Dale Yu: The Case For and Against Descent

In the past week, I’ve been able to play five different Descent scenarios, and despite my previous dislike of role-playing games (perhaps a hold-over from high school), I had a really good time with the game.  I know that I had said in the past that I’d just as soon never play another role-playing/dungeon crawl game ever again, but like everything else…. things sometimes change.

Is it the best game EVAR?  Not so much.  But it is much better than I had thought it would be.  In this column, I will outline the case both for and against Descent by looking at different aspects about the game and scoring them one by one.

Components
The first thing that people often notice about Descent is the huge box and the multitude of little pieces.  I’ve seen very unorganized games in the past where half the time is spent looking for the correct miniature to place on the board or for the right little cardboard chit to make a +1 modifier.  Seeing games like that only helped push me further away from this type of game.

However, the “Descenters” that I have been playing with are a much more organized group.  Dare I even say that they are anal about their organization?  Each of them stores their game in a plastic fishing tackle chest.  If you are unfamiliar with them, they are large plastic boxes with multiple drawers and cubbyholes to store equipment.  These boxes are also ideal from organizing the different pieces to Descent.  One drawer will hold board pieces while a different one will be filled with the miniatures—each type in its own section!  There are also some removable plastic trays (which are really meant to hold hooks, bait or lures) that are perfect for organizing all the different little chits in the game.  When you play the game with this setup, there is very little downtime as all the pieces are readily accessible and easily found.

The basic components are quite nice though nothing to really write home about.  The dungeons themselves are made with regular cardboard pieces.  The miniatures are single-colored plastic pieces of varying sizes.  It is certainly impressive enough to look at, but it doesn’t really pull you into the theme quite as well.  Again, I think my initial exposure to the game has spoiled me a bit.  The set that I played with (owned by Alan Moon) included hand-made and painted pieces for the dungeons (1/4-inch poured material on an additional 1/4-inch thick foam pad).  The doors were also 3-D and made of the same material.  Many of the objects in the game which are normally denoted with chits (such as treasure chests and gold pieces) also had 3-D representations of them.  Furthermore, just about every miniature in the game had been replaced with a painted miniature from some other game (mostly D&D I think).  When you play with a set like this, it’s hard not to get pulled into the game as it looks fabulous!  I’m not sure how much time, money and effort was put into this beautiful set, but it’s certainly a sight worth seeing. 

Verdict:  Positive (with the basic set), Very positive (with the deluxe handmade set)

Time
Another topic that always comes up when talking about Descent is the amount of time that you need to invest in the game.  In my experience (all five scenarios), it takes anywhere from 3 hours to 8 hours to finish a scenario—and to be honest, the shorter scenarios are usually short only because the heroes have been squashed by the Overlord and the game is called early.

I’ll admit that I’m a Eurogamer at heart, so I’m usually looking for multiple 45-75 minutes games each night as opposed to one six-hour long game.  The standard game of Descent is admittedly a bit long for me, but I will admit that time really passed much quicker than I thought.  As each scenario was finishing up, I was always surprised by how much time had managed to pass while we were playing.  This is probably a good thing though as the games never felt that they took as long as they actually did!  It doesn’t change the fact that you can lose 6-8 hours per game playing Descent, but it can be fairly engaging—though when it isn’t engaging, it can be painful… (see below)

Verdict: Surprisingly a good way to spend a day gaming.

Decision-making
Descent is pretty much a simple hack-and-slash game.  At the beginning of each scenario, the heroes are given a quest (which is usually killing a Boss creature or finding a certain relic).  The heroes start somewhere in the dungeon, then have to explore the dungeon while killing all the monsters that block their path.  Though the past few sentences are a gross simplification of the game, it’s actually pretty true to the essence of the game.

The game has a lot of group decisions that need to be made.  The group is usually composed of three to five heroes, each one controlled by a different player.  Due to the nature of the game, the heroes will generally succeed only if they work together as a group.  IMHO, the game itself is very much slanted towards the Overlord.  (Even with a bunch of home-brew rules added to the game to try to make it more favorable for the heroes, it still looks like an experienced Overlord will win at least two-thirds of the time.) So, each turn, there’s a bit of debate amongst the team members as they decide the best way to approach the current turn.  This could not necessarily be enjoyable though if you end up always arguing about the best way to move on each turn.

Also, there are not quite enough decisions to be made for my gaming tastes.  As an illustration, in the last full scenario that I played, we played for just over seven hours.  In that time, I had seventeen turns (and thus seventeen decision making points).  However, at least five of those turns involved very little thought (as I was either in town resting or unable to leave, etc).  So… I played a game and made about two thoughtful decisions per hour over the course of an entire evening!  I compared this to a recent Terra Nova game that I just played where I needed to make about the same number of important choices in a 30-minute game!

Is the lack of decisions too detrimental to the game?  In the final analysis, not really—there are plenty of other things to keep you occupied as you play.  You are always free to give your opinion on other people’s play, and there is plenty of downtime to allow you to chat with the other players, etc.

Verdict: Slightly against.  (Though I’m very interested in playing a game with only two players.  I think this would set up a situation where each player is fully engaged in the game with very little downtime.  Additionally, it will really speed up the game as the hero player will likely not spend quite as much time arguing with himself about the overall plan for the group!)

Theme
To me, theme is the meat of role-playing.  If you’re going to spend all day (or all weekend) playing a single scenario, there has to be a story that helps you make it through all the hours.  Each scenario in Descent does come with a little bit of a story, but frankly, it’s a skeleton at best.  You might get an additional snippet of story when something big happens—such as when you descend down a staircase into a cavern full of monsters—but for the most part, you get only a paragraph at the beginning (which really is there only to tell you what your final goal is) as well as a paragraph at the end.  IIRC, I got more story in Dungeons and Dragons trying to open a door than I get in a whole scenario of Descent.

Verdict:  Slightly against.

Luck
There is a LOT of luck in Descent.  I think the luck helps make the game loads of fun, but it can also be quite fickle.  The main manifestation of luck (as in all role-playing games) is that your success and/or failure is usually controlled by dice rolls.  If you roll crappy, you’ll never win—but that type of luck is inherent to the genre, and as a result, it doesn’t really bother me. 

However, there are other ways that luck can play a huge role in Descent that might be a bit too much for me.  First, as you generate your heroes (the ones you’ll be playing with for the next eight hours), you randomly draw them from a deck of all possible characters.  You better hope that you get a good character or you’re going to be in for a long afternoon… Furthermore, each character has three abilities or skills, which are also distributed at random from the different decks of skill cards.  While this randomization of both character identity as well as skills certainly does lead to an almost infinite number of possible combinations (and thus almost infinite replayability), it is a fairly capricious way to start on a six-to-eight hour game.  There are some house rules that we played with that help mitigate this issue, but it’s still a significant problem for me.

Verdict: Slightly negative (but for the same reasons why I ended up hating D&D!)

Experience/Learning Curve
Descent is clearly a game where experience matters.  I have seen firsthand how much a game can be dominated by a player who really understands the game.  I had a chance to play against (IMHO) a very experienced Overlord as well as a moderately experienced Overlord, and the games had a very different feel.  Even little mistakes were punished severely by the more experienced player—and to be honest, in some of those games, I really felt like the heroes almost stood no chance of winning given all the other advantages that the Overlord seems to have.  (It should be noted that this didn’t change my enjoyment of the game—just my outlook on success!)

That being said, the learning curve is actually pretty shallow.  I felt like I understood the mechanics of the game about at the end of my first scenario.  It is a fairly easy game to pick up and start playing.  Now, I wouldn’t even start to claim to understand the more advanced tactics and strategies, but the team nature of the game often puts you in situations where you have more experienced players to help you as you go along.  I think that just about anyone could get thrown into a game and feel like they were really playing in it in about an hour.

Verdict: Positive

Overall Impressions
Well, I still don’t think Descent is the best game EVAR, but it is certainly a game that I would play again.  I might not request it that often, but like everything else, you never know when you’re going to be jonesing for something.  I had a delightful weekend playing nothing but Descent, and I would happily do it again.  It’s a fun game, and it is an enjoyable way of spending an afternoon or weekend—but unless someone is going to make me a set like Alan’s, I doubt that I’ll go out and buy it.

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

© 2007 Dale Yu

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Comments:

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Dale, Re: “In the past week, I’ve been able to play five different Descent scenarios” And “it takes anywhere from 3 hours to 8 hours to finish a scenario” and “It doesn’t change the fact that you can lose 6-8 hours per game playing Descent” So 5 x 5.5 hours (average of 3-8) = 27.5 hours of Descent in one week?!?!  Where’d you get your Temporal Rift Gate?  I need to get me one of those so I can squeeze in more gaming too. Posted by Scott Tepper on Jul 18, 2007 at 08:17 AM | #

Scott, sadly there is no tear in the space-time continuum… But, I did get to play games Monday night, all day Tuesday, Wednesday morning, Friday night, all day Saturday and Sunday afternoon until about 2pm. Does the help you account for the time? Dale Posted by Dale Yu on Jul 18, 2007 at 08:44 AM | #

Nice take on all the angles. Helps me try to understand people who subject themselves to this one! Not sure about the RPG reference in the first para, because this is pretty far from an RPG. Posted by Mike Siggins on Jul 18, 2007 at 08:46 PM | #

Dale, If you really want to test your decision-making skills, try being the Overlord.  It really gives you lots to think about and consider.  As I remind anyone who’s played Descent with me, I strongly urge them to fully consider playing the Overlord (and not just a Hero) before passing “fair judgment” on the game.  Playing the OL is where the major challenge lies in Descent and even more so against strong/experienced players, whereas playing a hero is much easier.  Larry Posted by Larry Chong on Jul 18, 2007 at 10:43 PM | #

You don’t mind the luck component due to dice as it is inherent in the game, and then follow that up with dislike of the random character generation rules. At the end of that paragraph you mention how the verdict is slightly negative, but for the same reason you dislike D&D.  What reason is that?  (Seems to me that dice rolling there is also inherent to the game/genre, and character generation is quite often far less randomized...) I only ask because as I read all your comments above I found myself bouncing back and forth between wanting to give the game a try and realizing that just playing an evening of a combat-oriented would nearly scratch the same itch. Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Jul 20, 2007 at 08:02 AM | #

Larry Is a lot of that decision making on how the hell to fit all those monsters into the room? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Posted by Mike Siggins on Jul 20, 2007 at 08:09 AM | #

Matt, I think that my big beef with the character generation is that you don’t even really get to choose what type of character you want.  In D&D, you generally could at least decide the race/class of your character before the dice rolls started to screw things up.  In Descent, each player just draws randomly from the deck of characters.  Your party of four could end up with all four fighters or perhaps three mages and an archer who can’t really protect the mages. In any event, I think you should try it at least once.  I’m here at Gulf Games right now, and there are a number of Eurogamers here who are trying it for the first time, and overall, the response to the game is positive from that crowd Dale Posted by Dale Yu on Jul 20, 2007 at 09:15 AM | #

Great and thoughtful review of Descent!  I’m a big fan of the game, so I am obviously very biased, and feel driven to add just a couple of things. CHARACTER SELECTION The official, original rules for Descent allow for either a random character draw, or, upon agreement, for each player to take a turn selecting any character they like from an array of about 30.  Skill selection is indeed more limited, with the rules allowing each player to turn in one of three skills for a random re-draw. DECISION-MAKING It is true that your own hero makes a finite number of moves during the game.  But in the games I’ve played, there’s usually a lively debate about what each member of the party should do (which is fun as long as it’s not eternal), so I’ve (almost) always felt very involved in the game as it goes along.  Part of the fun of the game for me is that each hero has a variety of skills and abilities, and it’s fun and not so easy to maximize the use of those attributes. LEARNING CURVE The basic rules are easy enough to pick up on the fly, if you glance at them and play a game with experienced players.  But manipulating them well takes experience.  I thought the game was just OK the first few times I’ve played it, but now, I feel quite differently.  It takes a few games to get acquainted with what’s in the Overlord’s potential Bag of Tricks, but once you do, you have a much greater realm of information to take into account.  This adds a lot of depth to the game for me. STORY The game is weaker on story than it should be.  But I’ll say this: sometimes the text is just flavor text, and sometimes it’s not. There have been a number of games I’ve played as Overlord where the Heroes would have had a much easier time of it if only they’d listened to the clues.  The clues seem obvious when you read them out loud as the Overlord, but it doesn’t seem to play out that way. One more downside that I would add: the game has major, major rules ambiguities. Thanks again for the great write-up, CB Posted by Christine Biancheria on Jul 23, 2007 at 01:49 PM | #

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