I realize that, but sometimes I don't look at the screen per se (I'm too intent on getting my party together, listening to music, etc., etc.) Also, for some reason, I keep thinking picking the mission is the last thing I do...I know, me bad...

I have no idea where I was when the Ghoul showed up. And yes, the Collector seems to be random because I encountered him twice...the second time I ran, went back and he wasn't there.

Finally figured out what the numbers are: white good, black bad, red wounds. Still don't know what the halo/crowns are. Do the developers intend to put out a manual?

If you mean the black crownlike thing on top o the character's level number then it will be a mark that your guy is insane and must be cured

So I've been playing a while now, and with my usual luck, I got a lot of busts and things to upgrade the brothel and the bar. But not enough of the deeds and so on to upgrade my gear. But got through and completed a few dungeons, and a decent enough team survived until they reached level 2. All of them had horrible diseases and enough negative quirks to fill a sanitarium with fifteen stories or wards. The nun threatened to throw away her wows, the highwayman ended up being "Godfearing", the crusader was a cleptomaniac. But they were pretty tough, and I managed to heal people enough to complete the medium levels a few times. Then I got critically hit by a maggot and a leper with 25% prot and 26 hit-points left died. By the time we reached the Hag, I managed to bleed her down to 10 hit-points - before she cooked the nun and the houndmaster, and the highwayman was unable to launch the bleed-attack. Then I failed to run away four times in a row. And the highwayman disappeared when we returned to the Hamlet.

The next team got a room-battle with one of the extremely tough skeletons that spawn highwayman spectres, and couldn't continue. When they returned, they were all insane, and I of course still didn't have enough slots in any of the buildings to save them with either flaggelation, shackles or leeches.

That was entertaining, I'll admit that. It was hilarious. But I think the game is reliant on you figuring out the patterns of the enemies way too much (a lot of them have attacks that only work in specific slots, and you can skip a million free attacks by pushing one, or just killing a specific enemy in the front two slots). There's a lot going on with the variables as well that isn't mentioned in the game - how does SPD work for turns, for example. Why does suddenly the Hag have four extra turns for no apparent reason. When do debuffs stack, and how is the resistance going to affect the damage over time, etc. None of this is actually explained.

And it's the same with the resources you need to build the hamlet. As far as I know, the actual loot you get is random. And you seem to be expected to abandon quests fairly often to get the loot back to the Hamlet.

So if you go into this without wanting to study the rules of the game, it's very difficult to tip the odds in your favor. You could set up a team with a brilliant attack combo - and then run into mobs that essentially counter all the attacks with a single pull, or you get in a situation where any of the negative conditions after stress stops you from getting your people into position. Debuffs on speed as well - absolutely crippling to any team. Move-resistance - could be useful, but even a very high stat will eventually be beaten when you can be hit with over 20 damage from a maggot, and they essentially get at least two attacks in before you can fight back.

Basically, a bit of the randomness is hidden when it shouldn't be. And that makes risk-management very difficult. In theory, you could probably survive a very difficult fight with upgraded gear just to level 1. But in the same way, a new level 0 guy can survive by chance - and not get much new xp for some reason. Or, you could get xp, but now the character is crippled, and you have to do another run with another batch of fresh characters.

And if you knew what positions the groups you're fighting want to keep in order to launch their special attacks and debuffs, then you could do much better. Some of the attacks they have as well are completely ridiculous - they attack the back two guys in the group from the middle of the ranks with attacks that my guys would have to launch with serious penalties - and hit for comical amounts of damage. And that's on the first level dungeons.

So if you somehow figure out the mechanics of that. Perhaps guess that if you have damage reduction, then the maximum critical hit is seriously lowered, for example. Then you could work around that. Same with where you might get the right type of heirloom to get further on building your hamlet. But you're not able to actually see that, and that's the kind of information you probably need to get anywhere with the game.

I would strongly advise to any new or reasonable player to turn off two "features" in the game options:
1) Massive critical (seriously no need for that unless you are a sadomaso type)
2) Chance to fail retreat (again I have no idea why devs introduced fails but it is idiotic to keep this option on)

Haha, some feature. :D Thanks, will take another look at the options-menu, and hook off the "instant failure" option. >_>

Chance to fail retreat exists so that combat is always risky. Without it, you can just try every single combat encounter in a dungeon and when things go tits-up, you can just retreat freely. Not a great feature in a game centered on risk and reward.

I think you are missing a point here. You CANNOT just try every single combat and retreat freely. Retreat is never free. First of all in most of the dungeons you will not progress if you just retreat. It is possible only in seldom cases where dungeons are not linear. Secondly, in my opinion the most important no go for frequent escapes is a very severe stress punishment. Theoretically one can escape battle up to ~4 times before every single character gets crazy. Where is the benefit here? None, none at all. The retreat is ultimately the last resort to save your very precious (and very expensive) characters from certain doom. Not a convenient tea time break. With the introduction of the infamous "feature" of failing the retreat developers wanted to synthetically increase the death rate at higher levels and beat your tiny chance to progress. In the whole game I had to retreat 3 times and I want this to be my decision, not some RG.

Yup, that right there is exactly why retreating should be as dangerous as possible. While yes, stress penalties exist, they're just not severe enough to dissuade player from "I'll just try out the next encounter and see if I really need to abandon this quest" without giving it a second thought (perhaps save for having high enough stress level to risk a heart attack) and you're quite simply not forced into retreat often enough for stress to be much of a factor.

But... Well, if you dislike it, fair enough, that's the point of difficulty being adjustable after all :-)

indeed :) I wish this option was made available at the moment they introduced fails (would save two nice characters of mine) but it is there now so one can turn this "feature" on or off.

I don't know. It's "risky" on paper. But what happens is that you're not actually taking a risk by retreating, instead it's giving you another chance at avoiding complete failure. Or, when you decide to retreat, you basically know you're going to fail. Possibly you've already lost a minion, etc. And like mentioned, retreating on room-battles might allow you to go another route to a different battle, or you can do the battle again and maybe get some less annoying mobs to fight.

So the only situation you're actually going to be using retreat tactically would be at the very beginning of a battle. And then having retreat possibly failing several times makes sense. While when I'm using retreat, it's to avoid losing the loot I have, and to save perhaps one or two of the minions. So then having multiple retreat failures usually means repeated death's door saves.

Or, having a retreat function like that opens you to attacks for so many rounds that if you want to calculate your chances, you need to retreat before you actually don't have a chance to win. That's basically the problem with it. I would probably leave it on if you for example had.. I don't know... 75% chance at failure if you've used three other characters this turn. And then maybe 25% if you've used none. And then if you fail the first time, then the failure chance could have been lowered by 20%. So you would never go more than 3 rounds, depending on how many characters you've used, and how many defensive abilities you've favored that you normally wouldn't, etc.

In other words, you basically remove the risk aspect, and replace it with an extra set of potential failure conditions outside the battle itself.

It's the same with the critical hits - you need to fight so many battles, and you are guaranteed to take several hits. So giving the ai a chance to wipe out the team in one battle in the first round is a metacondition that doesn't actually increase the risk, it just introduces an extra instant failure condition. Which.. would make sense if you could raise your heroes from the dead, or perhaps save them if you win the battle, and so on. But like it is now, it just adds another scenario where you can fail without really having taken any extra risks.

And it's weird to have that when you tend to be forced to put lower level characters in a group with higher level characters on a high level mission, rather than the other way around.

So the impression I'm getting is that the designers have been looking at people who play the game "safe", and who game the system to get relatively higher level minions into the lower-level challenges. And then these "punishment" conditions make sense, right? If you're actually overleveled, and are able to always heal, or possibly disable the entire enemy team every round. And that's.. maybe how a "veteran" player would play the game, after having played the game through the beta, etc.

But if you're playing risky, and want to take on new higher-level challenges as fast as possible. And gamble on getting in damage with a gravedigger/dodge setup while the other characters defend themselves or heal as much as possible, for example - having these extra failure conditions is basically just an extra loss-condition that eventually is going to beat you, no matter how good you are at calculating the odds.

That's... Actually how I started playing the game straight away to be fair :-P But you're right, I suppose that if you want to induce possibility of swooping failure states yourself (in other words, to play risky), additional chance of failure doesn't make much sense. And I'm not criticizing risky playstyle by the way, that would be stupid - I'm an extremely careful player and I don't mind the snail's pace, but I realize I'm probably in the minority in that department. You do make a very good point that this might be the very reason why I'm a fan of conditions which introduce a level of randomness and excitement into otherwise careful and fairly predictable playtrough.

I reviewed DD on the main site and gave it 4/5 stars. I stand by the review. It's a great game.

Honestly, since its release I've played little else. DD is a superb game, and I think a lot of the negative reviews are coming from people who have played it and sucked at it. DD is a hard game, plain and simple. You will die, you will lose characters and you will often have to start all over. There is a grind involved.

But the art, the graphic novel-style graphics, the difficult challenges of the dungeons, the awesome voice narration, tweaking characters with trinkets and buffs... it's just a really well made and fun game.

should i apologize to people because i have fun with this game (even while not good/sucessful at it) and also find many qualities in it (mentioning art and sound for a start...) ?

i'm awfully sorry to say that i wont (apologize) for that...

in fact atm my gaming time is split between this and new xcom 2 game. I must be an RNG masochist.

what i also liked about the game was how to use player's habits and "granted ideas" against himself.

The game is hard... (as usual with rogue likes, but yet a step higher)
the game uses RNG and will seem (even "be") unfair
it is not an "rpg", really... the heroes are not your kids to raise and grow, they are disposable assets
pride and overconfidence will backfire. Fleeing is a valid option to use
all the above point are warnings about why you could dislike the game and they had been told again and again so one should be aware before buying, honnestly (also: countless strems and youtube vids should havebeen enough warnings)
some people DO like it rough this exact way...