So I've had a bit more free time recently and have been getting back into DROD a little more of late and thought it might be useful to design a more in-depth tool based on the information found
in this thread. As a result, I put together an excel spreadsheet which will calculate player stats after each fight in a gauntlet of up to 20 monsters (this includes health, greckles, rep and of course, score) meaning that it is much easier to see the score of doing one set of monsters and doors etc. versus another.
How to Use
Input your current stats into the Fight Number: 0 Column at the top. This is pretty self-explanatory - it's the stats and score that you have before fighting any monsters.
Each set of calculated stats after those you input show the player attributes *after* each monster in the gauntlet - i.e. the stats in Fight Number: 1 show the player's stats after killing the first monster in the gauntlet. If the player dies it will say 'DEAD' in the HP row.
There is capacity for stuff like doors, attack gems, hot tiles etc. within this spreadsheet also.
So in this section you can put in any additional stat loss/gain which will occur
outside of combat (not inflicted by the monster). It is important to note that this is the last thing processed by the spreadsheet. This means that if you start off with 20 attack and 10 defense and you fight a roach in battle #1 and then set yourself to gain an additional 20 defense in this battle also, the spreadsheet will still calculate that you will lose 20HP from fighting the roach because the defense gain occurs
after the fight with this roach. If you were to fight another roach in battle #2, the change will have taken place by then and so the player will lose 0HP in this battle. This section accepts both positive and negative values.
The next section is the most important part of the spreadsheet. Here, you can type or select the monster you'd like from a drop-down list in each cell. You can put up to 20 monsters in a row as part of the gauntlet.
As you can see, there is also room for special monster behaviours. I believe these are the only ones that affect combat but please let me know if not. Here is what each behaviour does:
-Surprised from behind: The monster does one less attack on the player.
-Lucky: The player gets double the amount of greckles after killing the monster than normal.
-Double rep: The player gets double the amount of reputation after killing the monster than normal.
-Attack first: The monster does one more attack on the player than normal.
Inputting a 1 into any of these cells will apply the behaviour.
Note that this spreadsheet assumes that the player is equipped with a sword and so will usually attack first.
You may have noticed that there is room for a number of 'Cases' when fighting. This is so that you can easily compare multiple different paths. Simply put in up to three different cases and then type in which case you want the spreadsheet to calculate in the 'Case Selector' box. Note that there are cases for each section so if you select case 2 for which set of monsters you are changing, it will still be in case 1 for the additional stats gained/lost and the behaviour of each monster.
Above is an example of a full gauntlet. As you can see, brains also work out fine. As far as I'm aware this tool works without any problems but if anyone finds any, don't hesitate to let me know. It's an extremely useful tool for RPG Architecture as well as much longer gauntlets where the best path isn't obvious. Of course, it does have some drawbacks - mainly that if you can't see how certain choices will it obviously won't be able to help, but hopefully at least a couple of you will find this of some use!
EDIT: I don't know whether this will work if used in other spreadsheet apps apart from Excel.
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[Last edited by navithmastero at 07-28-2019 10:26 PM]
