crockpotcauldron

One last batch of Mort comics for the road:

https://crockpotcauldron.tumblr.com/post/682973878187933696/eating-rations-restores-stamina-points-and

I'm going to have to track down more books. Choose your own adventure books are one of the genres really best suited to paper copies, but guess it's going to be ebooks from here on. If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know! I love a good dungeon crawl.

Mort's stats are 10/16/11, by the way. Irrelevant to anyone but me, but he's got middling Skill (attack strength), lousy Stamina (hit points), and good Luck. The minimum score is 7/14/7, the max is 12/24/12. He got through the dungeon, but there were a couple close calls with the minotaur and the cyclops. I rolled fresh scores for the second book (because the stats are, charmingly, based on how well you trained and worked out before each dungeon) but it just didn't feel the same, so I went back to his starting stats.

One interesting artifact of the choose your own adventure book format is the lack of backtracking. Outside of the maze and a couple dead ends, you can't choose to retrace your steps and go back south. The book locks you out in a way computer games don't. But then again, there's far more potential for cheating with a book. I mapped out the whole dungeon and inspected the decisions I didn't make - but I wouldn't actually recommend it for the initial playthrough. Part of the thrill is really the immediacy of making decisions and suffering the consequences. The alternate paths I explored didn't feel as real and high stakes to me. I didn't cheat in the fights at all, by the way. Won by the skin of my teeth sometimes, and though it's all just dice, it felt satisfying.

It has been a while since I've played rpgs with friends, and I miss it, so the other day I pulled my copy of Deathtrap Dungeon off the shelf. For the first time, I decided to actually roll the dice instead of cheating my way through, and it's nowhere near as annoying as I thought it was in high school! You roll for skill, stamina, and luck, which you use to fight monsters and get through tricky situations. I spent a lot of time drinking Mysterious Dungeon Liquids, and I wholeheartedly recommend chugging as many as possible, even though one of them turned out to be acid that burned my jaw off. There's a certain charm to brutal old dungeon crawls. I spent some time mapping out the choice paths, and also doodling the funny bits. I figured, people treat video game protagonists like characters and write fanfic about them, so a choose your own adventure protagonist can be a character too. I have named him Mort Manifold, because he dies a lot.

I haven't warmed up to Dreamwidth's image hosting and I'm currently on mobile, so here are the Tumblr links.

https://crockpotcauldron.tumblr.com/post/682589702544670720/unearthed-my-old-copy-of-deathtrap-dungeon-and-im
https://crockpotcauldron.tumblr.com/post/682625568565608448/everything-is-going-great-for-mort-hes-a-well
https://crockpotcauldron.tumblr.com/post/682691840665927681/the-adventures-of-mort-manifold-continue-he-had-a

Drawing cartoons of the funny bits has always been one of my favorite parts of rpgs. I miss being able to hang out with my friends, but that won't be happening any time soon. Still, this was a fun set of afternoons, and I like how a lot of the doodles turned out! I have The Warlock of Firetop Mountain after this, but then I'm out of books. Back in high school I tried ordering an assortment of choose your own adventure books online going by the blurbs, but I only wound up liking two of them, so we'll see how it goes this time.