TOPIC: True Dungeon History - A Dragon's Ring

In 2010 the final room in all three dungeons contained Smoak the Dragon (two groups fought her independently and one group was working on a puzzle). She was a very impressing animatronic especially for the time. She towered over the room.

She had a huge hoard of tokens. I think there were 6 five gallon buckets of tokens piled around her.

She was very difficult to kill on Nightmare level. We had been warned by the Lore Token Puzzle, that she had an “Ioun Stone Black Pearl”. This Ioun stone cancels any “plus to hit” bonuses from tokens. With an AC of 24 the only way to hit her was to slide a 20. On the battle board, the 20 area was a token sized circle inside of her mouth. The Ioun stone was also on the battle board but was not labeled. It was just a white circle connected to a thin white line on a black background.

So basically there were three ways to kill her.

The “Wil Wheaton” method, slide a 20 with +2 Long Spear of Dragonslaying and have the symbol pointing in the right direction. (Thus leading to the famous picture of Wil and crew in front of the defeated dragon, seen at www.truedungeon.com/tokens )

The “Incredible Skill” method, slide a boat load of 20s. I believe Laz and others did it this way.

The “Team Token” method, using 5 Rings of the Ram to shatter the Ioun Stone and then melee like normal.

Smoak was a smart dragon and used items from her hoard. One of the items was a “Ring of Wizardry”. A sharp eyed adventurer could have noticed that she had that ring on a claw. In fact I think you can see the token in the photo, right at the edge of Will’s right sleeve

This ring will be auctioned in the Token - Auctions forum later this week.

George wrote: In 2010 the final room in all three dungeons contained Smoak the Dragon (two groups fought her independently and one group was working on a puzzle). She was a very impressing animatronic especially for the time. She towered over the room.

She had a huge hoard of tokens. I think there were 6 five gallon buckets of tokens piled around her.

She was very difficult to kill on Nightmare level. We had been warned by the Lore Token Puzzle, that she had an “Ioun Stone Black Pearl”. This Ioun stone cancels any “plus to hit” bonuses from tokens. With an AC of 24 the only way to hit her was to slide a 20. On the battle board, the 20 area was a token sized circle inside of her mouth. The Ioun stone was also on the battle board but was not labeled. It was just a white circle connected to a thin white line on a black background.

So basically there were three ways to kill her.

The “Wil Wheaton” method, slide a 20 with +2 Long Spear of Dragonslaying and have the symbol pointing in the right direction. (Thus leading to the famous picture of Wil and crew in front of the defeated dragon, seen at www.truedungeon.com/tokens )

The “Incredible Skill” method, slide a boat load of 20s. I believe Laz and others did it this way.

The “Team Token” method, using 5 Rings of the Ram to shatter the Ioun Stone and then melee like normal.

Smoak was a smart dragon and used items from her hoard. One of the items was a “Ring of Wizardry”. A sharp eyed adventurer could have noticed that she had that ring on a claw. In fact I think you can see the token in the photo, right at the edge of Will’s right sleeve

This ring will be auctioned in the Token - Auctions forum later this week.

Wouldn’t Magic Missile also damage the Ioun stone?

bpsymington wrote:
Wouldn’t Magic Missile also damage the Ioun stone?

That's what I recall. Only force damage could hit it. I recall this because I used to run with a group of 10 local friends (sadly, most no longer play TD) and that was the year our player who normally chose wizard decided not to play. Up until that point I had always played a Fighter. So, we went against Smoak and without a wizard never got past the ioun stone. That prompted me to announce that I would take up the mantle of wizard the following year. By the time next year rolled around they created the Elf Wizard class. I decided I would jump in on the new class and have never looked back. Have played as an Elf Wizard well over 200 times since then.

Oh man, this is super cool! My first ever True Dungeon adventure was fighting Smoak in 2010. Needless to say my party all became dragonfire jerky, but I had an absolute blast. I didn't even notice the ring, I was probably way too busy sweating in my boots and looking at that horde of fabulous treasure around Smoak.

Powerblade3 wrote: Oh man, this is super cool! My first ever True Dungeon adventure was fighting Smoak in 2010. Needless to say my party all became dragonfire jerky, but I had an absolute blast. I didn't even notice the ring, I was probably way too busy sweating in my boots and looking at that horde of fabulous treasure around Smoak.

2010 was the first year I and most of my group had played as well. We did have 1 friend that had played in So Cal had had a couple tokens including a Rare Wooden weapon. Somehow the token ended up out of the puck on the table. The DM must have thought it was a consumbable because he threw it into Smoak's horde. I felt terrible for my friend...it wasn't worth much but still. Several years later I found that same token on ebay and bought for him. He later gave it back to me and I mulched it...lol.

Yes, Magic Missile would have worked but the Ioun Stone had 40 hit points so it would have taken more Magic Missiles than the Wizard had.

Also if asked about the size of the treasure horde, the DMs were supposed to point the to "Horn of Plenty" (the actual horn not a token) the dragon was wearing on a chain around her neck.

Smoak was very hard to kill on any difficulty

The Ioun also I believe was part of the animatronic - there was a token mounted on a wire near its head if I remember.

The futility for my group in combatting Smoak led about half of my group to permanently quit True Dungeon, and the rest to move from running Nightmare to running Hardcore. I hope that level of difficulty, at least on levels lower than Nightmare, doesn't return.

Mike Steele wrote: The futility for my group in combatting Smoak led about half of my group to permanently quit True Dungeon, and the rest to move from running Nightmare to running Hardcore. I hope that level of difficulty, at least on levels lower than Nightmare, doesn't return.

I have to concur with this. I think I managed twice to convince my son to run True Dungeon. The run with Smoak was his last. I believe he was playing the paladin, but had a ring of evasion equipped, so when he made his reflex saves, he took no damage. But due to the rest of our futility with the ioun stone, we ran out of time and were declared dead. He wasn't angry, but perplexed that he took no damage during the fight, but was somehow now dead. He just sort of shrugged his shoulders and has expressed no desire to play again since.

Mike Steele wrote: The futility for my group in combatting Smoak led about half of my group to permanently quit True Dungeon, and the rest to move from running Nightmare to running Hardcore. I hope that level of difficulty, at least on levels lower than Nightmare, doesn't return.

For me it was a Wizard fighting that Beholder with the anti-magic that seemed to just never go off unless I was also silenced. I was >< close to quitting. Glad I stuck around, but that was brutal.

NightGod wrote: For me it was a Wizard fighting that Beholder with the anti-magic that seemed to just never go off unless I was also silenced. I was >< close to quitting. Glad I stuck around, but that was brutal.

That was a miserable experience. I don't have any problem with failure. Not being able to do anything, though, is not just exceedingly boring, taking the time to figure out that you don't get to participate in a room wastes the rest of the party's time. Not the only room I've been in where I realized too late that it was far better for me to just look at the decorations rather than try to participate in combat.

Again, not being able to do things is qualitatively different from having no meaningful impact in what you do. Spell damage reduction makes far more sense than not being able to cast or magic resistance, analogous situations with non-spell actions. For instance, some punishing melee is okay. Massive punishment for melee (along the lines of say "that hit landed, now you're dead") is also boring.

Not everyone runs dungeons multiple times to metagame against screwjobs. I saw the Beholder once, and, at that time, had zero interest in ever seeing it again rather than being fired up to find a way to win.

Now, it was an interesting challenge conceptually but just the explanation of how things worked wasted massive amounts of time. Would make far more sense in True Grind, where maybe it got used.

On the other hand, that experience didn't really change my views of TD at all ...

NightGod wrote:

Mike Steele wrote: The futility for my group in combatting Smoak led about half of my group to permanently quit True Dungeon, and the rest to move from running Nightmare to running Hardcore. I hope that level of difficulty, at least on levels lower than Nightmare, doesn't return.

For me it was a Wizard fighting that Beholder with the anti-magic that seemed to just never go off unless I was also silenced. I was >< close to quitting. Glad I stuck around, but that was brutal.

The exact moment my friend who played the Fighter decided to quit permanently was when he rolled a 19 on his savings throw against Smoak and failed (and I had the group outfitted pretty well in tokens). Frustration about the Smoak Dungeons had been building for awhile, but that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I think if it had been just one year of getting annihilated by Smoak some of my friends that quit might have stuck around, but the fact that it went on for multiple years was just too much for them.