I’m pleasantly surprised by how well I did in both a general and absolute sense (if you asked me yesterday I would not have put my strategy’s odds of overall success above 20%). Of course, ~half the credit for this ~victory goes to Measure, whose inferences about the dungeons’ likely populations I was shameless in making use of.
If I’d had more time and energy to spare, I would have looked into how reliably teams which counter all their encounters win, and how character levels affect this outcome; from what I read here, I think that would have been a good next step.
Reflections on the challenge:
The problem statement was the most fun-to-read D&D.Sci introduction so far, including (imo) all of my own.
I found myself surprisingly uncomfortable playing a villain. (If you don’t get why I’d be bothered by mostly-task-irrelevant skippable flavortext then that makes two of us.)
The mechanic of “you have fungible but limited resources to allocate between multiple tasks, all of which have to be completed for a win” turns out to be an extremely good fit for D&D.Sci, and I look forward to using it in one several of my scenarios.
The difficulty level was in an uncanny valley between “simple task that’s only hard because Inference and Application are inherently hard” and “arbitrary fractal complexity which rivals that of the real world”; I would have liked this game more if it were significantly harder or easier.
I got to play another D&D.Sci scenario! Which I didn’t make! And which probably helped me to get better at making D&D.Sci scenarios!
Regarding future feedback:
If you – I here refer both to the esteemed OP and to anyone else with a complete-but-unreleased D&D.Sci game – want me to proof a future challenge before it’s released to the wider public, dm me and I’d be happy to take a look. I’d also be (reluctantly) willing to give (a small amount of) more general support to people perpetuating my genre (even though this would disqualify me from playing the resulting games, and my advice would mostly be variations on “do the things I did but better”).
Reflections on my attempt:
I’m pleasantly surprised by how well I did in both a general and absolute sense (if you asked me yesterday I would not have put my strategy’s odds of overall success above 20%). Of course, ~half the credit for this ~victory goes to Measure, whose inferences about the dungeons’ likely populations I was shameless in making use of.
If I’d had more time and energy to spare, I would have looked into how reliably teams which counter all their encounters win, and how character levels affect this outcome; from what I read here, I think that would have been a good next step.
Reflections on the challenge:
The problem statement was the most fun-to-read D&D.Sci introduction so far, including (imo) all of my own.
I found myself surprisingly uncomfortable playing a villain. (If you don’t get why I’d be bothered by mostly-task-irrelevant skippable flavortext then that makes two of us.)
The mechanic of “you have fungible but limited resources to allocate between multiple tasks, all of which have to be completed for a win” turns out to be an extremely good fit for D&D.Sci, and I look forward to using it in
oneseveral of my scenarios.The difficulty level was in an uncanny valley between “simple task that’s only hard because Inference and Application are inherently hard” and “arbitrary fractal complexity which rivals that of the real world”; I would have liked this game more if it were significantly harder or easier.
I got to play another D&D.Sci scenario! Which I didn’t make! And which probably helped me to get better at making D&D.Sci scenarios!
Regarding future feedback:
If you – I here refer both to the esteemed OP and to anyone else with a complete-but-unreleased D&D.Sci game – want me to proof a future challenge before it’s released to the wider public, dm me and I’d be happy to take a look. I’d also be (reluctantly) willing to give (a small amount of) more general support to people perpetuating my genre (even though this would disqualify me from playing the resulting games, and my advice would mostly be variations on “do the things I did but better”).