DotR Speedrunners mod ((Proof of Concept))
1 year ago
Australia

Hello everyone! As every DotR speedrunner knows, you're essentially forced to pick the Patrician of Darkness starter deck to speedrun, making the other 16 decks obsolete. Another mandatory part of a speedrun is editing the deck, which, since the discovery of all the passwords mean that at the start of the run, the best move is to edit out anywhere from up to half of the deck. As part of the run it means that in order to be competitive you have to only ever pick one deck and then every reset you spend minutes of entering passwords after minutes of skipping dialogue each time which already is brutal enough.

The short of it: Every starter deck has one copy of Dimensionhole and also has a deck cost no higher than 757.

So as proof of concept, I had the idea - what if all of the starter decks had one Dimensionhole? And also, what if the starter decks all had a low enough deck cost so that you didnt need to edit the deck at all and replace the contents with fake traps OR bulk passwords? The answer is a speedrunners mod that allows all starter decks to be a viable option to pick up and compete and try to beat the whole game without having to edit the deck (of course a deck edit is still an option, as are passwords, but you would be losing time over not editing, in order to gain the time back).

Because of the nature of all the decks being forced to have an edit to progress through the game, the DC must be lowered, and the easiest solution to this is to replace the bricks with copies of the lowest deck cost cards possible - the two being Call of the Haunted and Cursebreaker. Because so many of the base game fields have Yami/Wasteland, I figured it makes sense to include either no CotH or only one per deck to prevent every single deck being too reliant on CotH strats as it would make the runners mod a CotH strat simulator. So for the other cards I put in cursebreakers as they can simply be 'queued' up in any order eg the start of a hand sequence with no SP cost, while also still being a 'playable' card without affecting the run too much.

Here are the two videos I've made to explain it (only split up because it was more convenient for me to make) - comments are disabled because I would rather all the discussion take place in this thread.

Edited by the author 1 year ago