The improvement seemed to be about 50% less Zargon’s a dick and 50% less silliness in the metaphor — dying and then teleporting right back into the fight never seemed to match the adventurer/hero metaphor. The design also seemed to fail to understand players. Players don’t like dying, so making dying & resurrection casual and using conquest tokens as the “real” measure of success grates on the nerves. Dying should be noteworthy.

In Descent, Zargon is a dick because he _pretends_ he’s just the enemy and is not also the referee. But actually the more I think about it the more I think that the whole “I’m your enemy the Overlord, here to wipe you out, there is no referee, just the rules of the game that we both abide by – so it’s fair” is a *lie*. For a prime example of this I present Quest 2 (Slay the Giant Brothers). In this quest you meet the giant, kill him and he comes back after a few rounds and will keep doing that (stomping around after you) until you do something else. This could be an interesting RPG plot, and it certainly makes the competitive board game harder. _But it’s not anywhere in the rules, Zargon is just making it up_
Ok he’s not really making it up (unless he wrote the quest), but to suddenly jump from “we’re just playing a friendly competitive board game, here’s all the rules” to this seems a lot like a young child explaining the rules to someone and “remembering” rules as they start losing. When the Giant dies but comes back I think the hero’s response to Zargon is along the lines of “What are you, twelve?”. At least it would be if this was a straight competitive board game, in a normal RPG this would be fine.
Because the players all know each other and presumably get along, they know the Zargon player is not making up rules as they go in order to win, they tend to slip into the RPG mode of thinking that Zargon is the GM/Referee. But then the next turn Zargon throws down 4 pit traps in a row in a hallway the players have walked over 5 times, leaving the players thinking that they just got screwed by the GM, who responds by saying “I’m your enemy the Overlord, here to wipe you out, there is no referee, just the rules of the game that we both abide by – so it’s fair. Oh and as you open the next door you see a room with another Giant without a heart…” .

Normally a board game is abstract enough that the question of “is something reasonable?” doesn’t really come up (actually I think you could say that in any game, the rules define what is “reasonable”). Except that in a roleplaying game the rules tend to be more guidelines that the GM/Referee makes rulings on because the situations are much more open-ended; there’s a rule covering every possible situation in a game of chess, but not in a game of D&D.

Where I think we get into trouble is that Descent is just a board game with rules covering all the situations and no need for a GM/Referee. But it really looks & feels like an RPG. We play RPGs so much that we fall into the player/GM roles pretty easily. So I think when the Overlord starts putting monsters down on the map and describing the room we naturally slip into roleplaying mode. When really the game is intended to be closer to the roleplaying level of Monopoly then D&D.

Add to that the fact that our group has a tendency to the co-op board games (e.g. we don’t even play with the traitor rules in Shadows over Camelot) and the mix of faux-roleplaying, is Zargon a GM or an enemy, I’m not surprised Zargon comes off as a dick. At least to our gaming group.

I’m not sure that you would really need to modify the rules in order to get into more of a roleplaying/Zargon as referee style of game. I think that if you make sure everyone’s on the same page and then Zargon acts more like a GM and less like a opponent that might be all you need. Maybe some changes to the scenario and/or victory conditions might be needed since because the Overlord is not actively messing with the players, the pre-gen scenarios might come off easier than you want (but hopefully the Zargon/GM would see that and step up the heat).

The mechanical problem is Zargon’s power to randomly throw in a conga line of damage just to mess with the players for nothing but meta-game reasons (that chest/door/square is a trap, and that one too and that one too and bark! bark! did I mention there are hell hounds hiding in the closet?) I don’t like how trap cards work and I think something has to change with the spawning – but I don’t know what to do here.

So in thinking about the game I think would be fun, what about ditching conquest tokens and threat tokens. (I thought about keeping the threat tokens at first, but after some analysis on the threat token economy, I think ditching them all together is the right thing.) Give Zargon a finite number of spawn, trap, Aim, Dodge, and Charge cards per area. Or, ditch all the overlord cards and give the monsters PC abilities like double move, aim, guard and dodge – or not and just keep them as written.