Dungeon 6 Turn 5
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Lara and Macadamia switch targets, and Lohk joins in the fight from afar to ensure both centipedes are killed (but don’t drop venom glands this time).
Suddenly, a ghostly figure appears and swipes at Lohk with a sword! It leaves no visible wound, but nonetheless Lohk is severely weakened, taking 1 unblockable damage and having her maximum HP reduced! Ricki attempts to use a magic lens on the ghost, but it disappears as quickly as it arrived. It may be that she wasn’t quick enough to catch it, but it’s more likely that the spectre is not a creature at all, but merely an attack originating from a creature elsewhere.
Daisy barks at the ghost, as dogs do.
I still say we should have Lara burn 5 hp to permanently enchant Daisy’s teeth/mouth with the “Shock” Scroll then heal her with potions. We might need magical damage to hurt the specter or something….I mean who doesn’t want a loyal German Shepherd with a Shocking Bite or maybe even a Thunder Bark anyway?
I agree with using scroll. We need to up our damage and clear groups asap. Prioritize bigger groups since we need time to heal up after and we don’t want to get killed in combat if our max hp is too low
Unless the enchantment is incredibly strong, it won’t speed up our ability to clear the skeletons. They take 7 damage to destroy in one turn, so if the enchantment gave +2 damage it still wouldn’t be enough to let Ricki one shot a skeleton.
It will be very useful. Ricky’s not alone. Right now she has 4atk. With +2 it’s 6, not enough, true. But if combined with Mac or a frost bold from Lohk, it’s enough, and please notice that both Lohk and Mac, even together, can’t do much on their own, with 2 and 3atk respectively (I don’t count fireball, since it’s only 2 uses and we’ll probably keep it for groups and wish for AoE).
Lohk will keep staying behind, since her ranged frost attack is same as melee attack. So enchanting her weapon is useless, at least here. Maybe if we could enchant it several times, but probably not happening in this dungeon. Then, do we enchant Lara’s pick, Ricky’s sword, or whatever thing Mac holds? If everyone attacks the same enemy, it’s +2dmg regardless of who gets it. But if we split and mix attacks to different enemies, it starts being important, and I think enchancing Mac’s weapon makes more sense. He’d get 5dmg, making it noticeable and able to pass through most enemies DEF on his own.
Also, we shouldn’t forget that Ricky wields the Oxidicer, and it CAN BREAK, meaning we spent 5HP on perma-upgrade on a weapon that probably becames useless, or much less useful, like Kamau’s hilt. Please, don’t enchant Oxidicer. If my reasoning re Mac’s weapon doesn’t convince you, then enchant Lara’s MightyPick and make it EvenMoreMighty.
Mac and Ricki together can already kill a skeleton even without an enchantment.
Daisy is neither a weapon nor a ranged weapon, she is a good dog.
She also can’t safely attack most of the time. I’d lean towards the Longsword, more punch on a one-handed weapon lets you use a shield too.
But her teeth are weapons. If it has a damage stat it’s a weapon. And she was trained to be a living weapon. I say it’s worth the risk. It’s what Daisy and I dare say any good guard dog would want. We didn’t get the potion of shielding tho did we? That would go well with her Thunder bite
It’s not a weapon.
Also, imagine Daisy starts barking and bites her own tongue or cheek. She’d shock herself and die.
reminder for people considering enhancing Ricky’s weapon:
It’s the Mac who holds the non-rusty longsword.
Ricky holds an Oxidicer that I think we don’t want to spend a perma-upgrade on.
I’m a little disappointed Ricki didn’t immediately break the Oxidicer. I want to see what the Broken Oxidicer does!
The effect of breaking enemy rusty equipment is generally bad for us, unless we don’t finish the equipped enemy in one turn. To be fair though, I’ve recommended some inefficient attack splits so far…
I don’t think the spectre will be there next turn or able to be attacked on any turn, we may get a more elaborate traped or just go with the flow and Speedrun the dungeon
It’s gone already. It’s just a still photo image we got.
It’s a cool idea. But.
Let’s ignore the fact that that the scroll specifically says “on a weapon or ranged weapon” and Daisy’s teeth are intrinstic, built-in thing, not worn/wielded/carried nor listed in inventory. We could try, and get hit in the head by LSN for being stupid. Whatever.
Let’s be frank and realistic.
How many times did we use Daisy for combat while not having Kamau’s interpose around? She has 4 HP and 1 DEF. She’ll die pretty quickly if any group focuses on her, or if anything larger-than-normal hits her. She’s safe from damage as long as she doesn’t enter the combat. She doesn’t have any grit/etc ability, so any healing has to rely on items (or Lohk, but then, Fireball is lost, and that’s noticeable dmg!). And just by being here, Daisy gives some bonuses to her owner. I simply don’t see us using Daisy, with enhanced teeth or not, for any significant combat.
And for non-significant combats, it doesn’t matter that much who will have their weapon enchanted. If some combat seems safe for Daisy, even Mac’s whip could get this enchanment and Mac could do the fight with Daisy, and frankly, it’d be better for us if Mac took a hit rather than Daisy 🙂
And then, there’s the thing we only searched 1 out of 5 bookshelves. There may be more scrolls, there may be defensive scrolls. If we find any similar defensive scroll, I’d first try to spend 5HP and cast a stone-skin-like scroll on Daisy to raise her DEF, than to give her +2atk with lightning flavor.
Can Lara recruit any of the cat spider things? If the specter is attacking party members I presume that means pets too? More bodys mean better odds that the valuable members will get hit less often right?
Recalling my loose ideas for recruiting the wolfspiders (that’s their name):
just use Lara’s corruptive abilities. We can recruit from 1 to 3 of them, depending on how much corruption points we want to spend
try to drop a heavy thing via the trap door on the middle one, then use meat to lure/tame the remaining one or two of them
I like that idea in general, but I doubt it works the way you think with the ghost.
“Pets” are not fully “team members”. For example, they are 100% safe from being attacked unless they join the combat willingly. We don’t know yet how exactly the ghost picks its targets. It probably focuses on true team members only and ignore pets/summons/etc.
My my, the ghost may even focus its attacks on one person until dead, meaning we may very likely loose Lohk if we don’t hurry up. That would make a dramatic story point, wouldn’t it. It’s not that unthinkable. But the description mentions “random party member”, so I hope it’s picked at random every time the ghost shows up. Not “picked at random and hit until they are dead, then move on to next random”.
I’d still try recruiting some wolfspiders, but mostly for the added damage it can do.
Recalling my loose ideas for recruiting the wolfspiders (that’s their name):
just use Lara’s corruptive abilities. We can recruit from 1 to 3 of them, depending on how much corruption points we want to spend
try to drop a heavy thing via the trap door on the middle one, then use meat to lure/tame the remaining one or two of them
I like that idea in general, but I doubt it works the way you think with the ghost.
“Pets” are not fully “team members”. For example, they are 100% safe from being attacked unless they join the combat willingly. We don’t know yet how exactly the ghost picks its targets. It probably focuses on true team members only and ignore pets/summons/etc.
My my, the ghost may even focus its attacks on one person until dead, meaning we may very likely loose Lohk if we don’t hurry up. That would make a dramatic story point, wouldn’t it. It’s not that unthinkable.
I’d still try recruiting some wolfspiders, but mostly for the added damage it can do.
I think things got copied around in your post a bit, but anyway.
I generally agree that we should probably tame (at least) 1 of the wolf-spiders with Lara’s ability and try to tame another by luring it with food (meat or maybe rats). The one issue I have with dropping something on them is that this may put us/tehm into combat which may make taming them (by food) hard or even impossible (two mays in that – but loosing out one permanently getting one would suck)
Thought: specter attacks closest to door?
Time Limit: Every 5 turns, a spectre will appear to attack a random party member.
says right there it’s random, LS doesn’t Lie, except by omission.
in reality, LS probably rolls percentile and assigns each character 20 random numbers.
Turn, %death*
30, 0.293
35, 1.392
40, 3.864
45, 8.191
50, 14.689
55, 23.408
60, 34.044
65, 45.940
70, 58.186
75, 69.784
80, 79.877
85, 87.932
90, 93.760
95, 97.459
100, 99.365
105, 100.000
This is what our clock looks like, if anyone’s curious. I’m going to suggest we hurry
*percent chance of any character losing all max HP before or on the given turn
Not counting damage from other sources
This just turned into a speed dungeon. We have a hard limit here since the ghost is going to reduce max hit points, not just damage the characters. Poor luck may result in the same character getting hit multiple times. The door changed again. The skeleton dog did not move. I wonder if destroying it will result in a skull darkening on the door.
I don’t think so. Their eyes are dark/black, and every skeleton we kill has such eyes before disappearing. I think they’re dead, and just garbage on the floor. Odd. But we’ve already seen various bones scattered in various places.
Maybe so. Don’t destroy the doggo skeleton while Daisy is around though…
Avoid the trapdoors while moving around.
It’s possible we could drop something onto the middle wolf spider as it was described as a trap door. Similarly, we could potentially trip the pressure plate and get an entry point into the room with the monster under the bed, but we’d need Lara present to get out and that only while standing on the chest which is past the bed.
Not necessarily. If we get rid of the ‘eyes’, we could push the bed to the left, and then put an opened-chest on the bed, and it would probably be enough for even small person to reach up.
Ricki: Point out trapdoors, everyone else avoid them. Use the Magic Lens with Encyclopedia to identify the monster under the bed, then explore through the rat hole.
Lara: Subdue Spider on a wolf spider, ideally from afar (“one enemy spider in the room”). Assign to Ricki as a pet. (Note that we may need to kill it anyway.) Go up a room.
Lohk: Examine the tables with the vice and buzzsaw, see if they’re movable and what they could do. Then head up a room and back to the entryway. See if you can reach the painting while riding Daisy.
Macadamia: Smash the lone dog skeleton in this room while Daisy isn’t looking.
I want to try taking down the painting on turn 7, with Macadamia giving Lohk a boost alongside Lara. (Note Daisy can reach high places like a regular-size character, and can carry Small owners, so maybe Lohk and Lara would be enough.) I’ve a feeling Lara will be stuck here though, Subdue Spider may be considered an attack.
I also want to get a closer look at the door before we get too deeply invested in killing everything. There might be clues about partial credit. There’s also another key there.
This Is a good balance of actions, but I’m curious what your overall goal before turn 10 is. I think we need to map what we want to accomplish in this block of 4/5 turns. Do we want to focus on clearing out bookshelves and exploring the remaining accessible containers/set pieces? Do we want to focus on grabbing one of the sets of keys?
I’d like to focus on keys, as a path towards revealing the rest of the dungeon. There are three visible sets of keys, two of which were by locked doors with a monster under the bed; we have the tower keys. It’s possible the tower keys will unlock the door leading right in the room above the entrance. I suspect the keys by the skull door will unlock the main floor bedroom, and the keys past the skeletons on the upper floor will unlock the basement bedroom and possibly the other basement door here. Might still be worth picking the lock on the other basement door, the trapdoor might let us into the basement bedroom and we’d get an early look at another dungeon room (unless this mystery rat hole leads us left).
Bringing people back to the entryway to investigate the painting also sets us up to clear the bats, which is another 6 skulls which will be time-consuming as most of our damage is wasted on 1-HP enemies even before they dodge hits. At least Lara and Lohk can pick two of them off with ranged attacks before they start dodging, unless Lara targets a hidden venom bat which ends up being immune to poison. Once we know how many are venom bats, we can safely have Daisy help, which lets us throw 5 attacks a turn at clearing them out.
Maca can also take out a roosting bat with wand of death. Would also be interesting to know in the wand of death can be dodged (probably, but it does say ‘can not be reduced in any way’)
That wand probably is non-ranged. We were told this, and it’s called ‘death touch’. Pretty telling. But I agree that the bats are probably the best moment to try it out.
Also, Lohk could use her ability on that wand and we’d see what it actually does.
In addition to the above: Have Macadamia go left (top level), after smashing the skeleton (if possible).
I dunno if smashing a skeleton counts as an “attack”, as long as the skeleton isn’t awake/active, therefore moving afterwards might work. And we need to know where all the enemies are (asap), in order to kill them (efficiently).
Unrelated side note: OUCH. Getting 1 HP removed permanently is HARSH. I wonder if that will last “only until the end of the dungeon” or longer. If we are/were unlucky, we might have a death on our hands as soon as the 25th turn (2 chars have 5 HP max and we -have- had our share of dice rolls being super wonky around our chars).
EDIT: I just noticed that there is a locked door in the way to go left, so that’s not going to work, anways. Maybe Ricki could try the “lower key” on this at some point? I don’t remember if unlocking stuff with the right key was an action, or not. Lockpicking iirc. IS an action, but that’s also a lot more complex than using the key that was intended for that lock.
There’s one more thing that just came to my mind, and I find the idea rather unsettling (but unfortunately very likely, knowing LSN and his games). What if the “stolen permanent HP” get added to the knight’s body, thus making him even harder to defeat, the longer we take to get to him? O.O
I like this plan overall, the one issue/fear I have is that if the wolf spiders do enter combat if we subdue one ( I don’t think Lara would get stuck, she can do this looking down or from the top of the ladder), they might become hostile and prevent us from permanently taming one with food/rats.
Also it would really suck if we subdue one now and then find a bigger spider in one of the so-far undiscovered rooms, not sure how realistic that point is though.
Overall I would probably argue to delay the subdue for 1-2 rounds to see if we can make a more coherent plant of dealing with all the wolf spiders (and hopefully also have more info about other rooms)
We need to get a sense of where else in this dungeon can be explored. Assuming we get two more turns every day until the end of October, I believe it will be turn 21 by the time the month is over, which means losing 3 more max hp by the time the skeletons are weakened. If we can find productive uses for our time between now and then it might be worth waiting to try tackling the skeletons. If their targeting is truly random, we’d need 12 hp/defense on every character to survive 3 skeletons including the longsword one hitting the same character. All 4 hitting the same character would still kill that character, but that’s got a 1.5% chance of occurring. It is possible to get that defense total for everyone, but only just. It requires Ricki wearing the rusty chain mail, Mac wearing the wolf armor, and Lohk wearing the leather armor, bucket, and getting drunk. That leaves us with 14 points of sober damage to take out two skeletons in a single round. I’m not sure we can do the inventory transactions necessary gain that safety and still get to the group of skeletons in the library to fight them before the next specter attack, and if anyone but Lara is attacked the above configuration doesn’t work any longer. There may be another that does however.
I think we need to take the part of the skeleton description that says we should avoid them while buffed seriously. Right now the only thing the skeletons are definitively blocking access to is the owlbear/rats rooms and the set of keys outside that room. If we wanted to, we could give Lara a shield, some beer and the bucket to run her through the library crew to grab the keys. She can easily be buffed to 12 or 13 defense making that a low damage run that might save some lockpicks.
More importantly, we can unlock the door across from the library skeletons, which would put us in the same room as the ladder the other skeletons are guarding. Assuming we only get two turns a day, turn 21 will be the last turn of October. After that the attack of the library skeleton group drops by a total of 8, and the attack of the other group drops by 10. Obviously we can’t twiddle our thumbs for 16 turns, but given there’s an unexplored rat hole, and two locked doors that lead to new rooms, we may be able to productively use our time between now and then exploring, solving puzzles, and fighting other enemies. The earliest we could lose a character due to specter attacks, assuming they don’t change, is turn 30, but that requires that the same non- Lara character be hit each time. Again, as long as we aren’t wasting time, waiting to fight the skeletons until they have weakened isn’t necessarily a bad move. Better to kill the unbuffed enemies now and the buffed ones later.
Good point. End of the October isn’t that far. Don’t forget the bookshelves. There may be more scrolls or other helpful things there, and it will need 5 more actions to search through them. I think anyone can do that, not only Lohk. Maybe except Daisy (or can she? she’s a smart dog, may be able to tell an empty paper piece from a written paper piece).
In any case, if we meet a ghost we don’t see, Daisy will warn us \(^^)/
Also, dead dogs didn’t wake up. Phew.
Spectre showing up each 5 turns is just an attack for 1 dmg. That’s not dire. Still, it’s 1dmg that actually is non-healable for this dungeon, and we don’t know yet if it switches the targets each time. That forces us to work really quick, since we’ve not that high HP (Ricky&Mac&Lohk:5, Lara:8, Daisy:4 – but Daisy is probably not a viable target for the ghost). This gives us at from 4 (really unlucky, or no switching targes) to 19 (impossibly lucky, or intentionally prolonging the battle) safe ghost encounters, depending on ghost’s tactics and out luck, before the first person dies just to the ghost.
Considering I just roughly estimated we need ~20 turns to 300-400 dmg to kill everything just due to total HP to be shaved, I think we should press the matter at least slightly.
Loose idea: if Lohk’s Fireball is an AoE spell, then casting it on groups like small skeletons will make things quite a bit faster, but we have only 2 casts.
I totally support the idea about using enchantment scroll for perma-upgrade and then healing up. More dmg will be handy. Doing it early will mean we lose healing items, get some ENC for carrying things around, and dispose enemies quicker, which means taking less damage, it almost sounds like having no cons. However, I’d check all the other bookshelves first. There may be more useful things there. Could there be a healing or defensive thing there?
Also, Lohk and the wand-mastery skill. It opens new ways, I’d consult Lohk about that skill, ask if that’s a combat-only action, or safe to use outside of combat, and try doing it a.s.a.p. That wand doesn’t seem useful in this dungeon and it only takes up ENC.
Fireball : Can deal 3-6 fire damage at range.
Sun sphere: Can be dropped or rolled towards a creature, dealing 5 holy damage in an area when it makes contact.
Alas, Fireball isn’t an area effect. Agreed that asking Lohk about wands is good.
I wonder if Lohk or Lara could shoot their respective spell THROUGH the keyhole of a locked door. It would be awesome to lure whatever is under the bed out of there and into the trap trigger with a well aimed shot, while staying completely safe from both the retaliation from the “bed monster” as well as the traps consquences (as long as they don’t permeate floors, ceilings, trapdoors and/or wooden doors, that is). 😀
I like this idea, but I suspect it’s against the … spirit … of the level. 😀
Hmm, I’m tempted to have Lara just drop the cigarettes here. Unless wolf spiders can’t be made into pets with Subdue Spider, the only potential enemies worth using cigarettes on are behind locked doors or several rooms away. It’ll take an action to pick cigarettes back up, but that’s better than losing HP and items for no reason.
This also opens up giving cigarettes to someone else. I still feel very strongly about keeping Ricki from smoking, but curmudgeonly Lohk could get Addicted, and this would fit neatly into Macadamia’s life being suffering.
If we drop it then it’s and action to pick up again. If we were fighting, one action to attack would be better spent than picking up an item.
Better to just spend it on anything that would make a difference (like killing a centipede in 1 hit)
Sure, but every turn is a 10% chance we smoke them automatically, so a 5% we lose the cigs without getting to use them productively. There’s no fight we can see where the cigs would help Lara, and passing them to another character would cost an action anyway. I think dropping them is safe and smart, particularly if we drop them near other items. LSN has confirmed that picking up multiple items that are close together is still only one action.