New Nyarlathotep's Dungeon Topic, Updated 10/1/14 with new rules

[dude789]

Actually, I'm more curious to see how team uber tanks will do in the current format. I'll change my next team back to Lenneth(3.5) Zalmo (2.5) Citan (2.5) Snow (2.0), Rena (.5) with Status Symbol Sealstone.

[Dhyerwolf]

Due to peer pressure from super, a crappy team I came up with in about 5 minutes:

Souji(4) + Ginny(3.5)(Life) + Jack(2) + Tear(1) + Meru(.5)

While more teams are always good, I should again caution against having two super headaches in your team at once.

[Nephrite]

So, I'm thinking it may be time to retire the current format of the Dungeon. I've been mulling over ideas and thought I'd share a few with everyone and see if anyone has anything else they'd like to see:


Game-centric Teams with a Twist:

The idea here would be you'd form a party of characters from the same game, with the number of slots available normally +1. So, for example, FF4 could have a party of 6, but it must contain all FF4 characters. The twist would be you'd be able to choose one PC from any other game to go along with those people.


"Class Challenge"

An idea where you pick several people of the same archetype or class. Obviously things would need to be slightly tailored in this situation, or a special clause/sealstone.


It'd probably mean a complete overhaul of the current system in either case, but considering I've run this for about six years, it's probably time for something like that.

[ThePiggyman]

Both sound like really good ideas to me. While they're both a bit limiting, I think they'll make room for a lot more possibilities and give a new and fresh way to approach the dungeon. One of my personal gripes with the dungeon has been that, having participated in it 4 times (I think), I've just been using the same characters over and over. My RPG library is regrettably not as large as some of yours, so I'm a bit more limited in my choice of characters. I'd find myself just picking Eiko/Garnet/Red XIII/Sharanda over and over as my token reviver(s), and I think it did start feeling stale.

If I could just address a couple of things, the way you're thinking of operating Game-Centric Teams could be a little bizarre or imbalanced. Some casts may end up deceptively powerful (as mentioned with FF4, you've got 5 characters, which, regardless of character selection, is 2 extra bodies of HP that enemies need to take out compared to your typical 3-party game; that's a huge advantage.) Also, how would you handle games like Fire Emblem, where party size could be even more problematic? It's a good idea, I just think it could be fine-tuned a little.

As for the Class Challenge, that'd be really interesting. I know someone did a Final Fantasy Classes tournament not so long ago, and that was really fun to watch unfold. The only thing is that, maybe even more so than the Game-Centric Teams idea, you could find yourself in a lot of sticky situations. Several strong characters that would be worth having on a team don't have an obvious class (Is Tidus a Time Mage? What's Wakka? How 'bout characters like Aika, Edgar, Kratos/Zelos or Feena?). It feels like a Class Challenge system favours certain games over others.

Regardless what happens, I'll be the first to say that I'd happily participate in a new format for the dungeon and make some kind of new team. I'll be sure to give input and suggestions as they come to mind, too.

[Dhyerwolf]

Although I love dungeon in it's current incarnation, I can see the desire to switch it up after so long. I guess the advantage of gamecentric is easier to interpret, but it's not really balanced (not to mention that people can really do that now)! Just hope to see dungeon continue in some incarnation (especially since it's come off the period where I was the only vote).

[Nephrite]

I'll see what I can do to possibly keep the current format but maybe add a Sealstone that allows for the new format too.

[Nephrite]

So here's a potential "Class Challenge" idea. I'm open to suggestions on this particular format as well as the bonus.

Aeonless Yuna, Garnet, Eiko, Rosa and ZALMO (Class Challenge Sealstone: Healing does 25% More but the team does 10% less damage)

This happened to hit 11 points (If you assume Rosa is 1.0) but they really don't have to.


EDIT: Feel free to give me other ideas (who may not be currently part of the roster) that would fit in with these particular themes. (Alice from Shadow Hearts comes to mind, for example)

[Dhyerwolf]

That's a pretty big overall negative for a sealstone. Dungeon is about ending fights quickly a lot of the time (unless that's also being reworked). But with enough thinking, you can generally make someone fit into at least a general class, so maybe adding someone extra should just be on case by case request?

[Nephrite]

That's fine with me. The Sealstone idea itself could be worked into anything, like "Increases damage by 50%, but reduces healing by 50%" or something, too. There's no set-in-stone rule on that.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I personally like the idea of limiting the number of games in a team. Maybe only allow two games in one team of five, but just rank more PCs from all of the "Ranked" games? With fewer games to look up every week, it'd be easier to vote, but still retain that "team flavor" that I love about the dungeon. Also would definitely require a huge overhaul but that kind of balancing the meta is pretty fun to me.

In a way, you're pricing games instead of individual PCs because now nearly every individual is a forced set of units. Games without status protection are going to be a lot cheaper I'd guess, just as a first thought.

[Nephrite]

If I did that, I'd probably make certain people a lot cheaper. I've been doing a lot of thinking on how to revamp things, since I want to more or less completely reboot things once I get things started again, so that's why it's been quiet for so long.

[Nephrite]

So, it's been some weeks and months since the last update. A lot of people probably wonder if the Dungeon is finally gone.

I would say that it is dead, at least in its current iteration and format. I plan on massively changing the way things work, people can still make Teams and submit them, but they won't be facing a gauntlet of 10 floors of increasing challenges.

The idea that I have is that it'd basically be a different series of tournaments based on much different criteria than before. I will be posting an example of the idea here soon to give everyone a better idea of what I mean.

I appreciate the time and investment that everyone put into the Dungeon over the last few years and I hope that the new format is something that is at least moderately interesting to folks.