There are plenty of exhaustive reviews in here for Road to Legend (RtL) out there and I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, so if you want a detailed game flow synopsis or rules breakdown you won't find them here. I want to talk about why Road to Legend doesn't work for me personally. I still enjoy Vanilla Descent a ton and will keep playing it, but I don't know if I'll ever tough out a Road to Legend campaign again.
I want to point out that this is a very subjective review, is very personal, and is somewhat stream of consciousness. If that bothers you, turn back now!
Playing Through Jello
One of my biggest problems with RtL is how friggin' long everything takes. I don't mean the actual dungeon levels, I mean any kind of "campaign strategy". These are things like which city to sack as Overlord, when to visit a Secret Master as the heroes, or whatever. Things that don't involve directly slaying stuff and grabbing loot in the dungeons. And that's a problem, because each dungeon takes approximately six hours to play out...and that constitutes a single game turn. Sacking a city can take around 4 turns, which means that your Overlord may plan to sack a solitary city and then see it fall 18 gameplay hours later. But if the Overlord's plans are thwarted at the 12 hour mark? Well he'll be off to burn another city...hope that works out for him. You'll know after another 20+ hours of dungeon crawling.
And believe me, the "campaign strategy" matters a lot in this game. It determines which skills the heroes get and how close the Overlord is to winning the game before the Final Confrontation. You had better pay attention to what happens on the Overworld map as it slowly...slowly...slowly unfolds between dungeon crawls.
I hated this. It felt like I was playing the game through jello, where I would make a decision and only see it reflected in the game one month and 200 shattered skeletons later. For better or for worse, a real-life month may go by before the Overlord plans and then actually sees GrayHaven fall. Vanilla Descent is a relatively fast-paced tactical game. Road to Legend keeps that aspect of the game but slathers a slow-paced strategy game on top of it, and it ultimately taints everything.
The See-Saw Effect
In a game as big as ambitious as Road to Legend there are going to be imbalances, and that's ok. There are quests in Vanilla Descent that are imbalanced and they still manage to be fun. Heck, I've played a dozen games of Fantasy Flight's very own Battlestar Galactica game and lost the majority of them, but still had a great time and would play again in a heartbeat. So a game doesn't have to be balanced to be fun. But it should be fair, or at least feel fair. RtL almost never does.
Throughout the campaign, the heroes and Overlord were put in situations where victory was nearly impossible. Each side would pull out a card that basically would say "you/your opponent is screwed." In one instance the heroes would lay waste to everything on the dungeon level. In the next, the Overlord would pound them into jelly. Folks, it's simply not fun to play a game with two modes: "make the best of a bad situation" or "domination". It was a rare occurrence when both sides felt they had a chance at winning. There were a few surprises but for the most part the game constantly felt stacked against one side or another. So, even though the amount of Conquest points kept the same ratio throughout the campaign (and thus was, in some way, "balanced") the entire time felt either like a horrible trouncing or a supreme victory. There were rarely any nail-biters, something I've found Vanilla Descent to generate quite a lot.
The other problem I have with the game is that everyone knows which skills are insanely good and which ones are trash, and so the "campaign strategy" is, by-and-large, a race by the heroes to get those awesome skills before the Overlord trashes the towns that they are located in. You know exactly what you are going to see for each Hero: Knight, SpiritWalker, Leadership, etc. So a lot of the game is: are the heroes going to end up with overpowered skill combinations that they use round-after-round, thus negating the tactical elements of Descent? Or will the Overlord sack the city and prevent this? Tune in in 23 game-hours to find out!
The Locked-In Adversary
In Vanilla Descent the Overlord is the guy you love to hate, the Blofield oaf of the subterranean set, the mastermind who keeps things more interesting than some brain-dead paper-AI system. In Road to Legend the Overlord ends up battered, bruised, and burnt-out from constantly trying to go braino-y-braino against 4 other players.
It's simply too much to ask a well-adjusted player to sit across the table from his friends and, week after week, devote the entire space of his mental faculties to beating them. Wait, not just beating them...but utterly crushing them. Annihilating them. You can't ever let up as the Overlord, you can't hold back; because of the see-saw nature of RtL, where you never know when your next victory opportunity is going to be. You have Gold Beasts, the players just pulled a level with a Dragon in it, and it's time to bring the pain...over and over and over again, because the next level may have Humanoids and your Ogres are still pathetic Copper weasels, so it's gonna be a cakewalk for the heroes if that happens. And so you smash them, crush them, burn them to death, stall them, whatever it takes. And once they pull the next level dungeon and it's more Beasts, you feel elated. Let the good times roll! Until they pull a boss you haven't upgraded and one-shot him on the second turn.
The fact that Road to Legend takes so damn long to play out and tends to be so one-sided is why the Overlord is such an awful role in this game. At the beginning Copper level of the campaign he's a god, by Gold level he's Gollum. And unlike the Hero players, who can switch around their Heroes relatively easily, the Overlord cannot switch his role to another player (can you imagine? "Ok Tim, you're the Overlord now, here's my strategy for tossing the Sun Gem into eternal Darkness, good luck. I'm just gonna play Steelhorns for you 'till you're sick of it.") In Vanilla Descent, you're the Overlord for a while, you win or lose, you switch roles or do something else. In Road to Legend, you are in Overlord Jail, you're going to be there FOREVER. At the very least your friends are going to grow annoyed with you, and sometimes will get outright hostile. And eventually you can't hide behind "It's what I am supposed to do!" It just gets old.
I also want to point out that I don't care how smart you are, matching wits with 4 other players of similar skill is going to be hard. They will catch mistakes that you won't. So the game mechanics conspire to make the Overlord feel isolated and besieged by the other players. It's like a sick sociology experiment. Somebody needs to write a thesis: "The Overlord: Isolation and Madness in a Fantasy World". Anyone who actually does write that: you owe me a buck for the idea.
What This All Means Together
Now you might be saying, "Now David, you have completely gone off the rails here. In Vanilla Descent, there's an Overlord, and no one feels that way." Well in Vanilla Descent this is not so much a problem due primarily to game length. Once the game session is over, you can switch roles, talk about what just happened, etc. RtL isn't over until months have passed. There's a pall over the table after every session. Nobody knows if the ass-whooping they just got is going to keep being felt a month down the road. Nobody knows if the huge successes are going to continue. And the Overlord just has plain old nobody, and no prospects of anybody on their side.
Because Road to Legend is so friggin' long and time-intensive it starts to get a sort of oppressive momentum. At first you're just laughing about it and having fun. After you have sunk 30 hours into a campaign you start wanting to get a payoff. After 50, you're emotionally invested.
And when you take the see-saw imbalances you just never know when a small issue is going to multiply into a big issue -- if taking Born to the Bow instead of some other skill is going to end up costing you 30 hours from now. Everyone is constantly on edge, scrabbling for a small advantage, firing on all cylinders to beat their adversary. And that's fine in Vanilla Descent, where after 6 hours and 100 dead Beastman you put away the dice and congratulate your opponent for going 100 percent the entire time and close the book on that adventure. Then somebody else says they'll be the Overlord and the current one says, "Good luck with those crappy Hell Hounds, then." That intensity just doesn't work in Road to Legend.
Is there anyone out there who wants to run a marathon as a series of 100 meter dashes? That's how playing Road to Legend felt to me.
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