I ran 4 dungeons this year.
Zephyr Combat - Nightmare
Zephyr Puzzle - Normal
Viper's Puzzle - Nightmare
Viper's Combat - Normal
Flight of the Zephyr - Story was somewhat confusing. Was this the airship we took from Cogwind (the gnome from last year)? If so how did we get locked out when we crashed? If not how did we find this airship.
Room 1 - Door Lock - I thought this was an excellent puzzle, easily solvable if your party is willing to work together. I don't care for the progressive push damage, though it didn't really detract from my experience.
Room 2 - Fueling - I liked this puzzle as well, solution was simple enough to work out just with simple arithmetic and basic logic. On Nightmare we solved it but needed 30-45 more seconds to implement our solution and get the 3rd pellet. We spent too much time focusing on the rogue clue when we should have just been solving the puzzle. Was slightly irritating when on our normal run the group in front of us kept us waiting for 30-45 seconds that would have allowed our nightmare group to complete the room.
Room 3 - Air Intake? Steam Flow? (something like that) - Basic combat, nothing stood out in my memory to comment on.
Room 4 - Stabilizer -
Combat - Our Rogue immediately placed his flank at the first force field which helped tremendously figuring out what to do. GM irritated our rogue when he wouldn't give us the treasure stamp until someone said they picked up the gem left behind by the creature.
Puzzle - One of my favorite rooms. Solution came fairly easily to us once we started playing with the shapes. GM running the robot did a good job of being mostly unnoticeable. I actually checked under the table before it all clicked in my head. (I blame the fact that it was Sunday afternoon.
Room 5 - Navigation -
Combat - Animatronic was cool, nothing else to comment on.
Puzzle - DM "auto-passed" us due to equipment failure. My understanding was each sector had a series of switches that would illuminate the outer light as well as a series of switches that would illuminate the inner light of a different sector if the outer light in that sector was illuminated. We proved that at least one outer light was nonfunctional by illuminating it's corresponding inner light. With only being able to illuminate 2 or 3 of the outer lights we were unable to find a pattern to solve this puzzle.
Room 6 - Trans-gassifier - First run we got airflow to a pipe within range of exit, but had already used all our tubes, ran out of time before we could even get started on an alternate path. 2nd run didn't get anywhere close. Both instances we were just trying to brute force it and ignoring the gears around the various pipes. This seemed like a good puzzle, maybe a slight reduction in the complexity of the maze would have been good. I'm curious roughly how many groups completed it.
Room 7 - Bridge - Nightmare run was very anti-climatic. There was only one DM so we just did the flying tests once and then did combat, the wyverns were dead in 2 rounds. Normal run had 2 DMs and we got more of the full experience.
Into the Viper's Pit -
Room 1 - Gate to the temple - I thought this was a good puzzle. Again I don't like progressive push damage. It seems like this discussion came up last year but one of the DMs tried to tell our Barbarian that the damage from touching the glyph incorrectly was not reduced by damage reduction. I know our Barbarian has already started a thread on this.
Room 2 - Snake Statues - Basic combat. On our normal run we tried to employ "Malice" and "Deceit" by pretending to bow then attacking. DM gave us an initiative roll rather than giving the statues a surprise round.
Room 3 - Eggs - Nightmare we failed due to not solving it exactly right, not sure if I think Nightmare was too strict or not. Normal easily got everything green even letting those who hadn't run it before dictate what happened.
Room 4 - Corridor
Puzzle - We had absolutely no idea by the end of 12 minutes. A minor clue somewhere would have been nice.
Combat - We got through primarily with liberal application of Burning Hands. I'm still curious to know exactly the mechanics behind this fight. I like that it departed from the standard combat we have all come to expect.
Room 5 - Sands of Time - Also one of my favorite rooms, puzzle was easy to solve while not being boring. Use of the projector and the kinect was really cool.
Room 6 - Medusa - Nightmare had one person petrified which we cleansed with a scroll. Normal we killed her quick enough that petrification wasn't an issue. Not sure if there was a mechanic to unpetrify without the scroll, but if not this room would probably be a bit too brutal.
Room 7 - Sand Beast/Portal -
Combat - Amazing animatronics, the opposing rogue seemed a little random on the combat side.
Puzzle - My least favorite room. We did not pay enough attention to the symbols despite someone mentioning that it would be a good idea to do so. This puzzle needed some way to get information about partial success. Something along the lines of the Airship puzzle last year. The damage for failure wasn't a problem, but the all or nothing nature is really disappointing. It is possible we missed some critical piece of the puzzle but the DM indicated we had not.
