Ricki finished a dungeon! She can gain one new ability from this list:
Ambush I: +1 Atk when attacking a target that hasn’t interacted with a character previously.
Backstab I: +1 Atk when attacking a target an ally is also attacking.
Case: As an action can identify all items an enemy in the same room carries, even if some items are not visible. Once per dungeon can identify contents of a nearby chest without opening it.
Comforting Weight: +1 Def for each full stack of Gold Coins carried.
Crossbow Proficiency: +1 damage when wielding a crossbow or similar weapon.
Dagger Proficiency: +1 Atk when wielding a dagger or similar weapon.
Dodgy I: Incoming attacks have a 10% chance to miss.
Improvisation: Can use any type of dagger in place of Thieves’ Tools. Daggers always break when used this way.
Sneaky I: Once per dungeon can become undetectable by enemies until end of turn. Can’t be carrying any item of weight 3 or higher while sneaking.
Steal I: Once per dungeon in place of attacking, can try to take one item from an enemy. An item that is carried but not wielded or worn has a 100% chance to be taken successfully. An item that is held or worn has only a 50% chance to be taken successfully. Items have a -10% chance to be taken for each point of weight heavier than 1.
Trap Detection III: Can spot well hidden traps and point them out to allies. Automatically avoid poorly hidden traps.
I like having more options, so I think CASE would be a good choice for more intel gathering options early in the dungeon.
Case will let us peep on mobs to make sure we know what their equipment is, or if they’re carrying potions/scrolls/other scary stuff. Let’s get Case.
Not a fan since it takes an action. We are to starved for them as is.
If we want to know their equipment we can kill them.
Reminder: Case doesn’t tell us about drops that come from monster parts. LSN confirmed this on stream
I think picking Case would be a mistake right now; if Ricki could do it as a free action, that would be one thing. But as it is, we either kill/knock out our enemies and take their stuff and grab chests or we don’t. Identifying carried items and one chest per dungeon won’t help out a lot compared to bonus damage every time we gang up on an enemy (Backstab) or being able to use daggers as cheaper, disposable lockpicks to open locks (Improvisation).
I think case is pretty unlikely to be useful in the next dungeon, but I don’t think it’s a bad ability overall. The poison well doesn’t scream “humanoid enemies” to me. I think we’ll mostly be fighting animals, and case doesn’t do anything on animals. We’d still have the benefit of the chest portion of case, but case ONLY works on nearby chests. That severely limits its usefulness. I can see using it to decide whether we’d pursue a puzzle chest, perhaps, but using it to decide whether we can use a thieves tool to open a locked chest is probably worse than just bringing more lockpicks (AKA improvisation).
I’d take case as a level up after the poison well though.
Sneaky!
Improvisation.
Would have been grand if we had extra lockpicks this dungeon.
Except there were no daggers…
If we had Improv, there would have been daggers.
Nope, LSN has stressed that our choices don’t impact dungeon design. The same number of daggers will be around whether we invest in daggers or not.
Though yes, we might’ve brought a dagger if we had Improvisation.
I can respect taking whatever the DM says as fact. I’m mostly basing my claim on the bwerpg ruleset he made where he states if a player takes a certain ability, to add ways for them to make use of it from time to time. Different game, sure, but same creator and seems indicative of his DM style.
Could totally be wrong though, yeah.
bwerpg and dungeon eyes are two very different games. For one, bwerpg doesn’t take itself too seriously and seems to be designed about being as goofy and fun as possible as opposed to dungeon eyes, which is a game where lsn is surprised no one has died yet
I think one really good point on improvisation is that we are often reluctant to bring enough thieves tools to actually open all the locks we will see, since careful thief often means those lockpicks are wasted.
Having improvisation would mean we could invest in something like a parrying dagger, which we know in other LSN games has functioned as a +1 atk / +1 def weapon that can be wielded alongside another weapon. That’s actually a pretty functional piece of kit for Ricki, and given it would also act as a backup lockpick, we could build in a spare lockpick as part of our gear layout for emergencies. We’ve also historically found a fair number of daggers throughout dungeons, and being able to transform found daggers into thieves tools is really valuable.
Like we’d never take a rusty dagger out of a dungeon since it sells for nothing. If it functions as a free thieves tool (4 gp value if it’s discounted by our dead drop) that’s some great value creation from this ability. The costs of missing unlockable chests/doors (which we’ve done twice in a row) are presumably VERY high. We lost a pet in the caravan, and god only knows what we missed behind the door near the imp this dungeon. Given that locked door was in a storeroom, I bet there were some valuable items missed there.
I’d really like us to never miss another unlockable again, and improvisation is a good step in that direction.
The other benefit of improv is that it works with trap disarming. We’ve seen some traps now that we can’t safely bypass but that contain valuable loot (the Piercing arrows are worth 3 gold each sold and each chest contained 2-3 of them). Being able to throw cheap daggers we find at disarming traps is actually really nice.
I’ll make a case that case will be interesting going forward
Hehehe
Backstab I.
We tend to pile on enemies.
I like Backstab
Agreed, plus it’s Backstab I which probably means there’s a Backstab II at the very least. An additional +2 or even +3 damage could make a huge difference when fighting tankier enemies.
Sneaky I
With Ricki’s mobility she can sneak, loot and get back in one turn.
Also this is our “We f*****d up but let’s not end this series yet” card.
Per LSN, Sneak is the action for the turn. So no Sneak+Loot+Return.
She could sneak into an area to loot, but then we’d have to come back out without sneaking. Pretty much useless as far as I’ve been able to figure out.
Aww 🙁
Case!
Backstab for that extra damage while piling onto enemies. With so much invested in carrying capacity sneak doesn’t do much and we’re already dealing with action economy being limited so case feels weak.
To be clear, sneak only doesn’t work if we’re carrying an ITEM of weight 3. We can carry 11 items of weight 1 and be just fine to use sneak. We just can’t sneak if ricki is wearing chain or wielding a maul.
Man I just hope when we finally get the manor room for Ricki that we can get her some decent clothes. Girl needs something besides those rags! It would be cool if her official getup is some sort of thief getup like you see in DnD depictions with belts and pockets and chains and whatnot. Maybe Lara can get it for her. I think Ricki is the type of gal who would appreciate lotsa pockets! Or even if her new canonical getup includes a bandana or something.
So now that I’m thinking about it, that outfit with all the pockets might be difficult to convey in pixelated form. Maybe a nice blue vest and bandana as a quiet nod to thieves/dagger-weilders like Locke from FF6? Maybe we need a girly montage of Lara and Ricki trying out and choosing different outfits. Any other clothing ideas for Ricki?
Case
I like Backstab