As of right now, path is not in the winning bracket, but he is the last person to process from the Afternoon, and he could based on these results. Will that change in his action? Hold on to you butts!

path has slain the 1st animated tree, but battle continues!!!

C'mon chaos-fighter

Hope you brought a pot of speed

TWO aniamted trees dead......

but now.......PATH FLEES... OH NOES!!!

Alright, Night Actions are in for everyone who matters, get ready for the results!!

Alright folks. Step right up and it times to figure out who teh 4 players are that will join dubb in the semi-finals of the Dungeon. As you know, 16 Dungeon Blocks were in the opening round, and the top 5 winners advance, creating 4 Blocks with 20 players each, and then the top 5 winners from those advance to the final round, of 20 double winners, and whoever wins here wins the Pan-Planar competition and the 34th annual Dungeon!



Alright, so congratulations to our first winner, JAG!!!!! JAG was highest in everything that the judges use to determine where you fall. JAG is teh 2nd winner.


That means the final three spots will come from these five players:


Thomkal
ntndeacon
path
Chief Rum
Ziiggy


Who makes it in folks?

The next player in is level 7, has more XP than anyone else, and meets all of the other criteria for making it in as well.....



That right; folks, say hello you your favorite cleric and mine, Chief Rum!!!!


CR is the 3rd winner of this event.

Thomkal, I love ya buddy. I think you are an awesome player, and I would love to see your Ritualist make it in. Unfortunately, you have lower XP than anyone else. The winning circle takes more than just level into account in order to level the playing field, since some classes are harder to level. Even accounting for that, unfortunately, you came in 7th. Sorry buddy!



And that leaves 3 spots and just two players.....

Who's next?


Who's the most un-bear-able contestant? That's right, our favorite qwithi druid, a person with a random class/race who came in late manages to come in 4th and collect that prize....


Congrats ntndeacon!!!

And there's just one. Let's take a look at our contestants:



The first is path, and Chaos Warrior with a heart of gold, who's hobby includes just wants to break things and see what's inside.


The other is Ziiggy, a guzak scout who like to hide and then stab you in the back for fun, and he locates traps, picks locks, and stabs you again for thinking about him.




Who's in? Who's out?

And it is...............































It's actually pretty close......but.....................







path gained some good XP from the two trees, but fled before getting enough to give him that category against Ziiggy, adn Ziiggy holds all of teh other tiebreakers so....




CONGRAATS ZIIGGY you come in 5th and you are a winner!



path comes in 6th. Thanks everyone for playing!!!!!!

The final tally of current players and winners


1. dubb
2. JAG
3. Chief Rum
4. ntndeacon
5. Ziiggy
6. path
7. Thomkal
8. Danny


And then among the dead, Ragone was in front.

Thanks to everyone for playing, I really appreciate your hard work and time!!!!

And to you Abe, tremendous fun.

Congrats to the other winners.

Did anyone else end up hitting level 9?

Nope

In the Dungeons, our winners have included Clerics, thieves, bards, paladins, myrmidons, chaos warriors, a druid, artificer, berserker. I'm pretty comfortable with the class balance. Again, I'll likely tweak the XP lists - I dialed them back from D1 and D2 to make them closer to each other, and I'll probably do that again.

SO, what worked for y'all, and what changes would you recommend for next time?

One thing I thought of, not sure if you want to go for this, but I know the first monster I fought hit for 1d4+1, meaning it could kill a L1 d4 hp class in one hit 50% of the time, and had enough hps to survive any initial attack. Almost no one selected those classes (even Thomkal who did only did so as a secondary option), not sure if it was because of that fragility or most people prefer fighters or what. But maybe something like boosting the starting hps and then lowering the hp / level would give them better odds to survive past one encounter the first level and make them more enticing to people to play. So like 6-8hp for a battle Mage / sorceror to start and then 3 hp per level, they even up at level 4 or 6 and are weaker the rest of the way, but a bit more survivable early.

The biggest change I noticed was a lot less resources this go-around. Much fewer monsters dropping gold / fewer items being found. On one hand this was good because it made things more challenging, but it also made for fewer choices when it was time to buy from the djinni. That might be just a result of my class choice though...but not sure how folks without things like a spade of digging managed to get by.

That was an intentional decision on my part, in part because I felt that I overpriced a lot of magical items in previous games, so I dropped the price of various potions, special items, and such. I increased the number of scrolls and potions though, so you'd still have a lot of stuff out there of the disposable variety.

I liked the changes to parties, that seemed like a good way to make them more viable exp-wise and for the dungeon to still be dangerous to them while not messing things up for solo folks.

Liked keeping track of character sheet in a thread to be edited, not sure it helped you much as you were hoping though, since you seemed to be keeping track of that anyway.

Level 2 and 3 of the dungeon sure seemed ramped up in difficulty from last time, I think that was a good change. In fact I think those two levels were the only ones where people died.

I basically sold everything besides the stuff I had equipped and turned them into health pots. I bought horse figurines anytime I either lost time (ran into an unexpected wall or lost a fight) or felt like I needed to push further.

I found item ID stuff to be completely useless. I was able to successfully ID every item that I ended up with besides the two things I traded you. I did fail to ID something once, but that was one single time out of....I really don't know how many but I would guess it was closer to 10 than 5.

Yeah, I'm thinking of making the ID action automatic next game. you can use up one action, and ID one thing for free.

Oh, nd I would bump up other ID stuff - the ID ARcane Spell IDs everything not just a number of items, the Bard/Artificer ability id items on teammates without trading etc

I'm packing for a camping trip, so I won't really be able to offer up my full thoughts until Monday.

But I just wanted to take the time to say that I really enjoyed this Dungeon. Good job, Abe. You run a very impressive game (as always).

Happened with me too-lost track of how many times I just bought enough rations/torches to hold me to next time.

Could have been the group? Going solo I never really felt like I couldn't buy something I needed. Even had a few times I could buy things I wanted and needed. Maybe you guys were splitting loot?

I was alone most of the time remember-I think you were lucky that you found more rooms that had treasure, things you could sell.

Oh, and in answer to a question I thought dubb would have asked by now, every day, in movement phase, I toss some dice and there is a 50% chance that a random room someone is moving to either gets a new door out, or loses a door it has (50% chance for each). Those of you that moved through a tunnel only to have it disappear behind you, that was the mechanic in question.


Again, teh Dungeon doesn;t like you!


There were wormholes from level 1 to level 3 opening up starting day 11, and Thomkal caught one and choose not to go through (they would say in the room description something like right to darker level 3). They were every other entrance. The goal was to help folks who had gotten left behind. Danny didn;t go through them, but I'm not sure if he noticed or not, CR and Ziiggy moved through one accidentally. I think it helped them. So they worked as designed.

And then I've had random Magic Vortexes moving people to a random place on their level ever since Dungeon 1. It happened 3 times, if I recall, this iteration. There's a 10% chance it'll happen on any given day.

There was a very awesome Dungeon feature you didn;t notice, probably because people didn;t talk much about their pms here. Apparently it was too subtle for y'all, so I'll use it again in D4.


Anyways, I liked spirit magic, I tried really hard to have a version of Magic that didn;t feel like the other two realms. It's hard to do. But I took this class and concept basically whole cloth from Guild Wars and I really enjoyed how it played.



ONE CHANGE I AM CONSIDERING -

What about this? What if every character has the same XP chart. But some classes got XP bonuses, like humans get. So a Scout could get an 15% XP bonus as an example. That way there's just one chart, and no one gets confused.

Oh, I also want to make teh Rangers hit automatically with their bows, rather than just attack with them. Amp them up a tad.

I figured out the random doors on my own. Just didn't know the percentage.

That's great, I like that.

I think that's more convoluted. It's like a hidden xp chart for those classes or you have to calc it yourself, plus every time anyone gets xp you would have to calc their percentage, which adds a little to your processing time.

This was a ton of fun, thanks a bunch Abe. Any way to offer more options that don't require an action? Obviously it has to stay reasonably manageable for the dm but it would be nice to be able to make a decision and act during the same action rather than have to do nothing until the next action. Maybe that would make it too easy for players to advance and too much for the dm, but it's the only thing that really stood out for me as mildly frustrating.

Had a blast. Thanks again.

FYI, incase anyone didn't realize it. The rooms where you fought yourself were OP. I was lucky to find two of them. The first one gave me 50% of my current XP. The second gave me 11k XP.

I included them on my map, but I was careful not to reveal exactly how....dare I say broken, they were.

VERY excellent game!!! Probably the most fun I've had though it's close with Wheel of Time. Would likely be rated higher if there was a way to boost the chance of parties forming. Then again, I could have just been unlucky where that's concerned as there were some parties.

Yeah, and having the full 20 players would have helped that too.

Way to go, Ziiggy! Your cheering section rejoices.

Damn. I'm telling you folks this now because you were with me, but I am finishing up some random high school romance Visual Novel made in 2014 and all of the sudden it references Higurashi!


"In an anime that takes place in the summer there's always this weird buzzing noise. I've always wondered what the deal was with that. Now that I am in Japan I finally get it. It's the sound of the cicadas." - Tokyo School Life

Fully agree with you.