I picked up Descent: Second Edition from the FFG store on Tuesday and played through the first quest with my wife, so I thought I'd post some impressions.

-Way fewer counters: like, fewer by an order of magnitude. You pretty much have wound and fatigue tokens, and a bare handful of others. One pretty small Plano box fits everything, and that's with room to spare.

-Way less plastic: we knew this going in, but still a bit of a shock after the huge box of awesome of the first edition.

-Hero figures: much better than the old ones. They look like heroes instead of hero-shaped blobs.

-Monster figures: about the same. The new dragon sucks compared to the old one, though. But there's a walking shark-monster with sucker-tentacles coming out of its head!

-Rules: the rulebook is well-organized and clearly written. Few ambiguities to be found; most that do exist revolve around the use of fatigue for movement while under various conditions, or whether fatigue-moving triggers Overlord cards, etc. Having conditions summarized on cards is nice (when you are inflicted with the condition, you get the card). Player actions are simplified (no more orders). The new line of sight rules are conceptually weird, and we'll see how they play out, but they seem fine so far.

-Quests: they're definitely shorter. The first quest is only like 5 tiles! So obviously it'll play faster. Later quests, though, look just as big as any first edition one. Much, much more variety in objectives, though many are sort of race conditions: the heroes are trying to do this, before the overlord does this other thing. Also, no more hidden set-up; all monsters are spawned by the overlord per the monster rules, so there seems to be little actual exploration.

In thinking about the game, I realized it's largely divorced from its dungeon-crawl roots. Instead, the game is more like a strategy RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics: an asymmetrical fight between heroes and monsters on a map with varying objectives. (I've also heard it described as "Advanced Squad Leader in a dungeon" - that might've been here.) And I'm fine with that - I'm more interested in the skirmish angle than the exploration anyway.

Thanks for the impressions, Delobius. I never bit the bullet on the first edition because of the drawbacks I read about, but I'm seriously considering this one if it pans out. I certainly love me some Final Fantasy Tactics, so that's piqued my interest.

As a follow-up:

Monster castings are pretty much the same level of detail, although the fine detail on the Elemental is nice. This ain't GW, but then we're not paying GW prices for plastic, either. I didn't notice that the heroes were that much more impressive than the old stuff, to be honest.

The map tiles, OTOH, are definitely a step up in detail and presentation. They're double-sided, like the ones from Road to Legend and present a variety of terrain on the outdoors side. There a lot of nice little bits in the dungeon sides, including the fact that many are lit by torches, so there are soft spheres of yellow light in the corners of a room, for example.

The monsters are solid. The Elemental has 4 different attacks based on type (fire, water, earth, air) and the Flesh Moulder can heal other monsters, so there will be plenty of opportunity for nasty tricks by the OL. And, finally, appropriately sized giant spiders that may not even be shot as soon as a door is opened. Monsters are divided into Act 1 and Act 2 in terms of toughness, so number of players is less relevant to that.

The OL deck seems a little plain at first glance. There are some classics (Pit Trap, Dark Charm, Dash, Frenzy (Rage), etc.) and some interesting new ones - Expert Blow: Play this card when a monster attacks a hero, before rolling dice. The attack gains +2 wounds and Surge: Return this card to your hand. Word of Despair: Play this card at the end of your turn. Each hero tests Willpower. Each hero who fails suffers 1 Fatigue each time he performs an action during his next turn.

No more treasure chests or treasure decks. They're all shop items now that you can access at different points of the adventure. Many of them (Grinding Axe, Mace of Kellos, etc.) are, of course, from the First Ed. decks, but it's not about rushing to open the chest so that everyone instantly has access to the Staff of Ultimate Destruction™. This is more about leveling your character to access the cool powers, rather than finding the cool stuff. More like WoW than Diablo, I guess?

Looks cool, but very toned down from the complexity of First Ed. in its later days. I have mixed feelings about that. I like long, complex games. But, then, we played a quest in First Ed. a couple weeks ago and it took 8 hours. I like long games, but Descent ain't Here I Stand, either, and probably shouldn't be.

Looking forward to the Conversion Kit's arrival next week.

Agree about the map tiles - they're great. They don't quite fit with the 1st Ed tiles, but you could make whole new maps out of the old tiles by themselves.

The defense dice seems to make weak monsters more survivable, but strong monsters less so, in that a weak monster that might have had only 1 armor in 1st Ed might have 0-3 in 2nd (one gray die). Whereas a tough monster might've had 5 armor, but now has 0-6 (two gray dice). On the other hand, the monsters all have neat abilities, and they're printed right on the monster card (though I largely still prefer a reference sheet rather than cards).

As for complexity - I prefer the streamlined version, because one can always pile on more crap to make the game longer or more complex. It's much harder to strip a big game down (which was my problem with 1st Ed - trying to find fat to trim to bring it under 5 hours without ruining what made it Descent).

Looking forward to starting the campaign this weekend with some dudes (and the upcoming Conversion Kit as well).

A bit more:

I think the Search tokens and cards help a bit with the exploration angle. While the results aren't nearly as exotic as the grab bag that the treasure decks became, there are still some nice results, especially since health potions are really useful now (they heal you or an adjacent hero fully; no more desultory: "Oh. A healing potion.")

It really is a different game in many ways, though. It's extremely objective based, in that heroes dying affects nothing except how good their Stand Up roll is on their turn (Am I the only one who will be hearing Ludacris every time someone does a Stand Up? "When I move, you move. Just like that?") In First Ed, the best way to play the OL wasn't to tell a story or complete a goal. It was to kill the heroes, often the weakest one, repeatedly, as fast as possible. In 2nd Ed., you're attempting a mission at the same time the heroes are (getting people off the map, activating this or that feature, etc.)

But it's also very slanted toward campaign play. You don't even gain XP for many of the lower encounters. The presence of both a hero ability and a heroic feat makes up for that somewhat, but the transformative aspect of drawing Flying Death as Kirga is lost. That's a missing rush that may be disappointing to some players (and, of course, sometimes you never drew anything useful at all.)

I'm really not sure how my group is going to react to it, but I suggested to them a couple weeks ago that the edition seemed different enough that we could easily play either as different games and I'm glad to see that I was right in that respect. We still have several quests from the old game, including the hardback book, that we've never gone through, so keeping your old Descent not only adds more characters and monsters to the new one, but you can still go back to it, as we probably will.

Lots of little quality of life improvements, though, like trading costing no movement or actions and some of the healer powers are excellent (self-confessed healer in WoW.)

Jackwraith wrote:


Heroes do lose a turn getting back up (unless another hero spends an action to do it) and the OL gets to draw an extra card too.

That's true. I overstated the case. But it still lacks the impact that death has in First Ed, which is probably a good thing. When Well of Darkness came out and the OL's power ramped up radically, there were any number of times that our games ended in the second room of a map because the heroes had run out of Conquest tokens. Hardly an "adventure". I think we started using the "check the total at the end of the map" house rule then, so that they didn't lose upon hitting zero Conquest tokens and could still win if they got their total back above zero by the end of the game.

Bit of thread necromancy here since we tore through the first quest tonight.

Good news is I sat down, played Descent tonight, and actually enjoyed myself. I can have a good time playing bad games, but Descent is not one of them. I dislike the original game so much that playing it puts me in a thoroughly pissy mood every time. So, having genuine fun with the game was quite surprising, and quite nice.

For the most part, the core gameplay of the first edition is, for better or worse, still intact. The turn sequence, combat, and movement are, with a few tweaks, pretty much the same. The armor values have been replaced with defense dice (but still function the same way), LOS is traced slightly differently (but still basically the same in practical terms), and they got rid of the "ready" actions.

Other than that, you run around and roll dice. You count hearts, surges, range numbers, and shields. You shuffle little cardboard hearts around the table, you rinse, and you repeat. What they really did to change the game was edit huge swaths of crap that made the original game appear to be a lot more than the thing I just described. Gone are the threat tokens, conquest tokens, treasure chests, back-to-town warp squares, black dice, skill decks, cardboard coins, potion tokens, training markers, price lists, charts, and damn near any playing piece that isn't somehow used to keep track of combat situations.

Instead, you get one of two "class decks," depending on which type of character you're playing. This will have your basic starting equipment and one special skill, and as you gain XP, you can add the others to your character. These are basically same as what we got in the original; spend a fatigue to break the rules in some way kinda' stuff. The Overlord simply gets one card each turn, and can play as many as he wants, whenever he wants, within the restrictions of the card itself. Obviously, they had to neuter the power of these cards a bit, and many of them require the target to make a skill check (each character has four new attributes for this purpose now, and I'm sure they'll also come up during some scenario objectives). Still, pretty much the same as before. Even the skill rolls aren't much different from "roll a black die and get a surge, or the roof caves in on your head." During the game, you can pick up these "search" tokens that let you draw from a goodie bag; things like potions and bombs and whatnot. If you save them until the end of the quest, though, they can be sold in town for money.

Oh yes, going back to town... So, yeah, here's where all the very smart editorial choices they made with the game start to sort of fall apart, or maybe not. I don't know yet. See, the first quest is barely a game. It's on a tiny little board with a handful of monsters, and really, it's just an excuse to give the heroes some XP and gold. It took us maybe half an hour, and was pretty uneventful. We got to see how the new rules work, but that's about it. To really play the game, you've got to play the campaign, or at least multiple quests. The idea is that you play a quest, then you have a phase where you you spend your loot on more gear, upgrade your characters, let the Overlord use his XP to boost his decks and stuff, and then maybe have some random events (from a deck) as you travel to the next quest. Most of the scenarios are busted down into two encounters; that is, two mini-quests on two separate boards. So the game is as long as ever, there are just a lot more checkpoints where you can pack it in and continue later.

OK, now I haven't played any of the other adventures, but I looked them all over, and they don't appear to be that much bigger or denser than the first one. We banged out the first one in 30 minutes with a young kid playing who took turns slowly, a player who were distracted with family calling him, and a non-player who was disrupting the fuck out of the game. If we were all on and popping, not having to reference the rules, and really playing the damn thing, we might have had it done in 20, maybe even 15. So, we'll estimate higher for the other encounters, and say maybe 90 minutes for an average-sized quest.

So what? So, 90 minutes is just a weird time frame for a game that has to become a regular commitment. You're going to show up regularly to follow this campaign, only to play a couple of the bite-sized little encounters and go home? "But that just means you can knock out a quest, then play a different game to wrap things up", you say? Well, not really, because you've still got to get all the stuff out, set everybody up the way they're supposed to be, set up the board, play an encounter, set up another board, finish the game, then do your whole town thing, write down anything that needs to be remembered, and finally pick up the game.

So, I don't know. I really like that we're not fucking around with all this game-y bric-a-brac from the first edition; teleporting to the shopping center, magically appearing equipment that we all have to spend a turn trading with each other, conquest tokens, and the like. I very much appreciate that keywords have been kept to a minimum, and monster special abilities are mostly on the backs of the cards. I love that they added real objectives for the Overlord, went with opposed roll combat, and didn't allow surge abilities to stack, because that all cuts down on the tendency of players to obsessively math out every single turn. It's great that they managed to interweave Road to Legend's basic concepts with the ungainly bits of the standard game to make something that, at the very least, isn't sheer torture to play.

On the other hand, the combat rules still pretty much suck ass, and for largely the same reasons they sucked in the first place. Plus, there's still a bunch of non-monster slaying shit you're going to have to do, and it's going to require a serious investment of time any way you slice it. They definitely streamlined it, but it doesn't feel significantly improved. I could be totally wrong, though. Maybe the campaign will be fun as hell, and all this will have been pointless grousing. Hell, maybe it'll even be worth playing later quests with higher-level characters as one-off games. Or, it could just be a crappy game made more palatable.

mjl1783 wrote:


I don't understand this argument at all. Surely you could just play several quests in a row?

Descent 2.0 is my first ever "first day purchase", however you apply it to someone in South East Asia (the damned box isn't even here yet). I'm fully aware of its shortcoming (gutted single quest play among others).

I don't mind much of the "tactical factor" though. The scenarios I've seen are mostly linear and the rooms are small & narrow. With some kind of ZoC it would have been a game of attrition. I can't say the grid board is a total waste though, since they do evoke great atmosphere.

Besides, I have Okko for my tactical fix.