TOPIC: Gen Con 2019 Feedback (minor spoilers)

Once again, I had a great year of True Dungeons - I brought two new Gen Con attendees with me, so two new True Dungeon players, and they had a fantastic time. One of them was leery about doing all three runs due to the cost, so only signed up for two; I asked him at the end of the week if they were worth the expense, and he said absolutely.

Things I really liked:
- I appreciate the improved speakers very much. The one exception to this was the room with the singing skulls, but that might have been intentional for a player to stand near each and share information.

- I liked more monsters having specific hit location effects. It gave me as the bard more useful tips from Monster Lore and made the shuffleboard more strategic.

- The effects continue to be great. I particularly liked the soul-eating table and the marilith riding around. The singing skulls were also very fun, and that room overall was beautifully decorated.

- A particular shout out to the lamia on my run, she was super fun. She spent her time waving smoke at us to blind us and trying to smack the weapon tokens away with her swords. That and her banter had us all in stitches.

- I appreciated staff taking a few minutes to ask for immediate feedback at the end of each run. I think that's a great thing, and most of my thoughts were already said to them.

Things that could be improved:
- On my last run, our party card was getting filled out by two volunteers, one of whom was in training. The thing is, the other volunteer (who was, presumably, training her) was painfully slow and inefficient, taking one token at a time from a mat and noting its stats before moving on to another. He clearly needed more instruction on how to group the tokens by effect and write it all down at once - we actually ran slightly into our practice time on that run. I know these situations can happen with volunteer staff, it was just worth noting.

- The monster difficulty seemed inconsistent. In E1, the monsters all took multiple rounds of combat and felt threatening (that we could be dangerously low on HP if we didn't win soon). In both E2 and E3, we were killing off almost everything in the first or second round (the lamia and final bosses were the exception). True, I only know the gear of half of the party, but I didn't see any purples or oranges getting slid for attacks to make that much difference.

- On my E2 run, the sage kept making a lot of cracks about "Do you think I'm going to betray you now?" "I'm totally not going to betray you!" I'm sure you get people of both opinions, but I prefer NPC's who are in character, and even if there's one metagame-y joke, getting it every room gets tired quickly.

- The wand puzzle in E2 was not well-written. I was told the solution, and it made sense, it was a neat thing to do, there were clues for it in the room. But the riddle on the wall was completely misleading; the words used all implied physical things with the altar and the wands. Every other puzzle we either figured out or saw the logic after an explanation.

- New players who have no clue what they're doing continue to be...I don't want to say a problem, getting new people to enjoy something cool isn't a problem, but when they're playing a game and they don't know the rules of that game, that can detract from the fun for other players. At the very least, the Gen Con event system allows event organizers to send automated e-mails to people who get tickets; this is used to tell people what they need to bring or things like that (people got an e-mail from AEG with a link to a survey and a request to show up half an hour early). TD should use that to send e-mails saying here's a link to the Player's Handbook that you should read before the game and show up at least ten minutes before your run, because if you both don't know anything and don't have any equipment, it takes time to get you tokens and teach you things. It could be an even better idea to record a YouTube video of explaining the rules, how the token stats work, the difference between the classes, and e-mail a link to that.

Thanks a lot for another awesome year!

I am glad you friends had fun. As far as new people not knowing what they are doing, there is also a TD University that has TD101 run which explains True Dungeon. A email sounds like a great idea with helpful links to resources, and maybe oneday we can make a TD101 short video.

Seth wrote: - New players who have no clue what they're doing continue to be...I don't want to say a problem, getting new people to enjoy something cool isn't a problem, but when they're playing a game and they don't know the rules of that game, that can detract from the fun for other players. At the very least, the Gen Con event system allows event organizers to send automated e-mails to people who get tickets; this is used to tell people what they need to bring or things like that (people got an e-mail from AEG with a link to a survey and a request to show up half an hour early). TD should use that to send e-mails saying here's a link to the Player's Handbook that you should read before the game and show up at least ten minutes before your run, because if you both don't know anything and don't have any equipment, it takes time to get you tokens and teach you things. It could be an even better idea to record a YouTube video of explaining the rules, how the token stats work, the difference between the classes, and e-mail a link to that.

Thanks a lot for another awesome year!

The automated email you get from TD when you buy a ticket already says to show up 10 minutes early and already includes a link to the Player's Handbook:

MPORTANT: Please arrive ten minutes before your ticket's start time. If you do not arrive by the time on your ticket, your place may be given to someone else. You can find out much more about the True Dungeon event at our website - including buying Treasure Tokens. You can download a free Player's Handbook here: truedungeon.com/resources

Well, that will show me!

I stand by the video suggestion.

Next time you (anyone) see me, ask me to tell you the story about reading. It's short, funny, and disturbingly profound.

I beg a little bit of forbearance on my own part for not catching that bit, I feel like such an old hat at True Dungeon that I don't read the e-mails anymore - I figure I'd see in here if anything changed.

I had one other note that I forgot while I was typing up my post - the survivor buttons! I liked that they have not just different artwork but the name of the dungeon on them, that's cool. I didn't like that they no longer had the year on them. I would love both - keep the dungeon logos, but bring back the little year text on the bottom.

I'm going to have to start wearing a nerdy vest or something to display my buttons, my lanyard is just about choking me

Someone here makes a cool shadowbox so you could display some and wear others

I saw that advertisement in the other forum, thank you. Have to consider it...I like the shadowboxes for token display more than I do the board for pins, but it's not bad-looking.

Wade Schwendemann wrote: Someone here makes a cool shadowbox so you could display some and wear others

My personal goal is to make a scale armor shirt with them.

Harlax wrote:

Wade Schwendemann wrote: Someone here makes a cool shadowbox so you could display some and wear others

My personal goal is to make a scale armor shirt with them.

Do they need to be unique? If not, I will start saving all of mine for you.