TOPIC: Pay-to-Win?

I like to think of DC as "Target number" There are no Ties on anything other than initiative.
You either get your target number and succeed or you don't and fail.

Thanks for the clarifications.

Druegar wrote:

Allen John wrote: I still don't know whether ties count

DC acts just like AC. It is the number you need to hit/roll. E.g., if you roll a 10 vs. a DC 10 Fort save, you succeed.

Great, now I think I owe the bard from that party a Scroll of Stone to Flesh...

Given the likelihood of being turned off of the game by one bad DM or one unlucky die roll killing a player and making them feel the game is pay-to-win, maybe the default difficulty should be Non-Lethal instead of Normal? Or maybe the requirement to decrease difficulty should have to require only a single vote? Or maybe just even add an option to allow individual players to choose Non-Lethal regardless of what the rest of the party decides on?

Random thoughts:

No matter what you do, someone will be unhappy.

If it becomes too hard to die, "winning" loses all meaning.

Since players manage their own HP and XP, there's no reason they all have to agree between NL and normal. For instance, nine could play normal and the newbie tenth could play NL

As long as there are tokens, you'll never totally eliminate the "pay-to-win" aspect. Tokens do things.

The problem with non lethal is that if anyone in the group cares about TD EXP they get hurt by a non lethal run, as its capped at 650. I went non-lethal a year or 2 years back because the group had 8 first timers. No one died anyway and I wound up with less EXP =/

I also wonder if the Medusa issues cited in this thread, are actually more along the lines of issues reported this year with the Mindflayer, and the problem is the Dice. Since the big dice used in TD are countdown dice, it appears to be easier to roll high/low numbers in quick succession if the dice isn't rolled/manhandled enough. Thus giving a string of petrifications against medusa or misses against the mindflayer.

Don't you mean "spin down" dice?

I thought they were outlawed.

They clearly allow cheating.

I understand the problem with non-lethal vs normal.

I'm questioning why everyone in the group has to run the same, so long as everyone is one or the other.

Under current rules, the entire group runs at the same difficulty level.

DM's have enough to worry about, asking them to manage multiple difficulty levels within a single party is not reasonable. (That's an understatement!)

Surprise. I agree.

I can envision scenarios in which the non lethal level players in a mixed level party take all of the risks.

Disbeeleaf wrote: Surprise. I agree.

MetaphoricDragon wrote: I also wonder if the Medusa issues cited in this thread, are actually more along the lines of issues reported this year with the Mindflayer, and the problem is the Dice. Since the big dice used in TD are countdown dice, it appears to be easier to roll high/low numbers in quick succession if the dice isn't rolled/manhandled enough. Thus giving a string of petrifications against medusa or misses against the mindflayer.

It's not that. It's the fact that, from their perspective, everything that they had done in the dungeon up to that point was made completely irrelevant by a single die roll that determined whether they lived or died. I didn't ask for clarification, because I hadn't done Viper yet and didn't want to be spoiled, but I believe they were referring to the initial roll upon walking into the room and seeing the Medusa.

And don't give me that "she's a medusa, they should know better than to look" crap - if you're a first-timer, and you pay $50 for a two-hour game, why would you possibly think that after five rooms of gawking at the dungeon, where the DM's actually encourage you to interact with your environment, you suddenly have to avoid looking around the room for risk of instant game over? The game should be encouraging the players to interact with NPC's, not killing them for it.

You are correct in my opinion.

Instant kill scenarios in TD, especially when not in the last room, reflect a lack of depth of thought in dungeon design.

In this case however, my suspicion is not that this was shallow thinking, but more of a strategy to forcibly inject tokens into the game in a way that intentional token acquisition (meaning other than the 10 pack) cannot be avoided without a high risk of premature death, hence the conclusion by some that the game is "pay to win".

Of course most new players are not going to figure out that they need specific tokens due to a limited familiarity with the game.

So maybe it was bad planning.

Couple that with an intentionally oppositional DM and you have a mess.

Everyone makes mistakes, but only fools make the same one more than once.