Our gaming group has been switching things up a bit over the past month or so. Instead of bouncing between different wargames we decided to break out one of the many interesting board games that have come out in the past few years. One of us picked up the Second Edition of Descent: Journeys Into the Dark and we decided it might be a fun change of pace to play through it's campaign (we played the First Edition version a few times but never consistently.)
We recently hit the halfway mark of the campaign, so I wanted to share my impressions from this version of the game. Join me after the break for those impressions.
First, a quick overview of the game for anyone unfamiliar with it: Descent is a game that attempts to replicate the Dungeons & Dragons/dungeon delving experience in a more contained, easily deployable medium. Instead of having to spend a lot of time setting up characters, rolling up stats, creating a dungeon, coming up with monsters, etc, you can your friends can just sit down, break out the contents of the game, and have a similar experience in less time with less overhead.
The First Edition of the game leaned more towards replicating the Dungeon & Dragons experience with large dungeons, quest text and dialogue, and dungeon puzzles. It also tapped into the dungeon delving feeling of something like Diablo with plenty of loot to be found and monsters to be slain.
This version of the game was fun, but it ran into a few issues (at least from my perspective.)
The large size of the dungeons made them time consuming to get through, and it was a lot for the Overlord (the in-game term for the guy running the dungeon and the monsters) to set up and keep track of. Especially since the dungeon was supposed to built dynamically while the players explored it.
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| Example of a First Edition quest in progress |
The other issue we ran into the few times we played was that the structure of the game seemed to make it prone to landsliding one way or the other. Most of it came down to the early game: if the players moved quickly enough and got lucky with their loot acquisition, they could reach a power level that the Overlord had lots of trouble keeping up with. Alternatively, the only chance the Overlord had to keep the players in check involved keeping them dead and miserable, which wasn't very fun for either side.
The result was a game that was fun enough to play, but it also felt kind of unbalanced and draining to play. As a result it wasn't a game that we were too excited to revisit often, even if the idea was exciting and interesting.
The Second Edition of Descent addresses those issues in some interesting ways. I'd say the revision is largely successful in making the game play better (as subjective as that is,) but it also comes at a price (which I'll get to a bit later.)
The issue of dungeon size and game session length was addressed very directly: instead of each quest taking place in one large dungeon, it instead plays out across two smaller dungeons. These are much easier for the Overlord to set up and manage (along with being fully deployed at the start of each adventure, so no more "fog of war" building to deal with,) and they are easier for the players to navigate and clear in a shorter time.
Moreover, each quest is now tied to a set of objectives that the players and Overlord are attempting to accomplish in opposition. These objectives are frequently aggressively paced, which has the effect of making each quest functionally only so many turns long; either the players or the Overlord are going to win before either can get too bored or entrenched. This makes the quests play out much faster than they used to - we were often able to get through two quests in a few hours of play, whereas before we would have been hard pressed to complete one quest in that time frame.
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| Example of a Second Edition quest in progress |
The quest structure also helps to alleviate some of the issues that can arise from the adversarial system of players vs. the Overlord. Now the focus of the game is which side can successfully complete quest objectives first, which in turn removes a lot of the pressure around player deaths. It is still important for the players to stay alive for various reasons (reviving KO'd players is a big drain on actions and it gives the Overlord resources,) but the focus is much more on the quest and objectives.
The way that the power curve issues were resolved (or at least, the way they attempted to resolve them,) was to decouple the progression of the players from their acquisition of loot. Getting items is still very useful and important, but now the primary way to make your characters more powerful is to purchase better class abilities via XP earned after quests conclude. The class abilities represent the biggest improvements in the player's power level - they give the player access to better abilities, more capabilities, stronger attacks, etc; gear primarily improves the dice you roll.
This gives the game a far more predictable power curve, for both the players and the Overlord. XP comes in at a predictable rate (for both the players and the Overlord,) and so both sides can gauge how powerful they will be at any given point in time. There's still a lot of variance - the various classes have different capabilities, Overlord cards have different capabilities, and the players still need to spend the XP wisely - but it's also far less likely that either side will become suddenly imbalanced due to a random piece of gear showing up (though the Relics seem like they could do some ugly things depending on who gets them.)
The result is a game that plays fairly quickly and aggressively, with an emphasis on player decisions (for both the PCs and the Overlord,) and quest objectives. It's been a very fun experience, and I don't think we would have been able to keep up the momentum as well in the previous edition's rule set.
There is, however, a price for this progress.
For as much as I enjoy the Second Edition of Descent, I can't ignore the fact that the game has shifted it's fundamental direction and feel. For lack of a better descriptor, Descent Second Edition plays more like a cross between a board game and a tabletop wargame. That's been great for our group - it's close enough to a wargame to scratch that same itch, but different enough to not carry the same frustrations or complications - but I think it'd be quire a system shock for anyone that is a fan of how First Edition plays.
Second Edition is also harder than First Edition in some key ways. It's easier in that it's much more forgiving about player death (namely: players never die and can get back into the fight relatively easily, though in relatively bad condition.) However, Second Edition is also much, much harder in that it requires quick, decisive, inductive action from the players or they can very quickly find themselves on the losing side of a quest, with little chance of turning it around. Most of our failures were due to not acting quickly enough in the first turn or two, and our successes came from immediately identifying what needed to be done, and throwing our characters at it whole heartedly.
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| The many monsters of Descent |
Again, this may be exactly what some players are looking for (I definitely prefer the faster, more decisive approach,) but it's a complete 180 from how First Edition played. First Edition was, from my experience, a slower, more methodical game; trying the same approach in Second Edition is going to be met with catastrophic failure.
For those reasons, I think the edition change for Descent is one of those edition change overs that will be very polarizing. Some players may be fine with either approach, but I think most will strongly prefer one or the other. Which you prefer is likely based on the experience you're looking for: First Edition is probably a better realization of the "self contained D&D game" approach, whereas Second Edition is much more "gamey" and competitive.
I, of course, lean more towards the latter, so I've been greatly enjoying our Second Edition games. We haven't hit the second half of the game where things get markedly more difficult, but I think that will only make those encounters more interesting (and the gear we can get at that point scales up as well, so hopefully it won't take us long to readjust to the curve.) And there are a remarkable number of expansions out for the game, so we'll have plenty of reasons to revisit the game at another time.
So if you've been curious about Descent, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try. The Second Edition fixed a lot of issues I had with the previous version of the game, and the improved speed of play along with it having lots of content makes it a game I'm happy to play through and excited to revisit with different characters, quests, and expansions in play. Hopefully you enjoy it as much as our group has.
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