Dungeon 2 Turn 33
————
Ricki leaves behind a spare dagger and her empty mug, then brings the potion of healing and the oven mitts up to Kamau, who in turn gives HER all of his items that start with “buck”. Together they then attack the drunks, focusing on the blue one.
The drunk takes heavy damage but doesn’t quite fall yet. All the drunks continue to attack Kamau, and one of them lands a good hit, but he takes no damage due to a combination of armour, drunkenness, and soft cloth mitts which protect him from the burning torch. The fact that Kamau is wearing only one of the pair of mitts is no impediment to their function because he only has one arm to protect, by the way. But if Ricki tried to get away with only wearing one that wouldn’t work.
Kamau’s snale-induced buzz wears off once again.
Another fight turn. Ricki should finish off the damaged drunk, Kamau can move on to the next
She can’t, unless she uses the Rusty Sword. Drunks have 2 defense (see turn 17). Kamau can take that one down on his own this turn and Ricki can’t do much to change it, so if we come up with something else that could be neat.
It’s still worth working together, drunks have 5 HP so Kamau on his own takes 3 turns while one turn of Ricki’s help cuts it to 2 turns.
Thought: Kamau can armor up again and safely escort Ricki back over to the dying guy, especially once we take out one of the drunks. Once there’s only two of them then that’s 2 expected damage plus the torch plus 3 from the snale, so the mitts plus armor and bucket would be enough without a crit. That said, we want to avoid taking extra attacks that could break the buckler so that Ricki will be able to take the shield with her into the crawlspaces, so taking down at least one more drunk would be good.
Nevermind, mitts only defend against fire. None of the rest is new information.
Good to know about the mitts. That was my concern last turn. We can make Kamau incredibly tanky if wereallyneed to.3 base+1 leather (or +3 rusty chain armor)+1 mitts+1 bucket+1 cheap ale+0 weapon (or +1 cracked buckler)—At this moment we can give him 6 defense with no resources lost, and we had the potential to raise his defense to 10.10 doesn’t help us much now obviously, but at least we know that we can (and should expect) a lot of stat stacking in the game moving forward. I don’t think we’ll commonly face high defense enemies because of how game balance works, but at least we know that stats have the potential to get crazy.Consider this: Daggers add 1 Attack. Swords add 2 Attack. Traditionally Greatswords are bigger and deal more damage, so they’d probably add 3 Attack. Kamau has Greatsword Proficiency for +1 Attack with Greatsword-type weapons. Give him the right weapon and that’d be a baseline 7 Attack.
It’s also possible that all Greatswords are two-handed weapons, making the Greatsword proficiency more of a backstory hint. Who knows though, perhaps he was strong enough to swing the full sword of his broken hilt around one-handed, or he might get the option to attach some weird mutant/mechanical extra arm
My thought against common high-tank enemies was that Ricki, at best, could gain 5 Attack at level 3 for a single round while targeting the same enemy another ally is attacking (Ambush 1, Backstab 1, Dagger prof). Reliably she could only gain 3 Attack, either a rusty sword or dagger+prof, meaning it would be nearly impossible to explore/complete high-level dungeons if enemies were anywhere near as tanky as Kamau is at level 1. And if we have to fight them more than once? No way. That’s why I think enemies will generally have lower stats than a comparable ally, except for special enemies like the Snale.
Kamau is also a special “unit”, designed specifically to counterbalance Ricki’s lack of combat ability. It’s same to assume the next party member will fit somewhere between the two. Ricki has a max stat total of 7, Kamau has 21, or 2 and 6 if we don’t include HP.
Kamau: KO the blue drunk.
Ricki: Carefully avoid damage from the broken glass and head up the ladder, taking a peek at the room above. Use your action to come back down to this room.
Hmm, by my count that’d be 2 from the crit, 2 from the non-crits, and 1 from the torch. The drunkenness was there, but I don’t think it was necessary, Kamau’s baseline 3 plus the leather armor is enough for the untyped damage and the oven mitts handle the torch.
We’d be done with the drunks by turn 38, cutting that down to as early as turn 36 if next turn Ricki uses the Rusty Longsword so that the two of them can take a drunk down in one turn.
I was going to remark last turn that Kamau ended up tipsy despite soaking all the snale damage, but that’s not quite right, he did take 1 damage total that turn. I’m curious if he’ll still be tipsy if he takes 0 damage on a turn with a snale attack.
Point of clarification on my strategy for sending Ricki to the key room with the rats: Using the wand on the normal rats (1 HP, 0 Def) will wipe out that rat guaranteed. The dire rat is riskier (3 HP, 1 Def) but if it’s on its own then its 2 Attack could be soaked much easier. Ricki needs to spend at least two turns in there to close the valve and take the keys, and since it takes all of our gear to put her at 4 Def (armor, shield, bucket, booze), I like the sound of making that a little safer.
I really like your idea, and I’m hoping (against hope) that the wand will last. I mean armour, shield, bucket and booze are 4 items already, with the wand it’s 5, so once the wand breaks, Ricki would have no weapon to fight the remainder of the rats.
Of course we can have Ricki drink the cheap ale first (in the previous turn) and the leave the empty mug behind, but then we could only take the rust sword (might break, too) OR a dagger (less damage, takes more time against the dire rat) with us. And the advantage of not being able to miss from the wand would also be gone, so Ricki might whiff her attacks with the “replacement” weapon, more often than not. (Bucket is 50% miss chance and ale is another 20 % iirc.).
Besides, we only have ONE cheap ale atm. And – assuming that the changing position of the switch near the rogues did have consequences to what comes out of the tap – in order to get more of that, we’d either have to unlock the gate, where the one snale was, or turn the switch back into its original position.
Also, I didn’t think of this before, but the “cheap ale” might have been a result of THREE snales sucking the alcohol out of the beer (as well as the cheez contaminating it). It’s possible that we can’t reproduce those circumstances, now that one of the snales is dead and there’s only two of them left, and therefore we’ll get some other product out of the tap, even if we put the rogue switch back into its original position.
She only needs to wipe out one regular rat with the wand to cut the damage from 4 to 3, at which point we’re safe even if one piece of defensive gear is lost. If the wand survives to shoot the other rat then that lets us avoid risking the shield. I’d recommend switching to dagger or sword to finish the dire rat without bucket on head, using a turn of flipping valve or grabbing keys to use movement to head back through the tunnel and swap out equipment.
Don’t really need to finish the dire rat, but tails won’t drop until they’re all dead so might as well go for gold.
After finishing the drunks, we need to remember to bring the healing potion to the poisoned guy.
Just checked the map and Ricki will only need to solo 2 rats and a dire rat to flip a lever and get a key. The other hole (non rogue one) just has more dire rats and loot. We should be able flip the other 2 with Kamau’s help.
We could get cheez out of the tap near the entrance and try to use it like cheese, i.e. distract the rats with it (while Ricki gets some keys, switches a lever etc.).
half arms permit half equipment, apparently.
Perhaps if Ricki was one-armed as well we could use one pair of mitts/gloves/gauntlets to equip both?
though that would likely mess up the sword+shield deal, unless Ricki can pull off both on one arm.