I've still never played Descent. How does 2nd Edition compare to DOOM?

I'd say Descent 2 is faster than Doom. Descent 1 was just doom with extra stuff. they cut out the extra and then some. again, no orders, spawning is simpler, smaller maps. it goes back to the # of monsters adjusts to # of players that doom had. just without the technicolor imps

I like the sound of the changes. But I got so burned out on Descent, I just can't get excited about getting back into it. It's also frustrating that they did some things that I wanted to do in my own dungeon crawl. The one I'll likely never finish. The one I started over from scratch 5 times. cough

MattDP wrote:


I don't understand it either - that's what we did and it works well. It's actually better than playing one humongous quest, because it feels like you're getting somewhere, instead of slogging through the third room after four hours.

Many on TOS are complaining that "I don't have time for a 20 hour campaign" which also makes no sense - it's 20 hours in 2 hour chunks. You can't play a 2-hour game 10 times? What the hell do you want out of the game then?

Anyway, played some of the campaign and it's mostly good so far. It feels like an actual fight instead of a slog, though I don't like the emphasis on race-style quests. A major strategy thus far for the Overlord seems to be use one group of monsters as blockers and fodder, while another group jets around the map doing whatever it is you need doing. Since so many quests are races, monsters that can immobilize the heroes are much better than the rest.

Also, I got the Conversion Kit (though haven't played with it yet). It's all cool, but the dragons are WEAK - seriously, the Act I minion dragons have FIVE FUCKING HEALTH and masters only have 7. Their defense is decent, but it's entirely possible to one-shot them with a bad defense roll. What the hell?

Sure you can, if you don't mind having to set up, and tear down the board four fucking times. It doesn't take that long to do, and the between quest stuff isn't overly time-consuming or involved, but it doesn't really change the overall flow of the original game. That is to say, hack your way through two rooms, pause the game while you divy up loot and refresh your guys, hack through another two rooms, run back to town, hack through another two rooms.

I don't understand why they couldn't just give you a series of one-part, 2-hour-ish quests with one in town sequence per session. What was the point? Do they really expect people to stop, and leave the game for next week, in the middle of a scenario that takes an hour and some change to play?

It's just weird. The problem with the first game's length wasn't that the quests themselves were too humungous. They were usually good scenarios in theory, but there were just too many ways for players to grind the pace of the game down to a slow crawl, and no incentive not to use them. If it weren't so easy for the Overlord to retard the heroes' advance by clogging up the two square-wide corridors with shitty monsters, which serve no purpose other than to waste the other players' time, it wouldn't take 2 hours to slog through three rooms. If the heroes weren't able to freeze the play of the game by stopping to kit out, and toddle off to the shopping center before opening every frigging door, those adventures wouldn't take 4 hours to play.

Well, you can't do those things in this version, so why not just make a decent number of normal-sized scenarios instead of a truckload of little tiny ones? There are a couple of those in the game, but they're the exception, not the rule.




A 2 hour game that I can play 10 times, but don't have to do it 10 weeks in a row. I don't really want to have to worry about not showing up next week, so that next time I play, somebody spent all my XP on shit I don't want, things like that.

Yeah, that's the nature of campaign play, but in the old game, that was an option. Here, playing a self-contained scenario is an option, the rules they came up with for it are very obviously an afterthought, and the scenarios are structured in a way that doesn't really justify making a one-off night of the game.



And that's the way it was before, really. Block the corridor, spawn around the corner, do the Beastman shuffle so every single one attacks the weak guy, and hope you rack up enough points that way before the good guys get their thing done.

This is what ended up happening last night. The Overlord immediately dropped the big Ettin in the exit corridor, then hoped like hell he could get enough goblins behind him (and thus, unreachable by us) before we whittled the big dude's life away. Which, of course, we did by locking in our heels, doing nothing other than roll dice at each other, and wait to see which thing happened first.



2nd is closer to Doom that the 1st is, at least as far as the tactical play goes. There aren't as many powerups, respawning is a bit different, and damage is calculated by subtraction, not division. Also, there's no revealing new rooms in this one. Everything's right on the board at the start. Still the same basic style of play, though, other than the whole campaign thing.

Nowhere near as bullshit with the balance, either.

Haven't seen anyone mention yet, but is it possible if you own both 1st and 2nd, to shoehorn the new rules into the old scenarios at all?

(I did write a bit of a review Friday eve. No idea what happened to it.)

But adding the new rules into the old scenarios....Hmmm. It would rip the balance all to hell, but it might sort of work.

Let's see.
1. You don't have new rules for all the terrain types. You have Lava, water, and obstacles.
2. You no longer have threat cards which spawn, and spawning is defined by the scenario instead. The ported rule would be to allow a one monster spawn per turn from the entrance (or perhaps nearest town portal.)
3. Perhaps each treasure chest just becomes a treasure card draw? That means you are mostly just getting consumables over the course of a quest instead of items.

You'd have to do a fair amount of rules hacking, and I'm not sure it is worth it.

You STILL have all of those monsters on the oversize maps that can be used to clog the narrow corridors, and scaling problems because shopping isn't integrated.

That said, MJL's criticism of the new format seems...off. We just picked a random quest pair out of the middle of the book and played it. Seemed tightly balanced and a lot of fun, taking about 2-2.5 hours to play both encounters.

There are a ton of smart things in the new format. Everyone is either taking actions, or doing downtime tasks AT THE SAME TIME, which is the reason for breaking up into small sections. So no one is sitting there waiting on someone to painfully shop. And the tear down and setup of the map is actually rather less odious than stopping in the middle of someone's turn to put out new monsters. The larger tiles make the setup particularly quick, with the slow part being to pick up any new encounter rules.

he only played the first quest. which is a bit of a snore. 'looking' at the others doesn't really mean anything. The first quest is pretty much a...'hey this is how to play'. I mean, even in campaign there isn't a difference in reward between winning or losing the first quest. It would take alot of effort on the part of the heroes to lose the first quest I think.

Well, like I said, I could be way wrong about how much fun it delivers. I'll wait and see.One thing's for sure, I don't like the format in which they presented most of the quests, and I'm never going to.

However, my mind is open, and I'm certainly going into the next game expecting to have a good time. So, I'll weigh in for reals when I've played it a bit more.



Again, I might be wrong. Said that from the get-go.

On the other hand, I've been playing these nerd games since I was barely able to poop without supervision. There comes a point when you know what you like, and what you don't, and that don't require a whole lot of fucking around with the game itself. I'll give it its fair shake, of course, but if I don't have the same complaints about it 5 games down the line, I'll be very surprised.

I loathed 1st edition, but 2nd edition feels like they cut out everything that didn't directly contribute to having fun. I've been impressed so far.