|
ghost riding the tarp (!?)
Someone did a quicky write-up on the Ravenloft game from Gen Con over at somethingawful:
Mr Beens posted:
"Anyone here get to try the D&D Ravenloft boardgame at GenCon?"
Karnegal posted:
It seemed like a shitty Descent rip off to me. Clearly Wizards plans to use as another way to cash in on miniatures with a million future expansions (just like Descent). Aside from the inept demo, which was pretty much "imagine you just bought this game. Open it up. Teach yourself; I'm out of here," the game is limited by a set number of scenarios.
Essentially there are missions that you're attempting to complete and when you've run through them all (didn't look like very many in the book), you need to either make up you own or repeat. It's probably not a huge issues, but I think Descent's mechanic of GM vs Party is more interesting. The system is also pretty heavy D&D 4th ed., so if you're not a fan of that, you probably won't be thrilled with this. The game plays a lot like a simplified 4th ed. combat session. If you can grasp basic concepts, like fighter screens the mage or cleric heals, you'll have little problems with anything but the bosses (Strahd or a dracolich, among others).
The balancing feels off too. I played the mage, and the big encounter in our mission, which was a surprise (though it wouldn't be if you played it more than once), was that a bunch of crap spawned in the room with the item we needed to retrieve as soon as someone set foot in it. I'd saved my fireball in case we ran into something like this, and I 1-shotted the whole room with ease. This seems feasible in a lot of scenarios. The roles are pretty set except that the cleric sucks at healing, the mage seems very powerful as most of your spells target entire panels (which have like 25+ squares on them). Meanwhile, the rogue was pretty much reduced to disarming traps, which is worth 0xp and is generally unnecessary.
There is a leveling up system, which seems a bit random. Essentially, when you kill stuff it goes to the communal xp pool. When someone rolls a 20 if there are 5xp in the pool, they can spend it to flip their card and go to level 2 (the cap). It's pretty arbitrary and more than a bit frustrating when you just killed 8xp worth of stuff but can't roll a 20.
The game is OK, but I think Descent is a better buy for what is a pretty similar product. Admittedly, I could be soured to the game because of WotC's awful demo, but it just wasn't that great. The miniatures are pretty decent, but they aren't very clear (what's a ghoul vs what's a ghast for instance). Since almost everything is undead, you'll be turning over a lot of figures to squint at the small type on the bottom that identifies them. The one thing that the game does well is force pacing by making shit continuously happen. If you don't explore (and sometimes when you do) an event occurs, which is usually bad stuff. this forces you to be efficient about combat and not necessarily go for the total clear.
Still sounds interesting to me. I've never played Descent (I don't think) but I'm sure I've heard mention of it by the group before.