TOPIC: Proposal: New Dungeon Difficulty Level

Just some quick comments, before I head to the store to buy more denture cream....

Kirk Bauer wrote: I very much am interested in and respect your thoughts on it!

And I respect your posts too, Kirk. I can tell you've put a lot of thought (and a decent amount of math) into them. We're coming at it from different directions, but we both want to see the game do well, and provide fun for thousands of players for years to come.

The original suggestion was "Hellish" I believe which is better, it implies it is very very difficult but not actually Hell. Not sure if that makes a difference.

It makes little difference. It's the forum response ("Yeah! Beat up those Artifact-users!") which rankles. "We've got nightmare, and people are complaining that it's not hard enough? Fine! Let's get mean." The mentality of a "Hell" level really resounds with people for exactly that reason.

If you think your teamwork is so good that Hardcore will be too easy then you have that option.

We're really fortunate on the forums, that we can pick our teams.
Most - and I mean the VAST MAJORITY of people who play - have no say in their team. They don't even know what they're working with until they sit down at the table. They won't be able to assess their teamwork until they're actually in the dungeon.

I'm very leery of providing a lot of options, or a scaled event, which is based on the abilities of 10% or less of the player base.

With only three difficulties and no scaling and the continuing power creep I don't see how we can keep the game challenging for every player.

I'll be honest: I don't either.

Perhaps we should address the power creep?
Perhaps we could let players pick the stats of the monsters they fight?
Perhaps we need recognize that TD doesn't have the duty to keep the game challenging for every player?
Perhaps we should continue having good conversations like this, and let Jeff decide.

What I do know is that any solution which tells people "You will now be facing X difficulty" is going to be a problem. Way better to let people pick their difficulty. If they pick wrong, they can adjust their expectations (or gear) for next time.

If True Dungeon wants to keep selling tokens, especially to the veteran players, then I think they need to. Otherwise players will just max out and stop getting new tokens.

Right now I think we're running into the opposite problem: If TD wants to keep selling tokens, they need to stop making things harder and then making better tokens to compensate and then making it even harder and then making better tokens and making it harder again.

People are going to get off the merry-go-round, and they won't get back on.

Around 5 years ago, I made the argument that one of the reasons to keep creep down was because it would eventually make the event impossible to balance. Some people poopoo'd that idea, well welcome to the End Times, bitches. It's clear at this point the event is functionally impossible to balance as it stands. It's like a !#%^ing 3 foot blanket trying to cover a 6 foot tall man. You can pull it up to his head but everything balls down will be shriveled in the cold. YOu can pull it down to his feet but his nips will be able to cut like diamonds. There is no way to get the !#%^er to fit and you all (those of you who were actually around back then) laid the groundwork to bring this upon yourselves. Congradu-!#%^you-lations.

Now it's clear something has to give one way or another. This isn't just academic. There are some people who are probably thinking, who cares if some of the people who are prancing through the dungeon are unhappy hitting on 2's and 3's. They brought it on themselves so let them suffer the price. Yes, they brought it on themselves. More specifically they _BOUGHT_ it on themselves. Bought, as it purchased a metric !#%^ton of tokens. As in supported this event with filthy lucre which keeps it flowing. If equipment ends up having no meaning, you cannot expect them to keep purchasing. This would NOT be a big deal if we had reigned in creep and broadened the token-buying base like I, and some others, wanted. The idea would be that hopefully there would always be plenty of new token buyers coming up the ranks to replace those who sort of age out. But no, TD's strategy has always been to hunt the big whale token buyers, the ones who have to have 10 of everything and each item has to be more and more powerful. Well, this is what you get with that sort of strategy. We might be functioning on inertia right now, but it's pretty clear if equipment has no !#%^ing meaning because the dungeon is so easy that a single person can cakewalk through it, then eventually people will stop buying tokens.

So what can you do to fix it? Well, you've already !#%^ed this thing up pretty thoroughly. You can add more levels, which is like the equivalent of knitting another segment onto the blanket. This also adds more load to the volunteers and chances are will make for a more sloppy event and add far more DM variation in the running of rooms. I am sure that I've been in room before where the DMs have messed up between Nightmare and Hardcore or Hardcore and Normal stats. Imagine more of that with the more levels. This is especially true in those situations where a harder difficulty doesn't equal a simple number boost like AC going up from 25 to 30. Special attacks, number of attacks, etc. All of that is going to take a load on your DMs and make it more likely they screw up something.

You could try my scaling idea which does the best it can to stretch the blanket to cover as much as possible, but it leaves huge portions of player equip/skill/ability to be covered by a single difficulty level. Assuming equal levels of intelligence/puzzle solving skill/general teamwork....players with a handful of red's would no longer be able to survive hardcore. Players with just a couple purples would no longer be able to survive Nightmare. Everything would be jiggered higher evenly which adds its own problems. There are probably going to be plenty of people pissy that the difficulty they used to run is no longer possible for them.

The last solution is to do !#%^ nothing about it, which frankly is the path I'm starting to think we'll probably take because that's what we've been blithely doing for the last 4-5 years. Hell, just ignore it and maybe it'll go away somehow. It's not a problem until token sales drop one year and that will finally spark some soul searching about how to patch fix this mess. But if that day never comes and this whale strategy continues to flourish....well, then who the hell cares anyway. Maybe, for all we know, those mad money spending sob's will start a contest among themselves to see who can reach hitting on a -10 first and that competition alone will keep everyone happily buying and yelling for more powercreep. Oh yeah, well my AC's now 75 and once per dungeon I can use my headsquishing powers to instakill any monster! And I hit on a -12, bitches. Woo! Munchkin power!

Some days, I just love your posts, Henwy.

In my day, we Magic Users got one spell per day. ONE. And we were grateful for it...

Wanders off muttering.

I'll pop my head in here and agree with several things.

Non-Lethal, Normal and Hardcore seem good where they are. They are designed for the general public and any changes made for the "token elite" shouldn't affect them.

Nightmare is too easy to complete based on the gear available (I'm fairly certain that my crew could 3 or 4 man it) BUT a lot of people who play understand Nightmare at it's current level so scaling it up might not be wise.

Maybe an option would be to offer Nightmare Grind difficulty? Have the Coach check all 3 difficulty boxes. Give monsters a 1/turn special ability, special defense, etc?

Incognito does a good job of making Nightmare Grind hard, why not have an optional statline for Nightmare runs that only affects combat using some of his experience?

I disagree with anything that adds: More EXP, More Treasure, More Tokens.

I'd be OK with a "Nightmare Grind" survival button maybe

henwy wrote:
So here's what I propose. I'd like to see a party card redesign. At the bottom of each party card we add a new box under AC, +hit, +dam and +save. What that new box will track is the average AC of the entire party. Each coach will need a small handheld calculator, but those are cheap and easy to use. Nothing will change for normal. On normal, the monsters will be given their base stats....say:

HP: 50
AC: 15
+Hit: 5
+Dam: 5
DC: 12

If the group is a hardcore or nightmare group however, the DM will tally up the average stats into those boxes. When a combat DM gets the party card, they will quickly check to see if those boxes are filled out and if the group is hardcore or nightmare. They will have a sheet of paper/pad which lists the base monster stats as above. They will also have a cheat which gives them a conversion for each stat.

Average AC / +Hit/dam Adjustment
10-15 / +1 / +3
16-20 / +2 / +5
21-25 / +3 / +7
26+ / +4 / +9

Say the group is NIghtmare with an average AC of 22. The DM will then jot down on the pad with the monster stats that 5 + 7 = +12/+12. The same would go for everything else and if the pads are pre-printed with the monster stats and with little boxes to write the new values and the converstion matrix, the whole thing could easily take less than 15 seconds to do at the start of a room. What you get out of it is a room that will be more balanced for the group based on their stats.

Now, you might be asking won't people complain that there's no point to buy tokens or equip better since the monster will scale with how buffed you are?

1) The scaling will never hit a 1 to 1 level. In the above scenario for instance, the hit/dam of the monster only goes up by 1 or 3 for ever 5 that AC rises. So more equipment will _always_ be better for a party. It just factors in some diminishing returns.

2) If it's the average bonus of the party then there is always an advantage to any particular character being better equipped since the monster will be stated to the average.

This scaling can also be as broad or as fine as you want it to be. In the end, it won't take the DMs any more to calculate a fine scaling as a broad one, but it might be easier to start with something broad until everyone is used to the new system. Since the new monster stats are written down on the pad, the DM can easily refer to them instead of having to calculate or keep numbers in their head. At the end of the room they just rip the sheet off and chuck it in the trash and are ready for the next room. There would never be any scaling with Normal difficulty which is the base stats and the whole thing would only come into play for hardcore/nightmare.

Video games tried this type of monster scaling for a while, players found they didn't like it because it meant leveling up and getting better gear was pretty much pointless. People like the achievement of increasing their skills and moving on to the next challenge, not just having the old challenge become more difficult in response.

Raven wrote: I'm gonna be an old curmudgeon here, and post my opinion before I go chase kids off my lawn with a stick.

I don't like the idea of a "Hell" level.
I don't like the name, in particular. It implies punishment. Hell is a place you go when you are bad. Hell is damnation. Hell is retribution for wrongs you have done.

I never intended the name of the difficulty level to be a judgement upon the players. I don't care what the name of the new difficulty level is, we could be ironic and call it the "Lollipop Guild" if we want.

The name "Hell" comes from the Diablo series of video games, where the difficulty levels are "Normal", "Nightmare" and "Hell". So it my mind the natural next step past a "Nightmare" difficulty is "Hell" difficulty.

Jake Fitch wrote: The name "Hell" comes from the Diablo series of video games, where the difficulty levels are "Normal", "Nightmare" and "Hell". So it my mind the natural next step past a "Nightmare" difficulty is "Hell" difficulty.

Thanks for clarifying that, Jake.

I doubt we're up for a "Lollipop Guild" level just yet *shudders* but If we're going to do runs more difficult than Nightmare, I would rather find some other name than "Hell." Reinforcing the idea that token-elite players deserve poor treatment is counter-productive.

It's the first thing I thought when I read the suggestion of Hell. But then again I''ve played each Diablo since the first and precious few other games. I figured people understood the reference and were just getting their panties bunched on purpose as a rhetorical tool.

Raven wrote: Thanks for clarifying that, Jake.

I doubt we're up for a "Lollipop Guild" level just yet *shudders* but If we're going to do runs more difficult than Nightmare, I would rather find some other name than "Hell." Reinforcing the idea that token-elite players deserve poor treatment is counter-productive.

I also dislike the "hellish" name, mainly because of the subliminals it gives to the DM's. There has already been talk about how DM's often have the wrong "attitude" when it comes to Nightmare difficulty.

That is why, I prefer some more positive name, like "Epic" or something.

Incognito wrote:

Raven wrote: Thanks for clarifying that, Jake.

I doubt we're up for a "Lollipop Guild" level just yet *shudders* but If we're going to do runs more difficult than Nightmare, I would rather find some other name than "Hell." Reinforcing the idea that token-elite players deserve poor treatment is counter-productive.

I also dislike the "hellish" name, mainly because of the subliminals it gives to the DM's. There has already been talk about how DM's often have the wrong "attitude" when it comes to Nightmare difficulty.

That is why, I prefer some more positive name, like "Epic" or something.

Legendary.

If Hell is a bad connotation lets go the opposite direction.

Valhalla!

henwy wrote: This would NOT be a big deal if we had reigned in creep and broadened the token-buying base like I, and some others, wanted. The idea would be that hopefully there would always be plenty of new token buyers coming up the ranks to replace those who sort of age out. But no, TD's strategy has always been to hunt the big whale token buyers, the ones who have to have 10 of everything and each item has to be more and more powerful.

You make many valid points, but one thing I noticed was this. I suspect it would be easier for the event to sustain itself with new players if the event had room to grow and support more players. As it stands now, the veterans love it and buy a lot of tickets which leaves less room for newbies.

If True Dungeon could find a way to have more space and GenCon and, ideally, find another convention or two (my vote is DragonCon!) then token sales could keep going without as much power creep possibly.

Just my thoughts on this one little piece