TOPIC: An idea for the sliders

I was wondering how difficult it would be to color code the sliders as well as marking them designating class. I think this would speed up not only getting your sliders, but also the DM referring back to the combat sheet.

For instance

Rogue-- Black Slider
Monk-- Two Orange
Ranger--Dark green primary, lighter green secondary
Barbarian-- Red
Dwarf Fighter-- Dark Blue
Fighter-- Light Blue
Bard--Purple
Cleric-- Yellow
Paladin-- White
Druid-- Brown
Wizard--Grey
Elf Wizard--Silver

I know that the Wizards especially won't be using theirs often, and others like the cleric/druid/bard might not use theirs often either, but they need to have sliders for when they do.

I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, but I thought I would suggest it.

The lack of light would make a lot of these look the same.

Making different colored sliders might be too difficult or expensive, but how about colored stickers inside the slider. Then again, this would only help with finding the slider at the start.

Wizards use their sliders for sliding spells and scrolls.

Get your sliders before you start, carry with you and require turn in of said sliders BEFORE they allowed to pull from treasure chest.

Everrett Barnes wrote: Get your sliders before you start, carry with you and require turn in of said sliders BEFORE they allowed to pull from treasure chest.

Unfortunately this is not practical - there is no way to know if someone doing a treasure pull is using their treasure tokens or someone else's treasure tokens, so if you and I go together and want to walk away with some sliders, one of us would just give the other the treasure tokens and one slider to hand in, and we'd leave with all our treasure and one slider.

The biggest problem is that carrying sliders with you would up the total number of sliders that are needed by True Dungeon. If you have four rooms out of seven that are combat you still have thirty people playing at the same time in the other three rooms without sliders.

From what I have been told, the sliders are laser cut and not cheap.

Before I started experimenting, I tried to order laser cut parts. The two quotes I got to make a set of 14 sliders convinced to make my own. I don't think that there is much time lost in a room when it comes to grabbing sliders. An experienced team may take 30 second or so and a team of 'rookies' may take a minute or so.

You could make vinyl donut-ring stickers to put on the existing sliders. Should last long, much cheaper than making custom sets.

But then the party cards would need to be printed in color, so that ups the printing costs.

And DMs and/or players with some degree of color-blindness (like me) might find the colors-coding more confusing, or at least much less useful, than others would.

On the above thoughts

The cost increase for color coding wouldn't be that much I would think considering the overall production costs of TD, and could conceivably be a one time cost with occasional replacements/touch up.

As for color coding the character sheets, probably just using highlighters of various colors could work.

Also UV paint (since I think a lot of black lighting is used at TD,though I could definitely could be wrong on that) would add a cool factor to the sliders as well, reducing the chance that someone would accidentally take a slider since it would stick out.

I am not saying it would work, but I think discussion on ideas to improve the product are healthy. If changes like these make the game more fun, efficient or just look cooler it should be worth at least consideration.

Cost
Jeff has already said that the traditional plain white sliders are not cheap to make. If you add 12 colors into the mix, it would no doubt be more expensive than making white ones. Unless there is a compelling reason to change them, I think we're fine using the white ones.

Colors
Once you get past the main 6 (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple), it's very difficult to tell some of them apart--especially in low-light conditions. Hell, even red vs. orange and blue vs. purple can be challenging. How many players can quickly discern teal vs. green or indigo vs. blue? Of those, how many can do it in low-light?

I don't know about you, but I have no desire to manually highlight thousands and thousands of characters cards. I would not wish that task on anybody. (well, maybe if I really hated him...) Furthermore, the coating on the cards would make the ink wipe off easily.

Ultra Violet
Not all rooms have UV lighting in them. Lighting in TD is very complex and it's not always feasible to "just add UV lights" to a room. But even if it were a simple matter to have UV-reactive sliders and UV lighting in every combat room, I don't think it would change the frequency of sliders getting taken by players.

It is an interesting idea that has been tossed around before but the lighting really does make this not very feasible. During the training room we teach the groups to handle the combat board and often suggest ways to maximize speed at the board. While cool I don't think this would really solve any existing problems. It would add some zest but that's about it.