Pathfinder session report - good to be playing again!

Butt kicking - for goodness!

Picking up our PFRPG campaign, Caedric and Falstoff dove bravely into a goblin infested crypt to rescue a kidnapped child...  My summoner's ranged attacks were limited due to poor lines of sight and lack of darkvision (the human had my Light cantrip cast on his glaive to help him see what he was slaying) but much fun was had summoning creatures when my eidolon "died" fighting a bunch of orcs and bugbears.

Under the radar - MONSTERPOCALYPSE!

It's been a while since I played the frankly amazing Monsterpocalypse, and attempts to get my gaming group to buy into it fizzled out because of the "collectible" random packing thing... which didn't stop me collecting two whole armies!

Having not thought about it for a year or so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Privateer Press have not only released a compatible Voltron game - and PP are very good at maintaining balance in their games - but a whole new 2 player box set that gives you two (still random) armies without the crazy collectible buying...

Filler games

We've had two weeks without a full complement of players, so we've been digging out the filler games!

A couple of weeks ago it was Dominion (actually, Dominion: Intrigue) which we're still getting the hang of. We played a few games, trying to get a strategy together - I'm still on the fence about this one; one of our group likes it, one seems disinterested, I get into it at the time but don't really get that much out of it...

This week, however, was regular filler game Descent! Taking into account what was said last time, we decided to take one hero each - and the balance seems to be restored. We lost.

I drew Varikas the Dead (yay!) and some interesting skills - I regained (another) fatigue point when Advancing, got +1 armour and a free Guard action when Battling, and exploded killing everything in 3 squares if I died. Dave got Steelhorns the minotaur, the ability to Cleave into another opponent if he killed someone in melee, and invigorating battle cry and something else...

We were kicking ass and taking names right up until the final battle, when our lack of decent magic items meant we really couldn't touch Nat's dragon, and we went down. We play that if all the heroes are dead at the end of a turn then it's Game Over Man, so the evil Overlord finally won!

To his credit, Nat had an interesting strategy going; burning - rather than playing - spawns and traps to get get Doom, Hordes of The Things, Brilliant Commander and something else all in play - meaning the most effective way for us to clear a room in the endgame was for me to die, and take as many with me as possible!

Descent and balance

Descent's a great game, but our group's reaching the point where the Heroes are rapidly outclassing the Overlord player. We're only 4 or so missions in, so hopefully the balance will be shifted in the later missions.

Two of us took four heroes against the forces of darkness this week, and won by a margin of over a dozen conquest tokens!

We only used pretty basic strategies too:

* Open doors at the start of a turn, run in and collect chests/glyphs before slaughtering minions before they can react.

* Quaff fatigue potions with gay abandon to achieve the above - spend all money in ton on more fatigue potions!

* Position heroes to limit the areas the overlord can spawn in, as (s)he has to spawn out of LOS.

Now, either there're some equally basic Overlord tactics we're missing, or the game's balance is crazy... My thoughts on addressing this imbalance are:

* Start the heroes on zero conquest (or one, maybe) as the chances of getting slotted before activating a glyph are slim to none?

* Allow the Overlord to play multiple spawns when the boss room door has been opened - after all, the remaining minions would rush to the defence of their master, right?

* Give players fewer skills - maybe draw three as standard, but discard one?

* Maybe we should have just had one hero each, instead of two?

Any thoughts, or (better) advice? I'm aware that the expansions swing the balance back the other way, but we're only playing vanilla descent for now!