Dungeon Delver Quest (Original Fantasy... again)

Well, depends on how Yrs plays it. Just a few assholes on the front line of the tower could indeed break the low-level adventurer economy like you describe, and that would be kind of a neat thing to have happen.

 

I'll grant it somewhat depends on exactly how Yrs designs him. However, from his description, my experience is telling me, "force-multiplier support". That's the type of job that does very little for you in the early game because the numbers you're multiplying are still small (and thus they try to fill out in other roles), but late-game can become game-breaking in how much power they add to your group. His skills also revolve around enhancing equipment, and our equipment options right now are pretty limited.

Basically, then, I expect he's like Linnea: weak while solo, but the type of character you want to get on your side early on, so that they'll be your teammate when their full powers bloom.

Will grant this as well. Have to find out tomorrow.

It's interesting, because I usually design parties around a team of 6, rather than 5, so I look at 5 as needing to figure out what useful stuff I have to throw out. Part of that is also to get as many force-multipliers on the backline as you can, while still getting enough DD on the frontline that that's actually useful.

With the 5 setup I suggested, we have 2 primary DD, a healer, a support, and a mage who can probably shift around a bit between offense and support. However if we take out the dedicated support role (Du), that means the mage will most likely have to focus on support to make up for the lack. That means any offense focus they might have will tend to not get used at all, which is a bit of an irritating position to be in.

5 is also a lot easier to allow to split the party, such as having one DD on the boss and another DD on the various adds. That doesn't leave you with much wiggle room if you have only 4 in the party, and without the boost of a pure support helping out (possibly allowing the mage to switch to "Kill All The Things" mode), can end up a long, drawn-out affair right high risk of death.

That's all much later on, though.

 

That's Not My Name
"Hey Doofy!"

"It's pronounced Du-Fi," the weary Crea corrected the idiot with the sword for a third time.

"Right, that's what I said. I need you to do that thing again. It wore off."

"None of my abilities have timers. What do you need exactly?"

There was a clang as Velvet Midnight, Greatest Swordsman in East Northwestshire parried another skeleton. "The sword thing! Do the sword thing again."

"I told you when we entered the room, I cleared the slot I was using to increase your sword's Sharpness so I could negate this trap floor's Flimsiness. Do you want me to reset your armor's Toughness so you can get more Sharpness?"

"No! I need that! You have three slots, don't you? What's in your third slot?"

"That's what I'm using for MY armor."

"How much do you need that?"

Dufi took another swing with a basic mace at the skeletons closing in. "Kind of important."

"Well do SOMETHING, you're making me do all the work here!"

"Fine, be ready to act, fast, or you'll die." With that, Dufi cleared the armor slot not being used by the whinging swordsman, and looked around. With a slot empty, certain qualities of items nearby came to attention, including the pillars under the floor. "Take a jump to the left, NOW." With a step to the right, Dufi cleared the slot supporting the floor, letting the swarming skeletons all start falling through.

Letting out a sigh of relief, Dufi looked around. The floor could still be passable, if that weren't Dufi's last Negation. The Crea could Bolster all day long, but Negating and Imparting were both limited. "Alright, you're going to have to get comfortable, because I'm going to have to come back for you tomorrow."

"What do you mean tomorrow?"

"I can make my gloves sticky enough to climb the wall behind me back to the entrance, but I can only do that once. So I'll be back in the morning to help you. If I can find anyone back in town who can help you sooner, then I'll try to get you back in town for the night."

"I DEMAND that you make my gloves sticky instead!" Velvet was apoplectic at this point. This was no way to treat somebody with the Shining Champion class.

"You don't get to demand anything, you self-entitled middenmind. I'm coming back for you tomorrow. Don't say anything that makes me rethink that."

With a quick stop by the door to collect the loot, and toss an appropriate number of shards to Velvet, Dufi headed back, resolving never to work with the idiot again.

 

Actually, pretty much everyone will benefit a lot from shards dropping everywhere. For example, that Great Axe might not be so useful as we already have a more or less equivalent weapon, but later on the ability to just grab "Tree Weaponry" if we find a good tree means we won't be locked out a weapon as fast as we would otherwise be.

It also means we won't have much issue going "we have to wait to use stuff as later skills when the job is rank B-A are so much better". Because, well, when we do get rank B-A we probably will have 200+ shards to throw at all those skills instantly whatever we do.

TBH that won't do much- adventurers that keep climbing will keep finding more and more and more shards, and we wouldn't have trouble giving a lot of those in exchange for stuff later.

Yeah, my thoughts are basically that the higher we'll go and the more complete we'll want our party to be. In fact, it's in the early game that we might want to skimp on stuff more in order to get a leg up.

 

That's assuming that a large number of skills will be open for purchase in the future. Certainly, if getting our class up to C rank and/or other forms of unlock result in us having huge numbers of potential skills to unlock and level to C, shards will have enduring value (so long as those skills hold out). That's not currently the impression that I have. I propose that we rank up to C tonight, though, which should give us a pretty good idea of how many skills we're likely to have available to play with. If there are a lot of them then yes, it would be appropriate to reconsider the overall strategy.

So, the way I see it... You want a tank, so you can run tank/squishy synergies. You want DPR, so that things die. You want healing, because that's a really efficient way of keeping the tank standing. On top of that, buff skills are useful, and CC/debuff is useful. Whether or not they're critical depends on how useful they are. I also notice that most characters in this game are multirole. Linnea is heal and CC, and might get buffs later. Yatsurugi is tank and DPR, and could conceivably pick up some CC later. Murdan is ranged DPR but also can swap in some multirole support. He almost certainly has access to CC and buffs (though not necessarily at the same time). Shadow hasn't really shown anything other than pure DPR, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have anything. Still, to me, one tank/DPR, one pure DPR, one heal/CC, and one DPR/support is a pretty solid group. Adding a pure support to that? It's not necessarily a bad move, but it depends what that pure support brings to the table.

Worth noting that Du might not be quite as end-weighted as you think. He might be having problems getting groups right now, but that's because people at this level are kind of shortsighted, and not well-organized, not because he's weak. Right now, our gear is strong enough that you could hand literally anyone our club and shirt, and if they had the skill to wear them, they could one-shot skeletons while remaining perfectly safe. I don't know for sure, bit it seems likely that trash mob stats will raise faster than gear stats - being able to start at gear rank 2 is a big deal against the starter monsters. If his power scales with the importance of gear, and gear grows less important as we climb the tower...

Also worth noting that we might not wind up as gear-weighted as some parties. Shadow doesn't appear to use gear to attack, and might not use it for defense, either. We're a tank, but we'll never wear anything heavier than cloth. (Oni make up for it by developing resilient skin and so forth.) Du's buffs might or might not be of particular value to the casters. Now, how important this is depends on implementation. If Du's armor buff is multiplicative rather than additive, and a lot of his utility comes out of a weapon damage buff power that he could lay down multiple times, he'd be more useful with a party tank who clanked around in full plate and DPR who used bows and daggers. If his armor buff is additive, and talisman buffing provides significant benefits, it's much less of an issue.

 

As I guess, both the club and the axe are two-handed?

[X][Loot] Give Linnea the Talisman.
[X][Loot] Test the axe for now.

Also,

I was under the impression that people can't exactly leave once they've entered the tower area, until the tower is down.

 

Yeah any 'Great' weapon is generally two handed. And people can leave any time they want. Its getting in that's the tricky part sometimes.

 

Can I get the count?

 

Give Linnea the talisman, sell the great Axe, Dry Hall looks like it has the overwhelming majority, both by plan and by individual.

looks like 11 votes for the plan, and 2 votes not for the plan, by rough hand-count.

 

Vote Tally : Dungeon Delver Quest (Original Fantasy... again) | Page 14 | Questionable Questing
##### NetTally 1.5.2

Task: Direction

[13][Direction] Dry Hall

---

Task: Loot

[14][Loot] Give Linnea the Talisman
[12][Loot] Sell the Great Axe
[1][Loot] Take the axe
[1][Loot] Test the axe for now.

Total No. of Voters: 14

 

Hm. We have 59 Deucite Shards. Save 2 for sleeping, and some for breakfast tomorrow. For breakfast, Let's say 2 for now. Get a more accurate number after we get dinner tonight and adjust as needed, so I think we should set aside at least 9 overall in case things are more expensive than we think.

[X][Stat Points] Bread and Butter
-[X] Strength
-[X] Toughness

[X][Skills & Job] - 40
-[X] Greatclub C (10)
-[X] Job C (15)
-[X] Warrior's Challenge D (5)
-[X] Breaker D (5)
-[X] Steel Stomach D (5)
Cost: 40 shards. 19 remaining for food/drink, sleeping, incidentals, and new skills we get from the Rank up on our job.

[X][Misc] Spend No more than 3 shards on Food/Drink.

[X][Action] Social Activity!
-[X] See if you can't find Murdan or someone else that seems interesting and have a chat.

[X][Sleep] Sleep under guard. Costs 2 shards

edit: I forgot that leveling the Job gives more skills. I've dropped Warrior's Challenge from C to D so that we get an extra 10 shards to throw at new skills once we see what they are. I will not drop Breaker or Warrior's Challenge lower than they are now, because they are useful to us and I don't see a reason we shouldn't bump them up at least once each.

 

[X][Stat Points]
-[X] Strength
-[X] Will

We really need to up that will steadily too, and, well, it also gives us HP!

[X] Bring our Oni Warrior to C
This is because it not only gives us a passive but also will make it clearer what skills we can level up/get that way.
[X] Bring our Greatclub to C
Even if we do get another weapon proficiency to level, this is cheap enough that we shouldn't mind levelling it.
Those two should be 25 shards and we actually have 59 (are you sure about this yrsillar, that looks like a lot), this means another 34 unused shards. I think we can wait till we see what potential new skills we get from job to use most of those, so I'll wait for the potion/stuff.

[X][Misc] How much will you spend on food and drink?
-[X] 2 Shards (NO ALCOHOL)
[X][Action]
-[X] Mingle with adventurers. Try to see what kind of groups are forming, as well as look at what support people are potentially not finding groups yet (like Linnea didn't yesterday).
[X][Sleep] Pay 2 shards.

 

Yeah I know, you earned a fair bit, remember thats for selling your extra loot and last times big fight too.

 

yrsillar, how about tacking the Mechanics things to the front page?

Spoiler: Mechanics

Stat Explanation
Strength: Your ability to leverage brute force, affects melee attack acc/damage.
Toughness: How much physical punishment you can take: Defense against physical damage, adds to health
Agility: Your speed and maneuverability and reaction time. Defends against physical attacks if higher than toughness, determines turn order.
Dexterity: Controls smaller, fiddly motions and actions. Used in crafting, trap disabling, stealth and other such things.
Perception: Your ability to notice small details and find hidden things. Mostly used to counter stealth and find secrets.
Power: Your ability to leverage the well of arcane power available to all living things. Affects magical attacks acc/damage
Will: Your ability to persevere through difficulty and resist mental assaults: Defense against non-physical attacks. Adds to health.
Presence: Your ability to inspire others and lead: Some social effects, used for various leadership and pet taming classes.

Basic System Workings:
Rule 0: All rules are subject to change when QM deems necessary
Rule 1: All dice used are d10, success occurs on a roll of 7 or higher.

Your dice pool is determined by adding the values of your attributes and skills. For skills the dice assigned to each letter rank are as follows. The number of dice granted by your attributes are your stat divided by 2 rounded down. Minimum is zero.
E: 1 dice
D: 2 dice
C: 4 dice
B: 6 dice
A: 10 Dice
S: 15 Dice
EX: ??

Equipment relevant to a task at hand (such as a weapon during an attack, or lockpicks in a door unlocking) add automatic successes equal to their quality. You may only equip items with a quality lower than or equal to your level plus one.

In the case of static challenges, the challenge will have a flat number of minimum successes needed to pass. In the case of competitive challenges (attacking another person, a race against an npc etc.) all characters involved roll and the one with the highest number of successes wins.

In the case of attacks, for every success which exceeds the defenders successes one point of damage is dealt. So if you attack a monster and get 3 successes on attack, while it gets 2 on defense you deal one damage.
There are other modifiers, but they will be discussed later.

Raising/Purchasing Skills and Job Ranks
Skills and jobs have their rank increased through exactly one method. Use of deucite. Deucite is the crystalline material that remains after a tower monster is slain, and is colloquially known as godsblood. Monsters invariably drop at least one deucite shard when slain, with stronger monsters dropping more or larger pieces. Raising skills past C requires the larger pieces dropped only by elite monsters and bosses.

D: 5 Shards
C: 10 shards
B: 1 chunk
A: 1 Slab
S: 1 Slab, 2 Chunks
EX: ??

Purchasing skills is a bit different, in that each skill has its own price in shards. Some rare or high ranking skills may require a larger piece just to purchase/attune. Now you may be wondering, what does the Job Rank actually do? Increasing your job rank raises your stat caps(the number in parenthesis) and unlocks more skills for purchase. Certain ranks will also grant passive benefits, typically one at C and another at A and S.

Combat Systems
Aside from the basic attack/defense, there are a couple other items that should be mentioned. Turn order is determined solely by agility, although some npcs and monsters may have skills that affect it as well. Highest agility goes first and then all others in descending order.

The other major item is the ‘target priority’ system. Each character in your party begins with a target priority of zero unless modified by a skill. Enemies will move to attack the target with highest priority value. Each time a character damages an enemy this increases their priority by one. In the case of attacks that affect multiple targets this does mean that the characters priority increases by one for EACH enemy damaged. Killing an enemy increases your priority by two. Using a healing item or skill on another character increases your priority by two. Using such a thing on the character with the current highest priority increases it by three.
As always some skills may modify the base functions of this system.

Agreeing on raising Job Level.

[X][Stat Points]
-[X] Toughness
-[X] Toughness 2

[X][Skills & Job] - 30
-[X] Oni Warrior D - 5
-[X] Oni Warrior C - 10
-[X] Greatclub C - 10
-[X] Steel Stomach D - 5

[X][Potions] - 2
-[X] Minor Healing Potions x1 - 2
-[X] Check what Bonemeals can make or if you can stash Ingredients with the Apothecary

[X][Misc] - 5
-[X] Food (dinner & breakfast) - 3
-[X] Alcohol - 2

[X][Action] Mingle with Adventurers
-[X] Try to see what kind of groups are forming, as well as look at what support people are potentially not finding groups yet (like Linnea didn't yesterday).

[X][Sleep] - 2
-[X] Yes - 2

 

... I need to precise no Alcohol now, don't I? Really don't want to see what happens when you have a drunk superhuman oni around, nor do I want the status effect of drowsy tomorrow morning.

 

+grins+

The alcohol content and quality required to make an oni drunk and hungover probably costs far more than 2 Deucite shards, also it is part of Yuuka's fluff that a too long period of sobriety is an affliction that can make an oni grumpy from migraine.

 

So, out of curiosity, is Velvet Midnight real, and did he make it back to camp tonight?

 

Oni are like the robots in Futurama: its sobriety that causes issues.

 

Quite a haul.

On stats, while there's the obvious Strength+Toughness, I'm thinking we might want to consider 2x Toughness. Strength is currently an odd number, so +1 to that will give us +1 attack die. However Toughness is even, so we need +2 to get +1 defense die. Given that taking Greatclub to C will put us at 6D attack (which is about a 30%-40% increase in damage output already), while we're still sitting at 2D defense, we really need more on the defense side of things. The extra HP doesn't hurt, either.

[X][Stat Points]
-[X] Toughness
-[X] Toughness 2

For shards, I'd already intended to save about 10 as a reserve, so that leaves up to 49 to spend. Call it 50. I'll agree that we'll also want to hold some in reserve for any unlocked skills, but I'm more willing to leave that as a low priority til after our next run, given how quickly we're gaining shards. For this, I'd like to get all of our skills up one rank. In particular, I can't imagine Steel Stomach as having any useful upgrade that solely relates to ingested items (we're already immune to toxins), so I'd like to see where it can go. Possibly increased resistance to general debuffs (like that mage's spell earlier)?

[X][Skills & Job] - 40
-[X] Greatclub C (10)
-[X] Job C (15)
-[X] Warrior's Challenge D (5)
-[X] Breaker D (5)
-[X] Steel Stomach D (5)

That's 40 shards, leaving us with 19.

[X][Potions] - 7
-[X] Minor Healing Potions x1 - 2
-[X] Lesser Berserker's Elixir x1 - 5
-[X] Check what Bonemeals can make

Just one spare minor potion, given the likelihood of partying with Linnea again. However, also want to get the Berserker's Elixir. It's a minor healing potion plus a strength boost (one battle only), which I think could be an emergency backup in the event of a nasty fight.

For food, I figure we want to budget for both dinner and breakfast. I think a 2 shard dinner, 1 shard for breakfast, and a couple for alcohol would be a nice treat.

[X][Misc] - 5
-[X] Food (dinner and breakfast) - 3
-[X] Alcohol - 2

Have 7 left.

[X][Action]
-[X] Mingle with adventurers. Try to see what kind of groups are forming, as well as look at what support people are potentially not finding groups yet (like Linnea didn't yesterday).

Seems like a decent evening activity, so going with that.

[X][Sleep] Sleep under guard. Costs 2 shards

Seems like overkill to protect our last 5 shards and a potion, but with Yuuka's pitiful perception stat, might as well. Well, would be 6 shards since one of them is reserved for breakfast in the morning.

Also leaves us enough for a couple extra minor healing potions if we can't get Linnea tomorrow.

 

I want to upgrade this to see what it upgrades into. we can't get more immune to injected toxins, and completely immunity comes from rank E. does it make us able to digest things like raw trees? or does it make us immune to all toxins even noninjested ones? does it provides some measure of DR?

also, can we get new skills? we don't even have an axe skill but were considering it. Could we get a shield skill or an armor skill or some such? maybe some utility skills like trap finding? stealth? regeneration?

 

We unlock new skills by ranking up Job. I don't think we've yet seen any other means of unlocking skills.

[][Stat Points]
-[] Toughness
-[] Toughness 2

[][Skills & Job] - 50
-[] Greatclub C (10)
-[] Job C (15)
-[] Warrior's Challenge C (15)
-[] Breaker D (5)
-[] Steel Stomach D (5)

[][Potions] - 4
-[] Minor Healing Potions x2 - 4
-[] Check what Bonemeals can make

[][Misc] - 5
-[] Food (dinner and breakfast) - 3
-[] Alcohol - 2

[][Action]
-[] Mingle with adventurers. Try to see what kind of groups are forming, as well as look at what support people are potentially not finding groups yet (like Linnea didn't yesterday).

[][Sleep] Sleep by yourself. Free.
-[] Offer to let Linnea and Shadow join you if they want. If they're going to buy protection, you certainly won't try to convince them otherwise, but if they're not, then there's a bit of safety in numbers. You're not too worried about yourself, but youd rather they wake up okay. They're good kids.

I like @Kinematic's plan for the most part, but I just don't think it's worth delaying a skill-up for the opportunity to carry a potion around just in case. Having made that change, we're down to five less shards on hand overnight, which suggests saving on the guards and buying another potion instead. At that point, if we're going to be sleeping by ourselves anyway, might as well invite the other two girls to join us. We work well together, and it'll keep them safe and help build the social connection there.

For those voting will... it won't actually help our defenses unless you add two points to it.

edit: vote change. Bowing to the realities of vote-by-plan. I can accept buying the potion.

 

My plan is to vote Str/Will now, Will/Toughness next level, and Str/Toughness after that. Our will is quite low, gives us HP like toughness, and I really dislike being that weak to spells.

I guess I could put two points in will because we are getting GreatClub C, but ....

 

Fair - str/will isn't a bad choice. tough/will, though, is pretty strictly suboptimal, since it doesn't give us any two-point gains.

Actually, yrsillar, could we simplify? if we're always getting stat points in multiples of two, and stat points only really matter in multiples of two, would it be possible to just cut the numbers in half? Just get one point per level, and have each point in each stat count?

 

And then we were playing Dungeon Meshi Quest.

 

I would prefer saving Shards for any possible new Skills from ranking up the Job, that we might want to buff to D as soon as possible.

 

I figure we'll get a fair number of new skills from ranking up the job, which means there will be tons of arguing over what's worth getting. As such, making it so that we have to wait and think over what we might want to do, and then do it once we have our next batch of shards, seems less conflict-prone.

 

[X][Stat Points]
-[X] Toughness
-[X] Toughness 2
[X][Skills & Job] - 50
-[X] Greatclub C (10)
-[X] Job C (15)
-[X] Warrior's Challenge C (15)
-[X] Breaker D (5)
-[X] Steel Stomach D (5)
[X][Potions] - 4
-[X] Minor Healing Potions x2 - 4
-[X] Check what Bonemeals can make
[X][Misc] - 5
-[X] Food (dinner and breakfast) - 3
-[X] Alcohol - 2
[X][Action]
-[X] Mingle with adventurers. Try to see what kind of groups are forming, as well as look at what support people are potentially not finding groups yet (like Linnea didn't yesterday).
[X][Sleep] Sleep by yourself. Free.
-[X] Offer to let Linnea and Shadow join you if they want. If they're going to buy protection, you certainly won't try to convince them otherwise, but if they're not, then there's a bit of safety in numbers. You're not too worried about yourself, but youd rather they wake up okay. They're good kids.

 

[X] Arkatekt
seems to have a nice, simple upgrade. I'd be okay with offering Linnea and Shadow if they want to sleep with us (under the safety of the 2-shard cost, that is obviously what I meant), but they both bailed to photosynthesize or angst about demonic possession or whatever. I don't think they're available.

 

Yeah. This. I'd really rather avoid the hassle of two-staging it. We'll pick up a bunch of shards tomorrow. *those*, we can use for unlocking and maxxing whatever skills come next. We know we're going to want these skills anyway - fillign them out now rather than saving mostly just simplifies the decision-making process.