Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Dungeon Twister Terrain

I'd like to talk - briefly - about terrain today.

See, someone did the math on my reference sheet and called me out via GeekMail:
The numbers for your Dungeon Twister File seem odd when I look at room pair 7 - it looks like you have more than 25 squares in your file!
Since I'm going to be releasing an update to it within the next two weeks, I figured it would be a good time to explain the "Rooms" tab, which appeared a few updates ago.

I don't know if anyone uses this tab or not, but I decided that I wanted a list of how much of each terrain appeared in each room. I figured it might help me gauge the usefulness of certain characters and/or help me pick a tournament force.

I ran into a problem pretty early, however. Room Pair seven has two squares that troubled me. Square #25 in Room 7A has both Mist AND Falling Rocks. Square #18 in Room 7B has Mist and a Trap.

So what do I do when there is Mist over a Trap - is it a Mist Square, a Trap Square, or both? How do I count it?

What I did instead was classify Mist as an "Overlay Terrain" - Thus, room 7A has 25 total squares - 21 of them are floor tiles, 1 Rotation Gear, 1 Trap, and 2 Falling Rocks. Of these 25 squares, nine of them are covered by Mist.

I did so with a handful of other terrains as the project went on.

I debated the Portcullises for a good long while - I ended up leaving them as a "base" terrain, rather than as a Wall Overlay. There were two reasons for this:
1) They were introduced in the base set.
2) They have their own set of markers (Open/Broken). (Okay, not really. It's because the rules for walls are not the same as the rules for portcullises - the Wall Walker can go through arrow-slits, for example, but not through Portcullises. The Golem can break walls, but not ... you get the idea.)
The Overlay Terrain Types are (in order of appearance):
Mist
Pentacle Room
Small Bridge
Wall Sconces*
Arrow-Slit*
Secret Passage*
Fallen Tree
Snowy Ground
Ice Bridge
Ice Mirror
Pipes

Terrains marked with an asterisk (*) are wall overlays. The others are floor tile overlays.

If you do have comments or corrections to the file, please e-mail or GeekMail me. I appreciate and accept corrections (because I want the file to be perfect.

And your weekly DT1 Solo Card Update:
I have a few cards done. This isn't an easy project - especially when my goal is to have the same number of Character cards as DT2 does. For each set.

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