9 Apr

Descent

Filed under: Boardgames 9 Responses

We played Descent again for the first time since September last year, or at least we tried to. Though Sean and the others went on to play the other maps, we only ever played the first introductory scenario, so we moved on to the second map for this session, with Sean again playing as the Overlord. Suffice to say, we as the adventurers failed abjectly not once, but twice, without even managing to clear a significant portion of the dungeon, making it a short session indeed.

In retrospect and after reading up a bit on the game on BGG, it’s fairly clear what we needed to do to win. Heroes with low damage potential should give up on the idea of doing damage at all and just act as runners to activate glyphs and snag treasure. Some people even suggested not equipping runners with weapons at all, taking instead a pair of shields for example. Monsters should be avoided whenever possible and the party should focus purely on the objectives.

No big surprises there, and after all, playing to win in any game means understanding and exploiting all of the advantages allowed under the rules, right? Except that in this case, cheesing your way to victory feels to me to be against the spirit of a dungeon romp game. Whoever heard of a weaponless adventurer carrying nothing but a pair of shields into a dungeon? How does it make sense to grab the treasure a monster is guarding, equip everyone from the hoard and then use the new equipment to defeat the monster?

One reason why such silly situations arise is because Descent is an attempt to deliver a simplified version of the experience of role-playing games. RPG rulesets are pretty extensive and free-form, so it’s not surprising that trying to codify them so tightly sometimes yields unintuitive results. This is particularly evident in the scenario we played. In a traditional RPG, the adventurers could try talking to the giant, or examining the fallen body or searching the room he’s in for clues. But in Descent, the only things we could do were to fight him or run away, which feels artificially restrictive in a scenario that’s actually supposed to tell a story.

But I wonder if this isn’t also due to the antagonistic nature of games like Descent. In traditional RPGs, the GM isn’t actively trying to kill the adventurers. Instead, he’s working together with the other players to jointly create a compelling narrative and a fun experience. RPG groups know that the heroes should win to make the session fun, but it’s the GM’s job to make the players feel that they’ve earned their victory. In Descent however, the Overlord wins when all of the other players lose and vice versa. So it seems to me that either the heroes get it and cheesily exploit their way to victory, making the Overlord feel like a helpless punching bag, or else the Overlord kills the heroes over and over again, cutting the adventure short. Neither of them sound like very desirable outcomes.

The problem with traditional RPGs of course is that it takes a lot of effort on the part of the GM, a lot of time to play and a lot of rules to learn. The advantage of games like Descent is that everything comes in a nice complete package with lots of cards and figures to make visualization easy and add to the visceral thrill of playing the game. This is why I’ve been intrigued with Fantasy Flight’s latest attempt to deliver a complete RPG system in a boardgame-like package in the form of the newest edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

From what I’ve read, it has all the trappings of a boardgame, complete with a deck of cards for each player representing their tactical options, cards to track special afflictions and conditions, counters to track hit points and such, but it’s still a fully developed and free-form RPG. I doubt I’ll ever have the time or can muster the effort to actually play it, but I can’t help but think this is the right way to do the RPG experience.

Written on April 9 2010 and is filed under Boardgames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Descent”

Farhad

I enjoyed this analysis a great deal, and I think it does a good job of getting at some of the biggest challenges at the heart of translating the RPG into board game form.

One thing that I wonder is how appropriate the correlation of the Overlord to a GM is. Granted I don’t know much about Descent, but does he really act as a kind of GM in how the game is designed? Can you elaborate on that? It seems like a (somewhat obvious) fatal design flaw.

As an avid boardgamer, I take it you’ve heard of Arkham Horror? Another Fantasy Flight game, I feel it does a great job of getting across an RPG feel in a board game. There are some challenges along the same lines as you mentioned – some characters are simply too weak or under-equipped to fight the stronger monsters – but the objectives of the game are diverse and challenging enough that those playing weak combat characters generally have a good time sealing gates or healing people or one of many other important and engaging tasks.

I suppose part of the challenge of Descent is pitting one of the players against the rest (a la Fury of Dracula) and in that respect, it’s giving itself quite the design challenge. Sounds like it doesn’t exactly manage it well.

wankongyew

The role of the Overlord correlates pretty closely to a GM in my opinion. He’s supposed to read out descriptions from the scenario book whenever the adventurers enter a new room or something of note happens. He also controls all of the monsters, deciding on how they move and who they attack.

The main difference is that a traditional GM has pretty much unlimited power but in Descent, the Overlord is just another player. He gets Threat Tokens every turn and spends them to play Overlord cards, which can have a variety of effects including spawning monsters or using traps against the adventurers.

In Descent, the adventurers start with a pool of Conquest Tokens as specified by the scenario and each hero has a conquest value. When a hero dies, he or she is resurrected in town but the party loses Conquest Tokens equal to the hero’s conquest value. When the party runs out of tokens, they lose and the Overlord wins. This means the Overlord usually tries to kill the weakest member of the party over and over again.

I’ve played Fury of Dracula before but it feels completely different. The Dracula player very clearly controls only the Dracula character, so it in no way resembles the role of a GM in an RPG.

I do know Arkham Horror as well. I do agree that it comes across as an RPG (albeit one without a GM) and in fact, I think that it should be played something like an RPG in order to be fun (i.e. players need to soak in the atmosphere, get into the spirit of their characters, dig the flavor text etc.) I didn’t like it much because it takes so long to play and I think its rules feel very old-fashioned (e.g. the difficulty scales very poorly according to number of players, often heroes must skip their turn with nothing to do because they’re lost in time and space etc.).

I do agree that it’s a game in which any character can contribute. I suppose I’m weird. I object to the idea of runners in Descent, adventurers who do nothing but run around the dungeon snagging treasure and tagging glyphs while avoiding monsters. But I’m totally okay with shoppers in Arkham Horror. Investigators who hang out at the shops buying stuff and delivering them to other investigators. In the former case, it feels unheroic, but in the latter, hey, it’s just logistics.

Chong Sean

Farhad:
Descent is currently ranked #57 in BGG, so the overlord design definetly not flawed, at least not for BGGers.
But some of the quest are flawed though, some are too easy, some are too hard.
here’s a thread of other ppl said about descent
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/435597/flawed-game

You cannot judge this game base on wan’s review, 90% of the boardgames he reviewed here are negative review… haha :p

Wan:
We never used runner strategy, and the overlord only win 2 out of 8 quest that we have played.
here some of the advice by one of the quest designer
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=26
but you still have to be quick.

I think you guys made too many mistakes, including Lim(the other new player not andrew) bought the wrong weapon at the start of the game, and some other things which i don’t want to spoil the game here…

choo

i think if experienced heroes meet experienced overlord, the overlord just don’t stand a chance(maybe that’s why the expansion’s difficulty increased.)
from what i experienced (both as hero and overlord):
the creep is too weak, for experienced heroes, you can easily calculate whats the optimum move. which is, in most of the time you can wipe out most(if not all) of the creep behind the door.
After few games you know which high threat creeps to be killed asap, and some can be ignored (or to be killed later, some of the creeis hard to kill, but they deal low dmg to heroes). Got few times the boss just died without even move once, open door, straight die.
one useful tips that work most of the time: clear one door, then everybody rest by standing on good location (good line of sight to prevent spawning). Get good weapons and potions, line up properly on the door(don’t stand together to prevent trap, spending few round for resting,buying and lining up is worth, you got more than enough time to complete a quest). Get one person to open the door(usually tanker), let him take the trap dmg. The rest of the guys can 1) wipe off the high threat creeps, or 2) even take out the boss in one turn 3) or rush in to take powerful treasure. Depending on the creeps inside the door, you might change your mind to rush in to kill the important creeps and go back out and close the door, tho that rarely happens .

For this original version, unless the experienced hero haven’t tried the map(some map is abit tricky for the first attempt), it is pretty impossible for overlord to win.

choo

killing all creep in one turn is possible by using the double attack (for dmg dealer that hold gold weapon, there’s a possibility to kill a red color giant, dragon or demon in one turn, or just let another hero to deal the finishing blow) and guard wisely. Use fatigue for movements, but must be really careful on the pit trap card, overlord got 2 of the cards in the deck.

wankongyew

Sean, I don’t mean that the game is too difficult for the adventurers. I mean that it encourages playing in a way that seems counter to the spirit of a dungeon romp. For example:

1) Fighting should be fun and adventurers should be encouraged to fight monsters. But in Descent, it seems that outrunning monsters is better if you can manage to pull it off.

2) Heroes usually gain treasure and magical items after defeating monsters, but in Descent you are encouraged to steal the items first then use them to defeat the monsters if you have to.

3) On the part of the Overlord, the rules encourage the Overlord to kill the same hero over and over again, which must be frustrating for that player and boring for the Overlord.

And so on. I don’t think Descent is a bad game. I’m just saying that it doesn’t create the feeling of a satisfying dungeon romp consistently because of these kinds of frustrations.

choo

i think is a bad idea using tanker as runner, its slow and if u die u lose many tokens(runner die most of the time). i don’t like the idea of out running monster also because they disturb your chance to rest and making you easier to be killed by traps.
Normally we kill off all the creeps xD

choo

well..that’s just my thoughts :p

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