TOPIC: Reviews and feedback

Arcanist Kolixela wrote:

bpsymington wrote:

Arcanist Kolixela wrote: I'm not saying don't kill players in combat rooms. I'm saying don't insult players that do die and don't talk about killing other groups.

We had several reports this year of Combat judges incorrectly recording spell damage and not properly calculating spell slide hits. *Was told I missed on a spell slide on an 8. It's completely impossible for that to happen with my stats + hat + sniper spectacles + bardsong*

Bardsong does not apply to sliding spells.

See now I asked Widseth that was was told differently. I assumed the titular bard would know

Let me make sure I know whereof I speak!

Mekra wrote:

Disbeeleaf wrote:
Our Mirrors worked in both Normal and Nightmare

Thanks for the feedback.

It sounds like the dungeons were not consistent.

We played nightmare.

bpsymington wrote:

Arcanist Kolixela wrote:

bpsymington wrote:

Arcanist Kolixela wrote: I'm not saying don't kill players in combat rooms. I'm saying don't insult players that do die and don't talk about killing other groups.

We had several reports this year of Combat judges incorrectly recording spell damage and not properly calculating spell slide hits. *Was told I missed on a spell slide on an 8. It's completely impossible for that to happen with my stats + hat + sniper spectacles + bardsong*

Bardsong does not apply to sliding spells.

See now I asked Widseth that was was told differently. I assumed the titular bard would know

Let me make sure I know whereof I speak!

A pox upon me! I'll stick to wizard stuff! I haven't DMed in too long! Okay, bardsong will apply the TO HIT bonus to sliding spells, but it does NOT give a damage bonus to spells, sliding or otherwise.

D'oh!

This was my first year doing True Dungeon, and I had a blast. Thanks to everyone who put it together.

I did the Zephyr Combat on Thursday evening and Viper Puzzle on Friday afternoon. Everyone I talked to on Thursday who had done TD in past years told me I was in for a treat...but when I told a friend who had already done this year's Viper dungeon, he cut me off mid-sentence and said "Get a refund." Turns out the Medusa instant-death roll pissed him off so much that, not only will he never do True Dungeon again, he was telling others that it's a total waste of money. Asking players to spend $50 to roll a single die to determine whether they live or die will apparently do that. (At least he was nice enough to complain about this in a non-spoiler way, not telling me what caused him to die, but just that a single die roll that he couldn't do anything about ended his run.)

After that cheery pep-talk, I went in to my first run and had no idea what he was talking about. Everything about the Zephyr run was incredibly engaging. The opening DM did an excellent job of setting the mood, and we cleared the first puzzle about a minute after the first eldritch damage. That was my favorite puzzle of the weekend - visually stunning, clearly requiring teamwork, and straightforward to a fault - a PERFECT opening room. When we got to room 2 and saw a second puzzle, I was a little confused - wasn't this supposed to be a Combat run? Why are we starting puzzle-puzzle? The Viper Puzzle run didn't even do that! Anyway, it took us too long to figure out the symbols and time ran out just as I was explaining the circuit we needed to make for part 2.

The intervening combats were all fun, even if our Rogue was killed by the wind elemental (okay, at this point I WAS thankful the first two rooms were puzzles) and we ran out of time on the drone. We even managed to complete the liftonium puzzle! Even though I was thoroughly impressed by this point, nothing could prepare me for the final room. The whole room was a thing of beauty, and easily my favorite part of TD, if not the whole of Gen Con. Once we settled in at our stations (I was one of the two on the engineering platform), the fight actually felt epic in a way I wasn't expecting. I'm not sure exactly what was going on in front of us, because I was too busy chanting "Darkrift-Law, Frost-Acid, Sacred-Shock" the entire time, but the five of us fighting the wyverns were able to take them down and save the day for us.

The next day, when we did the Viper run, I don't know exactly why, but some of the magic was gone. It might have been the group I was with (we only solved the first and last puzzles), the fact that the eggs weren't working 100% (and the fact that my party thought we were supposed to make a spiral pattern with the green eggs as opposed to hitting every egg in a spiral), it might have been my friend's warning from the day before, but it just didn't live up to the expectations the other dungeon gave me. While our party knew enough to not look directly at the Medusa, requiring everybody who slid a puck to make a Fortitude save every round just to stay in the game was pretty demoralizing as well, even though I think I was the only person to fail it. Luckily, our bard was packing a Stone to Flesh scroll, but it still bothered me a bit.

Also, once we got to room 7, it felt like a bit of an anti-climax. While the puzzle was very well-done, and I loved the way the 'hints' across the dungeon came into play, not having anyone in the room but our party and a DM checking our progress felt a little emptier and less fulfilling than the final battle in Zephyr combat.

As a whole, I would give The Flight of the Zephyr an 11/10 and Into the Viper's Pit about a 7.5/10. Next year, please make everything as much like Zephyr as possible and less like Viper. I will probably only do one run next year, although I could be persuaded into doing two Combat runs if the structure of two combat/puzzle dungeons stays the same.

Wow, that was long. Sorry if I got carried away there.

Also, while composing that post, I just realized I had absolutely no idea how saving throws worked, having never played tabletop D&D before, which probably affected my reaction to that particular combat. Assuming I'm a Ranger with no relevant tokens, after attacking the Medusa, what is the lowest number I could have rolled for my Fort save to avoid being turned to stone?

Mekra wrote: Thursday Morning Grind- This was my first Grind and I had a great time. I brought a newbie with me and thanks to everyone willing to share tokens he was able to experience Grind on Hardcore, though sadly died in the last fight. The only complaint in this room was going from 3 DMs down to 1 really made it more difficult for the last battle. My biggest disappointment was the one use completion token :/.

Glad you had a good time.

Most Grinds only had 2 DM's (me as the primary, and then an assistant). Thursday 12 PM was the very first Grind so the other assistant (Raven) decided to help out to make sure the newer assistant (Brad) was comfortable DM'ing the room. In the final battle, although there were 3 boards, at any given time only 1 of them was "real" (the other two were illusions). So since only one board was actually being tabulated, it should have been manageable with just one DM (me).

Sorry about the consumable completion token. Unfortunately, I have no say regarding what the completion token is for any given year.

Incognito wrote:

Mekra wrote: Thursday Morning Grind- This was my first Grind and I had a great time. I brought a newbie with me and thanks to everyone willing to share tokens he was able to experience Grind on Hardcore, though sadly died in the last fight. The only complaint in this room was going from 3 DMs down to 1 really made it more difficult for the last battle. My biggest disappointment was the one use completion token :/.

Glad you had a good time.

Most Grinds only had 2 DM's (me as the primary, and then an assistant). Thursday 12 PM was the very first Grind so the other assistant (Raven) decided to help out to make sure the newer assistant (Brad) was comfortable DM'ing the room. In the final battle, although there were 3 boards, at any given time only 1 of them was "real" (the other two were illusions). So since only one board was actually being tabulated, it should have been manageable with just one DM (me).

Sorry about the consumable completion token. Unfortunately, I have no say regarding what the completion token is for any given year.

No reason to apologize, the only complaint was a token and it's pretty minor. As for the DM issue, I was saying if you had two for the final you could have relaxed a little. You went full out for the whole session.. That was a feat in itself! *Bows* If I can help it i will never miss another grind.

Back to back sealed pack runs through Zephyr-Combat and Viper-Combat.

POSITIVES:

Zephyr: NPC guide in rooms 1, 2, and start of 3 for the reasons already stated by other players. DM in room 7 had amazing energy.

Viper: NPC Medusa was also awesome. One of us got stoned but we managed to finish the medusa off and then I read a stone to flesh scroll during the last combat round to get him back. Managed to get to room 7 with a full party having used almost all of our heals.

MINOR NEGATIVES:

Zephyr: Room 6 lifting gas puzzle might have been too long. Even with all (experienced) party members participating, checking for air flow and moving hoses, there was not enough time to complete the puzzle (for us) due to the repeated 20 second air flow stoppages. Fewer connection points to reach the end or less time w/ the vacuum turned off would have made this (treasure stamp) room have a higher completion rate.

Viper: Two rooms had no curtained area between them. Despite this the DM of the egg room was able to manage keeping the two groups apart until we could move to the next (too narrow) room. We had to approach the board single file and were mostly clueless to how well the rest of the group was doing until we managed to destroy the sarcophagus (big cheer) and then basically went through the remaining skellies one per player.

HUGE NEGATIVES

Viper Room 7: We were on a sealed starting pack run and were treated to a nightmare combat in the boss fight. Even this would have been bearable if the DM was a little more focused on the story rather than just rolling dice. I got off 2 spells and then sat down in the corner dead having taken 10 and 5 unexplained points of damage in less than a minute. Then our cleric got backstabbed. The rest of the party except the bard and barbarian joined us two rounds later. Then the bard and barbarian died a few rolls later. A TPK (Total Party Kill) in under 3 minutes.

Turns out the DM did say before the combat began that all the damage would be poison and he was rolling saves (but not that they were fort saves). With the large group and the amount of noise in the dungeon it was hard to hear and most of us did not understand what was happening. The type of saves and the type of damage would have been nice to know as I would have taken less damage on the first two rounds and survived another round (and been stabbed in the back by the assassin). Also I might have been able to cast something to get away from the poison. Where it was coming from (poison gas) was also not explained.

It is really disheartening to hear the DM say "Bard take 10. Barbarian take 5. Cleric take 10." and so forth on down the entire party card list with no indication of what roll we just failed or where the damage is coming from. The DM was more focused on getting through the dice rolls and killing us as quickly as possible than in making the combat entertaining. "Bard fails his fort save and takes 10 poison." might take a little more time to say but would have been preferably during the first round or two of combat.

I would have rather spent 10 minutes slowly dying than the 1 minute insta-kill and go sit in the corner that I got.

We were lightly equipped and we expected to die. We didn't like the lack of information or the fact that it felt like than a nightmare level combat.

I've been running for a while and one thing I noticed differently this year was push damage. It seemed like rather than a big pile of damage at room end, the damage was spread over time during the room. I'm still churning on whether that was a good thing or not, but I think my introduction to it was handled rather poorly. We're using the rope in the room with the tile floor, and the DM asks us what that looks like. I'm thankful for the hint, but he followed it up with "the floor dims, lights flash, and you take four points of eldrich lightning damage". The damage was immediately associated with a correct answer? Maybe the answer was wrong? What's going on? Needless to say, we thought we were on the wrong track and failed to finish the room. Later and DM friend of mine told me about the spreading out of push damage into timed damage. Well, now I know.

My only other complaint isn't something TD can necessarily fix. My group is kinda slow. Not like mentally, but even when we come up with the right answer, it takes us a while to get going on the execution of the solution. Anyone have a suggestion that might work? We've talked about declaring someone the party leader on the way in, and everyone should shut up and listen to him _after_ he's listened to all the suggestions, but that seems to fly so rarely.

Or maybe my group is just mentally slow...

I started with Golden Ticket Flight of the Zephyr (Puzzle). We only got one treasure stamp

The light table/maze was cool and we did it (and the next two times I did it too). The energy ball room was crazy hard: we figured the first out and were working on the second when time ran out. At that time we had to do a third ball but I later noticed that they covered up the third one for future runs (we solved this one the next time). The rolling ball puzzle was interesting: we solved it both times, but I never did really figure out exactly what we were suppose to do until I asked the DM.

Now the inflation room: three times, three failures. On the GT run we spent a lot of time before turning on the air because we figured it would be poison gas or something. Also the vacuum cleaner caught on fire so it was actually almost poison gas On my next two runs through this room I cheated and just flipped on the air right away so everybody wouldn't argue about it and see it didn't hurt us. We still never solved it, but one time we were close until some people I don't know started unhooking tubes that we had already figured out.

Now, for Into the Viper's Pit, I did this run twice (once Puzzle, once Combat). The combat run was particularly awesome (with the undead coming from the coffin, and the big monster at the end). The pillar/letter puzzle was fun but relatively easy. The sand table was incredibly amazing. We failed to solve the puzzle with the floor tiles (still no idea what we were supposed to do) and we failed to solve the "plate" puzzle because we didn't memorize the symbols in the previous rooms...

TrueGrind was incredible! I wish I would have brought more Arrows of True Flight though.

The viper gas room I STILL believe to be broken.

Both runs I did with that room we found one of the tubes stopped getting air after about 5 connections were made.

We got to 9 of 10 tubes in the second run with those of us who'd run before pushing directly into the puzzle.

Either the puzzle was broken or you are supposed to figure out there are tubes not in use. I don't see that happening with the design.

Arcanist Kolixela wrote: The viper gas room I STILL believe to be broken.

Both runs I did with that room we found one of the tubes stopped getting air after about 5 connections were made.

We got to 9 of 10 tubes in the second run with those of us who'd run before pushing directly into the puzzle.

Either the puzzle was broken or you are supposed to figure out there are tubes not in use. I don't see that happening with the design.

Yeah, you might be right. I lost 16 treasure draws because of that room