TOPIC: Viper/Zephyr Analysis

balthasar wrote: So if the gas was a contact poison, it would not be helping you

Not disputing the ruling or anything but again it seems a little dodgy. That said the skeleton room did feature a poison gas where you could avoid the damage with either ioun so I'm not going to raise a fuss about the boss having a better poison.

Picc wrote:

balthasar wrote: So if the gas was a contact poison, it would not be helping you

Not disputing the ruling or anything but again it seems a little dodgy. That said the skeleton room did feature a poison gas where you could avoid the damage with either ioun so I'm not going to raise a fuss about the boss having a better poison.

CONSISTENCY

If the stone stops TOXIC GAS it stops all TOXIC GAS not SOME toxic gas depending on what type it is. Rulings like that are BS

Arcanist Kolixela wrote:

Picc wrote:

balthasar wrote: So if the gas was a contact poison, it would not be helping you

Not disputing the ruling or anything but again it seems a little dodgy. That said the skeleton room did feature a poison gas where you could avoid the damage with either ioun so I'm not going to raise a fuss about the boss having a better poison.

CONSISTENCY

If the stone stops TOXIC GAS it stops all TOXIC GAS not SOME toxic gas depending on what type it is. Rulings like that are BS

The Spindle negates the need to breath. The Sphere makes you immune to toxic gas. These are two different things, so I am not sure how this is BS. This difference was discussed quite a bit in the weeks leading up to Gencon.

balthasar wrote: The Spindle negates the need to breath. The Sphere makes you immune to toxic gas. These are two different things, so I am not sure how this is BS. This difference was discussed quite a bit in the weeks leading up to Gencon.

I agree. Most seasoned vets equip the (Rare) Irridescent Spindle, since not needing to breathe would - in most situations - be better than the (UC) Irridescent sphere. In this particular case, the Sphere was the one to have, and vets suffered where new players equipped with the Sphere should have done fine.

That's how it played out on one of our runs, and the group groaned when we realized our mistake.

The next time through, some of us were equipped with the Sphere instead, and the DM still said it wouldn't work. We tried to explain we were using the Irridescent Sphere and not the Spindle, and the DM told us "Ioun Stones provide no Immunity".

This felt to me like one of those situations where the DM didn't understand the room. It had a good mechanic, which favoured the prepared. It made one of this year's UC tokens very useful. But then to have that preparation negated and tokens declared useless? Yeah - why even bother equipping tokens, if they rooms are specifically set up to circumvent them?

I also do not recall any flavour text which said the Toxic Smoke was coming from the Staff, or we might have attacked the Staff. It definitely would have made a difference to our frustration levels, knowing we could make the gas stop.

Didn't matter in the long run, as our party was kitted and destroyed the monsters eventually, but the auto-damage (10 pts on Nightmare? Every Round?) was pretty steep. Still... Nightmare level, I won't complain too much. others who encountered the same problem on non-Nightmare runs? They have a right to complain.

Arcanist Kolixela wrote: My group ran Viper and Zephyr twice this year. On Combat both times. Just my observations on them.
Room 6 - OK yeah. Inflation puzzle. HOW DID THIS MAKE IT PAST PLAYTESTING? 10 tubes, 5 minutes to complete puzzle, treasure stamp in COMBAT RUN and the tubes 100% were not sealed right *more than 1 place I felt air leaking out of tubes that made me think we had a connection that wasn't there. The 20 on/20 off was complete shit and should NEVER have been implemented. Making this puzzle a treasure room was a horrible idea, took a complex puzzle and punished players completion for not being able to finish it on a combat run. DM reported 10/58 runs completing the puzzle and reporting NOT KNOWING THE SOLUTION so couldn't help us if it WAS broken.

Don't EVER make a treasure chip dependent on a prop functioning properly.

Oh, and make sure your room DMs know the puzzle solution. It's really disheartening to hear 20% success rate and the DM doesn't know the solution which begs the question... 20% success rate? or 50% broken prop rate?

The solution was just complicated. I ran this room for a couple of hours, and I didn't memorize the solution. Imagine memorizing the location of 10 different tubes. Hard to do until you've run the room for a shift (or two), and even then difficult to remember.

I checked on this puzzle many times, and it was always working. It was a maze, and there was a dead end. Many parties got to the dead end, and then figured it was broken, but it wasn't. You just needed to backup two tubes, and continue the maze from there. It was the most common reason parties failed. We play tested it ourselves with 3 people during the breaks to make sure it was easily solvable in the amount of time given. Every time we were able to solve it in just a few minutes with only 3 people. We just wanted to make sure the puzzle wasn't having problems, and it never did have any major problems that would have kept a party from solving it. You just had to be working as a team and have one person in charge of solving the maze.

Also many parties were afraid of the switch, but by room 6 you needed to have figured out that this dungeon was meant to be messed with, so you should throw the switch early to begin solving the puzzle right away. Many players thought they had to put the tubes on and then throw the switch and that just started them off on the wrong path and also wasted a lot of time.

It was a frustrating puzzle, but it was room 6, so it was meant to be hard. Usually it's room 7 that has a wicked hard combat that people fail that has the treasure stamp (which people then complain about). I do believe the success rate for room 7 in the past has been similar to the success rate of room 6 from this year. For a room 6 puzzle, the difficulty seems about right.

But the puzzle was working all weekend. The only thing we had go wrong is that the vacuum would come unhooked, but then the DM would step in and hook it back back up. That's the only thing that could go wrong, the only thing that did go wrong, and it was easily fixed temporarily by the DM and then permanently with a lot of gaffers tape.