Dungeon 7 Turn 26
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Macadamia uses Daisy’s high Mov stat to check on the barn’s entrance before joining the rest of the party in combat.
In the other room, Ricki adds two corn and five more tomatoes to the pile of stuff that definitely isn’t about to be eaten by some sort of pun-named thief monster offscreen. Absolutely no chance of that happening.
Once again, most of the party attacks a corn knight while Kamau interposes, and once again Kamau takes 2 damage despite his high Def.
Seems we didn’t learn our lesson the LAST 2 TIMES we left stuff on the ground. At least there’s a warning now. *facepalm*
As much as I agree, what else can we do with the stuff? Can’t carry it, and putting it in a chest would likely cost actions vs dropping which is free
Leave sentry? One person to guard it? I think we never considered it 🙂
The rat is just sitting around doing nothing. Let it sit around doing nothing on top of the pile of loot.
Can’t separate pets from owners.
Negative. The rule states “they can’t enter a different room on their own.”
The whole reason we domesticated dogs was to serve as guards when we weren’t around.
But isn’t Kamau in a different room than the loot-pile? (And do we want to find a looted pile and a dead pet (currently has 0 def, 0 atk, 1 HP) when we return?)
In LSN’s own words: a pet is a powerup, not a separate character. Argue with him not us 😉
Sorry, I’m not terminally online and on Discord, Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, and Truth Social.
I don’t see those words in the documentation anywhere.
I agree with Jerf, what else are we supposed to be doing, according to you? Stop looking into rooms and/or chests, as soon as our inventory is full? Keep the trashier/less useful items in our inventory forever and forsaking whatever good/more useful or more pricy stuff we find later on, instead?
This time it’s not even like we have a LOT of stuff that could be consumed (the moldy cheese by either a goblin or a rat, the birthday cake – which we only just got – , the corn spears – which would be a waste considering that we have a dungeon of undead upcoming – and the lenses; I’m not counting the thieves tools, by the way, because we can’t decide when they get used up and when not) and I have already advocated to use the lenses* (in last turns posts).
We can’t just expand our inventory at will (even if we are willing to invest our gold), we already got big haul I and II with Ricki, as well as bought Molly as soon as the opportunity presented itself and we can’t really reduce weight with our “perma-inventory” (aka atk and def items) as long as we are still going into fights, because Kamau is getting hurt as it is. Imagine him switching to an armour that only gives 2 def (because it also has only 1 or 2 weight), and THEN having to face the corn knights.
Also, we couldn’t afford the rabbit paw this time and even if we did, the last time we used it didn’t really turn out all that great. We would probably have to use 2 turns or more in order to sell all kinds of things (one turn AT LEAST – and that only works if we have the stuff we want to sell piled up nicely all together, instead of having to hunt for it over multiple screens – to gather all the stuff we want to sell in our chars’ inventories, and then one turn to sell all that stuff to Paws. Probably a third turn will be needed to sort the remainder of inventories out and get our chars “ready to fight” again.)
*By the way, I think magic lenses should be stack-able (to at least 5 per inventory slot). They are hardly a large item, and we’ll be limited in how many we can get (if any at all) by the still hefty price tag (and us wanting to upgrade the mansion).
I’ll admit that my plan would have been bad. I had Ricki and Mac go after the chickens cause I thought LSN would have shown if something changed when a char moved through the room. Still hoping for Manny but rat chest is an ok second choice.
Kamau: Interpose
Everybody else: put some butter on that corncob and kill that guy.
We don’t necessarily have to do the rat chest immediately after this.
Another option would be investigating the weathervane while Maca takes a quick side trip to look at Manny. I think rats first is likely optimal from an action economy, but something to calculate
Seeing as Kamau’s HP gets lower and lower, I think it’s good to recap how we can quite.
We can either “exit/finish” the dungeon, or “abandon” it.
It’s pretty much obvious that the “exit” is the far end of the map, behind the mammoth. Not much to think about here, either distract mammoth or kill it, then go right past it.
However, abandoning rules state “We can exit from any location that is considered “outside””, so let’s see. We’re in the barn, it’s hardly outside.
So, we need to either:
A) exit the barn straight into the mammoth (which may be problematic if it doesn’t react to the Hay positively, or if it is distracted for a too short time; Kamau may be too low on HP to be able to sink the damage, and/or the mammoth may do AoE trampling attack rendering ‘interpose’ useless).
B) exit the barn to the left, walk into the pumpkin monster (which may, or may not attack us on passing), and probably into the crows (hungry and eager to peck on our food, and probably on us as well, plus – crow boss may be not idle anymore)
Now, we could also get creative.
C) theoreticaly, barn’s roof area is outside of the barn. I doubt we can exit at this point, since the abandoning rules cleverly state “exit from any location (considered outside)” and the most part of those are actually depict barn’s top rooms, so those can’t be called “outside” at all
D) both locations immediately left from the barn (pumpkin) and immediately right from the barn (mammoth) are surely considered “outside”, and the ground level is for sure considered “outside”, but how about the balcony? Could we move all our characters to a balcony and declare ‘abandoning’ since the room is outside of the barn?
E) left from barn (pumpkin) – it seems that we actually don’t really need to pass the pumpkin. See turn 24. It still looks left. If we get all characters at the same time and walk into that location on ground level and stop before passing pumpkin and immediately announce abandoning — neither pumpkin, nor any crows/etc should be able to do us any harm.
EDIT: those are not suggestions of actions for this turn. It’s just thinking about emergency plans. I’m writing it here since I don’t attend to discord atm.
EDIT#2 geesh, this editor is awful. It again erased all formatting and I had to re-format it. Sorry about that, I didn’t notice it earlier.
The exit is whereever Ricki/the party decides to leave carrying 10 produce that’s outside. So long as everyone is outside and carrying enough produce it’s not abandoning. It’d only be abandoning if we had the party split (then the ones not with Ricki abandoned), or didn’t have enough produce. LSN confirmed this is how it works on the discord, but it’s also just the only reading of the rules that makes sense with this dungeon being easier to leave due to being outside.
We placed exactly 10 produce in Molly’s bags, Molly is auto-following Ricki, thus whenever Ricki is outside, we can leave without abandoning.
Great, that’s even better if in our current situation all options count as success. My post was mainly focused on where from we can teleport out safely if we i.e. end up having guys with 1 hp – so actually I could trim it down to just C/D/E.
It was mentioned by LSN that both Roof and ledge of barn would only work if party took falling damage to get to the ground. I don’t think we can take that so we’re left with option E and A in my opinion
Kamau: Interpose and feed cheese to Squirrel. Pick up a dropped corn spear, assuming both drop and Ricki already got hers.
Squirrel: Attack a corn knight having empowered yourself with cheese.
Macadamia: Attack the corn knight.
Daisy: Chomp corn.
Ricki: Go drop the cake from Molly in the loot pile. Return to the fight and attack the corn. Pick up one of the corn spears that drops as well as the two ears of corn.
Lohk: Ray of frost the corn.
Explanation:
We don’t need the damage from the cheese, but we need inventory space. After turn 30 the cheese doesn’t help anyway, so we might as well use it for free as part of an attack now while we can to clear inventory and get Squirrel started on bulking up to their future dire rat form we hope they have. They showed interest in the cheese before and we’re supposed to pay attention to pet behavior in dungeons to unlock possible pet upgrades, so presumably that was a clue. Giving Ricki a corn spear lets her get to 7 defense, meaning at worst we take 1 dmg when we kill the squirrels to loot the rat chest.
Great idea to put the cake with its burning candle to our loot-pile to scare away the potatobeast. (Should we mention that explicitly?) Regarding Squirrel & cheese: There was the idea, that feeding Squirrel to use the pet for an attack would not count for caring for the pet, but we would be required to feed it without making use of the resulting attack bonus. I do not know if that is correct. Regardless of cheese-empowered Squirrel attacking or not, we do not have a high enough atk value to kill the corn this turn without Ricki’s attack (do we?). Kamau could interpose the remaining corn as well as the centipedes, but the 7 atk from the corn plus 4 atk (?) from each centipede would be 15 atk against 12 def of Kamau.
Ricki is still fighting this turn, she’s just dropping an item first. We don’t actually know if squirrel cheese feeding has to be independent of his mechanics. That appears to have just been speculation, and I’d rather not avoid feeding squirrel to beneficial effect for ages because of speculation without any concrete grounding in the comic. Also if we don’t feed the cheese we will not have room for both spears and the corn, or we won’t have room for the rat chest contents if we go there next.
Yes, missed the “Return to the fight and attack the corn.” part, sorry. Dropping loot is free, thus mov+drop+atk, sweet!
While I am not against killing this last corn knight, I do believe this should be our last major fight. I do not think we should go for rat chest now as we have no space, and it will be the last area to be crow-swarmed anyway. We really should, next turns, get the hay bale out of the way, use lenses, clear the left side of the loft, get some enc back, and if possible, make a last attempt at the coop/weatherwane before it gets swarmed by crows, seeing LSN just confirmed the crows will be able to bypass the pumpkin. We could even leave some spare veggies in the left side to delay them
I suppose LSN confirmed that on discord? but we have the mega-gravity there, how will they do that? by killing the pumpkin? or will the pumpkin just ignore them?
Either alternative is plausible.
Current thoughts on future turns.
Turn 28: Double move slows to coop room. Macadamia mess with weather vane then go look at pumpkin. Ricki feed two corn cobs to coop.
Turn 29: Lohk open chest. Macadamia and Ricki murder stalkroach as it spawns. Kamau interpose and take either 0 or 4 dmg.
Turn 30: Everybody gather to right. Mac pushes the hay bale along the way. Ricki uses action to pick up whatever was in the skeleton chest since Lohk wouldn’t be able to hold it. That gets us the stalkroach dead, and insures we’ve done everything we want to do on that screen, sorta, in case crows show up.
Then we’d have something like
Turn 31: Inventory management, get Kamau, Mac, and Ricki into position to do rat hole
Turn 32: interpose centipedes, kill squirrels. Lohk stuck on hay bale screen for torch
Turn 33: Loot chest, run back to Kamau. Lohk still stuck
Turn 34: Lens mammoth. Final Inventory management post rat chest
Turn 35: Pray we can mammoth escape
These need some work, but they’re a good starting point for something like a plan to loot the skeleton chest AND the rat chest. One sticking point is that Lohk can’t actually pick up the loot when she opens the chest, which will require Kamau to interpose again and not escape with the others on the following turn. Not great. It also doesn’t include any provision for looting the shield Mac dropped to pick up his new heavy one, which we’d ideally like to do since it’s worth 10 gold if nothing else. It also doesn’t let us lens the mamoth in a timely fashion. Ideally we’d do that sooner rather than later, since it informs our choices moving forward.
Have Lohk drop stuff at the pile on the way by (I know, I know) because she won’t be fighting, and will have 2 turns at pile to fix her inv
I wrote it elsewhere, but let me try once more: can we escape when on the roof? technically it’s “outside” (althgouth the location presents some barn’ rooms). Or maybe we can we escape from the balcony in the mammoth’s location? It’s even more technically “outside” 😉
LSN said no in a roundabout way. “I don’t like your chances”
I can no longer edit this post, but since we now seem to be moving to the skeleton chest after this turn, we’d actually like to have Ricki grab both corn spears and Kamau NOT to feed cheese to squirrel. We can feed cheese to squirrel when we kill the stalkroach while getting the skeleton chest, which should give us the 9 damage we need to guarantee killing the stalkroach.
Caveat emptor, I didn’t check the stalkroach damage requirements myself, but that was the top end of the damage requirement for one shotting the discord was throwing around. Kamau interpose with Mac, Daisy, Squirrel cheese is 9 damage, with Ricki looting instead of Lohk since Ricki can actually have inventory space.
LSN, Thisnameismeta dropped an addendum comment because he can’t edit the post, please read it.