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[Dsell]

For the last two years, I've been responsible for creating a "puzzle hunt" for a local board game convention. The hunt consists of various puzzles on posters scattered across the convention area, with a meta-puzzle on a handout given to con attendees. It's been great fun, and last year I came up with a puzzle that uses a party of RPG heroes to defeat a villain. This puzzle format has a lot of potential and I think f.ds folks might really enjoy it! (Puzzles are in attachments.)

Within these puzzles I tried to keep things relatively tame and easy - I don't want to waste hours or even too many minutes of con-goers time working on these puzzles, and I want them to be accessible to kids and people who aren't super into puzzles. But designing these has made me realize that this is a rich and fun medium for puzzles. There are a ton of variables to change - obviously damage & HP values, but also # of heroes, # of rounds, how the villain attacks, not to mention special characteristics of the heroes and villains. There's lots of room for red herrings and tricky interactions.

So if anyone else feels inspired by this and wants to make their own version (text-based, probably? Unless you're feeling fancy), this would be a great place to share them!

Slightly-harder mode for these puzzles is to figure out the full order (though you probably have to do that anyway to confirm your answer)
Solutions:
Dragon: Shiva       
Vampire: Psysmic   

Finally, if you'll be at TokenCon 2019 in OKC, you'll see the vampire puzzle there!

Edit: If people are on mobile and it's easier to see this online, here are imgur links:
Dragon puzzle: https://imgur.com/D21ByfI
Vampire puzzle: https://imgur.com/MUkXqMZ

[sitnaltax]

Dragon: Chara, Shiva, Ilume, Tocks

Our "base" damage is 400 + 300 + 200 = 900. We need to deal 1600 damage. The only way to deal the missing 700 this is to use Ilume's double on the Tocks' 400 and let Chara's DoT tick twice for 300.
We need to survive 3 attacks. Shiva's freeze prevents one; one is healed by Ilume; the third will knock us down to 50 HP each. Tocks' damage reduction is a red herring; it can't possibly buy us another attack, because two 300-HP attacks will kill us as surely as two 400-HP attacks.

So: Chara goes first because her DoT has to tick after turns 2 and 3 (Dragon: 1300, Heroes: 150)
Shiva goes next to allow the DoT to tick (Dragon: 950, Heroes: 150)
Ilume heals the heroes and buffs Tocks (Dragon: 800, Heroes: 50)
Tocks swings for 800 and finishes off the dragon

[sitnaltax]

Vampire: Eclipse, Tactick, Taproot, Psysmic

The vampire has effective 1600 HP with healing. Our base damage is 1050, and we have the following opportunities for more:
Eclipse is effective 100 HP/round thanks to the healing debuff
Tactick is 200 as long as it's the first or second round
Psysmic is 50/round.

This makes the ordering pretty clear:
Eclipse needs to go ASAP to maximize the DoT (Vampire: 850, Heroes: 300)
Tactick needs to go second (Vampire: 750, Heroes: 100)
Taproot can go any time but the last round, so, third (Vampire: 550, Heroes: 50)
Psysmic is last, applying the debuff just in time for Tactick's recursive strike to do an extra 50 damage and finish off the Vampire.

[Dsell]

Really nice job!! You got them both perfectly.