Dungeon 5 Turn 13
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Ricki descends back down the ladder and escorts Lara across the hidden pressure plates, while Kamau returns from the room below. They all once again shuffle their equipment around, then they all rush the heavily armed thug and easily beat him into submission. Only the spider takes a single point of damage. The thug drops a greatsword and rusty plate armour, both of which the party leaves on the ground for the time being.
Unfortunately, the thug shouted a warning before losing consciousness. Ricki can see the gamblers collect their stuff and abandon their posts, joining the larger group of thugs on the right side of the room.
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GREATSWORD
Weapon
Atk +3, 2-handed.
Weight 1, Cost 12
PLATE ARMOUR, RUSTY
Armour
Def +4, or Def +5 if no accessories are worn on the hands and feet. 30% chance to break after being attacked.
Weight 5, Cost 15
Okay, because we might have to deal with a big gang if the bottom reds join the top ones, let’s plan on consolidating resources and continuing to fight the reds before they get completely organized.
Ricki: Drop the rat tails, rat fang, and shield. Head right while avoiding the pressure plates, then pick up the unguarded potions and bucket. Return to the left, still avoiding the pressure plates, and give Kamau the bucket then pick up the greatsword then wield the greatsword. Join the party to fight the reds above by attacking the halfling with the torch with Lara using the greatsword if it survives her attack. If not, she should attack a dagger wielding halfling and check out the signs as she goes.
Lara: While waiting for Ricki to get back, trade Kamau back his plate armor for your leather armor, boots, and your crit gear. Drop a set of thieves tools, then pick up the rat fang, rat tails, and shield Ricki dropped. Put on the crit gear and armor, then go above with the party to attack the halfling with a torch with Ricki using the longsword and your shield. Spider should attack a halfling with a rusty dagger.
Kamau: While waiting for Ricki to get back, drop a thieves tool. When she returns, reequip your plate armor with the bucket and shield to get to 12 defense. Lead the charge to the next floor and interpose for the party while ignoring your underlying shame and embarrassment about the bucket. Just imagine that if you can’t see the party then they can’t see you looking ridiculous either!
Final note: if it’s possible to do while still doing all of the above fighting, I’d like Ricki to tell Kamau what Macadamia said about ring smiffing requiring permission from the Imperial guard/Emperor. Does that jive with his experience as a guard? Is it weird for a ringsmif shop to be in the kobold warrens, far away from any Imperial guards? If this can’t be done along with the fighting, no sweat, but Kamau was an Imperial guard, wasn’t around for Macadamia’s story, and could point out any inconsistencies in this story. It still makes very little sense to me that such an important service is in such an obscure location.
Benefit of this plan is that it lets us maximize our defense on Kamau and have healing resources immediately available if the two groups combine and do more damage than expected. Right now the operating theory is that the reds seem to have 1 innate damage because the guard at the front only had one innate damage on top of his greatsword. This is extrapolated from the fact that the spider with 3 defense only took 1 damage and greatswords themselves do 3 damage.
Are we sure we need to Attack the same Halfling with Lara & Ricki? Might a bit of overkill and if each of them deals enough damage, we could maybe end this group in 2 turns.
I do prefer that they each took a halfling each. I think we’re being over cautious and the chance to take out possibly all the reds in 3-4 turns could be worth it.
Let’s Lara attack first. If her crits trigger and the halfling is KO or is KO even without the crits, Ricki can attack the next halfling:
Lara: …and attack the torch-wielding halfling using your longsword …
Ricki: … and if the torch-wielding halfling still stands after Lara’s attack, attack him with your broadsword, otherwise attack a rusty-dagger-wielding halfling with your broadsword.
The logic for doubling up is that we don’t actually know the hp of halflings. We could only do a guaranteed max of 5 damage with any character other than Lara by using a rat fang with a rat tail on Ricki or attacking with the spider. So if enemies have anything more than 4 combined armor and defense, splitting the attacks 3 ways would only kill 2 enemies MAX. If enemies do in fact have 4 combined armor and defense, this move kills 2 when splitting would kill 3, but if they have 5, or 6, splitting kills only one or none respectively. If we think 4,5, and 6 are all equally likely and the only possibilities, then splitting is only better in 1/3 of the situations, but worse in all others.
I will say the math is a bit different if we want to use cigs or rat tails. We could get 5 damage on everybody then. I personally think 5/1 is reasonably likely for hp and defense.
Oh sure. I get the math. I just think the 33% chance is worth the gamble. It’s a hunch.
It does not work:
1. The potions do not stack, thus Ricki indeed needs to
dropcarefully lay down the thieves tools and pick them up herself again after giving the bucket to Kamau.2. When Ricki wants to pick up the greatsword, there is no room for this in her inventory. Ricki needs to carefully lay down the lock-picks again, to be picked up by Lara later.
3. Kamau cannot pick up the bucket, unless he carefully lays down another item! Suggestion: Lay down 1 set of thieves tools.
You’re right. Fixed to have two thieves tool left on the ground.
Thank you! And we should ask Paws for a helmet, to save Kamau the embarrassment and remove the chance of breaking, preferably a miners helmet including a light source. (And because it would look cool.)
Why did we decide to attack red gang before checking if we can get what we need from them without having to spend 10 turns beating them up?
I don;t know, I was totally voting for “I think we should ask the poker guys if they know the whereabouts of the ball, the doll, or the ring. If they know, we know where to go next.” or similar plan, but then bang, and 8+ votes for kill-them-all happened 🙂
Because the reds and blues are occupying kobolds’ apartments and have nothing worthwhile to offer us.
No? they are occupying where single Kobold lived unrelated to Kobold family by entrance.
We are not killing them, just knocking them out so even beating them up will not help.
A single Kobold that was living on a ledge above alleged Rust Monster doesn’t need much space. Wipe out the animals on top of Red Base and clear it with them and i see no reason why they wouldn’t be allowed to hang out there.
Not to mention the rest of Gang will be back later. Even if we went against Kamau wishes and actually murdered them and put Kobold in there …. rest of Gangs comes back. Sees their friends dead. Sees Kobold in middleof their home.
Are we trying to see if we can cause NPC’s death even when GM clearly forbids this party from killling people-ish characters?
as for what they have to offer us.
Not fighting us for 10 turns?
At least we will have weapon stockpile to fight alleged Rust Monster
There’s still time to suggest a different approach. The only knocked out enemy is the one who wore a rust item we wanted anyway (sure, we could have tried to trade). The other Reds don’t know what happened aside from the fact that they are under attack. This is a good time to plant fake evidence against the Blues.
What motivates the attack is the assumption that Macadamia’s ring is inside the safe and to get to the safe we will need to defeat the Reds, and the earlier we do it, the better it is. We don’t how many reinforcements are coming.
thanks. That makes more sense.
Still not a fan but at least now i can see some logic here,
The whole idea is that the poker table was described as gambling for gold. We don’t care about gold atm, we care about the quest items we still need.
Because everyone wants to play this like an MMORPG, it’s what they know. Kill everything on the level, that’s how you play those.
We’re obviously meant to make the gangs fight each other with roleplaying, but MMORPGs don’t teach roleplaying. The natural reaction to any scenario is combat. What’s the DPS on our tank?
Heck, we could have played poker with them, cheated, and won some gold. That would have been fun and creative! But no, now we have an alerted base and there’s nothing ahead but combat. Yay. The top comment above is nothing but a tactical plan to kill everything in the room. I feel sorry for LSN designing all this cool content only to have it played by murderhobos.
You sound a bit “Tilt”ed mate. It is still VERY possible to cause inter-gang conflict, but given our assumption that the first gang to visit will be the reds, we will NEED them to be weaker given our devastation of team blue for any inter-gang conflict to work. If we can finish the fight with the reds here it will be very possible to frame the blues using the destroyed red base to throw the invading reds off our scent. Right now we need to focus on completing some of our goals – without the dog and macadamia our future damage options will be far more limited (and Macadamia will also single handedly solve our inventory woes at least temporarily). We know the gangs have at least some of the items we’re looking for – the ring is already very likely, if not the doll as well. Attacking the reds gets us access to their chest and eventually the safe.
I’m curious what your preferred plan for rping a conflict between the reds and blues would be? The red guard indicated they weren’t interested in seeing the blues wiped out, so how would you convince the reds to attack the blues, knowing that the blues, per their sign, weren’t open to talking?
Well, not that it matters much at this point, but I’d start with:
I didn’t really count, but that sounds like at most 2, maybe 3 turns. Some of those we still can though, so yeah, I am a little grumpy because I tend to investigate then attack, not the other way round, but meh, what’s done, is done, we have to proceed with the current state.
EDIT: Also, I have to keep reminding it to myself, that this is a heavily combat-focused game, not some LARP or some other collective story-telling.. so.. I doubt we could do here any good without eventually attacking blues and reds. I just personally would do that a few turns later.
I want to do all of the things you suggested, but our only clue on the ring is that macadamia thinks a gang took it. None of those suggested actions would get us closer to getting the ring for macadamia, and therefore hopefully our 4th party member because none of them interact with the gangs. We also know a bad guy took the doll from the girl, so we currently suspect that’s a gang member. Could not be, but it seems that’s our collective current bet.
To be honest, I don’t see the obviousness of having to get the gangs fight, so far I had the impression that we came up with it as an end-game measure for not having to fight three waves of enemies 🙂 I mean, end-quest, game still rolls.
I think you’ve nailed it. Even older CRPGs had more ‘roleplay’ and ‘using environment’ and creativity here and there than the current ones, where creativity often ends in crafting pre-defined recipes. I also hoped for a poker game, just to see how they cheat (I totally expect them to!). We could still attack them afterwards. And as it is now, it look like we lost a couple of ways to gain intel 🙁
However, someone, sorry I dont remember who, wrote that from the POV of the rest of the base, there was some hussle, a shouted warning (I suppose a short like ‘we’re attacked’, without detailed descriptions of the attackers). So maybe indeed we could now RP it and try to describe the situation like:
> BlueGuys attacked, but the BigRedGuy has fallen, we helped to repel them and kicked some Blues so they remember their place, and Reds don’t believe us, then why don’t they go take a peek at the state of the Blue base.
But I’m not sure if that’s worth trying out now.
I just looked through the votes on the last page and while the comment suggesting what happened now did have the most votes, it does eem to me like the votes for a peaceful approach were similar, but spread over several comments/suggestion.
Also as a side note: I didn’t really have a chance to vote on the last page, as it was up less than 24h and I never saw it before this one came up.
I was more curious what’s the end goal here.
not complaining about selection.
since i really see no point.
Just as a headsup – during dungeons two pages are usually posted a day. One in the early afternoon and then another in the evening.
Ah, I guess that’s US time though?
Because I’ve not noticed that pattern so far (and its early evening here and that page has been up since morning for me)
If everyone on the third floor has 1 Attack when unarmed that’s 6 damage. The Daggers and Torch all add 1 Damage, so that’d be 11 Damage total. Kamau’s 11 Defense is just enough to block all of it. If the three guys below climb up and attack, they’ll get at least 7 Damage too.
About when I said Platemail and Heavy Armor Proficiency was overkill? I take it back. I still think it might be overkill, but it’s really good for surviving overkill!
One other idea is some variation on sending Lara with a shield and in rusty plate (maybe even the bucket?) through the first group while Kamau interposes to take and drop the torch from the second group. If we take out the torch halfling and the two torches on the wall all of these enemies should be blinded and then get 50/50 miss chances from then on.
That’s a very nice idea, considering that 2/3 of our team sees-in-the-dark and the remaining 1/3 of our team is usually interposing and not attacking, and being-blind-in-the-darkness oddly doesn’t seem to affect his defending abilities. Removing the light out of the equation only works for our benefit.
Of course, that’s all assuming the RedGuys don’t have see-in-the-dark feat, but in the other case, removing the light doesn’t change that much. So yeah, why not try that plan out?
It seems unlikely they have dark vision given the fact they have all those torches. The halflings might have dark vision (they didn’t carry torches in the tavern basement), but they were in a room lit by a torch in the tavern so it’s hard to tell.
Hey, remember yellow orange rust-ish monster below? now we have a RUSTY PLATE ARMOUR 😀
Weights a ton, costs not that much (considering 50% nontreasure sale loss). I doubt we could use it in the upcoming fight, but anyways, I propose NOT looting it for selling, but rather, dropping tossing it to the rust monster. Maybe it will eat its breakfast and fall asleep or something.
As soon as the gangs are dealt with, yes
Our inventory space limits how much stuff we can take with us to sell, so it makes sense to feed that bug with rusty items.
…whether this opens the puzzle chest or whether it distracts the rust monster (like cheese distracts rats) and allows a character with very little metal on them to loot one or two of the un-locked chests next to the rust-monster. Yes! (After finishing the business above.)
Exactly my toughts (although I’d be more than happy to Lens the monster and maybe defeat it if possible, but hey, that’s the fun part, and if we can check out the chests for quest items safely, that goes before fun IMHO)
Quick idea:
If we end up doing something other than following with an all-out attack on the thugs, I suggest Ricky could take a look on that chest with weird eye-lock on the bottom-left. Just to see what can Ricky tell about it. Since Ricky has Trap-Detection-2, she should be able to tell us if it looks odd due to a trap or something, or if that’s a normal chest with a rare lock.
But by “taking a look”, i mean, just “taking a look” and describing either to the team or just for us. No touching.
This is just an alternative “roleplay” option.
Instead of attacking the Reds right away, let us get the red bandana from the knocked out guy and bring it to Blue territory. Once there, have Kamau put the red item and he and the spider can tackle the rest of the Blue guys there.
Have Kamau interpose against the Blues and the spider flipping the switch walking on the ceiling. It does not matter if the spider can flip the switch, because what we want is for the Blues to go after the Reds, who are now alert of intruders.
Once the lever is flipped, have Kamau and the spider leave.
During all of this, Lara and Ricki will be above the rust monster, preferably feeding it the rust items.
I believe having Blues and Reds fight each other is safer for the kobolds on the long run. It might at least get one of the gangs out of the Warrens.
BTW, this might turn into a VERY LONG waiting game if the gangs decide to wait on ther reinforcements before taking action against the other faction. AND we cannot forget the crows are a factor so far ignored.
Yeah the problem with this is that the red team is probably the first team to arrive as reinforcements. Ideally we want to frame blue for wiping out red (and vice versa) because blue is already weak, and couldn’t handle fighting the remaining red team let alone reinforcements.
So I’m definitely on the “pathologicallly talk to every npc” team myself most times. But, weirdly enough, taking out the reds was a role playing choice as well. There’s talk of liberating the Warrens from all fangs so they can live in peace. Also, with the spider we can burn through more of them faster. At this rate we can likely freely explore their territory by turn 20 or so. Thereby getting most of their goods and in theory most of the items we need to help all the kobolds.
My bigger worry is that somehow the blue eyes crow is above the chest with the blue ring we need for our fourth party member and that we’ve miscalculated which gang took it from Mac. But we’ll see
I’m afraid we have only seen half the dungeon and once we get access to lower floors we won’t have time to explore them
We still haven’t found 4th party member too.
Right, but what do you think we could do that would get us access to the lower floors? If the reds have the ring, we would have to have something of great value to trade for it. If they don’t have it, they aren’t exactly going to send us after the blues to get it because it would risk the peace between the groups, right? The current bet is that the ringsmif shop is hiding the entrance to the lower floors.
That is good point.
but we are gambling multiple turns on ring being in safe. (we could have at least have asked them about it 🙁 If they say no then there is option they are lying and back to square one, but if they confirm having it then we know to beat them up)
and i find it unlikelly for meta reasons.
If there really is entire second dungeon then requiring us to basically fully clear 2 screens worth of enemies seem, unlikelly?
it would make more sense for the ring to be relativelly easy to access, and then we gain choice of doing side objective on upper levels, or go to lower.
if i understand correctly the assumption is that Reds stole the ring. And fair, seems like it’s Kingdom regulated item and even sellers in slums in a hidden dungeon fear to make illegal deals with it. That is something bandits would want.
but i feel like we are forgetting that we are in a dungeon and said dungeon is also side in this conflict.
It could have been in any chest. Spirited away via dungeon magic and turned into treasue.
Soo:
1the wierd keyhole chest in Red’s base
2Chest above Red’s base defended by monke
3alleged Rust Monster, but only because it seems like “Boss” and it would make sense for us to gain key to leave that area by defeating it.
4only then safe
i also assume that ring is required to gain access to lower levels, but i think here we agree on that.
lol,
imagine if the Kobolds mine is a RedHerring and there is no way to access them at all. DM added them as flavour art because he didn’t know what to put in that space.
Ok, creazy pills talk:
Check Dungeon turn 0
Wardrobe is Directly above sus big stone and that’s how hidden paths always worked in DungeonEyes.
what if it’s a hidden entrance?
What if all we need to do it access lower floors is to open that wardrobe?
or do any quests for Kobolds and they will tell us?
what if the Main “Goal” is a hint and after doing it and gathering by entrance (and the wardrobe) they will ask us to help them with actuall problem they have bellow and we start second stage of this dungeon?
This is possible, but our best bets on quest items to help any kobolds are still these gangs.
So if the reds said they had the ring, we would kill them anyway, having wasted time talking to them. If they said they didn’t have the ring, we would have no reason to believe them, and would kill them anyway having wasted time talking. I just don’t think trying to bargain for valuable items with thieves is valuable when we have the firepower to take them down.