What was your favorite death test room?
 

Just wondering what everyone's favorite, or most favorite-to-fear, Death Test Room was while deep in The Thorsz labyrinth?


1. You pass through a great brass door. It closes behind you; you hear bars being thrown. Go east to 153.

JK

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

It wasn't the individual rooms for me -- it was the whole concept and how they all played that made the adventure for me. Every room was pretty uniquely challenging and rewarding, and the cumulative effect was tremendously greater than the sum of its parts.

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

Very true; Synergy cannot be present when Cohesion is absent.

JK

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

I also liked both for their challenge, clever rooms, and deadliness. Someone posted in another thread about how to make long dungeon crawls in TFT less deadly or more possible, etc. and I cringed a bit. I don't want to play D&D with healing spells and forever characters protected from themselves. I want poor decisions and fighting to end badly for the PCs or the game loses its tension and my interest in it. I don't want my ego stroked by the rules or the GM.

Two rooms that come up immediately are the Gargoyle Statue room, and the choice to cut your losses with a "so sad, too bad" exit from the poor chump who gets jumped by a Gargoyle and the room with Cruel, the battleaxe wielding NPC standing amongst bodies twirling his axe in the air, challenging any member of the Party to a duel.

Another room in Orb Quest became a quote for everyone, though usually slightly misstated, "The Octopus of Cidri is a dangerous and deadly foe, indeed."

It is these type of memorable writings and encounters that I look forward to playing again before age overtakes me and I enter the world of Cidri permanently. ;) I hope Steve is up to the challenge, as well...

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

While playing a party-of-four solo, I remember being lured back into the Gargoyle Room (aka Orange Room) after narrowly escaping a horrific combat by the instruction which tells about hearing what sounds like the screams of one of the party members being mauled. Such atmosphere! It gave me the chills when I read that.

SJ's taunting questions, witticisms, and side-ways heckling's which were counter-balanced by those stone-cold, fiat decree's such as: "You're dead." are such a HUGE part of the flavor of those adventures. For me that "Jacksonian-style" imbued thought the instructions, became a sub-script training-manual on: How-To-Entertain from the omnipotent point-of-view, while refereeing the action on the Melee map below. As there was so much meat in there -besides the adventure itself - I was able to cull so much out of it.

Granted, the Octopus in TFT:ITL is really something very cool. In fact, ITL dedicates about four or more paragraphs to it's description and handling-in-play; however, my cousin was especially insane over the Octopus from Death Test II. He thought it was the greatest. I think he would have rather BEEN the Octopus as a Player Character than fight it. It took a long time for his TFT Octopus-infatuation to pass! And then when it re-appeared two years later as part of the artwork on page 59 in Orb Quest, we had to listen to him go on-and-on about how awesome the Octopus is,... all over again. LOL!

JK

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

That was me, and you apparently misunderstood my point. I never suggested making them less deadly or any of the things you attribute to my comment here. There's a fine line between a D&D Monty Haul type situation and not being able to clear more than a few rooms and corridors of a mega-dungeon such as Castle Greyhawk or Stonehell before being forced to retire to town for re-equipment and a month or two of healing. I'd like something that allows us to actually USE a megadungeon instead of merely tapping on its outer shell every once in a while...and without having to wait a few years for Attribute Bloat to turn my characters into Einstein the Barbarian and Conan the Magician.

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

Agreed. The world is over flowing with fantasy roleplaying games where you are basically immortal, because of how sad and discouraging it would be if you could possibly lose a game you are playing. TFT is going to murder you unless someone is cheating, and that is good.

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

What comes to mind as my favorite element of a Death Test room was figuring out each situation and that some of the people in them were other contestants, and sometimes they might do something other than fight you to the death. In particular I remember that it was possible to get some of them to trade with you or even join your group (at least, if you didn't already have four people in your group).

I quite agree! Also it seems to me that such elements that make survival so much easier undermine the challenge, and the accomplishment of those characters who do/did manage to survive without them.


Yes!

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

I remember we all collapsed in uncontrollable laughter when our unarmoured, battleaxe wielding barbarian was assaulted by a swarm of spiders and was, quite literally, bitten to death. Even our leather clad elf was relatively safe. But old Conan was totally fubarrred. 😂😂

Re: What was your favorite death test room?
 

LOL! That's exactly what happened to me on my first play through Death Test. And then, I fell for it AGAIN! LOL! "Some people never learn" LOL!

JK