Dungeon 2 Turn 42
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Ricki raises her wand, ready to unerringly smite a rodent! The rats sense her hostile intent and rush forward to counterattack, but can’t deal any damage through all her defenses. One of the smallest rats gets obliterated by a magic missile.
Ricki enjoys a moment of celebration at not immediately breaking the bent wand after using it for the first time!
Kamau swats the snale, but can’t quite kill it in a single attack.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Ricki: Grab the keys and book it
Kamau: Keep attacking the snale
We should only take one point of damage, but since the Prophet of Rust never misses
(THE BUCKET HAS A 10% CHANCE HOW IN THE FUCK), we should evacuate instead fighting all the rats. Kamau will receive 1 more remorse, but it should be okay.I got greedy and foolishly thought we wouldn’t lose a 1/10, maybe we should have grabbed the keys from the start OTL
For those not in the discord, LSN has sworn that he’s not doing this on purpose.
Damned RNG. LSN, are you sure you are NOT using the famous IEEE-approved version?https://xkcd.com/221/
I hate that I have to join a chat server with people who are 24/7 online just to figure out everything that’s going on in this game. I want it all here in comments.
First of all, you -are- getting everything that is going on in this game here on the comic page and the comments.
Secondly, both CombatDoctor and (on a different occasion) LSN were graciously adding “bonus” information that they casually chatted about (on the chat server) here into the comments, so players that are not using discord (like me for most of the time and apparently you) would have it available, too. You should be thanking LSN and CombatDoctor for being so kind, but instead you are complaining.
For example of how else it could be handled, allow me to tell how it works at the goblins comic: the creator (today known as Ellipsis) used to hold streaming sessions where they (today she, but back then they represented as their biological innate gender still, I’m not trying to dead-name or dead-gender her here, I’m just trying to avoid confusion in case anyone ever did watch/listen to those streams and distinctly remembers a male voice/speaker. I have nothing but respect for Ellipsis and I want her to be happy and healthy and absolutely not tread on her toes emotionally or worse, cause her disphoria by my wordings! I’m not sure if Elli is streaming these days, so I had to talk about my experience back then.) talked about all kinds of bonus information and not only had you be online at – for Europeans ridiculously inconvenient – certain, yet irregular times of day in order to be able to catch any of these streams, but also nearly none of that bonus information was added to the comic or the forums (at least not to my knowledge). plus the (majority of the) streams were not recorded, so if you weren’t there to hear it from the mouth of the creator right when they spoke, you were screwed.
Thirdly, joining the discord server is free of charge and you don’t even need to register your name, so it wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to sign up. And when I last looked there, there weren’t tons of posts made each day, but a somewhat moderate number, easy to keep track of/catch up on, if you look into the chat once a day. Because those posts stay there forever, as far as I understand the nature of discord.
I tried it out myself, so I know for sure that they did stay there for however long I was part of that channel. I just didn’t want to stay there, because of the language that gets used sometimes. (e.g. LSN himself called all the people in the channel “fuckers” – or something similarly offensive, I don’t want to go back there just to check that out – when he announced an update. That’s not a noun/name I -ever- want to be addressed as by -any-one. So I left.) But if you don’t have an issue with such things, you have every opportunity to join in on those conversations and read up on what was discussed at any point in the past, too.
@LSN, if this is considered off-topic or otherwise unacceptable, I apologize in advance, please just let me know and I’ll stop talking/arguing about this. I just felt that Tiltowaits post was kind of uncalled for and that he lacked some of the information about how discord works, so I wanted to provide some perspective and additional knowledge. I’m not trying to pick a fight.
I think Ricki should fight the rat. It will probably attack when we try to get the keys and we’ll have to pull the leaver its also guarding sooner or later.
Kamau: keep fighting the snale.
Ricki: magic missile the other small rat. (If possible, as first action, in lieu of moving and before the fight: pick up the keys, too. If that’s not an option, stick with JUST the combat action.)
I think it is better to try and remove the threat from this area here, while we got the chance. Yes, Ricki will take one more damage (unless one of the rats for some reason whiffs their attack), but a) she will take this point of damage anyways, even if we have her just grab the keys and run, and b) she still has 2 defence (one from the thank-the-powers-that-be unbreakable leather armour and one from the ale she drunk, for 3 more turns.) That should be enough to deal with the dire rat, on its own, and once there is only the dire rat left, Ricki can go past it unharmed back and forth as often as she needs to, as long as she’s buzzed (and wearing the leather armour).
Also, while I do believe LSN that he is not messing with us, the dice clearly ARE. I mean what are the odds? (…and that’s a rhetorical question, I don’t want the actual math. 😉 )
Ah well, at least we have enough inventory space now to actually pick up the keys. 😛
EDIT: Since we can convert an action into an additional movement, maybe it works the other way around, too? So in order to try this out, I edited in the attempt for Ricki to pick up the keys before the combat (but not instead of it).
For this particular outcome, 2.1% (0.3*0.1*0.7). 3% for losing both destructible defense sources.
Agreed that we need to do two things here. The problem is that now we have to spend the two remaining turns of drunkenness after this turn of wand to do those two things, as defeating the dire rat would require two hits in a row including the rusty sword or a max damage wand, while drunk. We don’t have that time, character sheet says we only have three turns of alcohol left. This count is a little odd, it includes the turn of drinking against the 5 turns of effect vs the snale attack which starts counting from the turn after the attack lands. We don’t even have time to use Grit until we’re out of there.
If at least ranged attacks resolved before melee attacks then that’d be something, but the wording here suggests that rats counterattacked immediately and we did need all four defense. This is distinct from how the snale countered after Kamau missed, so maybe that was different.
I think I might have worded my other post a bit misleadingly, so just to clarify: I don’t want Ricki to try and kill the dire rat, too, because that would take probably 3 more turns (I’m fully expecting either the wand to break next turn, or to deal only 1 damage per turn to the dire rat, and once the wand is broken, we’d do 1 damage TOPS per turn – 30% miss chance while drunk and only a dagger on Ricki to help her attack) and with the weird ale turn count that would mean another point of damage per turn for her after the ale wears off. (Plus she’ll die from the second to next point of damage anyway. 😛 )
But if we kill the normal rat, the dire rat won’t be able to hurt Ricki (as long as she is buzzed and wears the leather armour), so we will be able to pull the lever and pick up the keys, even if that would take two turns (iirc. picking up things – like inventory swaps – doesn’t count as action, so we might be able to spend one turn to flip the switch AND pick up the keys AND leave through the rat tunnel) without accumulating more remose and get Ricki killed. Afterwards (= on the other end of the tunnel, in relative safety), she definitely should use Grit.
The advantage of killing the regular rat vs not killing the regular rat is that we can have Ricki (who is the only one to fit through the tunnels) return safely in case we need to flip the switch again for whatever reason, as long as we give her the armour and something else that gives at least +1 Def. (There is one more cheap ale where the first snale died and another one will drop from the one Kamau is fighting atm, so even if whatever comes out of the tap now – or after we flip the key switch – doesn’t offer a raise in Def value, we should have a decent chance to use some of that cheap ale for making Ricki more tank-y if the need arises.)
According to CombatDoctor’s map we need to flip this switch to shut down the cheez flow, but without flipping switch number 2 the cheez will still flow through the pipe behind the wall, i.e. we can flip this switch here and still get cheez out of the tap in the first room. If Ricki has the HP & time to flip it (after getting the keys), she should flip it.
My own post was similarly misleading. I am in full agreement, we need to cut this room down to just the dire rat, grab keys, flip lever, and leave.
We’d normally be able to grab the keys without an action, but they are being guarded by rats so it’ll probably take an action due to active combatants, like with the thrown dagger. That said, we did pull the rats over to the opening by using a ranged attack, so maybe the keys are unguarded. Let’s try to do both valve and keys next turn.
If we do go back in here, note that we may have the dire rat at the entrance immediately attacking on entry, so we should be ready for a fight before going through the tunnel. I think we need to really focus on finishing the dungeon over trying for more loot, though.
Another added tidbit: it seems rats can see in the dark (makes sense). There is no torch on this screen. The bucket had a good run at least.
I am sooo glad we didn’t do my earlier idea of just running past the rats,grab the keys and run back. We would have died 🙁
Idea for the future: go to the tap in the first room, check whether cheez can fix Ricki’s malnourished status, check whether cheez is fit to distract rats. (Fill the glasses with cheez, give cheez to rats.) By the way: “Of course” Ricki dropped the bottle of the used healing potion… If Ricki gets lost at some point in the future, we only need to follow her trail of litter. (OK, she is innocent of bucket and shield pieces spilled on the floor, but they are there nevertheless.)