TOPIC: Gen Con TD Highlights

Davoruk wrote:

Harlax wrote: The shield table should have been harder, but tech issues meant we had to keep the UV light on all the time.

Anyone know what happened with this puzzle? Our Group went through on Thursday and the blacklights never came on. We tried to solve using the almost impossible to see paint but failed. Then on Friday the words were perfectly legible and the puzzle was solved without much difficulty.

Our Drow/Spidaur NPC told us that the initial setup was 5 seconds of blacklight per cycle, but that was too hard.

Then it was changed to 20 seconds.

Then there was a technical problem.

Then the blacklights were always on.

She told us this after we solved it in a few minutes with blacklights always on, by way of explaining that this room wasn't the cakewalk it appeared to be by design.

Naarg wrote:

Davoruk wrote:

Harlax wrote: The shield table should have been harder, but tech issues meant we had to keep the UV light on all the time.

Anyone know what happened with this puzzle? Our Group went through on Thursday and the blacklights never came on. We tried to solve using the almost impossible to see paint but failed. Then on Friday the words were perfectly legible and the puzzle was solved without much difficulty.

We were wondering about this one as well. When we went through on Saturday this looked like plain white puzzle pieces that had been written on with a ball point pen. Didn't feel like the production values were up to par at all.

I heard that players handling the boards rubbed the paint off and the letters were done in visible marker so that puzzle could be done.

I forgot some highlights:

6. At hardcore our 6 person party had a very good second round against the Spidaur, and came up 1 HP short of killing it (sad trombone sound) - leading to another round of attacks and combat!

7. In grind Eric had me roll a save for the group - I rolled a 1. I shouted: "Questor's Charm of luck!" - Eric ruled _I_ could reroll, but the 9 stuck for the rest of the party. Boy was I popular right then!

bpsymington wrote: Never realized how popular The Shadowskin cloak was among Nm parties!

The Shadowskin Cloak is totally overpowered. I brought up that issue when it was developed/printed, but unfortunately, I'm like Cassandra of Troy....

True Dungeon runs went very well, great Drow/fallen actor in sunday noon combat into the deeper dark run. He really made the run extra special. The coaching of the new players was well done. Writing the damage reduction on the TD wrist bands was a nice touch. Most of the room GMs did great commentary. Also pulled my 1st ultrarare in the token box. The friday 7:50 pm BHM run with team synergy was a blast. As one person said, we were the nightmare, not the dungeon. The beholder went down in 2 rounds with about 700 damage! The bard's custom songs were especially nice. A great group!

it seemed to me that the puzzles held up extremely well this year. everything functioned for us, even on Sunday. Great design! The only negative I noticed was that the lucas oil stadium space seemed to be a bit hotter than the stadium, a bit tough on the actors...

Hope to do it again at whosyercon in 2017!
dave the barbarian.

A few non-TD comments if you're interested...

Had a great time teaching games at the RAM with KFG! Full tables and good gamers all around. Enjoyed the gaming at the Stink 13! I just noticed that the d20s they gave out have 2 "1"s! That's pretty bad luck! 　 Watch your free dice folks.

Demos of Scythe, isle of skye, mystic vale, euphoria expansion, evolution Climate expansion, above and below were great. Really glad I bought the kickstarter version of above and below before they sold out. 　 Great pokemon and ingress gaming...our team won the Overwatch tournament!.....hysterical theme at saturday NSDM (feel the Burn!)....enjoyed gaming with Andy Looney and his crew....Puppet slam was better than last year....math trade worked smoothly....Stonemaier room was good fun......noodles and co was a good solid go to food source...happy that we avoided will call.....vendor hall was a joy on thurs/fri...tough crowds on the weekend and the bathrooms went downhill fast..　 ....enjoyed meeting friends and gaming with my kids...I'd like to wind it back and do it again... next year I hope!

Gah, overall things were Amazing and hard to cover it all.

I'll start with the only two quibbles I had with my runs this year. The coach writing our stats sheets Thursday afternoon was brand, brand new, and definitely messed up our sheets a bit, for better and worse. I had the training room fix a couple issues I caught, and it worked out in the end, so didn't really put too much a damper on anything. Also found the NPCs very quiet that Thursday BHM, the Fallen and the angel in the beginning in particular, as well as the beholder.

But for the Fun parts.:

I ran twice, Thursday BHM Combat around 3:30 and IDD Combat around 12:30 Sunday. I was the crazy Dwarven Fighter carrying around actual mugs that looked filled and trading quips with the NPCs

Both runs had a large amount of new players, but I got there with enough time to explain to them a lot of what they needed to know early on, and was able to lend out some armor and weapons. Seems I was able to find everyone a good class and they enjoyed themselves, so I'm glad I could help. One of my friends fell sick and left early Sunday, so we were just going to refund his ticket, then random guy in the customer service line bought it, brilliant.

Very much enjoyed my interactions with all the NPCs, traded taunts with the succubus, and especially the Spidaur. "No matter how much I drink, you're still not getting prettier". Though we didn't manage to beat her. Too many of the party were equipped with common slings for ranged =/

Got a thumbs up from the fallen after I crit for triple damage.

We missed the first two BHM Combat puzzles just barely, both DMs said we were about 1 step away. I loved the chain puzzle, even if I clumsily shocked my party twice...whoops. I blame the drink

The Beholder sliding board was brilliant and I hope it becomes the standard set up.

We wound up with the Lead trainer during our IDD run, and he was absolutely brilliant, whipping all the new members into combat shape and fast.

I handed our bard my maracas and he danced his heart out, he had the rock golem dancing to his beat as well.

I Figured out the stone password at the last second, I just shouted it out and it took my party a few moments to even process what just happened, before I was inundated with high fives. We were riding high at that point. Unfortunately, we did lose our Wizard, a younger kid, 13-ish?, in the lava bridge room. Didn't know I could taunt the monster from a different pool. Still, kid took it like a champ, I was quite impressed. Shield puzzle was probably a bit too easy with the black light always on, but considering our normal puzzle luck we didn't mind.

Got crit by the lava worm...twice! First time I failed my save, was swallowed whole, survived, crawled back out, and wailed on the thing again. I learned my lesson though, and dodged that second one. It might be because we were at the very end, but that room h ad two GMs and it was super handy.

Treasure wise, I was ecstatic to pull my first UR out of a treasure box, a Cloak of Blending.

Just typing all this up has me itching to dive back into a dungeon again!

BHM puzzle Thursday afternoon

Angela Small wrote: (Raven, I would totally be down for a Tea with a Succubus event next year if one was offered).

Raven's exchange with the succubus was priceless. Wish I could remember it all. There was a certain picture of the succubus using a paladin as a footstool... That was a fun run.

BHM and ItD combat Thursday night
Learned about Twist the Blade. I hadn't looked that closely at some of the voucher classes. We had a new player that really liked shuffleboard. Could pretty consistently hit 19 or 20. When he did he could leave the puck there for the next round and do the same damage as long as it stayed during sliding. On the Beholder fight (running Nightmare) we ran out of time and the DM told us we were close but we failed to defeat the monster. We were about to leave but someone said we needed to get the token back off the board. Half of us turned, pointed at the board, and said 'He twisted the blade!' The DM looked at the token and the damage total and told us we had in fact killed the monster. In overtime I guess. Huzzah!

ItD puzzle Saturday night
Got to go on a run with a friend that was completely new to TD. He is a game designer and picked up on the puzzle clues right away. He figured out some of the key aspects of the combination lock, the stone wall palindrome, and the final weapon puzzle without me giving hints. I think this run had the male Drow who was great at giving hints to a mostly newbie group, and his flippancy and narcissism was an interesting change from some of the other snide and quarrelsome Drow.

NightRare ItD puzzle Sunday morning
The sound system was failing to give the drums and bells needed to solve the puzzle. The NPC called for a fix (later found her walkie had died so nobody knew). So she quickly improvised and invented the Drow beatbox. Her Thump, Thump, Thump, BOOOONNNNNNNG! routine was hilarious. She threw her head from side to side with each Thump, then shook violently like she was the ringing bell. Wished I could have recorded it. She was quite funny and good at improvising throughout the dungeon.

There may have been more, but I forgot. Got to meet a lot of new people and even hung out a bit with them outside of TD, so it was a really good year.

Naarg wrote:

Davoruk wrote:

Harlax wrote: The shield table should have been harder, but tech issues meant we had to keep the UV light on all the time.

Anyone know what happened with this puzzle? Our Group went through on Thursday and the blacklights never came on. We tried to solve using the almost impossible to see paint but failed. Then on Friday the words were perfectly legible and the puzzle was solved without much difficulty.

We were wondering about this one as well. When we went through on Saturday this looked like plain white puzzle pieces that had been written on with a ball point pen. Didn't feel like the production values were up to par at all.

There may be a couple of issues here. I ran through both puzzle and combat versions after noon on Thursday. Combat side the writing looked fine. Puzzle side the writing had faded terribly. Both runs had the lights always on. Even during setup I didn't see this slow strobe effect.

I'm not sure what happened to the puzzle side writing. It was not merely wiped off as under white light conditions the writing has a slightly different reflectiveness than the white shields. So with the white lights we were given (not the yellow ones) I could see the letters were still there. So somehow the blacklight reaction had faded. Either the conditions (heat? humidity?) were slightly different or they reacted with something the other set didn't have. The tables had a lot of junk from the centerpieces and we had them cleaned off, but the shields themselves weren't wiped with a cleaning agent and as I said the actual letters were still there so I'm not sure what was going on with that. They did what was reasonable to get things to work and keep going.

As far as the blacklight, I know from building my house that you have to get really special CFL bulbs that can handle being used in conditions where they are turned on by automatic switches. (I am certain they were CFLs as they were having a strange affect on my vision and I kept looking at them and then away to test.) So I'm not certain what the issue was, but I know CFLs are touchy and can't take 1. heavy vibration 2. being on a dimmer switch or 3. being on automatic switches. Regular CFLs can't take brown-out conditions or a continuous flickering. They are meant to go, stay on for a time, and go off. If they are used wrong the bulbs can blow, a fuse/breaker can blow, or they can fry the timer/controller circuit. I could see making the puzzle tricky with the lights flickering in and out, but this type of bulb wouldn't be right for the application. Incandescent would work, maybe LEDs if they were labeled to work with dimmers and automatic switches. But that's without knowing what the real issue was.

Here is the lowdown on the shield puzzle rooms 5.

The black light was supposed to be on for about 5 seconds every minute. We felt over time that it wasn't enough, so we changed it to every 30 seconds. About halfway through the con, the lights would not come on through the programmed timer, so they were just plugged in to stay on all the time, making the puzzle much easier to solve.

In the combat room 5, the UV-lit letters looked great and there were no problems. On the puzzle side, however, the letters were extremely pale and hard to see. Since the letters were painted in UV-sensitive paint with a vinyl stencil in Carbondale, there really wasn't a way to touch them up, so they were traced with a regular marker.

bpsymington wrote: About halfway through the con, the lights would not come on through the programmed timer

Yep. Probably blew a mini fuse or burned up a capacitor. Timer may be fried. Since the bulbs continued working.

That's the first time 'brilliant' has ever been applied to anything I've done. Humbled.

Shaman wrote: That's the first time 'brilliant' has ever been applied to anything I've done. Humbled.

Now we need to know which you did.