TOPIC: N1-3 feedback (mild spoilers)

Thanks to all volunteers for their great work this year!

I was able to do N1 through N3 at normal difficulty. Below are feedback on each. Quick summary:
N1 - Looked great and was really fun!
N2 - Way too much damage at normal difficulty and mediocre puzzles. Not fun and felt like waste of $78.
N3 - Really fun for our group. Definitely lighter feel but we enjoyed it and the fights were interesting.

N1 - Astral Journey to the Bliss (Thursday 7:00pm)
Full party including 3 level 5 players and 3 newbies.
1st room - ugly angel fight (not sure what this was): Looked great and a straightforward fun fight.
2nd room - lantern puzzle: The crazy old guy we ran into was amazing! He looked great and was really funny. Took minor damage from puzzle but figured out the trick and were pretty satisfied when we got it.
3rd room - goblin shaman fight on dock: This had some interesting choices between being on the ground and climbing up. It was a fun fight that forced players on the dock to make a tough choice each round.
4th room - tiger thing fight: Room looked great but volume too low. Interesting fight that was fun with good alternate option for one player. We had quite a few players that could reliably strike.
5th room - engine room light puzzle: Some of the wheels were very touchy and one didn't seem to work at all (upside down U). This puzzle wasn't that fun for us as we only struggled with getting the technology to work.
6th room - ship puzzle: This was easily the best puzzle in a long time. We couldn't figure out how the inside of the table was setup but it was a good team building puzzle that took every one working together. It looked really good too!
7th room - rainbow bridge: Fun puzzle and looked fantastic. We ran out of time so one of our players helping others didn't get a chance. Only 3 or 4 made it in our group but everybody enjoyed this one.
Overall: Everything looked great and the fights were really fun. This run gave us great hope that all the runs would be this good this year. We got pretty bad pulls with some monster bits and the rest uncommons from the box at the XP/reward table.

N2 - Odin's Haven (Friday 8:13pm)
Full party including 2 level 5 players and 2 who played once years ago. Didn't have druid or elf
wizard, 5th level paladin and fighter.
1st room - valkyrie challenge: Interesting choice to be made and party split. The 2 level 5s took quite a bit of damage but assumed it didn't really matter at normal difficulty. This was a fun room.
2nd room - ice dragon fight: Fun to see our favorite dragon head again. Finding the frozen body was fun but the hint didn't seem relevant. A fun fight that our group managed well.
3rd room - ice stream puzzle: Didn't get it at the time but figured it out later. We took 6 push damage which seemed like way too much considering we had already taken about 10 more from attempts at the stream. That's 70 damage. Didn't feel great but we understood we didn't get the puzzle.
4th room - ice goblin fight: Magical snow was incredibly frustrating. 4 damage every round (we went 5) was way too much and we were told it was magical and couldn't be prevented which greatly annoyed players with the token to prevent natural cold damage. Some players tried climbing up (especially since that worked out better in N1) in the first round while we figured out the goblin was carving the fear symbol. Our cleric had already acted by healing himself because he was going to die so he couldn't prevent us losing all of round 2. Then all the climbing people slid down the hill. At this point 2 rounds have basically been wasted and we could only use ranged. We had players with no ranged weapons so they had to sit out the rest of the fight. After the fifth round we had taken at least 200 hundred damage on NORMAL difficulty and weren't that happy about it. Fight might have been interesting without damaging snow.
5th room - 2 giant fight: Freed prisoner as quickly as possible hoping for some major help. 5th level Paladin had to sacrifice to save cleric in going into round 2. In this fight we finished checking all 15 Paladin heals twice and all cleric heals. By the end of 3rd round all but 5th level characters were dead, the 5th levels died soon after. The giants were throwing way too much all party damage, again on NORMAL difficulty. The prisoner we freed was useless. I don't understand why she wasn't designed to help us however we needed it. Rather than sliding she should have had some great party healing or something. This fight was not fun at all. It was a beat down on a party that had already suffered a lot. If it was the last room it would have been fun but we still had two to go and a TPK.
6th room - arrow puzzle: Since we were all dead we weren't that interested but gave it a go. It seemed unclear even to the GM where all the arrows went. Perhaps the lighting should have been a bit brighter. We were told if we were still alive we would have taken a bunch more damage which is unbelievable considering what we had already been through and the GM not totally knowing what arrows went there. Our final solution was one we were told was wrong earlier.
7th room - tree puzzle: Solved almost immediately by accident which was not fun. We figured out how to clear it and try again. Again we solved it almost immediately by random moves that were different than the first time. Maybe this would have been fun if we had to figure something out.
Overall: This is one of the worst experiences we ever had at True Dungeon. If a group of players who hadn't played before came through they would get beat down even worse and never play again. We didn't feel like we got the value of the ticket besides getting some good pulls up at the front treasure box which included a UR and black charm.

N3 - Vault of the All-Father (Saturday 10:02pm)
Full party including 2 level 5 players and 2 newbies, everybody was pretty decked out.
1st room - hallway with plaques puzzle: Corruption things were awesome although sometimes seemed to trigger without anyone that close to them. Each time they went off was very shocking to some of our party in a fun way. The puzzle was good logic puzzle that we got on first try.
2nd room - undead fight: There was some great effects in this fight. We were sad to see our companion go. Corruption pods in this room scared everyone into staying away from walls the rest of the time. While fun, the room itself was a bit cramped.
3rd room - day of week puzzle: Mirrors were a really cool effect and we were happy to see our friend again. The speakers were way too quiet but at least the GM warned us ahead of time and let us listen multiple times. The puzzle was pretty easy but we enjoyed it and tried to stack the tiles well for the next group.
4th room - drinking "puzzle": I loved this set a few years ago and loved it again. The drinking song took a few tries but was really fun. We also enjoyed our ghost friend again. This was a nice break in the dungeon.
5th room - sword puzzle: This was a really good and challenging puzzle. The DM was nice to tell us right away the symbols on the swords stood for three things. We got it figured out and the blacklight effect was really neat. This could have been really hard for some groups but it was fun for us. For $78 this year, couldn't the backs of the swords have been painted?
6th room - 2 helkyrie fight: Amazing costumes and great effects. Again the sound could have been louder but didn't matter much. This was a really fun fight.
7th room - devil dragon fight: We had a rogue so we got to use the wand which was fun. The dragon looked great flying into the air. While our bard figured out the mace thing our raging barbarian used a potion of leaping attack to smash the dragon for a ton of damage. Once back on the ground we tore it apart. This was a really fun fight for our group and the extra props were a nice touch.
Overall: We really liked the companion following along again. The speakers were too quiet. Everything else looked great and was really fun. Again we got good pulls at the treasure box up front, another UR and another black charm.

I agree the ship puzzle was far and wide the best puzzle at GenCon. Unique, required collaboration , communication, and critical thinking.

Overall, I really enjoyed the N series. The upgraded props, costumes, and backgrounds were great. It was obvious that the higher ticket price was put right back into the game.

Re-running N1 at GenCon did confirm something I had suspected at Origins. In the room with the invisible monster, my GenCon Nightmare PUG was able to defeat the monster in 2 combat rounds with about 7/10 people able to see invisible creatures. Which made the struggle (killing him by 2 points after three rounds right at the horn) my regular guild had with him on Hardcore at Origins all the more frustrating, because 9/10 of us could see invisible monsters. The Origins DM asked if we wanted to do anything before combat started, and we said no, we (well, 9/10) could see invisible monsters just fine due to lenses or beads. But either he didn’t hear/understand us, or we didn’t say the magic words, because he made us fight the guy on the harder setting. In the end, we got the monster down anyway, but we were a little annoyed, since we’d anticipated there might be an invisible monster based on the 2018 tokens and had equipped our party accordingly.

I absolutely despised the N1 R7 Rainbow Bridge puzzle. This light bright puzzle that moved slowly and fast was supposed to have the whole team memorize the pattern (if you could tell when the lights went out - which was not very obvious) in some squares.

Also, how are you supposed to move at the speed of light from a blacked out square to the next blacked out square. I heard the room GM was supposed to give a hint about moving into a lighted square ahead of the black out - but our group was not told this.

So 10 people are supposed to move across the whole bridge in 12 minutes when the pattern took around a minute to move across the bridge. Some lines only had 1 dark square so only 1 person can move.

Impossible to move people - especially when you are carrying ~30 lbs tokens in a backpack. What about people with disability or just say a bad knee??

this forced a Group room into a round of each person making 12 dex saves to move in the correct pattern. NOT COOL.

Robert Riffil wrote: I absolutely despised the N1 R7 Rainbow Bridge puzzle. This light bright puzzle that moved slowly and fast was supposed to have the whole team memorize the pattern (if you could tell when the lights went out - which was not very obvious) in some squares.

Also, how are you supposed to move at the speed of light from a blacked out square to the next blacked out square. I heard the room GM was supposed to give a hint about moving into a lighted square ahead of the black out - but our group was not told this.

So 10 people are supposed to move across the whole bridge in 12 minutes when the pattern took around a minute to move across the bridge. Some lines only had 1 dark square so only 1 person can move.

Impossible to move people - especially when you are carrying ~30 lbs tokens in a backpack. What about people with disability or just say a bad knee??

this forced a Group room into a round of each person making 12 dex saves to move in the correct pattern. NOT COOL.

The slow moving markings moved in a T shape, allowing you to always stand on a spot that was known to be safe (I died on this puzzle, but you just had to memorize).

The fast moving markings showed again the safe squares in a faster order.

For example, the lights would go like this for say the left half:


This means that you had to walk like this:


And so on.


You had 1-2 seconds to take each step.

There were two halves like this, so 2 people could cross at the same time.


I'm not sure if the speed changed, when I did this one on Friday night the cycle probably repeated 20 times.

I believe the right side was considerably easier, the left side was something like:

Left, Middle, Right, Middle, Left, Middle, Right, Right, Middle, Left, Middle, Middle, Right, Middle, Any.

The right side had more runs of 2-3 steps in the same path more like:

Left, Middle, Middle, Right, Right, Right and so on.

Spoilers
The right side was Blue-Blue-Purple-Blue-Blue-Green-Green-Middle-Blue-Blue-Blue-Purple-Purple-Blue-Purple-Blue. I think it was easier than the left as Matthew suggested, but I found most groups trying to memorize the left side. Go figure.

Spoilers
I ran N1 four times at GenCon and every group I was with tried the left side. Only on the last run did we get the 7 of 9 party members still alive across. Left side went yellow-orange-orange-red-orange-yelllow-orange-middle-red-orange-yellow-orange-orange-red-orange-orange.

At Origins they only made half the party go safely across and that made the bridge safe for everyone else. At Gen Con they went back to insisting the entire party make it across. The only way that even seemed possible was if the party was working both sides of the bridge and had two people trying to cross at the same time.

I love the light bridge puzzle. I have only done the right half though. Also I don’t memorize colors. I number them 1,2,3 and memorize the string of numbers. It is easier for me that way. Once you know the pattern of how the lights move and memorize the sequence it is easy but 1 error and you’re dead still made it challenging for many. It is room 7 though so I am ok with a high death rate.

Also that is a valid complaint about people with mobility issues. I liked it at Origins regarding only half having to cross. Everyone else can still contribute by memorizing the sequence and guiding their party members.

necromonger.

I just saw world's strongest man. leg press a car, hammer throw, stone carry, big ass log lift.

anyways... they were conversing about all of the days of the week coming from Viking mythos (ala N3)

we already know this. I just thought it was kind of neat.