Today we spent this afternoon inside of True Dungeon, a semi live action role play environment in which players experience a room to room adventure composing of puzzles and combat with monsters.
In order to brave the challenges that you'll be presented with, you'll need some gear. While you're given a random pack of tokens when you're about to start, anybody who follows the game will have ordered their own packs (often hundreds of dollars worth) months in advance to have a better chance. The money then goes towards building better sets and props, but creates a nasty difficulty curve that they've recently begun to address.
Combat is performed by taking these treasure tokens and sliding them across a game board towards the silhouette of your target with various numbers on it representing weak points. The sliding is best compared to shuffleboard miniaturized to a table. The strongest monsters will often have extremely hard to hit weak points, adding difficulty to the encounter.
Puzzles are often clever, some involving pure mind work while others require some physical work. It's hard to describe what they've come up with over the years, but they often are physical versions of some smaller puzzles that I've worked with over the years. This year we had to physically move a labyrinth table, for example.
The monsters in the past few years have been played by live action actors to bring you even more into the story. Over the years we've been confronted with Moss monsters, Medusas, Golems, and various demons. This year had a gelatinous cube and a frost demon, along with the dragon Smoak.
The Frost Demon was worthless without her morning coffeeSo this year we were down a party member, having our group of five, and then two others who joined up with us who weren't geared at all besides what was given to them at the start. We lent them a few pieces of our gear to keep us alive because we knew that we were going up against a dragon, and ventured on.
We went from room to room, feeling that even though we thought we were on the equivalent of the combat side, we were running into more puzzles than monsters. By the time we had made it to the final room, we had counted 2 combats and 4 puzzles. Maybe we were expecting too much, but when we signed up for the non "puzzle oriented" adventure, we figured we'd have some more combat.
The dragon fight itself was amazing to see, but we stood no chance at all. We're not exactly slouches when it comes to gear, having many epic level items in the party and those that aren't are filled with rares, but each hit we took from the dragon was more than enough to kill any player at full health. My hats off to anybody who managed to kill Smoak, because we got devoured.
I've written quite negatively in the past about the way treasure was handled, with players often receiving the most common of items pull after pull after pull. They have since discovered some problems with leavng extremely valuable tokens unwatched, and have moved to a system where you draw all of your treasure at the end. This worked great for us, pulling a few rare items and several ingredient tokens. We did pull a common token, but compared to what we've pulled in prior years, we felt like we got some great stuff.
So despite getting Smoak'd, our party had a pretty good time this year. The balance between puzzles and combat really needs more tweaking, but they've fixed many of the problems we'd run into in previous years. I can't wait to see what Jeff Martin has in store for us next year, but I really hope that they turn down the difficulty level of the Draco-Lich that we're undoubtedly going to see. There's nothing wrong with letting some people beat the last boss, after all.
