The really good gaming stuff from my personal blog, aka pastor guy... if you want the non-gaming stuff, you'll need to find your way to http://akapastorguy.blogspot.com.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that the already long playing time for Descent was a strike against the game. Back when I was young, single & collecting 1000+ comic books (why, yes, I wasn't dating anyone at the time - how did you ever guess?!), I could happily spend 5+ hours playing a dungeon crawl. Now, as a semi-responsible adult who (a) likes being married and (b) likes being a dad and (c) likes being gainfully employed, it's really tough to carve out that kind of time in addition to my regular gaming group.
But what really put a knife in my enjoyment of the game was the over-complication of a perfectly decent game system. Simply put, unless I was willing to devote a lot of time & energy to the game outside our playing time, I simply wasn't going to understand the rules and/or really be able to make intelligent decisions about the long-term effect of our dungeon-crawling choices.
The Road to Legend sapped my will to push through the "wow - this game can run a bit long" barrier... and I found myself making excuses to play other games when Steve Cates brought it out on game nights. (Sorry, Steve - who, btw, is a great guy.)
I think there's an art to expanding a game - probably something I should blog about down the line. The base credo of a game designer messing about with expansions is lifted straight from medical ethics: Primum non nocere - "First, do no harm."
Now we're sliding into the realm of "what if" (not "what is"), but I think that increasing the number of monsters while creating shorter scenarios would have (a) made the game more interesting while (b) increasing the potential fan base. It certainly would have helped me stick with it.
Anyway, haven't played Descent since 2007... and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.
Wasn't the purpose of Road To Legend that you could break up Descent into smaller, bite-sized portions, then conveniently put it away at the end of the evening in such a way that would be easy to pick up again where you left off the next time? Yeah, it turned it into a campaign, but the dungeon levels and encounters were a lot smaller...
Wasn't the purpose of Road To Legend that you could break up Descent into smaller, bite-sized portions, then conveniently put it away at the end of the evening in such a way that would be easy to pick up again where you left off the next time? Yeah, it turned it into a campaign, but the dungeon levels and encounters were a lot smaller...
Yes, but you have to meta-game the hell out of it for it to make any sense or for it to be fair or playable in the long term.
Am I a man or am I a muppet? If I'm a muppet then I'm a very manly muppet!
ninjadorg wrote:
kungfugeek wrote:
Wasn't the purpose of Road To Legend that you could break up Descent into smaller, bite-sized portions, then conveniently put it away at the end of the evening in such a way that would be easy to pick up again where you left off the next time? Yeah, it turned it into a campaign, but the dungeon levels and encounters were a lot smaller...
Yes, but you have to meta-game the hell out of it for it to make any sense or for it to be fair or playable in the long term.
Am I a man or am I a muppet? If I'm a muppet then I'm a very manly muppet!
