, when played by people who know what they are doing, is constantly tense and filled with tons of decisions, in my experience.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying you are a moron if you haven't figured out that players need to move quickly in Descent. It's not nearly as intuitive as playing low cards as the Loser. Just trying to illustrate the point.

I just played BSG a couple of weeks ago, with some parts of the expansion (characters, skill cards, treachery cards, updated Cylon locations.) Enjoyed every minute of it. I'd still play it, any time.

BSG remains one of the great games. We haven't played it much recently only because we spent the end of 2008 and a lot of sessions in 2009 playing it. It'll be back.

Bringing up COSMIC in any kind of discussion like this is kind of ludicrous, because you're talking about a game that has billions of potential interactions by design. It's a very volatile system that can break down simply because in those billions of potential interactions there are going to be some that aren't so great. And there is the possibility that players will not play their powers advantageously. That's a lot different than in DESCENT where the issue is that you've got a bulky, cumbersome design that relies on conditions including play styles for the system to work successfully.

The problem is that you are building a critique about "how people are enjoying it" when how they enjoy it is actually part of the designer's rule system. Running from monsters is a viable strategy. The OL playing more traps and events is a viable strategy. It isn't like people made "house rules" to make this possible. The fact that you are so rigid in acknowledging that there may be other strategies that are more fun (I pointed ours out because our groups seem similar, not prone to over-analysis) makes you look unreasonably stubborn in the face of what....for all intents and purposes....looks to be a well-reasoned argument.

Nothing presented here fixes the problems I have with the game. I don't see anyone stating "yes, this is a great design, we love the game as written". I'm seeing "it's good if". Well, what "if" not? There is no counterargument for that, and it seems that the core argument "DESCENT is not a very good game" is at its root agreed on by all here. Its benefactors all have conditions attached to their enjoyment of it, and I have yet to see anyone put forth an argument for the game as written.

The game obviously offers a number of strategic possibilities including the running we were discussing, and yes, that's written into the rules and I'll accept that it's a valid way to accelerate the game. But when I'm in a dungeon crawl, do I really want to say "Let's just run past the Beastmen to save time"? Then there's that spawn-spam issue- it's really just an artificial timer on the game. Mill around too long, and you'll get overwhelmed. But conversely, more monsters means more time. So to me, that system just doesn't work.

As for the "if you were 15 you'd love it" argument...I don't know that I would. I had much cooler toys than a bunch of cream and burgundy Beastmen.

Well, we should, because BSG basically requires you to give a sizable shit about pretty inconsequential things, otherwise it's dull. You have to really care about sniffing out the Cylons, even if they're not doing much of anything to sabotage you.

I don't think the you're-not-playing-it-right arguments hold up for Descent, either.

First of all, the most frequent argument for it here is that you have to play RtL. Sorry, but if you've given me a game that I don't like playing for 2.5-3 hours, the last thing that's going to change my mind about it is telling me I need to go buy more crap for it and start an 80-hour campaign. Besides, if I'm going to be playing it over multiple-sessions, then there's even more games Descent is going to have to get in line behind. I've tried to play RtL, but even the guys in my group that like Descent, and own the expansion, won't play the game for that long.

There's really no reason not to AP the game. If the heroes don't do it, they're pretty much fucked. I've lost plenty of games of Descent only because we just wanted to open the goddamn door, and move on instead of taking another turn or two to get ourselves properly outfitted. In fact, that's usually how the heroes lose the game; they just get to the point where they want it over so badly that they no longer care about playing to win.

On the OL side, it's almost worse. There's not much for him to do besides throw tons of weak monsters at the heroes. The only other option you have is to try to wait until they open up a room with a bunch of monsters, throw some traps down, spawn off in the corners, surround the heroes so they can't move at all, and hope to hell the dice go better for you than for them. I've won games within 30 minutes this way, but you need to have a good hand of cards to do it, and if you don't get that Beastment/Bane Spider/Monkey combo right off the bat, all you can do is continue to try to slow them down.

I mostly agree with the argument that all games need to be played a certain way to an extent, but the game needs to give me an incentive to play that way besides sucking balls if I don't. CE, for instance, is easy to ruin, but if you try to win by yourself, or with only one other person, that's not a big issue.

Huh, the "if I was 15" argument is exactly what I said way back when. It works for me. Unlike Descent now, unfortunately.

(playing the 40 as Loser is perfectly sound strategy, because Loser is an optional power. Anti-Matter is what you're thinking of...)

I'm sure it's possible to have a good time playing Descent with a "fukkit-lets-go" sort of group. I know it's never going to happen with the group of guys I play with, because one of them is very prone to square-counting and LOS-measuring and other fiddly time-wasting bullshit. Oddly enough, he's the one that owns it, and it just never gets scheduled anymore. We even had a good time the first few times we played it, mostly because we didn't realize until later how little we actually doing in all that time. It was fun to push all those chits and monsters around for a while. Then it waned quickly. Then we still had hours of game left to go...

(also, never mind the fact that the power scaling is ludicrous in that game. The gold treasure deck is just absurd.)

See, I don't see it that way. I'm trying to say "yes, this is a great design, it works great as written." Then people come along and say "no, it's not, it takes four hours to open the first door." And I go, "well, yeah, if you play THAT way it sucks!"

It sounds to me like it's more opinion than anything. Saying "it takes too long" is pretty different than "the overlord always wins." The former is much more an opinion and the later is much more a matter of verifiable quality of the game. I will defend the balance and structure of the game. I think it works, and works smoothly. I cannot defend against people who simply would prefer more narrative structure, faster playing time, or a CRT instead of custom dice. On the issue of quality, I think it's very strong, but if you'd simply prefer something different, I can see lots of reasons why.

How does this square with the "you have to play it a certain way" philosophy. Because this game, above many, many games, requires you to have both the right group and playing at least a semi-devious Cylon along with people trying to ferret them out for it to shine. The "game design" isn't great, rather it is sloppy and only makes a few improvements on Shadows over Camelot (in terms of design). It is definitely a game that "plays bigger than the design" and that is why it can also fail miserably. But, you have also asserted that we can't evaluate a game on those factors because it is transcends what is found in the box.

For the record, I am not trying to be an ass. I am just trying to nail down a consistent rubric by which to evaluate games. I think these types of discussions go along way in "cleaning up" both the thought process and the ability to critique games (or anything for that manner). Perhaps my definitions of the processes are too strict?

I will honestly play BSG about any chance I can get. It's still one of my very favorite games, and I never have any problems getting enough players at game night.

If you ask me (and I know, no one did), I'd say that the whole idea for a "rubric" for evaluating a game is pretty flawed. There are a ton of intangibles that make a game work, including the players, that can't be applied to a rubric at all. Playing a game is, in the end, an emotional experience, not some IGN-style grading system where everything needs a numerical score or has to meet a specific standard. We already judge games by numerous standards, and if that's the case, comparing anything between BSG and Descent is apples and oranges.

And I think BSG and Cosmic Encounter work because of what the games do to promote the ideal sensations. I'd say a flaw in Descent is that it encourages the AP-style play, even though it's trying to be a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. BSG does what it can to encourage suspicion and duplicity, while Cosmic goes out of its way to promote chaos and insane interaction. Obviously a player holds a ton of pull, but I guess my experience with all of these games has never proven it to be much of an issue. We've never had any problems with someone revealing on turn one in BSG. I think someone did it once, but the other Cylon didn't, and we spent our time trying to track them down and lost as a result. I'm not at all convinced that would be the "best" play for a Cylon in any given situation.

And no one has addressed the problems in Descent related to pacing, and how long the game can take. It's not interesting for 6 hours, end of story. I can handle rules bloat (I really love Arkham Horror), but if a game is going to be that long, it had better stay engaging all the way through. In my experience, Descent doesn't really do that well.

BSG has narrative atmosphere which keeps me engaged even when the game is not running perfectly. Case in point, at WBC, apart from initial cylon attack no further attacks were drawn AT ALL as a crisis. This is a rare event solely due to card draw but that's the way it fell. Combined with a newbie cylon, who probably should have revealed earlier, it meant the game could have been viewed as stale and tedious with a simple human win. It would have been that way without a bottle of Glenfiddich, which luckily I had on hand. The company of gamers and the narrative kept this a fun experience.

I am certain, even with your favourite game, a group of anal retentive gamers/ rules lawyers/ sober people etc will fuck up the experience, regardless of how good the system is. Games, especially brittle ones like BSG rely more on the group of gamers you have and whether they suffer from ADD.

Not me, bud. It's just not my bag. I'm cool with 3-day powersessions fueled by snacks and mountain dew, but I'd never have truly dug this game. I really believe it's the homework factor: I want to play a game, not become a part-time CPA. Unfortunately, Descent just doesn't pass muster as a game versus an interesting homework assignment, if you know what I mean.

And you and I both are in the kool-aid kamp on Runebound. I'd never, ever turn a game of Runebound down.

And no one has addressed the problems in Descent related to pacing, and how long the game can take. It's not interesting for 6 hours, end of story. I can handle rules bloat (I really love Arkham Horror), but if a game is going to be that long, it had better stay engaging all the way through. In my experience, Descent doesn't really do that well.

Exactly. The one time I played Descent, there was a lot of uninteresting repetition, and it went on for several hours. My enjoyment steadily declined until I just wanted Descent to end and I would never have to play again.

The Hotness on BGG suggests how much the gaming landscape has changed towards AT-style game: 29 or so out of 55 or so games listed.

Five years ago, I guess we can take it as a given it would have been very different on the euro-dominant site.

FFG, with games like Descent, forged a lot of the way for others to follow and for this they have been credited here and elsewhere, as they should be. But now that the dust has settled, it also seems that FFG has also become the biggest target for critics.

I think Ken B. is right to ask if some people have just gotten tired of games... For some it's an FFG hangover.

But others still get enjoyment out of the game, so I dunno. Objectively is it a bad design? Maybe. But if I enjoy it as a player or my group does... I may be willing to overlook its flaws. Barnes doesn't and won't. That's fine. There is better stuff out there, I guess. But RPGs are a different animal, some of those dungeon crawlers are two-player only, others are competitive races and not coop against the bad guy, and still others are OOP.

Anyway, I just think it's cool how much the landscape has changed (list below)... Anybody else wonder whether euros will ever rebound and if the hotness will ever again be dominated by German titles?

Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
Earth Reborn
Intruder
Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game
DungeonQuest
Dominant Species
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective
Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
Dominion: Prosperity
Vinhos
Wok Star
Defenders of the Realm
Dominion
Space Hulk: Death Angel; The Card Game
Agricola
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Thunderstone
Innovation
Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon Board Game
Race for the Galaxy
Arkham Horror
Axis & Allies Europe 1940
Merchants & Marauders
Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
2 de Mayo
Heroes of Graxia
Mutant Chronicles Collectible Miniatures Game
Constantinopolis
Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements
Small World
Twilight Struggle
7 Wonders
Glory to Rome
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
Cadwallon: City of Thieves
Battles of Westeros
Venture
Claustrophobia
Agricola: The Goodies Expansion
Descent: Journeys in the Dark
Summoner Wars
Battles of Napoleon: The Eagle and the Lion
Battlestar Galactica
Dixit
Puerto Rico
Nexus Ops
War of the Ring
Cyclades
Runewars
Power Grid

Everything goes through cycles. At some point, the market will be flooded with AT me too's just like Eurogames have now. There will be a clamor for the return of the simple deterministic style of Eurogame and AT will fade for a time, only to return once the next wave of Eurogames and receded. Or maybe by then we'll be talking about Ruskiegames and Chinatrash.