I don't play that much Descent, though I enjoy the game. Let's face it: when you run D&D, you've got a lot of your dungeoncrawling needs filled.

However, it's a fun game, so every so often I drag it out and play it with my friends. This game had me as the overlord (again!) and Josh, Rich and Randy playing the heroes.

There is one thing I really, really need, and that's more dice. It's such a pain to pass them around, and it means you can't just keep them in front of you with the right ones for every attack. However, as FFG has them back in stock, I've ordered four more sets, so when they arrive I hope our Descent games will go quicker than this one. It took about 3 hours!



The quest we were playing was the third in the book, "Problems of Life and Death", which I think I've played with Sarah once but never with this group or my set. The heroes were a good mix of melee and magic, and soon enough they were fighting my initial monsters and generally doing really well. As a D&D DM, I don't mind the heroes doing well, but as a competitive Descent Overlord, I was hoping to do better. What wasn't helping was the Cautious skill card, which the heroes seem to get every time I run this game!

Argh!

One fewer threat tokens per turn really hurts!



The heroes continued to stomp over my minions, but I did manage to have my revenge on Randy who was playing One-Fist: I turned him into a monkey and then killed him with a Naga. Take that! Randy was getting a little wearied of the cautious nature of Josh and Rich and began charging ahead and opening doors. Soon, the party was somewhat separated, but I wasn't able to breach their armour and take them down.

There are also an ungodly number of glyphs in this dungeon, and they were getting way too many conquest tokens.



The final room saw Josh trapped behind as Randy took on the nagas single-handedly (for a time at least). Eventually, I was able to take down Randy (hooray!) whilst reducing Rich's wizard to one health. That was annoying. He drank a potion of vitality in his turn, healing 3 wounds, and the next turn I reduced him to one health again!

Argh!

In the end, I couldn't spawn creatures fast enough - nor of a power to seriously threaten the heroes. The third naga fell, and the heroes were victorious!



Apart from not having an extra set of dice, the game was slowed by (a) me not having the table space to have all the monsters handy from the start (so there were occasionally delays as I scrambled for something) and (b) by me neglecting to create a few "cheat sheets" so I could remember what every condition and marker meant! The basic rules are horrible for remembering those things.

Still, it's a fun game and I hope it's not too long before our next game. After all, I've yet to play a scenario from Well of Darkness, and I also have Road to Legend and the Quest Compendium to play!

I also really need to learn to paint - what with unpainted Descent, BattleLore, BattleTech and other minis everywhere, it'd really improve the appearance of my games!

Yeah, Not killing the heroes fast enough can be annoying, especailly when they are in the brink of death and you just cant quite push them over the edge. Its like they just don't know that they are suposed to die....repeatedly.

After playing lots of D&D over the years I forget a few things to make the heroes lives miserable.

-Spawn monsters as soon as you get them.
-Plop your monsters on and around the glyphs and chests.Especially undying monsters. Nothing is more annoying to the heroes than ...not dead....not dead....nope, still not dead yet.....
-Laugh sinisterly when you draw overlord cards. Demoralize them with some good old fasioned table talk.
-Hit em with both barrels and when they are down, reload and blast them again! Double ....double tap them!
-Tank what? Death to squishy !

I sometimes forget that I am suposed to kill the heroes somtimes.

PS. you could always 'accidently' misplace your caustion skill card.

I played the same quest last night as overlord. You are right about the glyphs, my heros had 15 conquest at the end, even though I killed four of them (three 3 conquest, and one 4 conquest). By the end the nagas fell in one or two hits, and they had a blast weapon, so spawning was pointless because monsters would just get blasted away.
Despite my ranting, I still enjoyed it a lot, and we tried out about half of the tomb of ice stuff which was pretty cool. The heroes were really neat at least.