Hooo-boy. Look at that title. You must think this review's going to be a real gusher. I'm going to sit here and tell you all about how great Mansions of Madness, the new Cthulu game from Fantasy Flight, is, and how I loved Arkham Horror and now there's a more thematic version of it, how it's all the fun of a Call of Cthulu campaign packed into half an evening.
NOPE.
Don't get me wrong, this IS a rocket-powered haunted-house experience. It's fast, it's streamlined -- BUT it also moves forward quickly, is always racing toward the finish in the straightest, most direct way possible. It is not subtle in any way, shape, or form. Being rocket-powered, in other words, is a mixed-blessing.
As with all my reviews, this is somewhat stream-of-consciousness, and I assume that you are somewhat familiar with the play mechanics and contents of the game. If you don't - there are many excellent reviews on the BoardGameGeek that discuss this, and I am not going to do a better job than those guys.
Let's begin.
Mansion Dung
I'll start by talking about the central problem with this game: The fact that it takes Descent-style play mechanics and repurposes them into the wrong genre, and how this decision destroys the pacing of the game.
Now, I'm going to stop for a moment and say that I love vanilla Descent. Descent is a great game that accomplishes exactly what it's going for. It's frantic, it's play mechanics keep it moving forward, and it successfully captures the thrilling feeling of a band of heroes pushing back against a powerful outer force. So, mechanically and on the surface, this seems like a good fit for a haunted house game - instead of the fantasy hero pushing back against the cruel Overlord, we have the brave investigator pushing back against the powerful outer force of the haunted mansion. The problem is with pacing. In Descent, the players hit the ground running. They kick open the door to the dungeon ready to bust some Beastman and smash some Skeleton. But this doesn't work in a haunted house game. Haunted house games should replicate their source material - haunted house fiction.
In haunted house fiction, there is always a creepy calm before the storm. It meanders a little bit. The characters don't start knowing that they are threatened. In the haunted house genre, the protagonists show up to the haunted house and a) don't believe or know it's haunted, or b) DO believe it's haunted, but can't find any evidence or are not equipped to properly deal with it once they do find it. Over the course of a haunted house narrative, strange things become apparent. The supernatural tomfoolery gradually escalates until the remaining beleaguered protagonist(s) Must Escape This F'ing House Alive.
Mansions of Madness throws these important genre tropes right out the window. The protagonists show up and, in both a meta-game and mechanical fashion, know immediately that they are in a Bad Place and that bad things are going to go down. The mechanics reinforce this. The Keeper starts gaining threat from the word go and can unload all sorts of nasties on the investigators, and it only gets worse. Escalation is definitely part of horror, but Mansions of Madness feels like it ramps up too quickly or from too many directions. After a couple of games, players acted less like Investigators and more like a SWAT team, kicking down the door and sweeping through the house with grim determination, ignoring anything but getting through the clue-chain. In other words, they started acting like the heroes from Descent.
(As an aside, Betrayal at House on the Hill has played out for me as a game with, more often than not, a short and disappointing anti-climactic finish from way too much randomness, but at least they got the pacing right.)
I am not happy with how this game is paced and how the scenarios play out. It occurs to me that there's a movie that plays very similar to how Mansions of Madness goes down; where the protagonists already know that the house is haunted and show up to kick some ass. That movie is called GhostBusters. And, I'm sorry to say, with the current mechanics in place, Mansions of Madness fails as a haunted house game. Let me draw an important distinction here: it doesn't fail AS A GAME, and is still fun, as long as you think of the game as The Real GhostBusters of The 20s: Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good.
Mansion Run
You know what else suffers from this rapid pacing? The game's story. There's an afterward in the game's rulebook that stays how part of horror is a connection to the characters and the telling of a story, and that the designer (Corey Konieczka) was trying to make a more story-driven horror game. Corey, I love you baby, you've done great work, I am really looking forward to Blood Bowl Team Manager, but you absolutely failed on this one.
The narratives of Mansions of Madness are a house of cards. Literally, that's not a joke - the story is cards. Parts of the story are written on tiny cards (split between the clues and the events) that you read through as the scenario progresses, and there simply isn't enough text to make you care. Have you ever done a "campfire story"? You know, where everyone sits around the campfire, person 1 starts the story and says a few sentences, then passes to person 2, who tries to continue the story in a few sentences, then passes to person 3, etc. etc? If you've ever done this, you know that the end result is a disjointed, bizarre narrative that doesn't flow properly and is only tenuously connected to person 1's original premise. This is the exact sort of story you get with these scenarios. One adventure even ends with a sudden "Rocks fall, everybody dies." (and no, I am not making that up).
The problem is that there's simply not enough time and not enough text to make the premise work. If the Investigators want to win, they have to race around and pick up the clues as fast as they can...who cares about that story at the beginning? The cards themselves are no help: event cards have to be general enough to work with all scenarios, and suffer greatly for it. And, lastly, the Keeper is expressly forbidden by the rules from looking at the event cards, so they don't have a way to create an overarching narrative to tie everything together. The whole thing plays out as a farce. Here's a thought: this board game takes you to Disneyland, leads you into the Haunted Mansion, shoves you into the TombMobile, triples the speed of the ride, and then asks you to "enjoy the story". Not going to happen.
Mansion Fun
Well now that I've taken a dump on the story and the pacing, what's left? Only the rest of the game, which is pretty darn awesome. The combat system works well, the turns play fast and are streamlined but still present interesting options, the minis are great, blah blah blah yakkity smackity. You know all this from the other reviews. So I'm going to focus on the game's best feature: the modularity of its scenario design. The game's scenario-bsed paradigm is brilliant for the way that it could easily fix any problem with the game, because - as many astute reviewers have pointed out - the game system in the box is far, far larger than the included scenarios. If you've played Dominion you know what I am talking about - how different each game of Dominion can be with different "seed cards" from different expansions. Mansions of Madness has a very similar principle. This is a totally modular system that could support a ton of different play types, and I am greatly impressed by it.
Let's look at the included scenarios with Mansions of Madness for an excellent illustration of this point:
One scenario has a lot of "player screwage" - players trying to kill other players, including one player that might switch sides during the game
One scenario has a lot of combat against a tough, regenerating opponent that you have to manage, rather than fight directly
One scenario has a little combat, but a lot of environmental hazards that you have to take into consideration
One scenario just stinks and the less said the better (Classroom Curses, if you're curious - please do not play this scenario!)
One scenario has a lot of combat against a tide of weak opponents that can turn deadly if you let them cluster (as an aside, this is probably the strongest scenario, as the game's rapid pacing and mechanics fits very well with the scenario's narrative)
There is a marked difference between game #1 and game #5. The Investigators have different priorities, different builds. Oh, sure, there are similarities: the Investigators still rocket down the clue-trail and the story is a disconnected mess. But the individual game turns of the two scenarios feel very different from each other. In one, the Investigators are concerned with positioning, area control, and offense. In the other, they are suspicious of each other and the threat is much more internal. They really do play out like different games.
Man, I just can't say enough good things about the scenario system that Mansions of Madness uses. It's so flexible and modular, you can basically do anything with it. Let me give you an example of how you can easily fix my pacing problems and story problems that I've noted earlier, using nothing but a small tweak to out-of-the-box mechanics and some cards:
To fix the pacing problems, you just implement a simple rule built into the scenario: until the first event card is resolved OR the first clue is resolved, the Keeper doesn't gain any threat. This means that the Investigators can take a little time and scope out the mansion at the beginning. However, certain exploration cards might grant the Keeper threat or global advantages, so exploring the mansion willy nilly will cost the investigators. Since it's dull for the Keeper to sit and watch the Investigators without doing much, you might do something like allow the Keeper to draw and potentially play one Mythos card per turn, to allow him to mess with the Investigators without going into full-blown Keeper Attack mode.
To fix the problems with the disjointed narrative, each scenario simply needs many more event cards (instead of the ubiquitous five event cards for each scenario, there could be twenty...with much shorter time counters between them, so that the overall game length is only slightly increased.) The majority of these cards do not have to do anything except advance the story. Most of them would just have flavor text and detail the spooky goings on in the mansion, or to foreshadow later event cards. This would help to beef up the narrative thread. Instead of having guys suddenly pop out of closets or monsters just show up out of nowhere, the cards would set up these events and make each scenario more coherent. You can even make "major events" and "minor events" to separate the story events from the mechanical events.
As you can see, just a few simple changes would fix all of my major problems. That's how great the scenario system is - you can subvert or tweak the mechanics very easily to get the effect you want.
Mansion Done
More than any other board game I've ever played, the first expansion of Mansions of Madness is going to make or break it. If the expansion contains more incoherent mansion rocket-rides, with the Investigators tearing around the clue-trail to the exclusion of everything else, this game will become nothing more than Spookhouse Descent. If it contains well-paced scare scenarios with a strong narrative and different, plot-related mechanics and player choices, it will break out and establish itself as the premiere narrative board game. But all of the extra minis, combat cards, equipment, and new tiles won't matter if the game can't get the fundamentals right. Careful scenario design is critical to this game's success.
That's not to say that Mansions of Madness won't be a successful game, even if the expansion is just more of the same. Some people would really like Descent's mechanics but hate the dungeon theme; those people will enjoy Mansions of Madness. And the hard-core Lovecraftians will enjoy seeing the Shuggoths and Cthonians in the game, even if the tone is more like "GhostBusters" than "The Unnamable". But for those of us looking for a thematic horror experience in board game form - and I think there are a great, great many of us, judging from the reviews and posts on the internet - we'll have to keep waiting.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thunderspire Labyrinth Review of a Review That Annoyed Me
More like "Thud"erspire Labyrinth. That "thud" sound you hear is the boring tactical encounters of this module hitting the floor like a sack of dwarven hammers forged from potatoes. It's the sound of the module's numerous great ideas going absolutely nowhere. In short, Thunderspire is a friggin' dud of an adventure, and the savvy DM will rip the guts out of this module, dumping the awful structure but keeping the great settings and ideas.
This module has, and I am not friggin' joking here, one of the best hooks I have ever read. The ancient minotaur city of...wait a minute, what am I doing? You already know the plot of the module, you've got the internet. Google Thunderspire Labyrinth if you need the gritty details. What you need to know is that the end result of all that minotaur nonsense is basically Mos Eisley Spaceport in the middle of a maze. Is that not awesome? Duergar rub shoulders with Drow and Ogres. Kobolds slink in the shadows, and anything can be had for a price. Are you not getting worked up about this? Are you not seeing the possibilities? It's an early introduction to the Underdark, it's a black market, it's a bunch of ammoral NPCs giving the players reasons to go down into the cool-as-heck minotaur maze and fight Ioun-knows-what in Vecna-knows-where. In short, it's a huge nexus of excellent adventure hooks. And they really are GOOD hooks. Yet without fail almost every single one that the designers touched turned into vanilla pudding. And it's not even good vanilla pudding. It's the kind you could make yourself, if you were in a hurry.
One of the reasons I wrote this review is due to that OTHER guy's review of Thunderspire Labyrinth on RPG.NET. He absolutely raves about it. Go and read it now: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13899.phtml. "You are not going to believe this crazy stuff!" is the general vibe of the review. Well let me tell you something right now: you are going to believe this crazy stuff. It's very believable. Most of it is a bog-standard, linear adventure through a slaver's lair, duergar keep, and abandoned tower. This is not cutting edge stuff here, folks.
Sorry to harp on that other review, but I spent over 20 bucks 'cause of it and I want to play the module that guy was talking about. I really do. The sad fact is the stuff in That Other Review doesn't happen unless the DM is not running the adventure as written. For example, the big line that jumps out at me is when the review says, "The slavers would be disgusted at the sick crap the gnolls are doing." Well as written, the party will have literally wiped the slavers out on their initial foray into the Labyrinth. Then they will decap the duegar, and only then will they meet the gnolls. So there's nobody to be disgusted at the gnolls, because the party murdered them. Except for maybe the party, because hey -- gnolls are disgusting.
There's other stuff like that through the review, too. Like this choice cut: "the party will be competing with TWO groups of adventurers, only one of which is alive!" No way! I gotta tell you that sounds friggin' awesome! Too bad it's complete crap. One "group" of adventurers are two dudes who sit in a room until the party kicks down the door and confronts them, then they try to trick the party and stab them in the back. The other group is a wight and his zombie buddies who wander the Labyrinth looking for treasure and don't give a hoot about the party (in fact, the wight will bail if the party start whipping his butt, and plead for his unlife if captured). So again, it's horse-puckey, unless you take these two concepts and extensively modify them yourself.
Now admittedly you can take all of the elements in this adventure and start chopping them up and creatively re-arrange them. For example, you could say that the plain ole' duergar fortress in the adventure isn't so plain anymore -- it sits on a major passage to the Underdark and they are controlling the slave trade. Now the fortress is under attack by Drow, and while they fight 'em off the party has to infiltrate the fortress through a secret entrance that they bought off a shifty kobold. And maybe some of the slavers from the other encounter are there negotiating with the duegar. Not very good, I know, but it's something a little different, something that uses the setting of Thunderspire in the adventure. You aren't going to find a lot of duergar fortresses under assault by Drow for slave trade rights in most campaigns. However that's not what Thunderspire Labyrinth gives you, as written. What it gives you is a bunch of demon dwarves in a keep that you fight through room-by-room. Boooooooring. That keep could be anywhere, in any adventure. It's something that *I* could have come up with myself without any help...and folks, I'm an idiot. Any adventure idea that I could have written myself is not worth paying for.
Now you might be saying, "Jeez dude, quit harping on the dang RPG.net review guy. Every DM adds and subtracts something from published adventures. Hardly anybody runs them exactly as they are." I know dude. I know. But there's a difference between little things like changing your NPCs around and moving the town a bit and maybe adding a small subplot your players care about, versus huge stuff like gutting encounters, changing the plot, and smashing together different concepts from the same module. If I have to take the floorplan that the module gives me and plug new encounters into it because the designers stunk it up then that's it. We're done, game over.
Also I want to take this opportunity to whine a little bit. Thanks Wizards of the Coast for putting 1(!) poster map sheet into my 25 dollar adventure, which gives you three locations total. Great work. They weren't even nice enough to put the final battle map on there! To put a cherry on this poo sundae, I can't even go to DnDInsider.com and download high-res mastersheets for the other 90 percent of the encounters that they didn't include on the poster map. So I'm stuck with the dumb little postage-stamp sized pictures with little markers showing me where to set up the monsters that come in the encounter booklet. Here's a hint for whoever is making these modules: take every encounter in any of your books and make sure they can be downloaded and printed at 1" = 5' scale with no loss of detail and no markers on them. Could you do that for me, please? Because this whole pre-generated thing is kind of useless if I end up using my dumb dungeon tiles with dry-erase beds, pits, and walls written on them for pre-generated areas, thus looking like something I pulled out of my butt at the last minute. I want to make my battle mat look nice. Is that so wrong?
Now I want to end on a positive note here. So let me say this good stuff about That Other Review and about the adventure proper: Thunderspire Labyrinth does have one of the best encounters in a 4th edition module ever. Yes, the other review is right: the Proving Ground friggin' rules super-hard. Good job there, Thunderspire Labyrinth. But you're not off the hook. There's still a small matter of all that other dull stuff you tossed at us. And for that, we're taking you down. To Chinatown.
This module has, and I am not friggin' joking here, one of the best hooks I have ever read. The ancient minotaur city of...wait a minute, what am I doing? You already know the plot of the module, you've got the internet. Google Thunderspire Labyrinth if you need the gritty details. What you need to know is that the end result of all that minotaur nonsense is basically Mos Eisley Spaceport in the middle of a maze. Is that not awesome? Duergar rub shoulders with Drow and Ogres. Kobolds slink in the shadows, and anything can be had for a price. Are you not getting worked up about this? Are you not seeing the possibilities? It's an early introduction to the Underdark, it's a black market, it's a bunch of ammoral NPCs giving the players reasons to go down into the cool-as-heck minotaur maze and fight Ioun-knows-what in Vecna-knows-where. In short, it's a huge nexus of excellent adventure hooks. And they really are GOOD hooks. Yet without fail almost every single one that the designers touched turned into vanilla pudding. And it's not even good vanilla pudding. It's the kind you could make yourself, if you were in a hurry.
One of the reasons I wrote this review is due to that OTHER guy's review of Thunderspire Labyrinth on RPG.NET. He absolutely raves about it. Go and read it now: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13899.phtml. "You are not going to believe this crazy stuff!" is the general vibe of the review. Well let me tell you something right now: you are going to believe this crazy stuff. It's very believable. Most of it is a bog-standard, linear adventure through a slaver's lair, duergar keep, and abandoned tower. This is not cutting edge stuff here, folks.
Sorry to harp on that other review, but I spent over 20 bucks 'cause of it and I want to play the module that guy was talking about. I really do. The sad fact is the stuff in That Other Review doesn't happen unless the DM is not running the adventure as written. For example, the big line that jumps out at me is when the review says, "The slavers would be disgusted at the sick crap the gnolls are doing." Well as written, the party will have literally wiped the slavers out on their initial foray into the Labyrinth. Then they will decap the duegar, and only then will they meet the gnolls. So there's nobody to be disgusted at the gnolls, because the party murdered them. Except for maybe the party, because hey -- gnolls are disgusting.
There's other stuff like that through the review, too. Like this choice cut: "the party will be competing with TWO groups of adventurers, only one of which is alive!" No way! I gotta tell you that sounds friggin' awesome! Too bad it's complete crap. One "group" of adventurers are two dudes who sit in a room until the party kicks down the door and confronts them, then they try to trick the party and stab them in the back. The other group is a wight and his zombie buddies who wander the Labyrinth looking for treasure and don't give a hoot about the party (in fact, the wight will bail if the party start whipping his butt, and plead for his unlife if captured). So again, it's horse-puckey, unless you take these two concepts and extensively modify them yourself.
Now admittedly you can take all of the elements in this adventure and start chopping them up and creatively re-arrange them. For example, you could say that the plain ole' duergar fortress in the adventure isn't so plain anymore -- it sits on a major passage to the Underdark and they are controlling the slave trade. Now the fortress is under attack by Drow, and while they fight 'em off the party has to infiltrate the fortress through a secret entrance that they bought off a shifty kobold. And maybe some of the slavers from the other encounter are there negotiating with the duegar. Not very good, I know, but it's something a little different, something that uses the setting of Thunderspire in the adventure. You aren't going to find a lot of duergar fortresses under assault by Drow for slave trade rights in most campaigns. However that's not what Thunderspire Labyrinth gives you, as written. What it gives you is a bunch of demon dwarves in a keep that you fight through room-by-room. Boooooooring. That keep could be anywhere, in any adventure. It's something that *I* could have come up with myself without any help...and folks, I'm an idiot. Any adventure idea that I could have written myself is not worth paying for.
Now you might be saying, "Jeez dude, quit harping on the dang RPG.net review guy. Every DM adds and subtracts something from published adventures. Hardly anybody runs them exactly as they are." I know dude. I know. But there's a difference between little things like changing your NPCs around and moving the town a bit and maybe adding a small subplot your players care about, versus huge stuff like gutting encounters, changing the plot, and smashing together different concepts from the same module. If I have to take the floorplan that the module gives me and plug new encounters into it because the designers stunk it up then that's it. We're done, game over.
Also I want to take this opportunity to whine a little bit. Thanks Wizards of the Coast for putting 1(!) poster map sheet into my 25 dollar adventure, which gives you three locations total. Great work. They weren't even nice enough to put the final battle map on there! To put a cherry on this poo sundae, I can't even go to DnDInsider.com and download high-res mastersheets for the other 90 percent of the encounters that they didn't include on the poster map. So I'm stuck with the dumb little postage-stamp sized pictures with little markers showing me where to set up the monsters that come in the encounter booklet. Here's a hint for whoever is making these modules: take every encounter in any of your books and make sure they can be downloaded and printed at 1" = 5' scale with no loss of detail and no markers on them. Could you do that for me, please? Because this whole pre-generated thing is kind of useless if I end up using my dumb dungeon tiles with dry-erase beds, pits, and walls written on them for pre-generated areas, thus looking like something I pulled out of my butt at the last minute. I want to make my battle mat look nice. Is that so wrong?
Now I want to end on a positive note here. So let me say this good stuff about That Other Review and about the adventure proper: Thunderspire Labyrinth does have one of the best encounters in a 4th edition module ever. Yes, the other review is right: the Proving Ground friggin' rules super-hard. Good job there, Thunderspire Labyrinth. But you're not off the hook. There's still a small matter of all that other dull stuff you tossed at us. And for that, we're taking you down. To Chinatown.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Road to Legend Review
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.
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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