Ebonsword said:

What exactly do you mean...like a D&D automated encounter deck that circumvents the need for an overlord?

Pete C said:

Sacrilege!

Pete C said:

Well, hopefully better than the way that the D&D games do it, but, yeah, something like that.

In my opinion, no amount of cunning on the part of a game designer would be able to replace a human overlord with an AI system.

Descent is a game about one evil overlord player against a group of hero players.

I would not be against an optional, card driven AI for those that like it, as long as that would not affect the design of other parts of the game.

OPTIONAL, mind you.

Mestre dos Magos said:

100% agree, and something I've said previously.  Only a human can intentionally awkwardly throw a block trap down to make it impossible for a character to reach their destination with the amount of movement points they have left.  Only a human will ignore the heavily armoured, heavily wounded character in favour of the unwounded, but armour 1 character, as they know, efficiently speaking, they will inflict more damage.  Etc etc etc

Basically, if you want a co-op, all vs the game arrangement, why not play Gears of War of the D&D game?  Descent is harking back to the old Heroquest type of game, where one person was the evil Wizard/GM/Overlord, and everyone else rallied together to defeat him.  Changing this fundemantally alters Descent to a different game...

In my opinion.

Oh, and reading earlier posts in this thread, apparently I can't type.  Nearly everytime I said 'of' I meant 'off'.  And there's the odd 'so' instead of 'do'...  Honestly, for a native English speaking, that's p*ss poor...  :)

Sausageman said:

My two cents on this issue... you can solo Descent, playing both the Overlord and the Heroes. It's a complete different experience, clearly, but if you're fair with your choices and try to act honestly, you can still have a great time. This is a very important step if you need to playtest some Scenarios, or want to try some fixes for the existing ones (for my personal taste, almost all Scenarios published in the core set - not talking about expansions, I still have to try them - are kinda easy). So, no AI needed, just some patience and being fair with your choices :-)