Intermission 3 Page 9
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The night passes with only a few attempts at awkward conversation, most of which now end with a snarky one-liner. Kamau drifts off to sleep shortly after the stars come out, and Ricki also takes a quick nap. Lara and Lohk both stay awake, keeping an eye on each other.
A few hours after dawn, Ricki and her two companions once again sneak out to explore another dungeon. They are very careful to go quietly, lest they alert Lohk to the fact that Ricki is once again going against her wishes.
Should Ricki’s party go to the kobold warrens, an old house full of civilians and gang members alike? Or to the rat vault, a section of sewer which Paws warned was particularly dangerous and time-constrained, but full of valuable loot?
Comment below with your vote!
The VAULT
Wealth and Fortune! Let’s go to rob a vault and maybe see that rat king again!
Loot and GTFO! Vault!
The Vault
Warrens. I aint taking risks.
Actually, without the copper rings, the warrens are riskier.
Eh, copper rings are recommended but we have no idea what they do. Probably more useful than grave flowers which were consumable and mostly ended up being juggled in an attempt to not waste them, but our picking up good gear helps us everywhere.
That said, we did pass up getting proper armour for Kamau.
Guys I really wanna help people who are going crazy in their own home. Warrens.
I vote the Warrens first. We get an extra abilities no matter how easy or hard the dungeon is as long as we complete it. Complete the one that’s probably easier first so we can get stronger before the tougher one.
I feel like the rat vault might not be available later. It might be, but I feel like it might not, so I vote vaults!
It occured to me that LSN wouldn’t make an entire dungeon that could be missed. I am still pro rat vault but I think we make a lot of assumptions that cloud our judgement
Uhm… I’m a DM, too, and players often miss some of my dungeons. That’s just part of life. You can reuse the art assets later, but it won’t be the same dungeon with the same importance or goals, necessarily.
Warrens
Warrens.
Gotta recruit the kobold so that Ricki could have an easier time in Ricki-only areas, which the Vault is full of. If we screw them up, Kamau will get Remorse very early, and an already hard dungeon would get even harder. I understand that there won’t be another chance to visit the Vault, but there will be other dungeons, so let’s make our party full and only then pick a challenging dungeon.
I’d kind of prefer if we picked the next dungeon before we went shopping, because the choice of equipment heavily biases where we go.
Remorse is part of why filling out our party isn’t necessarily effective. Basically every dungeon has relied on stacking up high defense to be able to move around without being shredded. If we can pull off one good heist to set Kamau up with plate, then we can try skipping that frantic early phase of the dungeon where we burn half our HP looking for armour.
I do agree that we need to be willing to walk away from this one. It’s hard to say what is challenging, gear tends to change challenges from impossible to trivial.
I understand that Remorse makes big parties not that effective, but even in duet it was way too easy to get it, and with Lara it will be even easier. So if or when we get Remorse, I would rather have 3 active members instead of just 2.
I expect party limit sooner or later (based on nothing tbh) so the sooner we get “full” party and can ditch Kamau with his Remorse-issue the better. Less wasted EXP and so on
At least Lara negative just means with time we will need to stop using her skills.
Kamau is a problem.
Of course mom knows what you’re doing. It makes it much easier for her to keep track when Ricki thinks she’s getting away with it.
Kobold warrens. Low level dungeons first.
Time limits suck. There is never enough time to do everything that’s in the dungeon. I have no idea why LSN enjoys spending time creating all this content that nobody will ever see.
Vault.
We might not stay there to finish it, but we’ll hopefully get some good loot there. Once we have better gear (and/or enough money to buy some copper rings), we can STILL hit the Warrens.
The vault might not be available anymore, if we don’t go there now.
So risky: maybe. difficult Ricki only areas: probably. But that is only of relevance if we set our minds to finishing that dungeon (we don’t even know what the goal is there yet). If we are aiming to get a skill point (for all of our team members) out of it. However, since the goal/reason to pick it seems to be a quick buck or two, we can approach that dungeon completely different. If we keep Ricki near the exit, we might even be in a position to abandon it at any time we please (this might severely limit what/how much loot we’ll be able to get (because of “Ricki only” areas), but it’s worth giving it (the dungeon “vault” in general, not necessarily the “keeping Ricki near the exit”) a shot.
The way I see it: better to try the vault for a couple of turns (or more) and get SOME loot out of it, than not to try it at all and get nothing out of it (because the window of opportunity is closing and we don’t get another chance to go there).
As long as we don’t get one of our characters Killed (or irretrievably corrupted), going to the vault is a pure win, compared to NOT going to the vaule.
Edit: removed a typo/brainfart
I wouldn’t call it an pure win. Our time as players is also a cost. This does delay the introduction of potential kobold friend. This dungeon being time-limited is a bit of a trick, it isn’t like there’s a finite number of dungeons and skipping this one will reduce our time playing. We could totally come out behind if we burn the sun sphere and thieves tools but are chased out before we make up for it. It also isn’t guaranteed that we’ll be allowed to abandon this one.
I still think that the offer posed, presenting a chance at good loot with the warning that there’s lots of small-accessible areas (which we’ve built our equipment around), is a good one. There’s been a lot of cool side quests in dungeons that we skip because we spend too much time and effort just getting barely enough gear to accomplish the main goal. It’ll be interesting to see what LSN means when hinting that a dungeon is even more dangerous than normal for a dungeon.
Well, it has to be more dangerous, since we now have 3 party members and better gear. However, due to the nature of this quest, I think the danger will come mostly from the time constraint. The rats gather loot in the vault and are readying to move out.
We may expect that the time constraint will be either rats steadily pouring in from off screen (pipes, holes, etc) – to gather rat power needed to move the treasure. Or maybe it will be a group of big mutated boss rats that will trample our team (think: rat+bear mutation, etc). Or both of these things.
In terms of rats pouring in – remember what it would mean. Each rat is weak. But each rat adds 1 dmg, and the dmg accumulates during combat. Now imagine a small labyrinth of normal and Ricky-only rooms with like 7-10 rats each, and/or a pipe/hole system that steadily generates i.e. +3 rats per turn per room. That may go south VERY easily despite our best efforts to gear up. I actually think it may go this way since we already saw skeleton-generating graves, and pipes (dungeon 1), and the overall description of the place. We also may meet again the Rat King from the tavern. We still have him on the list of enemies, so it’s a repeatable encounter.
I reject the level-up treadmill. The dungeons don’t need to get harder just because we’re stronger, we have a lot of flexibility to push our luck and make things harder for ourselves by doing more. We’ll be tackling different sorts of places as we gain the capacity to do more, but I definitely hope that when we do go to the Warrens that it would have been possible with what we had coming from the Tavern Basement, so that we get to do more of the place by using the people, skills, and equipment we earned by taking another path.
> I reject the level-up treadmill.
Agreed. But to be frank, it’s present in almost every game. Even IRL sports have it – the better you are, the better other players you play with. So.. While I don’t like it, it’s unrealistic to consider otherwise. But, to be totally honest, I don’t expect Warrens to be “harder” than Value, since Warrens were made available earlier, and I don’t think the GM would it imperative to adjust its setup to simply make it more difficult. I think it may eventually end up serving as a one-time low(er)-risk break in between other things, and that would actually be quite cool.
I think LSN can easily add an extra monster or trap to tweak dungeons to party size and level while the theme and special mechanics stay the same . This ain’t no video game where levels are fixed on release.
soo, will Lohk be player controlable character? or a quest where we need to keep NPC safe?
Vault time
Warrens. More levels needed before Ricki can solo decently by herself
Warrens may make it easier to recruit a friend to help with the vault later on.