Trying to be a champion

Well, I’ve spent most of the last day trying to play Trial of Champions and it’s just brutal. After dying on Blood Island a half-dozen times, sometimes in combat and sometimes a “roll dice and die” situation, I gave up and just set my stats to 11/24/11. I didn’t want to go full 12/24/12 because I don’t want to steamroll through the book in one go. I did, however, finally get out of the damned arena so I could start the adventure. So then I inked in the character sheet, and I start the game on 261 from then on.

And yeah, the dungeon is lethal. Yay. Good job, Sukumvit. Why bother building a dungeon at all, when page 1 could be “you die” and then save yourself writing 399 more sections? That’s no substitute for game design, you lazy bastard.

So far some of the very random deaths have been:

• frozen and sucked dry by a coldclaw
• sucked into a magical box and trapped forever
• killed by a giant spider
• caught in a trap that was also the only way forward, and missing The Required Item to get out of it
• moved left instead of right (or right instead of left? some 50/50 with zero knowledge) against Trialmaster Noy and told that I just plain lose
• killed by some other critter, I forget what, just whittled down 2 points at a time

You may not know, but I am of the opinion that Deathtrap Dungeon was highly overrated. It’s just random stuff with no atmosphere and no reason, an impossible gauntlet, and a treasure hunt you didn’t know you were on (should you cheat enough to survive that gauntlet). ToC improves on that a little, at least giving a revenge story for why we want to survive. But so far the execution feels just as random and unbalanced, and I am not that impressed yet.