I have lots of thoughts/feedback on this year. i will start with non-room specific items:
is there any way to get tables and chairs out in the hallway outside TD? just turn all the open space inside the hall into more event space. There isnt enough light in there to do anything anyway.
NIGHTMARE - i liked the boost to the difficulty of nightmare. unfortunately, i only got to play that level once. all three other runs i was on had at least a few people who were not equipped for nightmare. and then came the problem...hardcore is not difficult enough. at least, not in the right way. it is frustrating to consistantly run into reasons why you cant hit a monster that has nothing to do with your stats: 50% miss chance, giant sections of the board are auto-miss, etc. previous years, little gimmicks were thrown in here or there and made for an interesting combat or two, but this year it just never seemed to end. i know this isnt completely on TD to fix, i need to think some more on how i want to handle situations where i equip 3 people kitted for nightmare, but have 5 of the group with only reds. ironically, my solution might be to run more than 4 times (i dont want to avoid running with less equipped players, but i also want to get good use of my thousands of dollars of tokens).
check-in: i think there really needs to be a good system in place for when someone shows up with all the tickets, but the people using the tickets arent there yet. im not complaining about how it was handled this year, the admins did a great job and were very understanding/cooperative with me. but it also didnt feel like there was much of a plan for dealing with it.
check-out: went very smooth and quick. i still dont particularly like the XP codes, but that may be worth the trade of getting all that time back that we used to spend waiting in line to record XP.
probably something else i meant to say, but for now on to rooms:
Elevator: good teamwork puzzle to get everyone working together, and a nice subtle effect in the wall when you got it working.
carrion crawler: combat room with potential slide consequence...seemed to be a theme this year. when done well, i find these interesting. bad: i was told that anything outside the monster outline was an auto-miss because you didnt penetrate the carapace; this tactic is annoying, if there is a number there please just add the bonus and see if it hits. This kind of thing is what makes me consider selling half my tokens and just running hardcore.
salamander combat: i remember the monster looking impressive, and we killed it. not much else comes to mind on this one.
mushroom combat: i almost forgot about this fight when trying to remember everything, which is sad because that mushroom costume was adorable. edit: wait, was this the one where we hit our teammates?
VS
lava stone puzzle: it seems a lot of people hated this puzzle. I LOVE IT! so, here is how it went down for our group: enter room, DM gives unhelpful intro. i feel like we arent given enough to even get started, but rooms should have everything you need so i start looking at the letters to see what i can figure out. not able to do much with letters on this side, what about....oh, 'GHT' there in clustered in the middle. i always remember that base-8 puzzle from years ago when spiders are around. and it looks like we spell it from the OTHER side- NICE, we are solving the puzzle backwards. i wonder if we can spell anything else. just then, the rogue pipes up: usually solved from the other side. AND the drow went 'first'. oh, the rogue clue just gave us the answer, spell the number you are to cross - 'first', 'second', etc. someone in our group had been before and said 'you dont want to spell eleventh'. i like to think that we would have figured out the puzzle reset without that hint, especially since someone pointed out that there was no 'L' as 'ninth' was crossing.
giant spider/fake treasure: what is it with spiders using illusions? i have say, this illusion was very enticing.
talking mushrooms: this puzzle could have been one of my favorites ever. instead, i was just annoyed with it. They should have been set up to speak on command, rather than have to stand there and wait. what they were saying was critically important and i wanted to gather all the info and try to logic that puzzle. instead, we spent half the time being annoyed, then someone threw out a guess (or knowledge from previous run) and we got our treasure and moved on.
final puzzle eggs/spider: we had been memorizing the houses, so this was really easy (once we sorted out which color was which...it seems my yellow bone wasnt yellow after all). i sorta would have rather had to solve it the hard way.
final combat mindflayer: there was a psionic blast, then some attacks, then we ran out of time.
other dungeon-
ball transfer: another good team building puzzle. would have been nice if the 'build a structure' option was more feasible, both time we just picked it up with 10 sticks, rotated around, and put it down on the other side.
giant snake in water combat: not a bad combat, but i feel like it shouldnt have been a reflex save every round just to act. theoretically, this could have left half the party to the side doing nothing the entire combat. if the idea is to limit players by keeping half the party from attacking, find a thematic way to change up with save is used for each round so that it can be a different group of players left out each round.
web puzzle: nicely put together. a bit too easy (though, maybe that was the rogue clue...she is good), almost easy enough to make us second guess our correct answer.
grubs & spiders: ok, this is a choose your style room; do you want this to be a puzzle or combat? but please, when you want to avoid token and character ability interaction, stop using the keywords from those things. if 'immune poison' doesnt work, dont call it poison. we dont have a 'cure infection' yet? call it that, it was an infection.
spider illusion: we either had a really good paladin, or someone had been through before, because the paladin did detect evil and we were not surprised. very cool room.
VS
EXIT blocks: i really liked this puzzle. even when you knew what to do, you still had to figure it out and it wasnt just procedural. we went back and forth multiple times on which blocks made which letters.
drow & egg combat: giant sections of the board = auto-miss plus massive party damage made this annoying.
final combat undead cow: not really sure how this tied in to the story, but we ended this combat with the barbar landing his +3 weapon on the 20 and my keen bow in the 19 for almost 100 points of damage.
VS
final puzzle pool items: by the time we realized the pool was showing us items, half of them were gone. then we spent a couple minutes trying to get them to show us again. one of our party had already been on the dungeon and started naming some of them, we made a guess and lost someone. then the items showed again. OH, THAT is how we get to see it again. then we solved it.
my biggest complaint about this year was communication from the DMs. when the players are in the dark, the DM needs to give some information. for example: dont just slide my puck back and say it was a miss - i will either assume the monster has an AC over 30 or that you read the wrong +to-hit bonus, because +16 should freaking hit...please try explaining what just happened: your arrow was flying true, but the monster blinked to the other side of the room when it saw you fire from a distance = oh, ranged isnt going to work.
oh, and as for the discussion on things like boots of lava walking: i like the solution of letting the tokens by-pass the damage and get you through, but not rewarding the treasure. that seems like a nice balance, especially since i am sure the alternative is to go back to tokens just not working at all. however, i would ask that using such items to bypass a puzzle should not count against the party for trying to solve. Also, the number of errors allowed should be looked at more closely. i understand not wanting to allow a party to simply eat from every mushroom and get the treasure, but sometimes you get one or two miss before having that AHA moment.
ok, so, all that said, i had a great time this year. thanks to all who made it happen.
