TOPIC: Overall Review of the rooms for V4A

Room 1: An annoyance for the spellcaster, but otherwise OK. Thief was tricky and grabbed the ioun stone necklace so his ability no longer worked, but he was almost dead by then. Sadly GM wouldn't let us recover it.

Room 2: great NPC. We had it, but ran out of time before we could solve it. A little tough for room 2.

Room 3: seemed about right

Rom 4 puzzle: flashing stuff and memorization annoys me. We figured it out, but video lag and golem instructions really really slowed us down. "To the left, no to far, to the right. Stop! back up!" Aargh.

Room 5: Excellent. Especially loved the GM's descriptions, like "you hit it in the ... abdomen???"

Room 6: Rouge clue really threw us off the track. Once again, ran out of time.

Room 7: Save or die is annoying IMO. And yeah, the only place it's good is room 7, but still annoying. At HC we still had around 1/2 of the party die, and only one scroll. Thief flailed around with his eyes closed, which was amusing. Otherwise pretty unexciting.

I'm curious how many parties succeeded in subduing her. I only ran the room twice, both times unofficially (teams rushed through 6 puzzle & 7 combat, then used the last 12 minutes to try out the 6 combat). I'm comfortable with the combat being tough, but if players pick the "right" plan they should have a decent chance of success, and/or a TPK should perhaps not be a TPK (maybe she was doing subdual magic? I dunno.) Maybe if there was something adventurers who only dealt 1 subdual damage could be doing to help, or maybe if the party could play dead, or if she had other, less lethal spells for parties that weren't harming her (slow, earth to mud, MAZEs, wind spells, transmutations, shrinks, etc.)

I would think, RAW, the scroll is not available, and I would rule as such on Hardcore+. On Normal, if the party planned on having those scrolls, or lucked into one in a 10-pack (in this hypothetical, they got 10-packs of 2021 tokens before playing, I guess), I would say the player dropped the scroll in their terror (with the caveat that the stoned player could decide what happened with their own token).

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Room 1: My first run was a Hardcore PUG person and this room was way undertuned. Our group was like 6 HC players and 3 NM+ and absolutely obliterated this guy. He was dead after the fifth attack-and one of those was my spell casting that got absorbed. By the time I was running it on Nightmare, it had been tuned properly and I had figured out how to avoid wasting my spells on him. I heard that on NM on Friday the inn keeper could only be hit by crits, which seems really rough unless there was a large 20 range programmed in or if maybe there was a magic item that the party could nullify or find a way to bypass, as with the ioun stones.

Room 2: This was a hard puzzle to do over camera, but pretty intuitive otherwise (once we stopped overthinking it). The NPC in here was amazing and I enjoyed the meta clues.

Room 3: I enjoyed this fight and the reference to it in the preview. The fight was great fun and really rewarded strategy when the party worked together and spread out damage-one of our fights ended with one dying from the 8th person to hit it and the other two dying from the wizard casting a Fireball. Their final HP were: -5, -2, -11. Suggestions here would be the visual duplication so we can see the number of mobs (minor, but 'nice to have') and I think I'd rather see higher numbers of mobs at higher difficulties. So instead of, say, three-600 HP mobs, we'd face four-450 HP mobs at NM or five-550 HP mobs at Epic. It would likely lengthen combat, but a tightly-coordinated team could still shorten it.

Room 4: Memorization puzzles are tricky in vTD because of screen captures, but outside of that, I really liked the way the runes were sort of grouped together (i.e- all of the Y-based ones grouped near the middle and all of the X-based ones near the end) to help with the memorization. It might have ben a cool effect to spread out the push damage based on time so, once the 6 min bell rings, start taking x hp damage per minute from insect bites, where x is PushDamage/6, just as a way to sort of reinforce why you're making this torch. You could use the timing of the bugs appearing on the screen in the loop to indicate when to take damage. Finally a use for Bead Bugbane and Cloak of Blessed Silk !

Room 5: Technically, this combat felt like a culmination of the vTD format. The blending of the physical model (that I raved about endlessly in the dungeon) and the sound fx and attack animations were pretty spot on. Given my druthers, the effect animations (like the blood splatter or acid blobs on the screen) would be a little darker in tone, but that's just looking for something to give notes on.

Room 6: I did puzzle on this run with the Hardcore PUG and it clicked for enough of us that we had it figured out with a few minutes to spare. It was one of my favorite kind of TD puzzles, where it seems inscrutable at first and then you have that 'Oh!!' moment when you figure it out. My first 6-Combat run was at Nightmare and we managed to subdue her. It was a rough fight doing subdual, but it was doable. 3rd run was another puzzle run. My 4th run was Epic Weird and subdual was not happening, but the group figured out the alternative way to end the fight (we had been discussing it for a while) and won that way. Contrary to other's opinion, this was actually one of my favorite fights, though I agree it was maybe a better room 7 fight with the damage she was capable of pumping out.

Room 7: Fun fight, I got turned to stone my first run, but realized after the fact that I had equipped and item that would have prevented that. Having that option was great, given my Fort save as an (Elf) Wizard!! Lots of Barbarian statues on my runs.