TOPIC: Thoughts on 5 rooms

I feel like there needs to be at least two 7 room dungeons at Gen Con. Mainly because of character and token design. For the 5 room to work effectively everything would have to get redesigned. Besides items like spell storing etc the hp doesn't balance. If you just increase the damage in 2-3 combats to equal what you would get in 4-5, the damage becomes too bursty, where people will die without chances to heal. Also not a fan of the time spent checking in, (especially if early), coaching, training and epilog approaching or exceeding the amount of time spent in the dungeon.

I ran all 4 rooms once. 2 were normal and 2 ended up on Hardcore. Each run was a mix of new and experienced. The overall feeling I had from the groups was that they enjoyed themselves, and appreciated the small things the format offered; we really liked the longer connecting halls and the finish of the rooms. The NPC's and DM's were all great.

When asked about format 5 or 7 at the end, there seemed to be a little bit of peer pressure to go for the 7 option. Honestly it's all going to come down to cost for me. The math says I would do three runs next year versus 4, but that's after the sticker shock upfront and then remembering the cost of this year.

I like the compromise ideas suggested. I don't have another one to offer at this time, but do agree the intro run really should be 5 rooms.

The 5 room format was perfect for new/semi-new player vibe in all of our runs. The $ wasn't as big of a concern as delivering a great experience, and 5 rooms helped our new faces really feel empowered to cycle through their abilities - less of a sense of "I need to save this just in case".

The reduced ticket price is a help, but I think in the case of Gen Con it's important to delivery the best possible experience.

That said, I think other shows like Gamehole should stick with the 7 room format. There's less "go go go" to get from one event to another outside of Gen Con.

I voted for 7 rooms instead of 5 because my true run-cost is not just the $$ but the time. Time before the con coordinating runs and tuning my builds. Precious vacation days allocated. Time at the con hiking to Lucas, checking in early, coaching and training rooms, hiking back to the convention halls, then the round trip again to Lucas at days' end to pick up my checked token suitcase. My quick-just-show-up-play-and-help-the-new-folks runs are the 4-room sealed pack runs.

I respect that others are in very different places in life. I once was too. But for me, where I am now, getting the full use out of builds meant to go seven rooms’ distance and the most dungeoning for my total time spent brings me more joy than saving a few bucks but spending almost as much time for less.

Thank you for listening.

One of the factors for us in voting for seven rooms is due primarily to cost we only do one True Dungeon run per year at GENCON. I feel like we get a much fuller experience with seven rooms (or even eight like we had originally). Doing just five rooms it felt like the Dungeon was over way too soon.

I do understand for those that do one of each Dungeon at GENCON it is kind of a wash, except for the extra 36 minutes of coaching/training room time.

For those that have loot as one of the goals, doing three 5 room dungeons as opposed to two 7 room Dungeons does give an extra batch of treasure.

When Jeff originally announced the switch to 5 rooms at Gen Con ( Change to In-Person Events in 2026 ), he stated several reasons:

(1) Lack of new volunteers that was tied to fewer new players;
(2) Event being too long (possibly mental/physical stress); and
(3) Cost.

Here are my observations after trying all four adventures at Gen Con:

Pros of shorter adventures:

(1) Having fewer rooms in each adventure does cut down on the need for volunteers so if the lack of volunteers is the issue, then fewer rooms might be the solution. However, that assumes the same number of adventures. If it's a choice between two 7-room adventures and three 5-room adventures, then the two 7-room adventures would need less volunteers (14 total rooms vs. 15 total rooms, fewer volunteers needed for coaching/training with two adventures instead of three).

(2) The 5-room adventures were physically easier on my now late 50s body. But, for reasons I'll explain below, that is outweighed by other factors.

(3) I was happy with the lower cost, but I'd rather have more rooms (with a qualifier I'll state later) even if it costs more.

Cons of shorter adventures:

(1) The player cards/tokens/stats are designed for 7-room adventures, not 5-room adventures. This makes each difficulty level easier and devalues the tokens.

(2) Gen Con's event system can't account for a 1 hour 36 minute adventure so it blocks out 2 hours. That makes it difficult to take advantage of the time savings to book other events.

(3) The ratio of "downtime" (coaching/training) vs. adventure is even worse in the 5-room dungeons.

Observations:

(1) My belief in the past was that the 4-room sealed adventures (like Fang & Fury) were designed for new(er) players. They are sealed pack so no need to have a great build, and they are shorter and therefore most cost effective. If a potential new player is price sensitive (either because of the cost of the run and/or the cost of buying tokens for a build), this was the option for them. If they like it, presumably they would then want the full adventures and you'd have a new long-term TD player. Hopefully TD has been able to track new players in Fang and Fury (and prior 4-room sealed runs) to see how many end up playing again in one of the "full" adventures.

(2) But if a player wants the "full" experience, wants to use their tokens from the past, and/or isn't as cost sensitive, they are going to sign up for the longer runs anyway. In that case, making the "full" runs shorter is self-defeating since now everyone is forced to the shorter runs.

(3) Gen Con event registration really doesn't tell you much about player preferences since for the vast majority of people who don't luck into an early lottery number, it's a question of what's left rather than what the individual would prefer. And, in any event, new players may not understand the differences between the adventures and will just grab what's left and/or what fits the rest of their Gen Con schedule.

(4) As for cost, I think TD was selling out 99%+ of the non-sealed runs in past years so there is enough demand at the higher price point to fill the runs. The qualifier on that is how many unique players are playing TD each con. There will be devoted and/or well heeled players willing to run multiple times for the same adventure. Although that is good from a "filling the runs" perspective, every multiple run taken by a vet is one less run available to a new player. And the new players will be trying other events at Gen Con, and if what's left doesn't fit their schedule, they won't play TD.

(5) I don't think the end-of-adventure poll will get you the data you need. If the goal is to see which format is preferred by newer players, then the poll at the end should have been limited to players that haven't played more than a handful of times. My family and I did all PUG runs of each 5-room adventure (twice). It seemed as though almost all vets were voting for 7-rooms. And for the new players, many may not have done a 7-room run so they didn't have a point of comparison other than cost. I think in a lot of cases the newer players just voted for 7-room because that was how the vets were voting. I think only 1 of the 6 runs I was in had a majority that voted for 5-rooms.

Just go back to 7-room dungeons, please. Maybe just stick with 2 7-room dungeons and a shorter 4 or 5 room dungeon for newbies.

Manimal wrote:
(3) Gen Con event registration really doesn't tell you much about player preferences since for the vast majority of people who don't luck into an early lottery number, it's a question of what's left rather than what the individual would prefer. And, in any event, new players may not understand the differences between the adventures and will just grab what's left and/or what fits the rest of their Gen Con schedule.

Just a slight clarification, the lottery system is only used for housing, event registration is still a free for all.

5 rooms did not feel threatening at all. The game/tokens are not balanced for 5 rooms. If 5 rooms continue I'm pretty sure my party will greatly reduce buying tokens as we "over leveled" for 5 rooms.

Hopefully 7 rooms come back in some manner.

I think the survey / feedback approach was done in a way that makes it quite hard to interpret coherently the results.

For me at least, I did 3 dungeons and our group was asked about 5 or 7 room preferences in two of them. In both of them the question was phrased something like "Raise your hand if you'd like to go back to the 7 room dungeon at a cost of $128 versus this year's 5 room presentation."

This form of the survey has several problems:

1. It will lump in people with no opinion or very weak opinions as 5-room-ers. (As if you don't care one way or the other you are very unlikely to raise your hand.)

Likewise anyone who was confused, didn't hear clearly, are still processing the idea, don't want to be conspicuous, or are waiting to see what their teammates do will be counted as a 5-roomer.

2. Status quo bias - It has been shown that people disproportionately stick with whatever has been designated as the "current" or "default" choice in surveys. The phrasing and survey context is likely to overweight 5-room responses.

3. Action vs. inaction bias - it has been shown that when one survey response requires doing something, and another requires doing nothing the response requiring an action will typically be reduced, and that this effect is amplified when the action is publicly visible. This bias will tend to decrease the number of raised hands no matter what option was applied to the hand raising, in this case to likely decrease the number of 7-room voters.

For a better survey, consider these approaches:

a. Make it anonymous and individual.

b. Force a choice between options, e.g. "For your next dungeon, which would you select?" i) 5 rooms at $98. ii) 7 rooms at $128. Randomize the order the choices appear on different surveys.

Or - just skip the survey - find a way to offer both next year and see where the demand goes.

I tried to not make up my mind on 5 versus 7 rooms till I played it.

Personally, and for my group, 5 rooms was fine. I might have a small nostalgic preference to 7 rooms, but 5 seemed equally enjoyable, and the reduced cost was nice.

Our group plays an optimized rare/uncommon with a handful of class relics. We play Hardcore and normally run shorthanded (e.g. 6-9 players rather than a full 10).

We were adequately challenged (e.g. across two dungeons 2 players reduced to zero hitpoints, one got their head bitten off by Cravenworth, and we were close to failing to defeat one of the monsters due to running out of time.)

I think "balance wise" 5 rooms does change/rearrange the value of some tokens and effects relative to others - however I also feel like 5 versus 7 rooms is not a top source of "balance" issues in TD so that aspect is kind of a shrug for me.

Matthew Hayward wrote: I think the survey / feedback approach was done in a way that makes it quite hard to interpret coherently the results.

For me at least, I did 3 dungeons and our group was asked about 5 or 7 room preferences in two of them. In both of them the question was phrased something like "Raise your hand if you'd like to go back to the 7 room dungeon at a cost of $128 versus this year's 5 room presentation."

This form of the survey has several problems:

1. It will lump in people with no opinion or very weak opinions as 5-room-ers. (As if you don't care one way or the other you are very unlikely to raise your hand.)

Likewise anyone who was confused, didn't hear clearly, are still processing the idea, don't want to be conspicuous, or are waiting to see what their teammates do will be counted as a 5-roomer.

2. Status quo bias - It has been shown that people disproportionately stick with whatever has been designated as the "current" or "default" choice in surveys. The phrasing and survey context is likely to overweight 5-room responses.

3. Action vs. inaction bias - it has been shown that when one survey response requires doing something, and another requires doing nothing the response requiring an action will typically be reduced, and that this effect is amplified when the action is publicly visible. This bias will tend to decrease the number of raised hands no matter what option was applied to the hand raising, in this case to likely decrease the number of 7-room voters.

For a better survey, consider these approaches:

a. Make it anonymous and individual.

b. Force a choice between options, e.g. "For your next dungeon, which would you select?" i) 5 rooms at $98. ii) 7 rooms at $128. Randomize the order the choices appear on different surveys.

Or - just skip the survey - find a way to offer both next year and see where the demand goes.

On our run it the question was presented pretty much as your option B "For your next dungeon, which would you select?" i) 5 rooms at $98. ii) 7 rooms at $128"