Quick tip about Descent: Journeys in the Dark with Road to Legend app
Hello everyone,
I just wanted to share a quick tip about Descent when playing with the Road to Legend app: Try to complete the quests as quicky as possible.
I had read about it somewhere, but I didn't know how extreme it was. I just came back home from playing, and losing, with some friends. Let me explain a bit why you need to be quick, with some examples from our game.
For those of you who have played the regular game, or just anyone thinking about getting it and using the app, one thing you need to know is that Road to Legends adds a new mechanic called Perils. Perils are basically random events that start happening after a certain amount of time, unknown to the players, as a way of forcing them to get to the point without dawdling too much. Perils are the reason while we lost the game, and the reason why you should focus on the objectives of the map.
They start slow and can even be funny. Minor perils may cause your characters to become paranoid and spend some free movement points to get away from each other, or cause one of them to trip and fall if he doesn't pass a check, nothing too bad. But minor perils are just the beginning.
After minor perils, things start to get serious. Major perils (not sure if they're called that) can cause real trouble, and usually require you lose time and/or resources dealing with them, or can cause major damage to your team. For instance, the one we got in this game: we somehow angered mother nature, and because of that we got a leader Elemental spawn behind our mage. Additionally, the elemental kept disappearing at the end of the turn and reappearing on the next turn, again behind our mage, until we managed to kill it on a single turn and banish it completely.
But if you're thinking, oh, that sounds bad, you need to hear about lethal perils (again, not sure if that's the proper name). That's what comes after major perils, and it's basically a "you lose" counter. Let me give you a example, the one that made us lose the game: at the beginning of each turn, tendrils of darkness start coming out of the ground and hitting the heroes. The first turn, we had to share 12 damage between all heroes. And then every turn the damage ramps up. On our final turn, we had to share 22 damage between the party, while fighting a dragon. Moving along doesn't stop perils. Starting a big encounter doesn't stop perils. Once they start, they're there to stay until you die or finish the adventure, and in this case, it was the former.
I don't particularly like this mechanic, since it forces you to hurry and prevents you from exploring the whole map, which we really like to do, but now that we know it's there and how relentless it is, we know we need to adapt and take it into account when making plans. Now you know too, so the next time you're exploring an ancient tomb looking for treasure, remember you're not a tourist looking at the scenery, nor a petty thief looking to steal every little thing in the place. You're here for the big prize, and you better focus on it, or risk losing everything.
P.S: Even when losing and with the minor disappointment of feeling like it was a bit unfair to end up dying this way, we've had a lot of fun, and some really epic moments. The app is great and still recommend it, but you really need to take into account this mechanic, or be screwed by it.
[Stock image found by googling, from steam apparently]
My group got hit by this too in our last session. We had the same elemental spawning problem you described. It really just amounted to a minor annoyance for us, because it didn't appear until very close to the end and didn't prevent us from beating the quest. But you're right, we skipped over some potential treasure and just rushed to beat the end goal.
I understand why they're in the game to prevent you from taking turns strategizing too much and resting and healing. In a dungeon full of monsters, you likely wouldn't have time to rest, so I think they're trying to make it more realistic. However, since this is a game, I think the ability to turn it off or configure the timing would be a good addition.
You were faster than us then :). I insisted on not opening a far away door just to pick some little loot behind it, but the other two wanted to go ^^".
I understand why they're in the game, and I think it may be too easy if they removed them completely, but I think the harder perils can be a bit frustrating and / or feel unfair. If they make additional monsters appear, or even buff existing monsters, you still feel like you have a chance (and you probably have it with extreme luck and / or strategy). If you just get hit by more damage than you can absorb with your characters, it's a "you die" card, without any kind of counterplay or way around, aside from being faster, which is something that is too late to do when the peril happens.
Personally, if there's such an extreme peril in the adventure, I would like to have a counter (or at least a rough estimate) of when it's going to hit, so I can be aware and try to adjust to it. That way, if it hits, it would feel like it's our fault, while the way it happened, it kind of felt like the app was cheating us into losing.
In any case I think this is kind of a "first time" fail, and the more we play, the more we will be able to adapt and prevent this kind of thing from happening. And as I said, I still think the app is great fun :D Just a minor complaint ^^"
A counter is a good idea. At least then you could make an informed decision about whether to try for more treasure or move on. There must be some algorithm behind it. Maybe someone has figured it out.