Dungeon 7 Turn 51
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The party continues on to the treehouse, where they spend some time trying to get the rope down without having to jump out of the tree, but to no effect. Instead, Macadamia and Kamau gather up the remaining carrots and onions and prepare to leave while Ricki experiences invasive thoughts about pushing squirrels out of trees.
Suddenly, the rat king bursts out of the fields and attacks Lohk, dealing 5 damage due to her Def being completely eroded.
Seeing this, Kamau’s mind takes him somewhere dark.
He flees into the field at top speed, leaving everyone else behind to fend off the swarm of rats. At this moment, a second swarm also appears from the other end of the farm. Things are looking bleak…
But suddenly, the ground trembles as flytraps burst out of the soil and begin attacking the rats!
“its okay everyone”
“we can leave while they’re distracted”
The party leaves the dungeon in victory, loaded down with the produce they came here for. As they pass through the dungeon border, the newest member of Ricki’s party pauses.
“Come on, let’s go before something else shows up to eat us, plant lady.”
“my name is Botanya”
“Oh! Botanya, then. That’s a nice name.”
“thanks”
“my mom picked it out for me”
Dungeon 7 is complete!
Per LSN on discord the rat king’s attack was a random roll. So 1/4 to kill Macadamia, 1/4 to kill Ricki, 1/4 to hit Lohk. And the single rat rolled to attack Ricki, but she could take it.
Just so you know.
E: fixed
E2: Fixed properly
Let this lesson be fixed in stone. Attacking an enemy once does not guarantee the enemy will fixate on the attacker forever. Once the attack stops, the enemy will roll randomly again. We got lucky with the spider before.
And all roving enemies break down the simultaneity of combat and must be treated with utmost seriousness. We got lucky with the chickens before.
We don’t quote know this is how things work. Kamau did leave the screen, which might have had an effect on targeting for the rat king. It’s not directly analogous to the spider where Kamau stuck around.
Look, I’m not betting our safety on our assumptions of roving enemies’ behavior anymore. Roving enemies are defcon 1 now. Nuke and/or interpose. Never just disengage
Right, and I’m not arguing we should, but your post WAS an assumption of how enemies like this behave.
Yes for the last turn’s plan, and I regret that intensely, trust me.
As for the current comment, I am aware, but the point is, I’m not betting our safety anymore, see. Regardless of their actual behavior, which I will pester LSN about the mechanics of during the stream, interpose has been shown and described as overriding it, so we use it while Kamau and roving monsters are in play.
About the random behavior – LSN did say it was random once the attacks stopped. I don’t think the change of screens made it random, just the stopped attacks – because it makes little sense to me to add the caveat of: only act randomly if a character jumps screen. Either the attacker character kept aggro from the monster and the monster was in hot pursuit (not shown here), or disengaging turned the monster random again (shown here). The monster beginning turn in hot pursuit and abandoning it halfway does not make sense to me personally.
Oh, and if I do come off as angry, it’s because I am – not at you or anyone else here on the discord, except for myself and someone who rarely deigns to divulge the rules of his game.
LSN’s exact statement was “actually I rolled randomly and you lucked out hard” in response to a comment that rat kings must be intelligent for targeting Lohk. He didn’t say he rolled randomly because Kamau didn’t attack, or anything else. So we just don’t know, and shouldn’t assume it works either way. Our only assumption should be that we don’t understand roaming monster targeting.
It’s just as valid to say that the decision tree is
1) Attack enemy attacking you if one exists.
2) Continue attacking previous target if available on current screen.
3) Pursue closest enemy if no target available on current screen.
4) Target random enemy if unengaged.
In fact that above decision tree better matches our observed results (see the spider not shifting targets) than the assumption that targeting is always random when an enemy is unengaged.
That’s valid! But, still, until we get a definite answer (low chance), best to use interpose when we’re faced with this situation. Because my actual greatest suspicion here, is that the “AI” of roving enemies is in fact very fuzzy.
For posterity: LSN confirmed the only rule is that a wandering npc can’t move after attacking (the rat king coming from the left couldn’t attack because it was the first time we knew of it, but an exception to this has happened in the Warrens already, so don’t count on that always happening). There was nothing we could have done to make turn 100% safe. He could have ignored the interpose or attack and gone to the other screen and attacked. Same for small rats. If we moved and interposed left, he could have attacked the feeling characters while they were on the screen to the right.
It is exactly as if another player entered the game. There is no AI for them, it is not even fuzzy, as I suspected: Their behavior is dictated merely by how appropriate LSN feels it is. (In this case, the rat king would have been happy attacking kamau as long as it was attacked – but the lone rats could have bolted elsewhere). We can’t know, because LSN decides that on the spot. So unless someone here develops long-range telepathy, the only safe route is keeping everyone under the interpose umbrella at all times when a roving enemy shows up, until it is dead or we leave.
Waaay to greedy for my liking. The second rat pile could have really screwed us if it showed up earlier. All for a couple more gold pieces…
Ah, that sucks. Kamau lost out on a level-up yet again. I think we should try and make getting him a room at the manor a priority, in the hopes that pursuing his personal story-line will remove or at least mitigate his Remorse.
(Personally, I think that it shouldn’t count as ‘abandoning the dungeon’ if everyone else leaves on the same turn anyways, but oh well.)
LOL minmaxing is its own punishment.
Every time I say something against it, I get downvoted into oblivion. You wanted this, players. Now enjoy it!
I’m confused – what are you even complaining about now? We handled the mammoth nonviolently in an attempt to befriend it and fed the crows so we could be friends with them. This has been basically our least murdery dungeon, but you’re still unhappy with the state of play? Did you have a bunch of comments advocating for us to like, try talking to scarecrows that I missed?
And with this attitude, and lack of clear reasoning, you will keep being downvoted into oblivion. All your comments are filled with buzzwords like roleplay, minmax, etc, and little to no definitive planning.
This is what happens when we get greedy 😛
No, just need to use Interpose when it is possible.
But, yes, you are right, we were greedy enough to not use Interpose. )))
We went for three more gold instead of Interposing which may have prevented the damage to Lohk.
That random die roll could have ended this little game also by hitting Ricki. We should be more careful in the future and look to upgrade Kamau first to see if we can get Remorse reduced or eliminated.
I take it that we are not picking Shield Bash.
Again.
Uhm. We can’t pick anything…. We lost the level up to remorse. Again.
Such a pretty lady. With a pretty name.
I really like how she is looking back to her mom one last time, before leaving. (I got to watch the movie Quigley again… 😀 )
I basically didn’t play this dungeon, so I don’t have a list of lessons learned. Crows can negotiate, which is neat.
I will point out a lesson from previous dungeons that we didn’t learn:
Three lock picks is too many. We may have thrown away more picks than Ricki has thrown away by using. We won’t get everything anyway, and having extra picks actually costs us treasure by taking up space when we find unlocked chests.
Big things keep happening off screen. This is despite our best efforts to scout. Pumpkin guard made that tricky.
Botanya sort of came out of nowhere, best to keep an eye out for companions in the other dungeons too. Would’ve been easy to just leave and never know… Wait, she’s the Pikmin, was thrown off by those Kofi hints because they went up with the stream talking about bonus characters which now have their own teasers. Zombie dungeon will have samurai guy then.
I preferred the dungeons where finishing the goal ended things then and there. I suppose even then we didn’t actually finish until forced.
Correct: we expect to find the ninja/samurai in the Zombie Plague Land!
About the lockpicks – what happened is that Ricki didn’t throw any lockpicks out. We do expect to take three into the next dungeon – if and only if we take trap disarming, otherwise we will take less.
We were expecting to meet Botanya, but we nearly missed her because LSN scared us enough with the crow horde that we thought we couldn’t go left after a certain point. (Pumpkin guard was a total hindrance here, he served little purpose but to prevent our scouting to the point even the DM got annoyed and intervened) We started thinking she was in the Well, even. Only when LSN made it clear it was safe to investigate did we dare to go back. And for good reason – as we all saw, lower our guard for one turn and disaster strikes.
About dungeons who end when the goal is reached – I have a feeling the next two will be like that. It’s just this one was our chance at collecting treasure so if it auto-finished we would have been screwed.