| SillyGuy |
I am running a PbP campaign, and am looking for a suitable Moment of Ascension for a party of five 5th-level PCs.
This traps the party in a simple, 2-D tesseract dungeon as mentioned in the link above, with 6 rooms who have 4 exits each.
Each room has a secret number assigned to it.
To *solve* the dungeon and escape, the party needs to follow a certain sequence of rooms.
For example: 1-2-3-6-5-4 is the correct sequence, and it doesn't matter where you start.
So you could move 2-3-6-5-4-1 and solve the puzzle, or 6-5-4-1-2-3 and solve it, etc.
If you enter the next room in the sequence, a bell announces the next room's number.
If you enter the wrong room, breaking the sequence, a different bell announces the number of the room you are in right now, and an encounter is triggered.
Example encounters:
1 - 1 small elemental
2 - 2 crawling hands
3 - Three torches animate and attack(tiny animated objects with Additional movement: Fly, Burn(x2); they have the haunted, brittle, flammable and clunky flaws)
4 - Four skunks are summoned in the corners of the room and attack: 1 celestial, 1 entropic, 1 fiendish, 1 resolute
5 - a magic circle traps an imp. Said imp uses SLAs like suggestion to try and leave the circle, promising wealth and power...
6 - a Haunt with a fear effect who forces the PC's to flee into a different room if they fail their saves.
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All these encounters are initially at CR 1, and may be triggered an infinite number of times.
Each time an encounter is triggered beyond the first time, the encounter becomes more difficult...
1 - Elemental gains the Advanced Template(repeat as often as necessary)
2 - Crawling hands gain the Giant template
3 - Save against Slow suffocation
4 - A new *wave* of summons appears after the first one; maximum number of *waves* is equal to the number of times you've triggered this encounter.
5 - A more powerful outsider is trapped in the circle.
6 - the Haunt's save DC increases by 1.
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If the sequence is solved, a portal leads to the bossfight:
An Invincible Gelatinous Cube advanced to 6 HD and Huge size in a 45'x45'x45' room with subjective directional gravity.
If the boss is defeated, the party re-emerges outside the original BLACK CUBE and gains a Cube of Force + their Moment of Ascension(Mythic Tier 1)
Any advice on the small dungeon presented?
Is it too easy? Too difficult?
Too boring?
Is it suitable for the PbP format?
Has anyone else used Tesseract puzzle dungeons and can tell me if they are a useful dungeon design // a hassle for everyone involved?
| Inlaa |
The one thing I'd be concerned about is whether it's suitable for PbP format. It may take your players a long time to figure out the sequence and numbers, and each room is a combat encounter, and unless PbP players are on the ball the combat encounters will slowly take longer and longer and longer AND be repetitive due to encountering the exact same encounters with only minor modifications.
It may work for you group, but I think PbP is not the right format for this kind of dungeon. Letting the players banter aloud about "okay, we know these four rooms have numbers associated with them; what do we do?" is simple enough in a live game, but... I just can't wrap my head around solving this PbP without a lot of trial and error.
(I'd be the first person to say "Hey, let's try the combo 1-2-3-4-5-6.")
For a non PbP game it'd probably not be all that difficult though, especially with combat moving more rapidly because the fighter rolls his eyes and says "Okay, I charge the skunk and it's dead."
| Adahn_Cielo |
As Inlaa already said, it would be unfeasible in PbP. Even considering the best case scenario (the PCs get it at the first try, and the finish each encounter in 1 IRL day), it will still take about a week.
In practice, it will take way more than that. Doors in PbP have the mystical power to halt games like nothing else, and this puzzle is a trial and error one that requires you to open a lot of them.