I've been having a great deal of trouble when it comes to playing campaign mode with our current group. Initially, we were doing well, and I think most of it had to do with a learning curve for the game on both sides of the table (players and overlord). We won two games, lost one, then won our Interlude.
Then the game became impossible. I think it was a combination of the game getting exponentially tougher and our Overlord actively trying to screw us. Granted, the game is modeled with an Overlord vs Players dynamic, but this was an unbalancing amount of difficulty.
To explain: We were trying the Act II quest to search for the Dawnblade. We had to get up to an altar and stand on it and wait for the sunlight to hit it. The Overlord chose spiders as our open group (because moving past them costs fatigue) and then chose Merriods (since they can immobilize you) and zombies (to help clog up holes on the battlefield).
Without getting into too much party composition, our first turn went fine with us removing most of the spiders. But the next turn had him spawning the master spider again, a zombie, and then a Merriod behind us. Two of us go immobilized, and the other two were scrambling to get to the altar before he stopped us. But, as you can imagine, the dice were not nice to us at all, the immobilized people went down, and we lost the encounter.
In hindsight, it wasn't a fair fight at all, since there was no good way of us getting to the altar with the abilities we had or the gear we'd managed to get. He had us beat on every front, and even if we got lucky, he could plug up holes faster than we could kill monsters. Suffice it to say, he was able to win the next encounter in three turns, because he used the same tactic and rolled to finish the encounter on the first turn he got to the objective.
So, in summary, I've found that the game is very heavily weighted against the players in almost every encounter, unless the Overlord is playing to have fun and not playing to win. If the Overlord plays to win, the players really don't stand much of a chance. And some encounters seem to require certain skills and tactics to even make them viable. So, am I missing something that the players should get above monsters? Or is this just how the game is designed and I need to work with it?
