So let me start that my criticism is meant to be constructive. I really enjoy True Dungeon and this year the only room me and my group didn't care for was the bug necklace room. (The immunity to magic by the bugs felt cheap.)
So anyway, I'd love to hear comments on any of these ideas from other players. I'm definitely in the upper middle of TD goers. I've got about 50 Ultra rare and relics that are distributed among my 10 players, so I'm far from BiS for everyone.
Design advice for True Dungeon:
1) Tokens that subvert a puzzle just unlock a different easier puzzle/activity. Example: Lavawalking boots may allow you to avoid the letters of the puzzle, but now the lava is roiling and you have to avoid bubbles or be knocked off of your feet and drown in lava. Bubbles easily represented by a light projector. Now instead of a word puzzle, it's become a maze and timing challenge for that player. I realize that this puts additional work on the DM, but if one player crosses at a time, it shouldn't be that much worse for a significantly improved experience. On the spider orb with spheres, if there was a mage hand spell, it could simply give the wizard a stick with a small cup/glove on the end. Better than a spear, but not an auto-solve.
1.5) Add clues to puzzles that are only accessible to players with the right kinds of gear who investigate the environment. Reward players who bring the right gear to the adventure. Example: Speak to Dead in the Carrion Crawler room could have given a warning that hitting the stalactites is dangerous or that what the monster's poison does.
2) Define the damage types (melee, ranged, spell, shock, frost, fire, force, poison, acid, darkrift, radiant, eldritch, push), and stick to them. Avoid adding more if at all possible. Keep normal mode the same as today. For Hardcore mode, assume every character resists 3 damage of each type and increase the typed damage by 3. For Nightmare assume 6. Adjust the damage boosts by difficulty to resist as needed. Fire is really easy to resist so make it 8 for nightmare, I'm not sure there even is a force resist, so maybe reduce it a bit. Define push as its own type of damage that is by definition unavoidable. Don't spring new damage types on players who have geared up to avoid the old types.
3) Add new spells and abilities to control the flow of combat. Currently the Paladin can protect a single target and invisibility and elven cloak make it so one character can't be targeted. These abilities are regularly subverted by a DM chosing to ignore a very small subset of characters. Add new features like:
Bard: Taunt: Will save or monster focuses on character of the Bard's choice next turn.
Fighter Provoke: If fighter hits with next attack, attack deals max 5 damage and monster focuses on fighter for the next turn.
Elf Wizard: Sphere of invisibility: Target 4 allies cannot be targeted by the monster next turn.
These abilities allow a party to use teamwork to gain control of the fight's flow, allowing for more strategy and fun for experienced players.
4) Saving throw scaling by difficulty. Monster's AC goes up with difficulty and so does player gear. A monster with a 25 AC is just as easily hit by a player with a +10 to hit as a monster with a 15 AC and a +0 to hit. A monster with a +6 saving throw is a lot easier to affect with a spell than a monster with a +10 saving throw. There is no gear that can give a spell caster a bonus to hit with a spell save. This means that the value of save spells drastically drops in Hardcore and Nightmare.
4.5) Polymorph potions are fun thematically but sub-optimal tactically. This is another scaling problem. Wizards and Druids don't have the strength bonuses of fighters and barbarians. Polymorph potions give the damage boost over normal Wizard and Druid weapons, but in Hardcore and Nightmare there's no corresponding attack bonus so Polymorphed players miss for a whole lot of damage. Gear or character sheet updates to provide a bonus to hit while polymorphed would make these options more viable and several members of my group would be totally psyched to maul a monsters as a bear.
5) Indicate graphically on party card which of 4 types of test a spell uses. Automatic, slider, skill test or saving throw. I've had a DM require a skill test for Lightning storm, then roll a saving throw (our Wizard passed both, but that doubled our chance of failure).
6) Abaci for combat rooms. (10 bead variety) In my personal DMing, I regularly use an Abacus to track monster hit points. I feel like a DM can learn to use an abacus in about 5 minutes and it's really good at tracking a numeric state value from round to round. Monster has taken 53 hit points, barbarian hits for 28? Slide 7 from top row, reset slide 1 more to 8 and slide one from second row, then slide two from second row. The DM doesn't actually have to know the monster's current hit points to add new damage this way. Just needs to add the new damage to the abacus and evaluate if the new total is greater than the monster's hit points.
7) Would small electronic scale expedite non-point based transmutations? 25 tokens weighs a particular amount, dump them in the bowl, check the read out, dump the bowl in the barrel, give the token to the player and move on to the next one. (Solo cups would work in place of bowls and players could grab a stack and be ready with it in line.) If you had two people available, there could be one line for Argonite, Bismuth, Oil, Hide and Steel, and a second line for everything else.
