Dungeon 7 Turn 49
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Kamau charges the rat king in order to protect his friends! Neither he nor the swarm are able to harm each other.
Squirrel feels conflicting loyalties but decides to remain true to the party. It’s easier to make that choice given that he has literally no way of affecting this fight to either side’s benefit.
Ricki, Macadamia, and Lohk rearrange the items they’re carrying to get ready to leave the dungeon. In particular they pile the heaviest stuff into Molly’s packs. Ricki and Macadamia now have more room to pick up some of the items littered on the ground next turn.
The plant lady doesn’t seem interested in helping. Mostly she looks around the room blankly, as if reminiscing, or possibly preparing herself to never see this place again.
Plan to safely leave with the rope while abandoning only a tomato. Includes carrots on treehouse screen.
Current turn:
Kamau: Interpose
Ricky: Pick up a corn spear and onions, go up one screen, then go left and drop bat hide armor on the pile of carrots then climb up the rope
Lohk: Drop a tomato to pick up the shield then go up
Mac: Pick up carrots and eggs then go up, then left, then drop carrots into the pile of carrots then join Ricky on the treehouse
Next turn:
Ricky: As your action, have treehouse date with the dryad
Mac: Take Lohk’s fire robe. Stay on the treehouse.
Lohk: Go left, climb up the rope then give fire robe to Mac. Stay on the treehouse.
Kamau: Move left, drop plate on the pile and pick up everything else from the massive pile. Wear the hide armor.
END:
Kamau: Interpose
Mac: Go down the rope then destroy the scarecrow for being mean to our crow friends
Ricky: Go down to pick up plate and stuff it into Molly
Lohk: Pick up the rope after everyone is down then use Mom’s Sense to join Ricky on the ground safely.
Everyone: Leave!
Pretty self-explanatory. Kamau will take a little damage on hide armor turns, but he got plenty to spare and even dauntless as a backup.
This plan is not safe as there will be a further debuff next turn that allows the rat king to hurt kamau, and dauntless can only be triggered once
Even if pollen gets so ridiculously bad that it reduces Kamau’s defense to zero, we can always pivot the plan into leaving on turn 51 while covered by dauntless, in which case we will still end up with equal or slightly better loot than leaving this turn.
We cannot do so if dauntless happens now because of pollen.
Rat king only have 5 atk.
Kamau have 12 def pre-pollen and 7 hp.
Even if pollen were to massively double next turn to -8 instead of the usual increase by 1, Kamau would only take a single measly point of damage.
For dauntless to trigger, pollen would have to be way past rock-fall-everyone-dies level of crazy at -14. And that is if negative def even work that way in the first place.
LSN wants this done. What if instead of pollen doubling, something a lot nastier than the rat king shows up? We should be out turn 50.
In that case, this is the best plan as we pivot into a turn 51 exit variant.
Not that it’s likely, we had the last roaming monster on turn 42 and this one showed up on turn 48. And, as we learned from the rat king, they don’t attack on that turn. And, few monsters have more atk than a rat king with none of them having >7 atk.
But let’s consider a big monster does appear, say, an owlbear(6 atk) and that it attacks on the same turn it appears unlike the rat king. In that case… we’re perfectly fine and leave on 51 as I said above.
I get that LSN wants to finish up on this dungeon. This is an “pack up our nearby loot ASAP to leave” plan. Not an “walk halfway across the dungeon to grab barn loot piles”, let alone “then walk all the way back to unlock a chest”.
If you think LSN is the kind of person who would go “Screw you, 20 scorpions suddenly appear and attack. You die.” for not doing exactly what they want right-this-moment, they would have done so last turn as we picked a multi-turn exit framework instead of leaving straight away.
And at that point, why even give us agency at all instead of making a regular comic? This is a collaborative creation where we do our best to explore dungeons with timer-like mechanics that LSN’s design placed. I feel they have been, overall, fairly balanced.
But oh well, the current votes seem to be headed for another plan anyway. Such is democracy. Maybe my experience with DMs have been less railroad-y than most.
Actually, we’re basing this on our experience of this DM – he is not exactly the 20-scorpions guy, but he’s not that far away. Please browse the archives… We left literally by the skin of our teeth, one turn away from death, in:
-The Warrens
-The Chapel
-The Manor
-The Rat Vault.
This is not a good safety track record. In fact we have been continuously skating on the edge of LSN’s leniency.
And LSN has been continuously telegraphing, including spoken commentary, that we will be punished for continuing on past turn 50. At this point, if we vote for a plan that plans for staying past 50 and he kills us because we unable to leave at t50, I will consider it fair, because we have been warned. The sudden -4 def debuff that nearly remorsed Kamau and killed Maca, the appearance of chickens, the appearance of the rat king, his literally predicting out loud on Twitch that we should be have been out of the dungeon earlier this week…
I predict that any plan we do now will activate Dauntless. But if Kamau is still locked on combat afterwards – and he will be – nothing could save him on t51, save, perhaps, nobody taking any actions and everyone just leaving in a desperate, untested and unproven attempt to prevent combat. Ergo, the same as leaving now.
Do I think it’d be fairer if we were given a true bag of holding to stop our inventory woes, given the huge gold sinks we have now, including the (to me, as a lore buff) not-optimal-game-design-practice(to say the least) of locking lore behind gold purchases? Or at least allowed to loot in peace? Yes, I do. Do I expect that we will be granted such mercy, ever? No, I don’t.
Even a true bag of holding has a weight limit. Molly alone is a pretty generous holding boost, with her distributed packs.
Is and isn’t – even with her around, there is no way we could ever carry everything out, even if we completed the dungeon.
Perhaps another two of her would do the trick. Or even a produce bag (inb4 rat chest being bag oh produce holding)
Re-reading the last few turns to the dungeons you mentioned, I see half of them caused purely by us poorly handling existing threats and the other half being calculated and purposefully timed exit part of the well-planned framework to get as much loot as possible.
To be specific:
-The Warrens. We calculated and tracked the existing threat of the Justicar and his soldiers to execute a plan that let us kill and loot the boss with perfect timing before leaving.
-The Chapel. We made a rookie mistake in not interposing the existing threat of the dungeon boss, exposing Ricky.
-The Manor. We sent a low hp Ricky to hit-and-run the existing threat of a explicitly intelligent dungeon boss instead of just letting Lara handle it(whyyyy??)
-The Rat Vault. We actually had an extra turn here? We left on 19 when the threat of rising water would cause damage for ending turn on 20. But we got all the reachable loot so might as well leave.
In all 4 of your examples, we either purposely left on that turn or made a mistake against known/existing threats. No magic BS suddenly happening to mess us up. I feel like the protests again this plan are the equivalent of “It’s unsafe to take a turn to kill salamander, what if Justicar magically teleport a bunch of guards on us and they get to attack on the same turn!? LSN wants us to leave!!”.
Obviously, any plan can be called unsafe if we make up OP new threats/exaggerate existing ones well beyond previously shown growth. But this plan handle existing threats to what I feel is all reasonable degrees. The telegraphs you’re mentioning look like standard “Dungeon gets harder over time, here’s some more timer mechanics” to me (except Twitch, idk about that, I’m only here), not “The sky will suddenly fall on your heads on 50”
Let’s review what we know and their progression:
-We got threat of pollen that jumped to -4 def and will grow this turn; this plan handle it and is the best even if we get another -4 to -8, even if it triples, we can just pivot to safely leave on 51.
-We got threat of incoming animals from the right on turn 42 and 48 that do not attack on screen enter; this plan handle 20 scorpions by pivoting if something appear on 50 at all, and even if the new incoming animals get to magically attack on spawn unlike the previous ones, we are still on track for pivoting against anything reasonable like an owlbear.
Sorry for getting rant-y. I’m kinda frustrated that we’ve invested all that time and resources on healing Kamau (How many corn spears did he eat? Those are worth more than a full stack of duplicate produce each!) and then not leverage it at the perfect time to (safely, I personally still believe) leave with much more gold.
At this point in the state of the votes, I’m just hoping that you’re right and that LSN did say on Twitch that the sky will fall on our head on 50, that it does fall to trigger dauntless as we leave and that I was just an out-of-the-loop casual reader so I can get the relief of a bullet dodged instead of bittersweet vindication.
He did say, again, today, that he should have done the wrapup today, but we have been fucking around (his words) in this dungeon. I would hope you’re right, but the risk is unfortunately too high.
We could just, you know, roleplay instead of minmax every situation with spreadsheet math. But the players are going to play how they like, and no DM can, or should, change that.
I do not understand what you mean, sorry. Roleplay can mean so many different things that you ended up not being clear. What exactly do you mean?
If you mean playing while not paying attention to the numbers, that would kill us in short order.
You know what could help incredibly much with roleplaying? Actually knowing something about the character you are trying to portrait. And… – unless I am mistaken in the assumption about the individual rooms being needed in order to progress the character’s story/remove the bond caps – in order to learn something about the characers in our group, we need to do what?… oh, right. spend a whopping 50 gold each.
Now, if getting gold was as easy as sitting around, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for it to fall from the sky, then gathering it up by the zounds, I would be all for doing that, and role-play my fingertips off to the best of my abilities while the chars wait. (Not that LSN actually lets us decide very often what or even when our characters say something to each other…)
But unfortunately, until/unless this becomes a valid option, we are stuck with tying to get as much (monetary value) out of every dungeon our party goes to, while taking as little harm (damage to/loss of equipment and/or characters) as possible in order to learn more about our protagonists.
Many of the players don’t even like it.
But it’s not as if they got much of a choice, if they want to learn more about the characters’ backstories.
I know I certainly wouldn’t mind if a more casual approach would still bringing “enough profit” to progress at a sensible pacing (I would hope for being able to afford at least one upgrade of the manor after each dungeon, while still being able to kit out our char for the next one) and we wouldn’t be forced to be “mathemancers”. (credit to Erfworld comic for that word, at least I first read it there.)
If you recall, we couldn’t even afford to buy gear for the dungeon and get any upgrade to the manor last intermission.
(Although I admit in hindsight that buying 2 sets of thieves tools seems excessive when going to a mostly outdoor location. Then again, hindsight is always 20/20. 😛 If the “careful thief” skill hadn’t triggered as often, we might have needed all 3 sets.)
So yeah, maybe you kindly could elaborate how you expect people to “roleplay”, I’m very curious what you are envisioning.
*applause*
Turn 52?!
Shh… don’t tempt LSN into getting sued!
Jokes aside, 52 is the ideal case but I designed this plan to be fully capable of pivoting into an turn 51 exit with still more loot than any other plan if turn 50 pollen is really bad.
Correction: turn 51.
LSN confirmed leaving does not require mov, hence this plan.
Kamau: move left, climb up rope, untie rope, letting it fall down the tree to the grass, drop down to treehouse screen’s floor.
Ricki: Grab the corn spear and shield (or onions instead of shield, if the shield is somehow too far), then go up and left.
Maca: get the full stack of eggs, the full stack of carrots, go up, left.
Lohk: drop tomato, mom senses to ricki near treehouse screen, get rope
All: only once everyone is near each other at the treehouse screen, leave the dungeon! Definitely run directly into the 4th wall to get out of the dungeon. Once out, alert farmers that Manny the Mammoth should be docile now.
This is a variation on Jerf’s original framework, given the inventory ended up somewhat different than expected.
With Kamau running away from Rat King while everyone else approach it before moving away, I don’t feel safe that it won’t kill one of our smalls.
Also, the shield and the spear are in two different piles. Does picking both really still counts as one action?
I am not sure about the shield, but the corn spear is priority for next dungeon, so I left in a conditional to take onions if we can’t take shield.
No other character will go near rat king’s current position, so it should attack kamau, who aggroed it – this is the same discussion we had over spider targeting. It was, at the time, decided that unintelligent enemies shouldn’t swap targets on a whim. Especially since I suspect that it will be able to damage Kamau next turn.
We don’t know what it’s even doing though. It stayed because it was attacked but if it isn’t attacked it might continue its mission of finding snacks.
Kamau has food on him, so it should be attracted to Kamau. On that criteria, everyone is equally targettable, but kamau aggroed him.
In the spider’s case, Kamau moved toward the spider to steal its chest before anything. Here, Kamau just retreat from the fight and even leave the screen so I feel like the targeting might not be the same.
No worries. Posted an alternate.
Alternate plan (safer, but loses the rope)
Kamau: interpose
Maca: grab full stacks of eggs and carrots, move up.
Lohk: drop the tomato, get your shield, go up
Ricki: grab corn spear and onions, go up, Leave once everyone is nearby.
PSA: LSN wants us to leave right now. By his stream comments, we should already be out. Next turn’s debuff will likely be a doozy, making it impossible to fight the rat king further.
inb4 every party member just starts puking every turn from the debuff at turn 50
— ‘Meddle not in the affairs of the DM, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.’
My DM is not a dragon. But I am…
Siv…? Was that downvote you?
…
No? Why should it? Unless there was a misclick somewhere.
For posterity: this was correct. It was confirmed on stream that past this point there were not safe plays.
Alternate to the “get rope” plan (safer, but sacrifices an onion)
Kamau: drop one singular onion to bait the rat king, move left, climb up rope, untie rope, letting it fall down the tree to the grass, drop down to treehouse screen’s floor.
Ricki: Grab the corn spear and shield (or onions instead of shield, if the shield is somehow too far), then go up and left.
Maca: get the full stack of eggs, the full stack of carrots, go up, left.
Lohk: drop tomato, mom senses to ricki near treehouse screen, get rope
All: only once everyone is near each other at the treehouse screen, leave the dungeon! Definitely run directly into the 4th wall to get out of the dungeon. Once out, alert farmers that Manny the Mammoth should be docile now.
“Untie rope” might be an action. “Mom sense” might require an action additional to using movement (using the abilities fireball and heal are actions and cost “star”). Transfer rope from Kamau to Lohk: requiring an action of each one (even if the rope is on the floor in the meantime but in the same turn). If the total of actions of either Lohk or Kamau is greater than one, than this doesn’t work. And it risks the shield (20 gold) for the rope (8 gold). I prefer your alternate safe plan.
Mom senses does not require an action, explicitly.
But the transfer thing is a very good point, one I forgot about.
I am not entirely sure it applies though, because it is like kamau was battling the rope, so to say, it doesn’t go into his inventory at any point… We’ll see.
An additional passive action for Ricki: talk more with our new friends. Ask what her name is or if she needs a name. Ask how she feels about the farm in general.
Unfortunately, we cannot direct that 🙁 that is at LSN’s discretion, even if we use an action for that – he did ignore our request to use Lohk’s action to talk to the dryad
Ricki: Grab Corn Spear 3 Eggs. Head up.
Mac: Grab 5 Carrots and 3 Onions. Head up, drop your Onions by Kamau, and head left.
Kamau: Punch the Rat King.
Lohk: Drop your Tomato and grab the Shield. Head up.
Sets us up to maximize produce gathered without pulling Kamau away from the Rat King and risking remorse, and lets us leave next turn.
After this, Kamau will pick up the 3 Onions while Mac takes a trip leftward to grab 5 more carrots, then rejoin us so we can escape the dungeon.