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In 2013 our plans call for us to add an additional adventure to the event. There will be two consecutive adventure modules, and each module will have two variations of either a combat or puzzle orientation. The first module called “Lycans Afoot” tasks the party to travel through a dark forest in search of a tower, while the second module called “Golembane” challenges the party to reach the top of tower.

TOPIC: 2013 Recap

Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #37

Druegar wrote:

archmage78 wrote: Years ago the Medusa costume was AWESOME and we still took a penalty for looking at her...I mean the costume.

I had no difficulty not looking at her. :P


I was a DM for that room and worked with (if I remember correctly) five different NPC actresses. Darn near everybody had difficulty not looking at them. Unless the players were preinformed and came walking in holding up mirror tokens each of the actresses had a different way of making the eye contact that triggered the dreaded fort save.
Everybody gets to make fortitude saves.  Again.  Also, mind your step to avoid the pixie, lest you risk eldritch immolation.

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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #38

This was my very first year playing TD and I pulled a ring of Heroism. I have buddies who make the TD runs every year and I had tokened up a decent Bard set. I pulled the ring and they all got kind of pissed at me. It was amazing to see all the treasure pulls, thanks for a lovely gift and a lovely bribe to keep me coming back lol.

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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #39

Maybe I got lucky on both my runs, one with mostly new people and one with people who have played about as much as I have (2-3 years). Both on Normal difficulty, everything seemed...easy. I can't put my finger on it, but we flew through all the monsters and puzzles. The will-o-wisp was the toughest one, it didn't kill anyone but we didn't take it out.

Definitely more signage outside inviting people to come in. Most had no idea TD was there unless they were holding a ticket.


And now to something I hope won't make me enemies:

If a year's tokens feature certain themes, please make those themes prominent.

Lycanthropy showed up one time in a puzzle run, but with huge number of potions I would have expected at least twice even in puzzle. Don't get me wrong, the forest was fantastic and I enjoyed it, but all the potions and silver equipment was wasted. We took down the wolf in two rounds and no one got hit.

In the tower on a combat run, there were two(?) constructs to fight and it was fun. The puzzles were good and the fights interesting. Between the two, the tower was my favorite by far. The one bit that confused me was when we fought the big construct at the end. It felt anticlimactic, like maybe this wasn't the final room because all of the sudden there's a giant construct and wait that's it we're done?

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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #40

I understand your concerns. I suspect the fact that not all token features were used this year is an attempt at getting returning players, by making tokens useful for multiple years. For example, there were plenty of items this year that dealt with fey, charms, falling dangers, plant creatures, and poison, yet to my knowledge none of these things came up at all. I suspect they all will next year, but I agree that this results in some dissatisfaction. (What do you mean I wasted all that time and energy getting anti-charm and featherfall-like items and I don't even need them?!)

I also agree that Normal felt a bit too easy. Even my Nightmare runs felt too easy, despite less than half of the party being 5th level and most of them only having 2 or 3 ultra rares. I understand the desire to please the customers, but unless the challenge is real then victory is hallow.

If it is not already being done, I would advise Jeff and co. to poll the GMs throughout the Con, see what the pass rate is for each room, and adjust things accordingly day-by-day. For example, I would like a general dungeon success rate of no more than 50% for Nightmare, and perhaps 80-90% for Normal.

One may say that keeping newbies interested and people happy with victories is a key component of keeping True Dungeon running through repeat players. While I agree that participation would drop off pretty quick if the dungeons got too deadly, a huge part of TD's revenue comes though tokens. If the game is too easy, the value of all tokens drops and so too drops the revenue of TD.

Given this year's experience, for example, I find myself wondering why the hell I have so much cash value tied up into numerous relics and ultra rares. It appears that I could sell half of them or more and still have an excellent shot at surviving Nightmare nearly 100% of the time.

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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #41

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There were two creatures that were plants on the Lycan side - the puppet vine and the Direwood Tree(?). I wore my +2 damage to plants belt on my second Lycan run to great effect.
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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #42

  • Adeya
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Garrison's post reminding me of something: did the earcuff that allowed one to read and speak fey (earcuff of the vale) ever come into play?
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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #43

bpsymington wrote: There were two creatures that were plants on the Lycan side - the puppet vine and the Direwood Tree(?). I wore my +2 damage to plants belt on my second Lycan run to great effect.


One of these days I'm going to have to use my Druid ability to talk to some of these monster animals and plants. Although I did spend quite a bit of time chatting with the cockroaches this year :)

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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #44

The comment about the dungeons being too easy - they were easier this year - once again goes to play balance and play testing. In my opinion, the standard should be the same as what we use in D&D.

The fear of death should always be present in the dungeon, so the possibility that any character could die should always be there. That being said, instant death scenarios should be avoided, since they can create a malaise (Oh well, I'm going to die anyway so I may as well press any button or just moon the monster and fall over). This is called learned helplessness in your psych class. Of course it will decrease enjoyment in our scenario.

I have to say pretty much instant death scenarios were successfully avoided this year, except for the final room if you didn't solve the lever puzzle, and everyone had a fighting chance to solve it. It is just my opinion, but TPKs should be rare as long as the party is properly balanced for the level of difficulty they select. Only if the party really misplays the situation should this occur. When I was a DM, I saw it happen. If balance is reasonable, it will still happen once in a while. Frequent TPKs suggest to me that gameplay is imbalanced, occasionally grossly imbalanced.

On the other hand, if the dungeon is a cake walk, and the fear of death is absent, people will not be challenged or fully entertained. Even though player satisfaction is higher in this scenario, player satisfaction will be optimized when the fear of death is always present, all parties are forced to struggle, and most parties survive.

It is a tricky line to walk, and a tricky balance to maintain, but that is the challenge that comes with owning the game. I think this year came closer to it than many other years.

The issue of having tokens with no applications is different. Every year there have to be 140 tokens in the basic set. Every year, those tokens have to fit the general theme of the dungeon or be so general that they could fit the theme of any year. I am sure it takes a good bit of effort to figure out what to do with those 140 slots. As I have said before, in my opinion, the game would be better with less reliance on tokens altogether, but token worship has become such an integral part of the experience, and more importantly, an integral part of the revenue stream, I don't expect to see any decrease in reliance on tokens, or any change in the approach to token creation.
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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #45

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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #46

Whoops! I totally forgot about the tree. Silly me.

What was this "puppet vine" enemy everyone keeps talking about? I ran both puzzle and combat, both normal and nightmare, on both dungeons and don't recall anything that I would call a vine monster. Am I really getting that old? :(

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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #47

Wasn't that the thing that resembled a shambling mound?
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Re: 2013 Recap 10 years 6 months ago #48

  • Picc
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Mike Steele wrote: My group thought that the Hardcore difficulty level was perfect this year :)



I also felt like hardcore was right on the money in terms of difficulty.
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