Ro-gan wrote: I'll agree that some of the monsters weren't as cool as previous years. But as to the rest of your post it just comes across as whiny.
There's a reason the party characters have HPs. Death is a possibility. Just because our school and sports systems over the years have given everyone trophies just for showing up doesn't mean TD should follow suit. I still think it's the dumbest thing that athletes and students who study/train have to sit back and watch the lazy get the same rewards they do.
I've been playing TD since its 3rd year. Back then I didn't have the money to run multiple times. And back then I died 2-3 times. Oh well. I didn't whine and cry about it. I knew going in... ya know because I saw HP were on my character card... death was a possibility.
If you don't like dying or unavoidable damage (which is nothing new and has been around in one form or another since I've been playing) then play on Non-Lethal mode.
If you leave for good that's okay, too. I'd recommend Dungeons & Dragons or MtG at GenCon as a substitute, but you can die there, too. And the cutthroat players of MtG will not please you.
We seem to have dramatically different take aways from his post.
Unavoidable damage is an entirely valid complaint, in my eyes; if damage prevention is going to be on tokens, and then damage is untyped or typed in a form that cannot be prevented, what is the point of using the tokens? If TD doesn't want to engage in an arms race with players for damage types, stop giving out damage resistance items, or avoid doing so in an escalating fashion.
The issue with tokens being partially or entirely useless is a very valid consideration when people are spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars on them (on top of potentially spending hundreds of dollars to play the game itself). I may be new, but I'm no stranger to game mechanics, especially various flavours of D&D. If I give my players damage resistance itmes and then feel the need to use a type I know they don't have, those resistances are at best reduced in utility, and at worst actively detrimental (in that another token/item could be used in its place to provide a benefit they're not getting otherwise).
This discussion has been had (at length) regarding the lava walking boots alone, but they are merely an aspect of this very problem; why give tokens that are going to be circumvented in the dungeons? Why should players spend money on them if they're not going to have actual uses in the game (or be penalized for their use)? I empathize with trying to build dungeons that challenge veteran players without utterly stomping newer players (like myself), but 'sorry it's untyped' feels, to me, like it should be attached to Push damage alone. Having it as a mechanic elsewhere strikes me as a bad idea, and while it must be difficult to keep pace with the hundreds or thousands(?) of tokens that now exist, that's an aspect of the business model that's on TD to manage.
Players shouldn't feel that the tokens they bought or traded or were lucky enough to draw are being ignored.
As for dying, from my read, it wasn't 'omg I died waaah', but 'I'm having so little fun at my favourite Gencon activity that I was relieved when I died at the end', and that's a hell of a thing to say.
Telling him to go play D&D or Magic isn't remotely constructive; he doesn't want to not die (how strangely phrased), he wants to have fun playing, and wasn't.
I didn't play the Sable gauntlet, so perhaps there are aspects I'm unaware of, but let's recognize that constructive criticism can be leveled without taking it personally, or resorting to personal snipes.
