by Morph Mode
So I have been playing Descent semi-regularly with the same group for almost 2 years. We are towards the end of our third campaign and our games are almost always fun and tense matches between an experienced OL and 4 experienced hero players.Over the weekend we had a pretty rough experience with the Nerekhall Act 2 quest Into the Dark. I wanted to see if anyone else had experienced problems with that quest specifically or had similar experiences with other quests.
Encounter 1 doesn't really have an end condition the OL has any control over. It ends when the heroes close all 4 rifts or when the OL moves 5 citizens all the way down the board to the end and into a pit. Realistically that end condition is never going to happen for the OL -- I just don't see any way it could possibly happen if the heroes are even a little bit on the ball. That means the heroes control when the scenario ends since they choose when to close the portals. To make it worse the OL can only reinforce at still-open portals meaning he gets fewer and fewer options as the game goes by. So it turns into a long slog as the heroes hack their way through rats and grab search tokens while the OL tries to just stack as much damage on the heroes as possible for encounter 2.
So that turned out to be not much fun, but the real issue came up in encounter 2. The OL can win this quest by extinguishing two torches. As OL I was able to extinguish torch 1 on my first turn -- the 'unseen foes' reinforcement gives me a chance to reinforce next to a hero in an unlit space who fails a perception check. Then it was as simple as using a dash to get movement, action to pick it up and then an second action to throw it down a pit. Picking up the first torch removed the locked door blocking torch 2 so I was able to then double-move my carrion drakes to the second torch for an easy pick up and extinguish on turn 2 that the heroes couldn't prevent.
We rewound it and let them try again; this time the heroes all ended in lit spaces so I couldn't reinforce. But I used the 'shifting earth' threat card to move heroes that failed a check, so I got one to an unlit space, he failed his check and I reinforced and took the torch again like the first time. Rewinding again and theory-playing it out, if they didn't advance to the torch at all I could still get my carrion drakes there for a next turn pickup.
So that was super-unsatisying as you can imagine. And it just rendered the 2+ hours we playing in encounter 1 meaningless. This was one that legitimately took longer to set up and explain the quest than to play. Maybe this was just a perfect storm of OL cards and failed checks:
First try:
- failed perception check
- OL holding Dash card
Second Try:
- OL has Shifting Earth (or some other way to move heroes at the start of his turn like Dark Charm)
- hero fails check for shifting earth/dark charm
- hero fails check for unseen foes which allows for reinforcement
- OL holding Dash card
But I wanted to see if anyone else experienced similar problems with this quest or conversely had good and fun experiences with it. Or if not this quest, what quest have you played that seemed really broken or a letdown? I guess I've been lucky to get all the way to our third campaign before hitting a clunker.