TOPIC: Proposal: New Dungeon Difficulty Level

Raven wrote:

Brad wrote: Hell could only be accessed by those players who know to ask for it and on the sheet we just need to make a note to the Room DM's

"Make them cry"

While it's amusing from an external perspective, I have actually encountered DMs who took that attitude in earnest. It's not much fun.

When you have a DM who arbitrarily increases his monster's HP because he hasn't killed a party member yet, that's a problem. When you have a DM who decided that a puzzle needs to be solved *in a certain way* instead of just correctly, or the way it's described in the Nightmare puzzle stats, that's a problem. When you have a DM who changes the rulings on how tokens work in the dungeon in order to make it more difficult for Nightmare parties, that's not fun, and it's a slap in the face for people who spent $100+ on a token so they could use it in Nightmare runs.

I like running Nightmare for the challenge. I don't run it for a "DM vs the Players" feeling, or out of sheer masochism. "Crying" is really not the intent.

Yeah, I've ran into the DM vs. player thing a few times also. They might recognize me and/or look at the Party Card to see how good we are, and try to kill us. I've even once or twice had the same DM in a room from a previous run, and they have actually said something like "you won't get by me this time". And then, suddenly, tokens that worked the previous time don't work anymore, or he even said "that should work, but I'm not going to let it. If you protest later you'll probably win". I actually had a great friend quit True Dungeon permanently because of that room, because he was angry for me that all the tokens I'd bought for the group weren't being allowed to be used correctly, as well as the DM's attitude.

99% of the DM's and volunteers have been wonderful, but when you get one that is out to get you, or even gloats after they did get you, it's not as fun.

Its been a few years since I have DM'ed a D&D campaign. But my philosophy was that I had two jobs:

1 Entertain my players

2 Occasionally scare the crap out of them.



It was not necessary to kill anyone to achieve these goals. It happened from time to time. Sure, when someone did something stupid there were consequences. But I never enjoyed killing characters.

A Hell level is an interesting idea, but I think unnecessary for as Raven noted teamwork and puzzle solving is as good if not better than raw token power. If nightmare is easier this year it was likely due to well equipped druids/clerics healing 100+ point on spells (yea rod ring and lenses and 2 15 pt 1st level spells). Balancing through creative combat issues is good. When running on normal with my son and a group of 1-2 year players with few tokens (we were prepared for nightmare combat).They were great and solved most of the puzzles (this was a pick up group no less)and with our help killed every monster in 2 rounds or less. However a certain snake tressed lady turned 4 to stone (including the wizard and our young bard). After reviewing what my fully kitted out Druid can do, he cannot read stone to flesh scrolls. Had several on my person but only useful to writ notes on. Had to break (kill) the bard and death's door him so save the party. This was the idea of a second year player and impressed the **** out of the DM so it worked. showed to me that creatively dangerous monster work and team work is great

Perhaps a better way to look at True Dungeon levels isn't "How many tokens do you have?" or "What is your skill level?" but:

"Why are you playing this game?"

If you answer, "To see all the rooms, try my hand at all the puzzles, and relax with my friends in a low-stress way." Then Non-Lethal is probably what you're looking for.

If you answer, "I heard it was a great game and want to challenge myself, to see if I can make it all the way to the end!" Then Normal Mode is your best choice.

If you answer, "I really like to push myself and my friends, to do the best we can, with what we've got. I've done some preparation, and now I'm looking for a challenge which will make me feel like I've earned it, if we make it to the end." Then give HardCore a shot.

If you answer, "I enjoy the very real possibility of failure. I have the equipment and the teammates to take on a serious challenge, and feel like we can have a great time even if we all die." Then maybe Nightmare was made for you.

I posted the following in the L&L forums a while back. It didn't seem to get much traction but since it applies here, I'm reposting it:

So, anyone with half a brain has probably realized at this point that TD has a real problem with balancing the various difficulty levels to provide an experience that is challenging at all levels. Mostly this has been due to some really ill-considered power creep which has resulted in not only a blurring between classes but a truly chasm-like difference between the power of various builds. Well, I have an idea to sort of fix, or at least mitigate the problem.

Currently we have 3 difficulty levels (not going to consider NL here since the stats don't change for the monsters/puzzle damage from normal). The way we've set the difficulty for the three levels is to assign a particular discrete number for each state based on the level. So for example on a particular combat room the monster might have 15 AC on normal, 20 on Hardcore and 25 on Nightmare. The same adjustments would be made for hit/damage, DC for saves, number of attacks, and other whozits. In a puzzle room the changes made to scale the event between the three difficulty levels would be limiting the amount of information given, requiring a more exacting solution, and adjusting the amount of damage dealt for failure and room push. The problem we have now is that it's no longer possible to adequately balance within any difficulty level. No matter where you set the 'line', it's going to be too hard or too easy because though creep we've hugely expanded the possible range of stats we'll see. Even if you count nightmare as a group that's mostly using URs, there is a huge difference between the low end of that scale and one that's BiS. If you adjust to the low end of that (as we have been doing) the BiS people hit on 3's. If you adjust to the high end, then all the non-BiS people will die and even some of the BiS non-combat builds will die.

So here's what I propose. I'd like to see a party card redesign. At the bottom of each party card we add a new box under AC, +hit, +dam and +save. What that new box will track is the average AC of the entire party. Each coach will need a small handheld calculator, but those are cheap and easy to use. Nothing will change for normal. On normal, the monsters will be given their base stats....say:

HP: 50
AC: 15
+Hit: 5
+Dam: 5
DC: 12

If the group is a hardcore or nightmare group however, the DM will tally up the average stats into those boxes. When a combat DM gets the party card, they will quickly check to see if those boxes are filled out and if the group is hardcore or nightmare. They will have a sheet of paper/pad which lists the base monster stats as above. They will also have a cheat which gives them a conversion for each stat.

Average AC / +Hit/dam Adjustment
10-15 / +1 / +3
16-20 / +2 / +5
21-25 / +3 / +7
26+ / +4 / +9

Say the group is NIghtmare with an average AC of 22. The DM will then jot down on the pad with the monster stats that 5 + 7 = +12/+12. The same would go for everything else and if the pads are pre-printed with the monster stats and with little boxes to write the new values and the converstion matrix, the whole thing could easily take less than 15 seconds to do at the start of a room. What you get out of it is a room that will be more balanced for the group based on their stats.

Now, you might be asking won't people complain that there's no point to buy tokens or equip better since the monster will scale with how buffed you are?

1) The scaling will never hit a 1 to 1 level. In the above scenario for instance, the hit/dam of the monster only goes up by 1 or 3 for ever 5 that AC rises. So more equipment will _always_ be better for a party. It just factors in some diminishing returns.

2) If it's the average bonus of the party then there is always an advantage to any particular character being better equipped since the monster will be stated to the average.

This scaling can also be as broad or as fine as you want it to be. In the end, it won't take the DMs any more to calculate a fine scaling as a broad one, but it might be easier to start with something broad until everyone is used to the new system. Since the new monster stats are written down on the pad, the DM can easily refer to them instead of having to calculate or keep numbers in their head. At the end of the room they just rip the sheet off and chuck it in the trash and are ready for the next room. There would never be any scaling with Normal difficulty which is the base stats and the whole thing would only come into play for hardcore/nightmare.

henwy wrote: <snip lot o' complex stuff>.There would never be any scaling with Normal difficulty which is the base stats and the whole thing would only come into play for hardcore/nightmare.

A phrase that I despise: diminishing returns
If I recall correctly, that led to the extremely weak +4 mithral bracers legendary, which people now consider on a par (or subpar) to other bracer UR (or R) slot items.

The final sentence gives me a knee jerk response desire to play normal and chuck my collection.

Better do it fast before Lazlo crashes the market. He told me he was going to start next week.

Jake Fitch wrote: Hell: This is for people in all BiS gear, including multiple relics and legendaries. This would be significantly more difficult than the current Nightmare runs... closer to Nightmare Grind.

Someone liked my Hell idea!! I would love to see that difficulty myself!

henwy, I did see your post in the other thread, and I've been mulling it over ever since. I think it is an interesting idea, and I haven't seen a better idea yet.

The concern I have is that (for example) it pushes people that would otherwise have high AC to lower their AC to be closer to what the rest of their team has, or run the risk that they are causing their party members to get hit more often and harder. At least in my experience, outside of Grind, the party member with the highest AC almost never gets targeted in combat (I think my Fighter was attacked a grand total of once out of 5 runs this year). So this feels like it mostly winds up hurting the people that are already sitting at the low end of the party. I've already contemplated dropping all the AC boosting items off my fighter and rely on Cloak of Shadowskin, this would just ensure it (again, outside of Grind where I know I'll be targeted more often). Obviously, this is just talking about the AC side of things, I suspect we'd see similar impact to the other things that would be gettng scaled.

Now honestly, I don't see this aspect as a big problem for groups that know they are running together ahead of time, as it gives them the option to strategize their approach. Do we armor up the Paladin and run he risk that the Wizard is going to be easier to hit? And for the runs I do with my normal group, I wouldn't have a problem (here Wizard, take these AC items). What I do feel it hurts is the runs where you have no idea who you are running with, and so can't plan your build ahead of time. Yes, I know many of us show up to those cases prepared to play more than one character, but I also know that many of us try to have my stats printed out ahead of time for each different character we might play. With this change, it means either we would need to prepare multiple builds per character, or we're likely to need to spend time to adjusting our builds in the coaching room, rather than use a build that we have already printed out to save the coach time.

Also, I don't know that your idea necessarily precludes a new difficulty level. Each difficulty level can have different scaling as well as baseline numbers.

Normal: baseline and no scaling
Hardcore: increase baseline and introduce minor scaling (2/5?)
Nightmare: increase baseline again and introduce moderate scaling (3/5?)
Hell: increase baseline a final time and increase scaling again (4/5?)

Fiddy wrote: Normal: baseline and no scaling
Hardcore: increase baseline and introduce minor scaling (2/5?)
Nightmare: increase baseline again and introduce moderate scaling (3/5?)
Hell: increase baseline a final time and increase scaling again (4/5?)

That's the single best idea that I have seen in a long time. You get to choose the difficulty which affects both the difficulty and rewards. Equipment helps in every case, but the enemies scale up more in Nightmare and Hell mode.

On a numerical scale, assuming Normal's difficulty is a 1, this looks something like this:

Normal: 1
Hardcore: 3
Nightmare: 8
Hell: 15

As I understand it the difficulties were traditionally more linear (don't have the modules in front of me), so Hardcore is twice as hard as Normal and Nightmare is 2 times harder than hardcore. This is why 4 or fewer people can survive a Nightmare run. If on the scale above Nightmare was a 4 in 2014, then two well-equipped players who ran together in 2014 would need to be at least 8 well-equipped players to run Hell in 2015. That seems like a good scale.

There are a few effects of power creep. One is the effect on old token values. One is the need to increase dungeon difficulty to compensate. But the final one, as mentioned, is the widening gap between Normal and Nightmare players. This solution to basically move to more of an exponential scale for difficulty will really help to address that gap.

My only suggestion is to think carefully about how the scaling works. I don't think it should be simply AC because that will encourage more and more damage and less and less AC. I'd recommend something like this for each party member:

Scale Factor = Melee To-Hit + Melee +Dmg + Melee AC + Ranged To-Hit + Ranged +Dmg + Ranged AC + HP, divided by 10 (for ease of math) rounded up to nearest whole number. You could maybe add the saves in too. Then figure out the average for the party.

So, say my Ranger is 12/8/36, 6/6/37, 30HP, that's 135, or 14 after dividing by 10. Then figure out the average of all party members. Then use that number to up the monster stats.

If that is too much work you could consider another scale factor like this:

+1 for each 10 AC
+1 for each +5 To-Hit
+1 for each +5 Damage
+1 for each 10 HP

So then my scale for my Ranger would be 11 with easier math. The average for the party could be an approximation without a calculator. Say the "scale" for each player is: 11, 7, 9, 5, 14, 8, and 9. It should be easy to see that it is about a 10 average (real average is 9). Since most parties tend to be fairly close in levels that shouldn't be too hard. We aren't worried about 9 vs 10, we are worried about 3 vs 10 vs 18 for the party average.

I definitely am intrigued by Henwy's suggestion

Kirk Bauer wrote: As I understand it the difficulties were traditionally more linear (don't have the modules in front of me), so Hardcore is twice as hard as Normal and Nightmare is 2 times harder than hardcore. This is why 4 or fewer people can survive a Nightmare run. If on the scale above Nightmare was a 4 in 2014, then two well-equipped players who ran together in 2014 would need to be at least 8 well-equipped players to run Hell in 2015. That seems like a good scale.

The levels pretty much scaled like that. Push damage was 4/8/12 for normal/hardcore/nightmare. Monster HP and AC increased also, but not a doubling like that.