Dungeon Delver Quest (Original Fantasy... again)

Taken in context, your thesis appears to be "We should not deliberately take on a higher difficulty unless the current difficulty is trivial." *Is* that what you mean? (Caveat to the below - if that's not actually what you mean, and you're just nitpicking out of a desire for logical accuracy, I respect that. It would be helpful to have that clarification, though.)

If it is what you mean, that seems... excessively cautious. We have a *lot* of untouched reserves, and even if we couldn't fight this fight more than about ten times (I'm not convinced I agree, but I'm not willing to run the math, so I'll take it as a given for the moment) it still seems pretty clear that we could handle a single encounter at even a notably higher difficulty level. We have full HP, a healer with full heals, and two party members who haven't spent any of their panicbuttons at all (one of whom would seriously prefer not to). We're ready for something a bit more threatening... and if we just play it safe every time, the quest will get boring.

Now, the follow-on threat for others is a thing. This *will* increase the danger level for everyone else in the place (some of whom are cracking already). On the one side, we might not personally want to be responsible for that. On the other side... it's kind of what you sign up for when you show up at a tower. *Somebody* is going to open up this portcullis. It's not like it's going to not happen. If it's not us today, it'll be someone else within a few days. Saying that we don't want to be the people who do that sort of thing is okay. It's a reasonable moral decision for the characters to make. It's also equivalent to saying that we personally don't want to be the team that makes it to the top. The folks who do make it to the top are going to be ones who took some risks and cracked some seals.

 

No, not at all
I am saying that I completely disagree about the notion that the current difficulty is trivial, I don't see how "our team can handle 10 fights and then we die" is trivial. Yes the last fight went well, but it depended on using dailies, and it could have also gone poorly in so many ways... especially if/when we run out of dailies. Our ally used up 2/7 dailies on this. 3 more fights and we have to fight without the wonder of rooting.
And on top of that we shouldn't rush to amp the difficulty yet on day 2, for all we know it spikes a lot. We would have a better idea after we have a few difficulty increases, but I would rather be cautious at the moment.

Our ease stemmed from effective CC and armor (that also depends on CC). A fight that is just "same but 3x more enemies" could be game over for us.
Also, remember we have to fight our way back out as enemies respawn behind us

Also also, note that I explicitly addressed the whole "potential party members who are not with us dying" thing which is explicitly stated by QM, its not just increasing the difficulty for us, it increases it for everyone.

On top of it all is a question of efficiency. Lets say we still handle it fine, but we are not stuck doing 2 fights a day instead of 10 and getting overall less loot. We harmed ourselves by increasing the difficulty too soon. The goal is max DS per day not toughest enemy fight per day

 

Huh?

Only Linnea used dailies, so I'm assuming you mean her. She did not use any healing, so she's still 5/5 on that. She used the rooting effect once, and can use it two more times, so she's 2/3 on that.

So if you're counting her total combined dailies, she has used up 1/8, not 2/7. And it's a bit misleading to combine two entirely different categories of abilities like that.

I'd estimate the number of repeats before we'd be "tapped out" at about 15 fights, actually, considering 2 more binds, 5 heals, 1 potion, a likelihood of multiple fights per required heal, and then whatever Shadow's specials are.

I'd agree that it feels like we'd be pulling a Leeroy Jenkins by opening the gate right now. There's a lot of new people that have only been here a few days, and if we ramp up the difficulty suddenly on everyone, that's a lot of deaths that can be on our heads. At the very least, I'd like to get a rumor started that the difficulty in the dungeon is likely to go up the next day (though we better be ready to execute on that rumor).


My own thought is that I'd really prefer to bump up a skill tier before taking on boss-level threats. I believe we only needed 10 shards to get to rank C in greatclub? That's 2 more offense dice, which is a relatively substantial edge, plus whatever the passive bonus is. It's also not an unreasonable goal to be able to hit level 3 today, which would allow us to boost strength for another offense die, or toughness by 2 points for a defense die. Plus the various other options we have available.

Plus, if we end up fighting a boss, we may get one of those chunks, but what we're needing right now is more shards, both for upgrades and for general currency. We have 8 shards right now, which is just baseline general currency for food and stuff; we probably don't want to fall below 10 after buying upgrades, anymore.

That's my "logical analysis" of our current situation, and how I'd proceed based on known and speculated needs. On the other hand, both Shadow and Linnea are tempted by it, and I feel like we'd greatly increase our general bonds with them if we were to step up to the challenge, regardless of risks. Or maybe backfire if it really is a Leeroy Jenkins trap.

Personal playstyle would lean towards the cautious route, but I'm not totally against opening the door right now. Going to hold off on making a decision to see what other arguments people might put forth. For example, Sirrocco makes a good point that if we're serious about being the winner of the dungeon, we should be pushing forward whenever we can.

 

Let's try that again. Your logic appears, to me, to be as follows.
1) We should not deliberately take on higher difficulty unless our current encounters are trivial.
2) Our latest encounter required us to use one of the healer's three uses of root. Therefore, as it consumed a daily power, it was not trivial.
3) By extension, we should not choose an obviously more threatening encounter.

Is that an accurate assessment of your logic? As far as #2 goes, I acknowledge that "need not spend any dailies" is a reasonable definition for trivial. Given that, though, I don't think we should be insisting on trivializing encoutners before we hit things of higher difficulty levels.

As far as efficiency goes, there's also a matter of quality. Sure, swinging for the big guys isn't the most efficient way of turning HP and daily powers into exp and shards - but exp and shards aren't the only rewards, and hp and dailies aren't the only limiting factor. We're also somewhat limited by time (eventually it'll get late, and we'll go home - likely long before we hit ten encounters equivalent to the ones we just hit). Likewise, chunks, slabs, and dungeon gear are all significant resources, and we'll *never* get any of those if we don't push things a bit. Pushing stuff is worth it.

Mostly, though, it's metagaming. Cracking the seal is interesting, and interesting stuff keeps our QM interested and engaged. Harvesting room after room of skeletons may be more efficient overall, and it's probably what I personally would be doing in this circumstance, but it's not all that interesting.

 

I already said this is wrong.
My logic is
1. We should not take on a higher difficulty unless it is safe to do so
2. We can not determine the difficulty spike at the moment. However I am guessing that it would be very significant considering the exact reason for which the current fight was easy (namely, excess CC, mindless enemies, and we are stronger). I can think of many ways in which things would get harder which would be disasterous. 6 instead of 2 of those big zombies along with 3x more minor zombies could TPK us. Smart enemies who would let the chaff tie us up and then gang our caster support could as well.
3. Our current battles are not trivial, and they are only easy, and they are only easy because we are consuming dailies and have just the right dailies for the job (CC is awesome) and have the correct balanced party for it. Without dailies or the party this would have been a difficult fight now an easy one... but one that still cost us dailies.
4. releasing this respawning roving boss will kill some potential party members who are not ready for it (QM practically told us so)
5. Regardless of difficulty we should optimize for growth aka deucite shards per day of work.
6. We still need to get back out and enemies will respawn behind us. This was explicitly stated to be a thing by the QM. So even if we win, if we use up our dailies to do so we now have to refight the same fight without it.

she used it twice. she rooted the minor zombies and also one of the big ones

Not today. its day number 2 and we are a total noob.

 

I was sure it said twice, but looking over it it was only once. there was a case of a misplaced apostrophe which made it seem like plural. Thank you for correcting me

Yea, that. QM even provided a nice in character note that explicitly told us so.

 

Linnea does have an infinite use ability. As she noted though, poison is kinda worthless on Undead.

 

The amount of CC used vs expended has already been covered. I'll note that it is a pertinent change data that should cause you to re-evaluate. I'm not saying it should change your mind, but it should at least be worth a reconsider in light of the new information.

For #1,2... we're *never* going to 100% know that it's safe. We're never goign to know the difficulty spike. Deciding to deliberately up the danger level is always going to be an increased risk, no matter how powerful we are, no matter how far we get.
For #2,3... the last fight was easy because we one-shot the weaker mobs, we two-shot the stronger mobs, the weaker mobs are flatly incapable of harming us without large numerical advantages (and aren't likely to be able to without numerical advantages that are massive) and we have CC, of which we've used one of three. We haven't dipped into our HP pools, out heal pool, our own dailies, or whatever it is that Shadow's packing. Note that we could have won this fight entirely without our healer. Arc Smash would have cleared out the trash mobs quickly, and with our HP and defenses, we could ahve tanked the big mobs long enough to take them out. that CC was the *only* thing that our druid added to the fight (because we didn't need more).

Worth noting here that we *just* saw an upgrade in mook value. This is the first fight that we've seen zombies in, and we're already trivializing their weak versions. We're not going to see large numbers of significantly stronger mooks through the grate. Given game narrative logic, and the fact that our first zombies were the guards here, what we're likely to see is something like a zombie boss room, followed by the skeleton spawners upgrading to zombies. Further worth noting that if we start getting swarmed by zombies, we have three uses of Arc Smash, each of which is capable of taking out three of the things.

For #4, QM has pretty much said that this is going to unleash... something. Something potentially dangerous to others We don't know what. "Roving boss that will kill potential party members" is *awfully* specific as a prediction, given the information available. Also, if we don't hit it, there's a good chance that someone else will, even if we just wait overnight. People are adventuring in groups that head out at different times. People are doing nighttime runs. This is another reason to grab it now rather than waiting. There are some pretty clear indicators that we can take what's behind the grate, and if we don't, someone else likely will.
For #5, there are resources that are qualitatively different than shards. I can pretty much guarantee that cracking the seal and facing what's on the other side will either drop some of them or drop a *massive* load of shards. It's a yrsillar quest. "Turtle up and never take risks" isn't going to be the most efficient answer for building power quickly.
For #6... even if enemies do respawn behind us, those enemies we can take out without daily resources, so what's the big deal?

More than all that, though, I just hate the "we should never take risks" philosophy. If the answer was "adventure some more, head back to town, prep, and come back in the morning to handle the grate after warning people."? I could be convinced... but the current opposing vote is, in essence, "Nope. Too dangerous. Some other time. Maybe. Or maybe we let someone else go first." We didn't hit the big iron door, now we're not hitting the grate. This passing up chances to push ourselves gets old fast... especially since I like this game, and a bit of risk-taking feeds the QM.

 

Keep in mind, if we do get a chunk we can get B in Greatclub. That would be a very sizable boost.

When we have seen that the area enemies actually can't hurt us (and I am sorry, but Linnea used root because she was cautious. Her not using it might have cost us one health, but might have meant nothing at all) without severely overwhelming us in number it's basically not 'leeroy jenkins' as 'appropriate challenge'.

Likewise, you folks voted to get the healer. If we don't even get to be healed once today after specifically looking for a healer because we don't want to actually take advantage of having a healer this is a shame.

Just FYI, but if I hadn't already voted this would have forced me to vote against you.

This kind of reasoning is shite and not only is counter-productive (it actually kill games instead of making them last longer) but it also reeks of "ohohohoohoh my choice is GM-approved, suck it".

 

In the other direction. I don't know where I got 7 from (did I add up the remaining heals to her remaining CC?). 1/3 is actually more than 2/7.

We will have a pretty good idea after having done this several more times. When we are at 57th floor and considering if we should open floor 58 I am sure we would have a pretty good guess of what to expect
Even just after this one time we would know better. So for our very first time I would rather play it a little bit more safe than increasing difficulty after a mere 3 fights

We two shotted the stronger mobs, but they could hit us and there were two of them. Now imagine if all the difficulty spike does is increase it to 6 of them? now we are taking serious hurt.
Also, you are trivializing the use of 1/3 CC, that is huge! without the CC the fight will go completely different. 2 more fights and we are out of CC.
Also, I disagree with your use of the word "massive" to discribe the numerical superiority needed since its -1 per 5 enemies.

 

Zombies are not an upgrade over skeletons, this is a side grade. These zombies and the skeleton gang under the necromancer are both equal distance from the enterance, on different sides of the same fork, and about equal danger. We have a grand total of 3 points of reference which is not enough to determine if they are really that significant. Also, this seems more like an optional miniboss rather than a floor boss to me (I imagine the floor boss is the third path, the "forward" which we didn't take and was the most pristine)

QM said

Demise is death. "not always for the brave" means OTHER PEOPLE suffer when you do it, and in this context explicitly die
And unleashing here is clearly the method via which the deaths occur.
And we know for a fact that other potential party members are still around

The tower is 100 floors tall, there is zero chance of the top tier stuff being dropped here. And I disagree with you on the "massiveness" of the shard drop. Furthermore, I AM NOT advocating we turtle up and never take risks, I am advocating to wait longer than 1 day and 3 total fights before we ramp up the difficulty.

I disagree, the only thing we ever fought without dailies so far were the scrub skeletons on the very first encounter ever. And I have explained exactly why I think that we will not fare as well with our extra resources. If we come out of the next fight wounded and out of dailies and then have to fight everything on the way back out we could be in real trouble.

 

I'll note that this is basically my stance on the cautious path. My sole concern about opening this door is that we have no idea what it will do to everyone else in the tower. I can live with a choice that has a chance of getting me killed; I really don't like making a choice that's likely to get a bunch of other people killed.

That said... If our little group of three can handle what's behind that door (according to Linnea), it may not result in "OMG Death!" for everyone else, but just general upgrading of skeletons to zombies (or whatever), with higher risk of stronger mobs showing up. In that case, people won't be at risk of dying unless they were already stretching themselves thin.

Which reminds me... Chunks are dropped by both boss and 'elite' mobs. Bosses would be rare, while elites would be (relatively) more common. It could be that opening this door just lets the elites out to play, which means everyone has more chances at higher-tier upgrades (as well as more chances at death, but already covered that).

The main resource concern with this being a boss room would be splitting any potential reward. However if we're getting more elites to fight, that gives everyone in our group more chances for those higher grade upgrades, which would be nice.

You had to have added her heals to the total, though I'm not sure how you ended up with 7. Comparing 1/3 with 2/7 is meaningless in this case.

I think you're overexaggerating the cost of using the ability. (I'll get to the math in a later post, as starting it took me to the next point.)


However, a reminder of a bit from the start of the chapter:

We should consider that this particular door isn't exactly very far into the tower, and that it would be quite presumptuous to think that we were the first to encounter it, or something like it.

Which means it's entirely likely that that elf encountered a door similar to this, and his party didn't make it through. Similarly, if it increased the entire tower difficulty (ie: the Leeroy Jenkins trap), it almost certainly should have been triggered multiple times by now (assuming doors like this are scattered throughout the floor).

If we don't beat whatever's behind the door, though, then we'll have fulfilled the little warning/prophecy. So if we open the door, we better be ready to beat anything inside to a pulp.

The more I think things through, the more convinced I am to go the somewhat reckless route. Particularly since, as noted, we brought the healer for a reason. It's a bit foolish, and almost certainly less efficient, but the main value I see is the gain in social bonds with Linnea and Shadow. Whatever's behind that door will almost certainly allow them to strut their stuff, rather than having the party be entirely "Yuuka and her tagalong friends". Giving them a situation where their contribution is truly important, is important.

[X] Through the Portcullis

 

Remember that it was quite early, it was quite a slog for people just to push the monsters into the tower, they barely managed to push through the first skeleton room in the tower and destroy a few of the spawn points with explosives, and aside from all of that we are the only one in our party strong enough to actually open the door. Other party members are leaving it to us because they literally can't open it
aside from all that, i don't each floor is linear in terms of power, rather I am assuming diablo 1 like generation, or any roguelike, where each floor is randomly generated and the levelups occur mostely between floors. It is always possible to just stumble on something like that early through exploring the level

 

[X] Through the Portcullis

 

A bit of fight analysis.


Enemies in the room:
6 basic zombies
2 big zombies

Mobs get bonus dice at +1 per total number over 4. They started at 6, and after killing 2 of them there was basically no risk from the normal zombies. That, to me, implies they're 2D mobs. Even with 2 successes, they can't break the 2 auto successes we get from our armor.

With all 6 of them, the last two would have had 3D and 4D offense, which would have a small risk of doing damage (2% and 8%, respectively).

The next question is how the bonus dice are allocated. Does the big zombie that attacked us count as the 5th mob, or the 1st mob? I'm going to assume the count always starts with the weakest mobs, because the stronger mobs are going to take advantage of their numbers advantage more. That means the weak mobs are a threat just by their very existence, and we shouldn't think we can completely ignore them.

So after that first round, we have 4 [2D] zombies, and 1 [(n+1)D] big zombie (the final big zombie being rooted).

Now the comparison becomes, what if that last big zombie wasn't rooted? Well, then it'd be the 6th attacker, leaving us with 4 [2D], 1 [n+1D], and 1 [n+2D].

The first big zombie caused us to skid back. That implies it was a strong blow, and we matched its total damage. That means we probably rolled 2 successes on our defense, plus our automatic 2, giving us 4. That means the zombie rolled 4 (probably with an automatic included). That means the zombie is at least 3D+1, and probably 4D+1, possibly even 5D+1. It's going to be stronger than the basic zombies, which are 2D, so 3D is minimum starting. Plus it gets the +1 numbers advantage.

With two of them on us, it would be 4D+1 and 5D+1, or 5D+1 and 6D+1. That means we'd have a 60% to 70% chance of taking damage each round, instead of 30% to 40% with just 1 big zombie on us.

Overall, we'd almost certainly take 1 damage, and probably take 2 damage by the time we finished them off. Slight chance of 3+ damage. We'd probably also use an Arc Smash to speed things up.

So the binding had a pretty high value, as it saved us from needing to use other abilities. Not 'essential', just 'more optimal', in that only one ability use was needed instead of (probably) two. If there had been fewer lesser mobs, there would be relatively little value in rooting one of the big ones since they wouldn't get the numbers bonus dice.

If we had the same scenario with more of the little mobs, we should Arc Smash them to clear out their potential numbers advantage quickly, because we absolutely do not want to let the big mobs get the numbers bonus dice if we can help it. 8 normals could be taken down to 4 in one round (3 from Yuuka, 1 from Shadow), and Linnea rooting a big one would keep us pretty safe.

While it didn't have armor, it probably still had some sort of equivalent for automatic successes on defense. We should not assume that equipment is the only way to get such bonuses.


Given what we learned from this fight, and the options we have to prevent numerical advantage from being a thing in future fights, I think we have a pretty solid chance of handling whatever's behind the door. And as long as we can kill it, we're all good, though we might need to be sure to come back here each day for respawns.

 

Good analysis

wait, the bonus only applies to the "last one" like that?
That is, shouldn't it be 5d+1 and a second 5d+1, or 6d+1 and a second 6D+1?

That is, lets say we are facing simple 1d skeletons. if we are facing four of them its 4x1d, but if its 5 then its 5x2d, if it is 6 then it is 6d, etc?
You seem to be saying that in the case of 6 skeletons its actually 4x1d + 1x2d + 1d
Also, its +1 for every individual after 4? I thought it was +1 to dice of all combatants at 5 intervals.
So, 8 gives +1d to every one of the 8. 10 gives +2d to every one of the 10, and so on.

also, your writeup really clarified why we were disagreeing about the level of threat we would face if we increased the difficulty. Since a mere "double the mooks" is very different in terms of danger depending on which way the math goes

 

Went digging for it.

Also pertinent to the matter at hand:

I suspect that means that whatever comes out of this thing, it's not going to gratuitously kill any of the characters from chargen.

 

Was going to look it up, but Sirrocco did it for me. Yeah, this is my understanding. The 5th gets 1 extra die; the 6th gets 2 extra dice; the 7th gets 3 extra dice; etc.

Or, in table format:

Skeleton #	Dice
1	1D
2	1D
3	1D
4	1D
5	2D
6	3D
7	4D
8	5D
9	6D
10	7D

Giving 1 extra die at 5 mobs, and 2 at 10 mobs, and giving that same bonus to all mobs, would mean that at 10 you'd have all 10 attacking you with 3D+0. For us, that means there'd be a 2% chance per attack of taking 1 damage. Basically insignificant.

With the progressive increase, numbers become a serious issue. The 10th mob in that pack (all by itself) would have a damage distribution of: 64% @0, 21% @1, 11% @2, 4% @3, 1% @4. Overall average damage per swing would be 0.57.

Basically, things become significantly more dangerous in large groups, but at the same time, only part of the group gets that extra benefit. The first 7 skeletons out of 10 are still doing almost no damage, so reducing numbers quickly is vastly beneficial. Going from 10 skeletons to 7 skeletons with an Arc Swing would reduce damage taken from 1.24 per round to 0.11 per round.

 

Kinematics interpretation is correct. And yeah, tougher mobs with the same agility as weaker ones will have their attacks done last. Helps keep the mooks significant.

 

+is wondering if the writing is an interpretation of AoE attack+

You know, the guys at the back still feel the damage.

 

A super boss that can't manage to get through a portcullis? Not too worried about anything we might 'unleash', people in the tower know what they signed up for.

[X] Through the portcullis

 

Bonus dices are allocated by the turn order. Turn order is rolled depending on agility.

This means that, basically, the assumption that the zombies have 2D attack might be false: you have to count the big zombie in the bonus dice. So if they have only 1D the 7 to attack in the turn (because one of the big one is rooted, so not 8) would have 3D 4D to attack us, so a slight chance to do damage (very slight).

Likewise the interpretration we did manage 2 success on our defense is a bit unlikely: even one success on 2D is something notable, so that might just be it. Depending on whether the big zombie was 5+ to attack us in our turn, his innate dice might be as little as 2d+1 and then doing an average roll (thus gaining two successes +1).

 

I'm not quite sure what you're saying, but this looks like a counterargument.

 

Not really? I am not disagreeing with the foundation of what Kinematic is saying, just that he forgot to add the big zombie in the bonus dice rolls, so that means they probably have much less dices than theorized.

 

[X]Through the Portcullis.

 

So if the big zombie had the same agility as the other zombies (and zombies probably all have 1 anyway - especially given that we have 1, and it looks like we went first) then it would attack after the others (as it's a tougher mob with the same agility), thus being the one to get the benefit of the numbers, and not adding to the numerical benefits of the lesser zombies. Right?

Again, I'm not entirely clear I'm reading your arguments right. I apologize if I'm misrepresenting them.

 

Yes, if the bigger zombie has the same agility as the other zombies it would attack the last (well, unless it's 'numbers of successes on agility roll'), hence it wouldn't need to have a very big dice pool as it would have a +3D.

Likewise, the last smaller zombie to attack, if the large zombie attack last, would have +2D, hence a chance to touch us (if a remote one).

Of course, that's only if they have the same agility score, and only if the agility score is taken as is and not rolled.

 

Agility is taken as is and follows the priority bosses> players> normal monsters in the case of a tie.

 

Well, we have an agility of 1, and went first. Assuming that 0 agility is not a thing here (or at least not a thing for mobile foes) that means they all have 1. Also...

Also, the big zombie was described as going last.

edit: semi-ninja.

So bosses don't get the mobbing benefits of their own minions, assuming equal agility?

 

[X]Through the Portcullis.

Might as well.