Dungeon 15 Turn 44
————
Ricki makes her way back to the lower levels of the dungeon. On the way, Amadeusz feeds her a potion of poison resistance on his way up.
Looks like Paws has left.
Ricki meets up with Sue, who has recently tied off a rope to make the lower left areas more accessible.
Lara continues alone to the right and tosses her webbed morsel to the spider there. It immediately chomps into the silken mass and starts slurping down on whatever was inside. It is now in a food coma and won’t attack unless agitated.
The drider and arachnomancer attack Lara, but even after using the drider’s poison gland, they can’t get through her huge Def against poison.
Ricki: move right . Tell Daisy to STAY on the left side of the room. attack Arachnomancer (12 damage – 10 = 2 Damage, 8 HP remains)
Sue: switch to death robes. move Right, throw Shocktail at Drider (9 damage – 3 Def = 6, 9 HP remains.)
Lara: mive right, then left, attack Arachnomancer with Venom Blade, dont wield shield. (11 damage, Arachnomancer ded)
Wolf: Up, right, action right.
Gets eyes on 2 braziers on t45 and wolf in position to transform and dirge to make HP leave if we need to.
Are we sure Lara will see end-of-turn patrol spawns on the lower right if she is doing her action and ending turn in another room?
Edit to Claudious’ plan cuz I’m paranoid a patrol can spawn to the right on end of turn and Lara wont see it if she leave to fight in another room. Like, we are totally fucked if it happens and we go right not expecting it.
This delay the dirge idea but prevent the immediate worst case scenario.
Ricki: move right . Tell Daisy to STAY on the left side of the room. attack Arachnomancer (12 damage – 10 = 2 Damage, 8 HP remains)
Sue: switch to death robes. move Right, throw Shocktail at Drider (9 damage – 3 Def = 6, 9 HP remains.)
Lara: Attack Arachnomancer with Venom Blade (10 damage, Arachnomancer ded)
Wolf: Right. Down. Action Right.
What exactly is the worst case scenario being avoided here?
I think it’s that a patrol will spawn bottom right and attack Lara as soons as she moves right?
If that’s true I don’t see that as a possibility. All summons happen at end of turn
No, its on the turn right after.
Let’s say we see no patrol on 45 with your plan so we go for the bottom right brazier on 46.
The worst case scenario is game over on 46 because turns out a patrol did spawn there at end of turn on 45 and Lara didn’t get to see it because your plan has her leave brazier room to do her action in another room so she was gone by the time they spawned.
Like, unless someone can confirm we see end of turn spawns in a room even if we do our action and end turn elsewhere, I feel safer with having amad end his turn with eyes on that room so we are sure there are no patrol there if he doesn’t see one.
We can always poke out head over first before breaking brazier.
I know we like to joke about the evil DM, but LSN doesn’t really deliberately pull ‘gotchas’ with information gathering in an attempt to kill our characters like that. At least in my experience.
I can’t say for absolute certain that if enemies are spawned in the bottom right that we will definitely see them there just by having Lara check the room momentarily, but I think it’s not unlikely that we do.
And at the very least, we’ll have eyes to see if the Arachnomancer summons spiders in her little hidey hole if Wolf is up above her, which could be just as vital to know if there’s any spiders converging on us from the bottom left.
I’m under the impression that LSN is the sort of DM that will neither cheat in your favor, nor against you (including gotchas), unless players are being way too annoying with their cheat attempts (staying too long in a dungeon when it has been made clear it’s getting more dangerous, trying to play around too much with action economy).
A couple of questions:
1 – Any particular reasons y’all have done everything you can to avoid solving the Kill All The Red Spiders Puzzle Chest?
(The Puzzle Chest is exactly the same colour as the red spiders* and every time there has been a Puzzle chest it has been colour coded to it’s solution… thematically speaking.)
B – Is there a reason y’all are trying to “ambush” the High Priestess instead of just destroying all but one brazier to reduce the places she can teleport to? If we destroy all but one brazier, there are two
(or more)likely possible outcomes: She parks it at the last brazier summoning spiders and reinforcements until we whack her, or she loses it and goes “rogue” “wandering the dungeon” till we find her and whack her. My guess? She’d park it in that one known location to summon in reinforcements.* I’m tempted to call them Killer Spiders, following the naming schema so far (Killer Scorpion, Killer Centipede). But they aren’t in the Enemy Codex, hint, hint GM…
Γ – Can we play with conditionals in our orders? An “If X then Y, otherwise Z”?
Frex “Ricki and Sue move in A3 bottom tunnel (avoiding traps) with pets, if and only if High Priestess is in room return to B3 up rope, then pull rope behind them; otherwise kill Spider while pets stay out of melee.” I haven’t paid enough attention to know if that has been tried in past dungeons and shot down, or if it’s allowed, or if it’s never been tried (I’ve really only paid close attention to this dungeon as I caught myself up).
100 – How often does LoneStar update? I’m too lazy to go back and look at dates…
Strategically speaking: This is the map as far as I understand it;
There are five chests and a Puzzle chest left unlooted. One of those chests could be easily looted by Ricki, Daisy, Sue, and Molly (once Diasy is healed up) or possibly just Ricki alone? I’m unsure of how much Atk those Purple Widows have and there are three of them guarding the chest in A1 (Though now that I mention it, do we really want to go about killing widows? They have kids to feed and are single mothers… 😛 ).
All the Killer Spiders should be killed, because I’m sure that will open the Puzzle Chest and I’m 99% sure the White Widow is “meant” as a pet for Lara.
Then the braziers should be systematically destroyed until only one is left. My recommendation (in this roughish order):
Heal Daisy.
-Finish clearing lower tunnel in C3.†
-Kill the spiders† in A3, leave the brazier alone.
-Kill the Killer Spiders in A2.
-Loot the last chest in A1, kill the Purple Widows.†
This leaves all A sectors “cleared” (not accounting for HPriestess tp’ing in and summoning).
-Kill the Drider in C1 (it’s a mercy killing†).
-Kill Killer Spiders in D1, destroy brazier. Possibly have Lara or someone who can tank poison next to Puzzle
TrapChestin case it is a trapto collect new white spoder pet.-Clear† C1 and D1 lower tunnels and destroy brazier. Loot chest.
-Somewhere in there have Ricki pop into the Imp’s room and loot the chest. It’s not like this Imp is trapped in anyway, so I doubt it’s hostile. We can probably walk past and ignore it like we do the PET MA- I mean the Pet Master.
This sets us up for the HPriestess being ‘trapped’ in the lower far left ready to be jacked by the party.
† Now you might ask: Why is he advocating almost going full murder-hobo on this dungeon? Because I doubt y’all will go for my Full Murder-Hobo plans… but seriously, A-finish Puzzle Trap and B-if the High Priestess goes “rogue” or off script and starts pulling in the remaining spiders, driders, and Arachnomancers as reinforcements (this has been a threat in previous dungeons), then we’ve reduced the numbers she can pull.
Plan “Full Murder-Hobo” (just in case some of y’all are into my vibes):
While any non-Imp foes that can be reached and killed by the Bigguns alone (Lara and Amadeusz) are being whacked, Team Smalls (Ricki and Sue) goes and kill everything only reachable through tunnels. I mean I’m pretty sure Ricki can solo those rooms alone (I have no idea how to count their scores up, they don’t make sense to me) but it would be faster if Sue piles in once enough threat is lowered enough that she can also tank the enemies (and kill them faster with two, or even with pets once numbers are lowered enough – I’m looking at the Wolf Spider room).
I mean, kill everything except the Imp. We have no idea how rough it is. Side note, if while finishing the looting we come across a Magic Lens I suggest we scry the Imp… be nice to know if we can send it back to hell where it belongs.
None of this is meant as “current turn actions”, because I doubt I can pull sway for the next turn. But if I get enough people upvoting, I’ll start submitting turn actions.
(Also, I just caught up, I’ve spent the last three days binging this one, I think I’ll go read WSWfG next… and once I’ve got money, the ‘prequels’ and other Ko-fi stories.)
1. Time. Killing everything takes a lot of time and other things take precedent. And we dont exactly know the opening condition of the puzzle chest. (Though yeah it is probably killing Spiders/Killer Spiders).
B. Time. There are character-killing encounters at or in the way of almost every brazier, and it would be too long to prep for and break each and every one while also keeping our characters at a safe HP.
There are a few chests left. yeah. Purple Widows do something like 6 damage each. so Ricki could feasibly get that chest herself by spending some hp, but Daisy could get trapped in the web and there is a widow sitting on top of the chest so it would have to be killed first.
Remaining chests are behind some very deadly encounters as well. The Imp and Wolfspider chests could again be gotten by Ricki if we spent the time to get it, but she is pretty important to our endgame and is needed elsewhere.
Also keep in mind we dont get infinite time in every dungeon to do whatever we want. Turn 40 summoned 2 extra regular spiders, but turn 45 and beyond will probably get exponentially worse until we’ve hit a state where we either abandon or die trying.
In theory, having infinite knowledge from the start and creating the perfect loadout and party comp to steamroll every dungeon and achieving every objective with no risk of death sounds nice, but is basically never possible. We dont have infinite hp, we dont know the enemies stats, we don’t even know what the dungeon looks like until we have seen every room.
I very much recommend WSWfG! Probably my all time favorite webcomic personally.
Finally, welcome to the comic! Hope to see more of you, you seem really into the game like the rest of us. If you’re interested, consider joining the Discord. Theres a bunch of us there regularly coming up with strategies and future plans, Im 100% sure you would fit right in.
Answering other questions, conditionals are funky and generally not allowed, unsure of the exact line, but when asked about whether or not we could have a character use a healing wand simply on “whoever got damaged”, LSN has said no.
Dungeon Eyes typically updates twice on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, once in the afternoon and once at night. But sometimes turns or days have to get missed for various reasons.
Welcome!
As Sick explained, we are always short on time (ie actions). With so many unknowns (enemy stats, dungeon layout, heck sometimes how to actually clear the dungeon) it is a fine line between being reckless and being efficient.
We have almost gotten killed by going to fast and we’ve also almost failed for going to slow. LSN is very good at keeping us on our toes and throwing curve balls.
Right now, we’ve passed the “soft timer” turn 40. Which is when things start getting harder very quickly so we need to wrap this up asap which means forgoing some chests sadly.
If you don’t want to or can’t join the discord, please do share your thoughts and theories here. I enjoy these discussions and is why I’m a huge fan of LSN’s work.