Adventures with Girls II: Down in the Dungeon

Totally suitable armour for a female rogue

Yeah so, my first series of articles on playing Dungeon Crawlers with girls actually 'went down' rather well amongst the readership of this blog it seems. Perhaps it was because the word 'girls' featured prominently in the title, a popular ploy I'm told by successful blogging types often employed to increase hits. Other ploys include the use of semi-nude photo's of celebrities or soft core pornography, not that I've deployed such base forms of popularist nonsense myself you understand. Innuendo laden articles? Maybe. It could just have been that people found them genuinely interesting to read, and occasionally amusing. Who knows, however, at the end of the first social experiment we discovered the girls felt the lack of narrative had hampered their enjoyment with the Dungeons & Dragons game Castle Ravenloft. That, and the lack of customisation of characters left them a little bit frustrated with their choices. They had declared that perhaps a more involved experience might actually be in order, and that we might seek a 'deeper' experience with which to test their mettle against. And us boys also felt that although the Dungeons & Dragon games weren't all that bad really, they weren't exactly the sort of game we'd personally relish playing all the time. We also wanted a more involved experience that tested our gaming skills a little bit more.

See! All the important parts are well covered, and the cape keeps her warm.

So off I went in search of a number of potential candidates to fulfill this brief, determined to find a beast of a game the likes of which have never been seen before. Super Dungeon Explore seemed a long way off, as did Kingdom Death. Claustrophobia wasn't available in any of the shops that I usually frequent, it was to be honest a bit of a bugger to track down, but not as hard as Descent was. Although  both games are now in my possession, I'm like the Canadian Mounties, 'I always get my game'. That's their saying, right? Any way, one name kept coming up, time and time again, like a clarion call to intrepid adventurers and nerds alike everywhere. That name was 'Descent: Journeys in the Dark', a legendary name steeped in myth and lore, a Dungeon Crawler idolised and worshiped by literally thousands of game nerds the world over (well maybe two, Larry and Bob). How much of the praise is deserved? How much of the adulation stems from blind faith? Do the tales of joyous adventure and perfect Dungeon Crawling ring true? Can any game be truly worthy of such devotion and hype? Well I guess we're about to find out aren't we?

Now Mages don't need armour, and she's got a staff so what's wrong with this?

Finding the first edition of the game actually proved bothersome, as I stated above, mainly because Fantasy Flight Games have announced that soon the 'one Dungeon Crawler to rule them all' is getting it's second edition. Cue wild celebrations and wailing and lamentations in equal measure amongst geek kind all over the globe. It's caused quite a stir, and people are clearly worried and excited in equal measure. Also Cue lots of bloody shops rapidly running out of stock and stockists, wisely, or perhaps unwisely refusing to order any more copies of the first edition in. Still I managed to track a new copy of the game down after a brief search on Amazon, much to my delight, You can see the unboxing here. Suffice to say after reading over the rules, skimming the contents of the box, I was at the very least starting to  expect big things of the game. But what about the girls, what were they expecting? Well they just wanted a night of gaming and birthday cake, as this gaming session was going to be on my birthday! Yay, happy birthday to me!!! So lets recap who the girls are again shall we:

Geology Girl
Level 18 Geek

As many of you will be aware, Geology Girl was a level 13 Geek last time. So why the sudden 5 level bump in her geek rating? Well since getting her first class honours degree she has started an MPhil degree, now that's got to be worth a geek level or two, plus it's all archeology based. Yep she's going to be a female Indiana Jones. We've warned her about Nazi's and told her she needs to perfect her whip based skills, and although at first she seemed unconvinced, I think she's really starting to warm to the idea. She obviously still loves her a bit of Cthulu and is still into a bit of steampunk, anime and comic books. However, the biggest boost is that she now quite likes some board games and some toy soldiers and indeed has taken to playing more computer games... or she would if her boyfriend Mr Chaos Space Marine stopped hogging Skyrim, you've already colonised all the bloody mines and are a master smith!!! Subtle hint buddy let the girl go slay some dragons. So between articles Geology Girl has 'geeked' up a fair amount and now totally understands the importance of leveling up in games. She also has a top hat, which you know is pretty cool and has got to be worth something right? True it's not a fedora, but it's a start!

Dr Brainiac
Level 19 Geek

As you will no doubt know from my previous articles on my blog, Dr Brainiac is the love of my life, although she very nearly lost that status by asking "who is this Deadpool then?", I don't want to dwell on the bad times though. No, she has been suitably educated and schooled in the ways and exploits of Wade Winston Wilson and many other more exotic, exclusive, niche and specialist super heroes since her faux pas (notice I did not use the word obscure... bugger). So Dr Brainiac now understands just how glorious Rocksteady's depiction of the Dark Knight is in their computer games, and just how woefully poor Ryan Renolds is as the Green Lantern, and just why killing him would count as justifiable homicide. Pillock! She has also continued her love affair with RPGs and has sadly recently been lost to the 'real world,' possibly for good, since the release of Skyrim. So she deserves most of those levels she's increased by. She has also finally entered the last year of her PhD, so those boffin skills are on the rise even more now, that must give her at least a one level bump. She's also been adding to her worrying obsession with Sci-fi females such as Starbuck, she now totally has a girl crush on Scully from the X-files, after deciding she wanted to watch them all from the start again... should I be worried about her obsession with hot sci-fi babes? Ah screw it.

We're off to slay a Giant!!!

So we'd mustered a decent bunch of heroes. Obviously there was Dr Brainiac and Geology Girl, but there was also Mr Chaos Space Marine and my good self. All we needed now was an Overlord, for this particular adventure. Somebody truly despicable, cunning, evil and ruthless, a true test of our adventuring skills. A tactical genius with whom to battle with, who'd show us no mercy and pounce on any weakness, savagely cutting us down with diabolical plots. However, as we couldn't find anybody matching that description we settled on the Cursed instead! We decided as this was our first attempt at playing a game of Descent: Journeys in the Dark, that we should probably stick with the first mission. We also decided to fore go the random character selection and selected the characters we actually wanted to play. This seems like a better use of those 20 or so characters that come with the game, although by choosing them it does allow you to formulate a pretty well balanced group as opposed to everyone being randomly crap. However, being as though choosing characters was something the girls wanted in a game, it seemed counter productive to go the random route.

This led to our first discussion of the evening about the depiction of females in fantasy literature and games. Turns out that the girls felt the attire the women were wearing on the game cards was wholly inappropriate for adventuring and was a little bit too revealing. While Mr Chaos Space Marines and my own counter arguments went something like this:

Yeah, turns out because we're men we happen to be automatically wrong, no matter what. It's like some special power or perk female characters get. It also meant there was a damn high chance that because of our apparently 'sexist' comments I wasn't getting laid on my birthday. Stupid bloody Descent: Journey in the Dark, and its stupid female armour. Any way totally none related to their gender the two girls decided to go and pick two female magic users independently of each other. Go figure, two girls picking mages, I mean what are the chances of that? Meanwhile I went for a rogue and Mr Chaos Space Marine his typical warrior tank, OK lets just admit it, we might have all fallen into stereotypical gender defined roles within the group.

Not even Red Sonja helped us in our cause for revealing armour!!!

We then went and randomly picked the best abilities we possibly could for our party from the various decks of abilities, and looked suitably smug. We all decided that trading any of our awesome abilities in just didn't seem like a wise course of action. The Overlord looked suitably pissed off at our decision and more importantly our luck. He might even have mumured his latest catchphrase "and so it begins", it's something he's been saying a lot during his games recently, and none of us can think why that might be... OK it's because of his dire luck. It was here though that Dr Brainiac pointed out that realistically the character customisation of Descent wasn't really customisation, more just random character generation. A fair point, although she was happier with the wider selection of base characters afforded her over say the Dungeons & Dragons Adventure System Games. That's a positive, right? Apparently so.

Oh come on! It doesn't take all of you to kill me!!!

So after what seemed like an age setting the game up and picking our characters we were ready to start the adventure. Huzzah. Things got off to an absolutely awful start for me. My rogue with her, yeah that's right I'd taken a girl character again, look are you judging me again? She was the best rogue character out of the lot, OK? Any way, with her superior movement she strode into the first room, revealing the baddies and treasure available in the area. There were a lot of bad guys in there, and she didn't have much movement left. Not to worry though, there was a skeleton Archer right in front of her about to get a face, or should that be skull full of arrows? Either way I rolled my 5 dice and prepared to smite my foe. Obviously I fecked it up didn't I? I mean it's now mandatory that whenever I take my first action in these sorts of game that I fail it miserably. It's tradition, and who am I to break with tradition? The damage would have been utterly massive had I not rolled a miss on one dice.

Next up came Mr Chaos Space Marine, charging into the room and smiting some bad guy or other with one attack. Splat. Gone. Dead. That didn't happen in the previous adventures with girls and totally wasn't in the script. Next up was Geology Girl who smashed the face in of that Skeleton Archer I'd failed to hit. Then up strode Dr Brainiac to wipe the floor with another bad guy. This wasn't so hard now was it? I mean apart from my hapless rogue with her bow of Epic Fail (warning Bow of Epic Fail sold separately and may not actually exist) we'd done alright. We'd smashed three bad guys too bits and the Overlord was starting to look frustrated already with what he described as our "Jammy bloody rolls". However, in his first turn we started to go a little bit pale ourselves as he activated his monsters and ganged up on Mr Chaos Space Marine and myself. In fact he was a total of five health points away from winning the game there and then. I had two health left and Mr Chaos Space Marine had three.

Wait. So my giant spider has to wait here while you butcher the rest of my henchmen? Lame!

This game wasn't as simple as bad guys equal cannon fodder, and good guys equal superior beings of awesomeness! After this round, us adventurers had a brief conflab. Just what the hell was this game about? Had the Overlord been slightly, and I mean very slightly luckier with two of his dice rolls, first a missed attack on myself and second an attack on Mr Chaos Space Marine that did a piffling amount of damage, when an average roll would have done. We'd have been toast at the end of the first round, we'd have lost our 5 starting conquest points. We choose to mop up the remaining bad guys and position ourselves so the Overlord couldn't spawn more bad guys near us and get his remaining monsters in to finish us off. We also took some health potions. Turns out our adventurers attacks if they hit invariably did enough damage to totally wipe out lower level bad guys in one hit. Although supremely cautious our plan actually looked like it was working, and frustrating the Overlords plans. OK so it wasn't very heroic and was 'gamey' but it was our first game.

For the next 4 or 5 rounds we methodically screwed the Overlord over by denying him access to many spawn points for his monsters and nipping back to the shop to buy potions periodically. Yes it was slow, and yes it allowed him to store up threat, but realistically there really wasn't much he could do with it all for now. Clearing the first area out of treasure, we were ready to proceed. Geology Girl said what we were all thinking, "there's no point splitting the group up and exploring the two areas separately is their?" nope there wasn't. Fully healed the rogue and the warrior went first again into the next chamber. This time revealing slightly harder bad guys and a red rune locked door. Thing is, we'd already got a fair few useful treasure items and were well and truly on our way to becoming an unstoppable force. The room didn't pose too much of a threat with it's big cave in bang smack in the center of the space meaning his bad guys had to come round the corner single file and take their beating after forming an orderly queue.

erm boss... why are we doing the conga again? Is it an evil conga?

True the Overlord finally got to unleash some of his threat and use some of his Overlord cards, but seriously, we weren't too worried. Again he whittled the Warrior down and damaged the rogue considerably, but for what? The loss of all his bad guys and we were still standing, if only just, and with new money burning a hole in our pockets it was time to nip to the shop again. We were activating runes and collecting conquest points at will. We could now quite happily afford a few deaths, besides we'd all got ridiculous amounts of health potions. Once more we decided to take a pause for the cause and collect everything and regroup. Again slowing the games progress down to a snails pace, and the game itself is hardly lightening quick, it is designed to be a slow methodical grind. However, what we were doing as adventurers was the only wise course of action, it was clearly the most optimal of tactics. It was also a little dull. Nearly 3 hours into the game we hadn't really gotten very far.

We took a pause in proceedings to stock up on cake, in the real world I might add, the shop in Descent is woefully bereft of cake! An oversight I hope Descent's second edition puts right. We had a brief chat about how the game was playing out. Realistically it was actually quite a dry and demanding experience. I think Mr Chaos Space Marine and myself could see the appeal of such a game from a strategic challenge point of view, but we had to concede it wasn't the game for this group of friends, or it certainly didn't appear to be. It was clear that both Geology Girl and Dr Brainiac were again frustrated with the lack of progress and narrative. Progress in terms of both character development and storyline, the game didn't seem to be developing a story at all. Three hours and realistically very little had happened to either the characters or any story. We'd methodically hacked things apart and harvested all the available treasure, stripping areas bare and leaving the Overlord with very few options. Speaking of which, the Cursed started to explain his frustrations with the threat and card mechanic, he felt hampered and powerless to force us to go quicker.

So explain my motivation for going round the corner again?

So we hatched a plan to try and speed things up. The third remaining area, which we assumed contained the red key for the red locked door was our next port of call. It was bound to contain plenty of bad guys. But Geology Girl actually had a card that meant if she died then any monster, regardless of their strength or health, and that wasn't a named character was toast. Dead. Poof, gone if she died within 3 squares of them. We had our very own magical suicide bomber and plenty of conquest points gathered to take the losses in our stride. Sure enough this further infuriated the Overlord, and rightly so. The tactic, while valid in terms of the rules was a little bit underhanded and well out of character for supposed adventurers. In reality the conversation might have gone something like this

"Right then, we'll send the witch in fir..."
"hang on, hang on! you want me to go in first?"
"erm yeah why, do you have a problem with that?"
"Well yeah, have you seen the fricking armour they've given me?"
"Yes it's very fetching, it shows off your ample bosom and crotch area beautifully. It's designed for the female form, so you can fully express your feminimity"
"I'll express my feminine wiles by kicking you in the fu..."
"Now there's no need for that sort of language. It's very un-lady like."
"Yeah, but seriously they'll hack me to pieces. I'll be eviscerated, do you want my boobs to get eviscerated?"
"Well now you're just being silly and melodramatic. Of course I don't want your boobs eviscerated, I mean they're lovely, but..."
"But what? Seriously they call this thong and skimpy crop top suitable armour? Besides I'm a fricking witch not a warrior, why should I go first?"
"Yeah but you're a mage and you don't need so much armour. Besides, when you die you blow up killing everyone near you. And then get this, you'll love this part, you'll be teleported back to town ready to go shopping again"
"Oh, that doesn't actually sound too bad at all now you mention it!"
"Hey, see, told you so. Not bad at all, and as you're a girl you like shopping right?"
"Well I could do with a new hand bag, and then I'd need to get some matching shoes... OK I'm game"
"That's the spirit, now off you go deary and take that sweet ass of yours to get butchered, try and keep those boobies safe though"

Yeah sure, send in the vulnerable female witch into the room first to be savagely killed, so she clears the way for the big hard warrior with that explosion of hers. Very heroic. It also garnered us 6 more conquest points for activating runes. Because the witch also had an ability whereby if she was within 6 squares of a teleportation rune she activated it, thus giving us 3 conquest points per rune. Broken!

A female character shopping... look it's not sexist if it happened!

Nearly 4 and a half hours had passed before we felt we'd rested and harvested enough potions and treasures to totally brutalise the final room, and this so called boss. Thing is I'm not too sure any of us were bothered at this point just what the hell happened in the game. It had taken too long, we'd all given up caring, and realistically after missing his two opportunities to put the group onto the back foot early on, and maybe even win the game, the Overlord was utterly screwed. The game had been an inevitability for nearly 3 hours. There was little he could do now to stop us as a group from winning. The final door was opened by yours truly, who instantly slew two Orcs standing in the doorway with a magic rune I'd picked up. Easy. Then in strode the warriror, scratch one dead Maticore Champion, because he too had a ridiculously overpowered gold level magical axe. Our two magic users severly damaged the other Manticore Champion, leaving it clinging to life by only the thinnest of threads. It looked like curtains for the Overlord.

So we just run at them and die? That doesn't sound like much of a plan boss!

Did I mention that the final room also contained a pit that meant the supremely powerful giant couldn't actually get over the other side of it to take out anybody with ranged attacks? Well he couldn't. True the warrior was over there and got totally owned by the giant, our first unintentional death, but from that point forward it was really game over. With the second Manticore dead from a magical missile and everyone rocking relatively powerful ranged weapons we stood there, out of the giants reach and slowly chipped away at his health... we decided with five health left on the poor lumbering sod to call it quits. It was clear which way that particular fight was going and it was late in the evening. None of us had the will to finish the game off and realistically none of us cared. As a group this wasn't the sort of game we wanted to be playing. It also didn't really offer the girls the narrative, or the character customisation and development they were after.

What it did offer was a stupidly long slog of a game that didn't feel like we were getting anywhere fast, and the game didn't really feel like it was rewarding us for our time investment in it. Geology Girl confirmed she'd rather play Mansions of Madness or even Gears of War, or possibly anything else. Dr Brainiac said it wasn't a patch on her computer RPGs and she felt it was time wasted when she could have been playing more fun board games or possibly Skyrim. Yeah OK we get it honey, you love Skyrim!!! But they are all fair and valid points. Descent promises much, but didn't seem to deliver in this play through, it took too long and didn't seem in-depth, just painfully slow. I suppose this game sits somewhat awkwardly as a product for me as well. I mean the mechanics of the game are actually quite sound underneath it all. I like the way the combat dice work, but there are some concerns from my end about scalability of the game and whether there is ever a nice even balance that can be struck with it between the Overlord and Adventurers. Also who the hell is it genuinely aimed at as a product, it has a devout following, so perhaps I'm missing something that this single play through hasn't shown me.

The giant was killed. the end! Thank the lord.

This is a six hour long Dungeon Crawler. Yeah you read that right, six hours! Now if you and your mates want to play an in-depth Dungeon Crawler that's fine, but as Dr Brainiac said "in-depth doesn't have to mean long winded", too true. Plus, if that is genuinely the experience you are after why not just go the whole hog, ditch the board and just play a full on RPG? That's a question I can't fairly answer right now as I haven't played enough of Descent to give a full and honest review of it as a product. This was just another adventure with girls, another unsuccessful adventure with girls too I might add, as it turns out Descent is most certainly not for our two female guinea pigs. That's fair enough, as it didn't really offer the two things they were genuinely after, which was total control over character generation and a deep involving narrative. So I think it's back to the drawing board, maybe a full on RPG is what's required after all. I think though the most important lesson we've learned from this experience is that it's way harder than we first thought it would be to tempt girls down into a Dungeon with us. Perhaps I should stop wearing the leather chaps and put the chains, whips and gimp masks away as they are just too off putting... Peace out!