by Diegann
Hi,Me and my 3 friends have been playing descent. My version of the game came with the original campaign, The Shadow Rune. I play as the overlord, I own the game, so I have been spending many, many hours, reading this forums, learning and teaching the game, preparing everything, even painting the figures.
We have played First blood, a fat goblin, and castle daerion.
I have lost all games up until now. I already read many an advice for Overlords in this forum, I perfectly know that I dont need to confront the heroes directly, but go for the objective, while hindering their advance as much as I can. I of course made some mistakes (like picking zombies in the first part of fat goblin) and I have learned from them. We are now playing with whatever monster I want, I just look for the info in wikia, and we proxy the miniatures.
Actually I dont really care if I lose, I love being the "bad guy" and for them to win, but only if it is challenging for both sides. In my opinion this campaign is not challenging for them, it is very easy to defeat me, and I can see that things will not improve, they are getting ridiculously strong, while I am not. Also, I believe that the adjustments to play with 3 heroes are also not good, having only 1 master monster to fight them is not enough, I would much more prefer for them to be 4 heroes, so I can at least use a whole group (master+minion). I also hate to have to house rule stuff, and I hate that the heroes themselves ask for me to put more monsters, because they clearly see that I have no way to fight them.
First part of castle daerion was fun, but I was unable to kill even one townsfolk. A friggin shadow dragon tried to kill one for 2 turns, and was unable to do so. I know we are dealing with fantasy here but that is too much!
The second part of castle daerion after errata, was horrible. Basically I did not spend any overlord card on the first encounter (which is not fun at all) because I knew I would need them all for second part of the quest. I knew that the dude that I need to kill would be behind the impossible-to-kill heroes at turn 2 (because I of course was unable to put a monster wall that would be impossible for them to overcome in turn 1), so I put my ettin as near of him as possible, and I dashed, and punched and surged him as much as I could on my first turn with ettin and the remaining monsters that I had, putting him at 4 point of life. Then, he just run behind the heroes, and I conceded, there was nothing else to do. The idiotic bad guy, at 3 movement per turn, would spend what, 5 turns into reaching the main hall? And what could he have done?
And even if I have killed the guy, that would be an idiotic way of winning, so unfair, so friggin boring!
I know, I probably suck as an overlord, I know that a perfect strategist could probably invest even MORE time than me and come up with a perfect strategy, but I expect the game to be good enough and fun enough, without having to ask in forums, and compare and overthink every single encounter. Castle Daerion is almost impossible to overcome as overlord. My heroes are experienced ad&d gamers, we have been at it for years and they do not make mistakes, they clearly see my weaknesses and go for them, there is no way to avoid it and no houserule will be fair (putting more monsters wont make this fun).
So the thing is, I am not getting much fun from the game in this campaign, like I said, I dont care about winning, but I do care about the fun ratio vs the time it takes to prepare and think and set everything up. I feel that the 1 vs 3 heroes adjustments are not fair for the overlord.
Please spare me your "you suck as overlord, you should have done X" and the "if you dont enjoy, go play something else" because I know I am not the best one, and we do play more stuff. I just think I should not be a genious to present a challenge to the heroes, and also I should not have to house rule an expensive game like this.
So my question is, what do you think about heirs of blood? I read that its more fun, and more balanced. I am thinking about starting that, this time with 4 heroes. Maybe having more experience with the game and playing with a full group this time around, I will be able to do a better job, but the game, the campaign, MUST be more balanced...