Dungeon 8 Turn 11
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Ricki returns and collects her party, who then absolutely steamroll through all three guards in the massive battle (with a little help from the bandits). Kamau takes 3 damage from absorbing their attacks. Only the unarmed merchant remains (also the bandits).
Ricki: Attack the merchant. He’ll get knocked out anyway, but this way you’ll be around to collect battle loot. For our purposes, we’re interested in the gold from the merchant/group, and any other items that weren’t visible that the enemies were carrying. Assuming you have room left after that, also pick up the shield the one guard was carrying. The bandits can take the rest of the visible equipment. Hopefully they’ll give us another token now that the fight is ended, which you can grab if they don’t just toss it to Cordy before he leaves.
Cordy: Move downstairs and right. Drop your magic lens on the floor of screen 4 (below the big wolf and two little wolves) for Ricki to use next turn. Attack the owlbear from his right side so he feels surrounded and splits his attacks.
Lara: Move downstairs and right. Attack the owlbear with your battleaxe from the left so he feels surrounded and splits attacks.
Kamau: Move back left. Pick up all of our loot from the floor pile and for now equip the owlbear talons. Store the plate armor and heavy shield that you grab on Molly to minimize the space taken up.
Explanation: This gets us set up to have Ricki lens on the following turn, and disposes of an owlbear that will otherwise be annoying later when trying to get to the rathole or the bandit group on screen 4. Cordy and Lara do a minimum of 17 dmg together, which will 1 shot the owlbear. This also lets us get Kamau up to 2 movement, and collect the loot we left behind.
Should we have Ricki move with any of the team members to point out the traps, before she attacks the merchant? (she won’t be able to move after becoming involved in a fight).
iirc, the trap on the same floor as the loot pile is left of where Kamau needs to go, but if you want to send him after the chests on the lowest floor, there is a trap in the way.
I’m not entirely sure though, so in case I am wrong, I wanted to remind everyone of the traps. Better thought about it too often than forgetting about it.
The pressure plate is to the left of our loot pile, so Kamau should be fine accessing the loot. If anyone wants to go loot a guard chest, Ricki will need to point out the trap, but that’ll happen next turn. Pointing it out early won’t help.
I think we should have Ricki pick up the shield. Those are extremely good to bring out due to their sky-high value per weight. Ricki has 3 mov so it’s pretty easy to drop it to a bandit group if we find even better stuff to carry out in our non-cargo slots anyway.
So far there’s A LOT of good gear like shields and other 1-weight loot to go around. In all likelihood, we wont have the space to carry everything out anyway. So one lost shield wont mean much to us. What would suck is losing these 6 bandits before we can exit the dungeon.
We haven’t even seen a single 1-weight loot with a value remotely close to a shield’s(20) in this dungeon so far.
As for boosting bandit’s defense, droping items is free so it would make more sense to drop it to a more vulnerable group on room 5, or even back to this one later if we want to. It’s free. No reason to lock the shield to this group when Ricki got 3 mov.
I’ve made this edit. I do think we’re unlikely to want to carry out anything other than unique/magic loot more than a shield, so it’s worth grabbing the ones we can.
This might be a fair point. I’m sorta thinking we’ll end up with way too much stuff to carry anyway, once we’ve opened chests and cleared the remaining guard group on 4 plus whatever guard group is waiting on 5. Shields are exceptionally valuable for resale though, and given the check I just did, we probably do have room to carry it out. We’re only looking at two enc 5 items and 1 enc 3 item as of the present count, and there’s room to carry all of that and more once we’ve eliminated the consumeables still in our inventory.
A different idea would be to just have Ricki go back left and drop the purse with the loot pile, then open one of the chests. Kamau then stays behind to attack the merchant and pick up the dropped loot. He can grab the chain armor and shield, then combine the gold with the purse on the following turn when he goes to grab the loot pile.
I don’t think we want the chain armor. I know you really like chain, but there’s already 2 more from guards below the big bad wolf. And good chance of more chain/plate in room 5. Poor Molly only has so many slots. Let’s let the bandits have this one.
Sick observed on discord that Kamau’s damage this turn (3 hp loss, for a total of 17 dmg suffered), probably gives us the following previously unknown stats.
Battleaxes do up to 3 damage (probably a range of 1-3, or 2-3).
Guards do 2 attack at base, and get a buff of 1 attack from the presence of a merchant.
Given the greataxe and longsword were known quantities, that’d give us a total of
6 base damage (3×2)
3 buff damage (3×1)
and 8 equipment damage (3+2+3)
for a total of 17 damage.
We’ll be able to precisely confirm the battleaxe damage once this one drops, which should confirm the rest of this.
I love the merchant’s face. So much expressiveness in so few pixels.
I do feel sorry for the merchants. I understand the feeling of having to work for an oppressive employer because everyone has gotta eat. That’s what a real dystopia does: it takes away people’s feelings that they have any choices.
At least he won’t become wolf food. I hope we can house/help the merchants later on, after this dungeon.