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]