Dungeon 6 Turn 10
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Ricki waits in the closet briefly in hopes of seeing something interesting happen when the spectre appears, but the only thing she sees is a sword passing through her brain.
Don’t worry, she’s fine. Just missing 1 HP for the rest of the dungeon.
Ricki returns to the basement. She drops her keys by the ladder, as does Lara, and Lohk adds her helmet to the pile. Macadamia deposits his wand upstairs in the kitchen, then returns to feed a potion to Daisy, healing her for 2 HP.
Lara swings her heavy pick at one of the wolf spiders and instantly kills it, taking no damage in the process. She sees one of the medium skull emblems go out as soon as she does so. She also sees one of the little ones go out shortly after.
Ricki and Lohk head through the tunnel together, emerging back in the upper room. Lohk bops one of the squirrels with her cane, killing it. She takes no damage in return. She’s not sure why anyone would think she might. In fact, she can’t think of any circumstance in which squirrels would be a legitimate threat, much less plot-integral.
Ricki uses her last magic lens on the strange human below. The reading takes an unusually long time to come through, and doesn’t give nearly as much info as normal. Still, she learns some useful things. She decides that she or Lohk should go talk to him if they can find a way to reach his area.
The wolf spider considers messing up the dog skeleton, but balks under Daisy’s judgemental gaze.
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PET MASTER
HP: UNKNOWN
Atk: UNKNOWN
Def: UNKNOWN
Ability: 1000% chance to evade all forms of damage, even ones that can’t miss
The master of pets. This mysterious man is found sometimes in dungeons, but appears to be uninterested in exploring, and doesn’t appear to be a dungeon creature himself. His only desire is to seek out other pet owners and challenge them to pet duels. Though gloating in victory, he is magnanimous in defeat, and offers unique rewards to those who can best him. Some say his true power has yet to be revealed.
Now that Pokémon battles are on the table I bet my “Shocking Bite” and Dog armour plans looks a whole lot more appealing don’t they!
Daisy used shocking bite! It’s super effective!
If we’re going all in with this being Pokemon, I’m going to have to be a triggered Pokemon fanatic and correct you. 😛
The “Shocking Bite” attack is called Thunder Fang. It has 65 Power and 95% Accuracy. (66.5% after Zubat’s Evasion) It also has 10% To Paralyze the opponent and 10% to make them Flinch. Zubat can have the Ability Inner Focus, which prevents Flinching, but Flying Types are weak to Electric.
I’m all for making Daisy evolve int Boltund. Let’s enchant her teeth!
They never weren’t appealing. The problem is that they are directly contradicted by the written rules. I’d gladly take upgrades for Daisy, but there’s no mention of pets leveling up.
Of course, LSN has created things based on our speculation before, so it’s fine to have fun. Just recognize that it isn’t the case that we have been offered cool options and are choosing not to take them. We have been told explicitly (dog armour – pets without Enc can’t carry or use items) and implicitly (the enchantment scroll works on weapons and Daisy is not a weapon) that we can’t do these things.
There are however 5 more bookcases and a mysterious Pokémon trainer who only offers rewards to people with pets, so we might still find a way to upgrade Daisy which is allowed.
You look Daisy square in the mouth and tell her she’s not got any weapons. Go on I DARE YOU. As far as dog armor, potions seem to work on her so we should have gotten the potion of shielding in case of emergency since she can’t currently wear any of the armour we currently have available to her. Listen all I’m saying is we all know if a certain blonde eladrin had an attack dog, a scroll and a Pokémon battle he’d be rubbing the scroll all over that dogs teeth and hurling them at that neon bat thing.
Are there any limits on how many potions-of-sihelding a dog can be fed?
Would they stack? 🙂
If they did stack, I assume it’d be for duration, not effect, but we’ve never tried it! I believe the rule with alcohol was that it would stack duration, but I may just be basing that on my reading of that coin boon we got from the god of alcohol/debauchery.
Probably too late to mention it, but there is some mention in the how to play of pets upgrading – usually through actions unique to that pet. So we should keep an eye out for Daisy’s behavior in dungeon as the how to play says.
Maybe something to do with all the dog skeletons in this dungeon?
Macadamia: Pick up the helmet and keys. Equip the helmet and then move upstairs to the kitchen, then left to the main entrance.
Ricki: Move out of the rat hole and then upstairs to the kitchen. Pass under the table to avoid the flies, then pick the lock on the bedroom leading to the bugs.
Wolf Spider: Try eating raw meat off of the table (go for the one on the left if possible).
Lara: Kill the last hostile wolf spider.
Lohk: Loot the chest the squirrel was on. Move out of the rat hole and then upstairs to the kitchen.
Plan with Lohk is to have her able to drop the contents of the first chest (assuming there weren’t two items or a two weight single item) upstairs with the rest of our loot if it isn’t something we want her to keep on her. If it’s a lockpick, lens, or another item suited to Ricki she can drop it downstairs with the other lockpick so Ricki can grab both items with one action. She’ll also be able to get back into the rat hole, where Daisy can kill the last squirrel and Lohk can loot the second chest. Alternatively, Lohk can heal Lara, Daisy can kill a squirrel, and we can loot the chest turn 13.
Macadamia is making his way upstairs to the library to try both our keys (the “Tower” key and the “Master bedroom” key on the locked door leading right. If we’re lucky, this will also give us access to the “Pet Master” and the big old bat. If not, it’ll at least let us access a new room.
Unlocking the bedroom with Ricki will let Lara spend turn 12 fighting the bugs (perhaps with the help of Ricki?), which seems like the best thing we can have Lara do on her way towards the entryway. It also lets us know now whether Ricki has used her lockpicks on the bedroom. If she has, she’ll have time to go grab the lockpicks in the basement and get back to the kitchen (which keeps her in range to unlock the library door turn 13 if the keys don’t work).
Killing the wolf spider with Lara needs to happen eventually anyway. Doing it now means we won’t have to worry about Lara having a free action when we come back to tackle the boss.
I know I suggested that Ricki uses a set of thieves tools on a door myself (the “closet” in the basement), but that was in order to learn more about the dungeon. Also, luckily she kept the set. 🙂
However, I’m disinclined to use the thieves tools at this point on another door that we might still get the keys to (there are still 2 key rings visible in the rooms we have already seen, one above the 4 small skeletons and one behind the pet master Ash). And there might even be more in the room(s) that we haven’t seen yet.
On the other hand, there’s 5 doors and and 4 locked chests that we know of (albeit there seem to be 2 doors that have no point of us unlocking them. The one in the “trap” room, where we built the stairs instead and the one in the tomb – that just seems to lead to a sniping position for the last boss fight). That leaves still 7 locks that we might need the lock picks on, but we don’t know yet which ones (because we haven’t even tried the keys on any of them yet).
My main reason for unlocking the bug door is that Lara doesn’t really have anything to do in the kitchen, but also doesn’t really benefit from double moving past it (she won’t have anything unique to her to do in the library, and she could just access the entryway with a single movement the following turn without a double move). Unlocking the door would let her engage in combat in that room, and we still have another 11 turns before we’re out of October. Lara’s still our best source of damage (and we need her to try moving the painting), so I think it’s important to squeeze every turn out of her we can.
One alternative would be to have Lara pick up the potion, and use it on a later turn. She’s the most damaged of our party members and there’s a decent chance she’ll find another potion she can use later. I’d just really rather she be able to pick up more than one useful item when we have her use a pickup action, and just grabbing a potion doesn’t feel super impactful.
We could have lara investigate the stove and table and flies to get a hint as to how to get past that hazard. If you wanted to move her up to the kitchen.
That’s true. I’m just not certain having her “investigate” will do a lot. Trying an individual course of action is probably more likely to work, and I’m starting to lean towards the flies having a solution in dungeon (like bug spray in the closet or the like). The smoke em out plan might work, but also might render the stove unuseable (which would make the raw meat way less attractive).
That could be true. I’m certainly reading the flies as more of a puzzle to solve than something that’s gated behind a chest, but I suppose all options are on the table (heh). I just think the puzzle solve can be ruled out sooner than the searching for the item solve.
Are we really sure that’s even a hazard? IIRC no character said anything about them yet.
LSN did mention that Ricki avoided the flies by going under the table when she grabbed the keys. No real commentary but their existence was at least acknowledged.
I just double checked this and I was wrong – no mention of the flies when Ricki first crawled under the table!
Dear madame Lohk,
When we have the time, remind me to sing you the ballad of Peanut and Castyhexxy.
Also, “She does her keys by the ladder” – ? Drops her keys? Leaves her keys? What does she does, er, do?
Lara: Kill the last hostile wolf spider.
Macadamia: Pick up the helmet and keys. Equip the helmet and then move upstairs to the kitchen, then left to the main entrance.
Ricki: open/loot one chest (the one that is “free” at the start of this turn already). go back through the rat tunnel, then up into the kitchen (avoid the flies)
Wolf Spider: kill last squirrel
Lohk: Loot the other chest (the squirrel that the wolf spider is killing this turn). Move out of the rat hole and then upstairs to the kitchen.
Daisy: mentally prepare to fight (and defeat!) a venomous bat later.
Ricki probably can’t leave the room if the wolf spider fights. I’m not sure this was ever fully tested, but it feels like a weird work around to the “can’t leave room if you engaged in combat” rule, since the pet definitely would have engaged in combat and also can’t be left behind/separated into a different screen from Ricki.
All hail to the SkullBot
30, 0.39, 0.39
35, 1.76, 1.56
40, 4.69, 3.76
45, 9.63, 7.06
50, 16.84, 11.38
55, 26.27, 16.60
60, 37.49, 22.55
65, 49.69, 29.10
70, 61.89, 36.09
75, 73.06, 43.37
80, 82.44, 50.79
85, 89.65, 58.24
90, 94.71, 65.55
95, 97.86, 72.52
100, 99.47, 78.93
105, 100.00, 84.60
Updated death table. Second column is anyone running out of max hp, third column is Ricki running out of max hp.
Daaaang. Almost 1 in 20 for a perma killed by turn 40. Jumps to 1 in 10 five turns after
Thought: The goal of making it an action to pick stuff up is to limit how often we’re rewriting the character sheets. It may be fine to just use up an item directly from the ground, at least if it’s unguarded. (Pushing this further, if Ricki decided to throw away thieves tools while there was another set on the ground, wouldn’t it be less work if she picked up the replacement for free? Silly, but practical.)
The Broken Oxidicer does specify consuming a rusty item from your inventory, but Master Wand and smiffing don’t call out that requirement. May be worth considering.
If we can get LSN to explicitly state this is okay, then it’s worth doing. Without that guarantee it feels super risky to attempt this in any case where we weren’t planning on picking up the item and using it immediately anyway (so a potion or food would be a good test case)