I wanted to review the two puzzle runs of this year's True Dungeon: The Moongate Maze and Dancing Among Stones.
Overall, I was pleased with both of the puzzle runs this year. This was my second year of participating in True Dungeon and I enjoyed both. My party ran the normal difficulty puzzles both on Thursday night.
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We ran Moongate first. My close friends consisted of the first 7 of our party while 3 others joined us for a full 10 party group. The character setup was pretty normal and straightforward because we had more experienced True Dungeon players than new players. We were all able to teach and share the setup gear with the new players which went well. Quick note about setup, our DM who took down all of our stats and gear was SUPER good. She was extremely experience with it and was quick. I really liked how she simply kept our character sheets facing our way just in-case we had other questions.
In our training room, I didn't like our trainer at all. I don't remember his name but he said a few things that I would never say to paying customers of True Dungeon. Being that some of us knew what True Dungeon is and what the training room is, my friend and I started quietly talking about the technical ways of how damage works with the pucks. I was simply interested in how things really work. The training room trainer overheard us talking about how damage works with the numbers around the pucks and he comes up to us and says the following: "Just shut up, it's just not worth the time or explanation". I don't care if we were even correct with how damage works; this is something you shouldn't ever say as a trainer for True Dungeon. My friends and I were talking together; we were not talking to the trainer at this time. He was very rude when he said this to us. He wasn't joking, he was literally trying to be rude with us about talking about how the damage works. During the entire time of the training room, he also said a number of other things to us that was not welcoming. I don't remember everything he said but his demeanor, tone, and overall presence was just rude. Compared to our 2016 True Dungeon experience, our trainer that year was in full character; acting, talking, behaving all in a fantasy character. This year, our trainer was rude, not in character (at all), and didn't welcome us very well.
The Moongate puzzles were great even though my party didn't solve all of them. We felt really certain about a few but were not able to solve them.
Our second run was the Dancing Among Stones puzzle run. Setup was again just fine. Our DM who wrote down our character stats was not as great as our previous run but no issues there.
Our training room trainer in this puzzle run was much more easy-going. Our trainer was much more helpful and laid back. For example, he quickly went over the rules again for the couple of new people but for the second half of training, he just went around answering questions. We again talked about how damage technically works with the pucks. However, this time, the trainer came up and simply told us how damage works with the pucks. He wasn't rude at all, he was helpful.
In our first room, we had an NPC who was our guide for the first room and into the second room. This guy was simply amazing. He was a very charismatic, happy, and funny character. For example, when we attempted to pull the chains and solve the puzzle, he popped his head up smiling and said that we were not successful. -Expect that he didn't say "we were not successful". I'm almost certain he said something funny. While we made mistakes solving this puzzle, he basically made our mistakes fun.
In a later room, we faced a dragon head enemy. Great job on the work of the dragon. It was really cool! My only complaint was the following. I don't know if the DM was being generous or not but a lot of people died in my party fighting the dragon. When there were only 2 of us left, the dragon simply retreated away from us. Again, I'm not sure if that was intentional or not, but I didn't like it that he just left. I was one of the two alive and I enabled my Rage ability as Barbarian. There was this moment in our party that with only 2 of us left, we may have been able to finish the dragon. But in the peak of everything, he simply left. It was so very anti-climatic.
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A couple of generic comments on the bad things of the puzzles. A few puzzle rooms in both runs had some mechanical things that didn't work fully. This includes the room with the bowls (or plates) that we had to put flowers on them. If we tapped the bowl, a music was made. It's totally fine that some didn't work because we were able to solve the room. But I mention this because the broken bowls confused us in the puzzle.
Another room that apparently didn't work fully was the room I mentioned earlier with the awesome NPC. We had to pull levers out of a box. We weren't allowed to pull the levers because they apparently didn't work. Again, not a big deal but in the theme of things, we instead had to say "Open" when attempting to solve.
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Final thoughts. My friends and I had a great time this year. We thought the puzzles were pretty difficult though. We went through a couple of rooms back to back where we didn't solve the puzzle. The Dancing Among Stones puzzle run was particularly difficult. I read other reviews before writing this and I would agree with the price point of True Dungeon this year. It was pretty expensive to play this year at $62 per run. 8/10 people in my party died in Dancing Among Stones and paying that much money to die in room 5/7 must have sucked, even on the normal difficulty. I hope to see TD around the $50 to $55 price point next year.
Thanks for another great year. Good job to everyone behind the scenes.
