Stories from RhyDin & The Rings

Upcoming DoS Boss Fight: Sword Dancer

This is an out-of-character thread for player sign-ups to participate in an upcoming boss fight. Characters should not have any in-character knowledge about what is to come unless they have explicit prognostication powers; and even then, I request that they not be used in such a way that could reasonably prevent the event from occurring at all.

This event will be taking place at 8 PM Eastern on May 2. After some IC set-up, the boss fight will likely begin at around 9 PM Eastern. If you didn't sign up, that's okay; if you want to participate, you're more than welcome!

It's time for the mask to come off, and for Christa's long-awaited assassination attempt on Trinity to finally take place! Christa has a sinister plan to lure Trinity to the Battlefield Park manor for their fated clash, but she knows that her plan will result in a number of Trinity's friends following her there to help. And that's where Christa's conglomeration of ghostly armor, the Sword Dancer, comes in. It will keep her friends occupied while Christa fights Trinity to the death!

This boss fight is modeled after prior boss fights that have taken place in Duel of Magic such as Blood of the Dragon, except that this one will use Duel of Swords mechanics. To give a fresh overview of what exactly will happen, this is an everyone-vs-one encounter, and the bot will not be involved at all. It will be manually called. Everyone who engages the Sword Dancer will get 5 HP, and the Sword Dancer's HP will be scaled based on the number of opponents. To be specific, the formula is 10 + (5 x N).

The boss submits one move, and everyone fighting it submits their own move. The boss's move is individually resolved against every combatant's move to deplete its own HP and its opponents' HPs based on how much the move scores. It's basically an inversion of how scoring normally works. Normally, hitting TH over LC would gain you one point as you ascend toward five. But instead, hitting TH over LC reduces their HP toward zero. If the Sword Dancer reaches zero HP, the encounter is over and you win. If a combatant reaches zero HP, they are incapacitated and unable to continue fighting the Sword Dancer. If all combatants are incapacitated, the encounter is lost. Everyone will be fighting at four mods tonight, regardless of rank. I know that prior boss events eschewed modifiers, but the boss gets to use them too, so it's only fair for everyone fighting them to also have them.

Not all moves in DoS are created equally, so tonight, we're going to even the matrix out with some extra perks. Disengage has an extra use in this boss fight: healing! As long as it doesn't get hit, it will recover 0.5 HP up to the starting amount of 5. But if you Fancy it, not only will it recover 1.0 HP instead, but you can give that HP to someone else, so that players with higher HP can take on some of the risk inherent in using DI for the benefit of players with lower HP. If you want to heal someone else, indicate the target when sending the move. In addition, Slash will deal 1.5 damage if it connects.

The move sequence has been decided ahead of time by RNG, The candidate moves are, in order, TH, HC, LC, LP, CP, SS, DU, and SL. A d8 is rolled a whole buncha times to decide the sequence, matching to the moves in order. Repeats are skipped. Because DoS's moves aren't created equally, the selection is refined a little bit. SL is only used every second time that it comes up to reduce its occurrence. Every second SS becomes SH, because SS/SH/DI have strongly overlapping purpose. Every fourth SS becomes DI. If the end of the sequence is reached, it is looped.

The boss also has special moves, which upgrade/replace specific moves in the sequence after various triggers occur, except for one trigger that will cause it to occur on the very next round. The special moves will be secret until the event, but I am happy to give you hints on what special moves are coming:

• A move from Duel of Swords with a Feint modifier applied to it.
• A move from Duel of Swords with a Focus modifier applied to it.
• A move from Duel of Fists given custom interactions and a Fancy modifier applied to it.
• A move from Duel of Magic given custom interactions, but no modifier, because it will beat a lot of moves.

While it is true that I could run this assassination attempt story entirely off-screen among myself and the writers of the other characters involved, I wanted to host a boss fight because boss fights are really fun, and I don't think that Duel of Swords has had one before.

I'm really hoping to run an event that will be a lot of fun for everyone!

(signing up.)

I'm in

I'm in. Don't know as who though

Barring complications, I'm in.
Beltane events were announced for 4-10 May. I didn't take that into account before adding the 4th to my available dates.

I don't want to step on the toes of Beltane, because I know it means a lot to a lot of players. But if some Beltane events are forum-only, I think it may be reasonable to keep those dates as candidates, especially if it's implied that the forum-only events are happening during the day. Christa's villainy to lure Trinity to the manor will 100% go down in a dueling venue of some sort, near or during regulation hours; she's not going to mess with Beltane.

But I'm happy to tack another week onto the end of the poll if everyone thinks it might be easier to do things after Beltane instead of before or during it.

Battlefield Park has its own chat room under The Nexus. Since it looks like hand calling is going to be the rule of the day, that could be a good option and it would make sense for a scene at the Haunted Armory to be played there.

Right. So the sort of order of events I was thinking was that Vacía springs her trap and sets the lure while in whatever dueling room is active for regulation that night and then leaves. Trinity discusses a plan of attack with whoever is there with her and wants to follow her to the Battlefield Park manor. Then everyone moves from the regulation dueling channel to the Battlefield Park channel, and the party gets started.

Right now, I'm currently leaning toward this coming Friday for the event, because it ensures that everything gets wrapped up before Beltane starts, and Beltane will be good to help pick everyone's mood back up after this villainy. Gilly didn't vote, but she has confirmed her availability to me in DM. We'd miss Abyss and Anubis, so for current signed up participants, it looks like Troy, Maggie, Gillette, and one more person whose availability I need to confirm. Those four plus whoever happens to be there on Friday night and would be happy to join a siege on the Battlefield Park manor.

Maggie, do you remember how much HP Ashene had, and/or how they calculated it? The scaling is a bit complicated based on the fact that the boss can hit everyone at once, and everyone can hit it at once, too.

Hey there. I found some info that might be helpful for you.

Here are the instructions from the green room that night.

And according to Round 1 posted in play that night, it seems that Ashene began with 40 HP. Taking that in conjunction with the format listed above, the boss HP was decided by tallying the total HP of the contestants and then adding 10 on top. (6 participants at 5 HP each = 30 HP, plus 10 = 40 HP.)

Hope this helps!


P.S. As someone who is helping plan and run Beltane this year, I just want to say that I feel like it's fine for you to run this during that week if you want to, so all your people can participate. We won't be running a live event every night that week. I'll check with the rest of the RP team and see if I can get you some hard dates to work around.

As the one who ran all the boss events the only tips I can give you is be flexible and view this from a Dungeon Masters perspective more than running a strict dueling event. There were mechanics that completely changed on the fly due to participant interactions that were not planned at all to help facilitate the narrative of the story. The participants first and foremost are the stars after all.

Also, here

https://duelingzone.org/brawl/monster_brawl_2.htm

It's DoM with a few extra special moves from the No Quarter Given event, but can easily be translated into other moves if needed or for general tracking.

The information above on the HP is correct.

Big thanks to Gatito and Royal for all that useful information! Royal, I'm pretty much of the same mind going into this about approaching this more like a dungeon master using dueling mechanics. I am not especially confident to set up additional actions outside of dueling since this is my first time running an event like this, but Duel of Swords has the aspect of an unbalanced matrix; I've decided to add more reward to risky and niche moves. I also have set aside a surprise mechanic to power up our heroes!

Okay, so the event is going down tonight. All the IC setup leading up to the boss fight will kick off at 8 PM Eastern and the boss fight will likely start around 9 PM Eastern.

I will add all this extra information to the OP, but here's some more info.

First, you can join in even if you haven't signed up! If you're available tonight and you wanna join a boss fight, we'd love to have you!

Everyone will be fighting at four mods tonight, regardless of rank. I know that prior boss events eschewed modifiers, but the boss gets modifiers baked into its special moves, and it will definitely be harder to wear down its HP without mods.

The boss's HP formula is 10 + (5 x N) where N is the number of opponents. I am admittedly a bit worried about making this the same as Ashene's without special actions, but given that I'm running this like a dungeon master, I can scale that surprise mechanic depending on how things are going. I do ultimately want our heroes to win this!!

Not all moves in DoS are created equally, so tonight, we're going to even the matrix out with some extra perks. Disengage has an extra use in this boss fight: healing! As long as it doesn't get hit, it will recover 0.5 HP up to the starting amount of 5. But if you Fancy it, not only will it recover 1.0 HP instead, but you can give that HP to someone else, so that players with higher HP can take on some of the risk inherent in using DI for the benefit of players with lower HP. In addition, Slash will deal 1.5 damage if it connects.

The move sequence has been decided ahead of time by RNG, with the exception of one of its special moves, which occurs via a trigger and replaces whatever move comes next in the sequence. The other special moves also have triggers, but they'll replace/upgrade the next instance of specific moves in the sequence. The candidate moves are, in order, TH, HC, LC, LP, CP, SS, DU, and SL. A d8 is rolled a whole buncha times to decide the sequence, matching to the moves in order. Repeats are skipped. Because DoS's moves aren't created equally, the selection is refined a little bit. SL is only used every second time that it comes up to reduce its occurrence. Every second SS becomes SH, because SS/SH/DI have strongly overlapping purpose. Every fourth SS becomes DI, which the boss can't use to heal. If the end of the sequence is reached, it is looped.

And, again, I'll post the move sequence and special moves after the battle. I hope everyone has a great time tonight! I'll do my best for you all!

Nikolai is telling me that he wants to dance with swords. I guess I am in.

Okay! This event did happen Friday, and I had a blast running it! We had eight participants! Abby, Abyss, Gillette, Lani, Maggie, Myth, Nikolai, and Troy. I actually miscalculated and gave the Sword Dancer HP for seven participants, but it is a good thing I did that, because the boss fight ran from 9 PM to midnight, and even with a party heal and buff unlocking the other sports' mods, the party could have been defeated!

I want to thank everyone for their participation. You all made this event a success, and I really appreciate it!

If anyone has any feedback, I would legitimately love to hear it. One thing I know that I could have done better is setting up the pre-written narration to be much less text-wally. I think I also could have used the IC thread to document Trinity and Vacía's fight in the background instead of periodic text walls. Lani and I set up the plot point of kidnapping Harlee, so I wasn't sure how I could get that going without text walls that left no gaps between snatching Harlee and establishing her defensive measures. I would love to hear ideas for how I could have done that better!

All in all, I do know that this was largely a whole lot of theater for my characters and stories, doing it in the chat room instead of on the boards, but I hope a cool boss fight was adequate compensation. If I do another boss fight again, I would like to avoid the wordy exposition and background scenes!

I said I would reveal all of the moves after the event, so here they are. Here is the move sequence that had been generated:

01. HC
02. CP
03. DU
04. LC
05. TH (upgraded to Feint TH)
06. SS
07. DU <-- When this came up, SD was *just barely* still above 50% HP.
08. TH
09. CP
10. DU (replaced with Fancy Leap)
11. HC (replaced with Immolation)
12. LC (upgraded to Focus LC)
13. CP <-- This was the final round, thankfully!!
14. DU
15. SL
16. SH
17. DU
18. TH
19. SL
20. TH
21. HC
22. TH
23. HC
24. DU
25. LP

I generated 25 rounds, but I am so glad we didn't have to use them all!!

Here are what the special moves ended up being. If I do something like this again, I would like to come up with better triggers, and maybe special moves that have different interactions than just matrix interactions.

Special Move 1: Feint Thrust
Hits LP, CP, SS, DI. Gets hit by TH, SH. Nulls LC, HC, DU, SL.
After reaching 85% HP, is used the next time the sequence calls for TH.

Special Move 2: Focus Low Cut
Deals 1.5 damage to SS, LP, DU, SH, SL, DI. Gets hit by TH, gets blocked by CP. Nulls LC. Uneven trade with HC: deals 1.5 damage while receiving 1.0 damage.
After reaching 65% HP, is used the next time the sequence calls for LC.

Special Move 3: Fancy Leap
Hits LC, LP, CP. Gets hit by TH, HC, SL. Nulls SS, DU, SH, DI.
After reaching 50% HP, is used the next time the sequence calls for DU or SS.

Desperation Move: Immolation
Hits TH, HC, LC, DU, SH. Gets hit by SL. Advantage on LP, CP. Misses SS, DI.
After reaching HP = number of combatants, is used the very next round.

I wish I could stamp a big heart on this post. I'm so happy that things went so well for your event, and I hope everyone had a blast. Well done!