Sword Coast Adventures

[BlueBard]

Just out of curiosity, is anyone playing "Sword Coast Adventures" via the Neverwinter Online Gateway?

https://gateway.playneverwinter.com/

It's a rather addicting virtual dice game where you take 1 to 4 of your in-game companions and send them on short dungeon crawls for experience and loot.  You have to have gotten to level 15 in the online game and gotten at least one companion (first one is free) to play.

The cool thing is that this is something you can do a few minutes at a time on the web and it affects in-game stuff.  Your companions gain in-game experience (must actually log on to Neverwinter to send them off for training) and your in-game character collects any coins or items that drop.  There's even an invocation trial that refreshes the expiration timer on any celestial coins you've obtained.

Each companion has a set of base dice (6 sided) with symbols and numbers that indicate how many of those symbols the die face is worth.  Companions also get one or more of a set tokens representing the favor of a diety (Tyr, Oghma, Lolth, Kossuth, Shar, Tempus, possibly others ).

If you don't have four companions available, the game will provide temporary companions to fill out the group of four.  Temporary companions don't get experience or increase in rank.

For each room or encounter, you have to match a set of symbols and each time you roll the dice, you either have to match a symbol (and the die is retired) or pick a die to throw out for the next roll.  The trick is deciding which companion to use (and the symbols on their special dice) and which die to throw out when you don't get a match.  Also, sometimes changing the order in which you take on each of the challenges.  You have to beat all encounters in a room to open up another part of the map.

You can keep playing as long as you have companions with enough stamina remaining to keep going.  Stamina regenerates over time, so you can always let your companions 'rest' awhile then log back in and play again.

I'm not sure I'm doing anybody any favors by recommending this game, because it will suck your free time away and spit it out dry. 

The key here, how PWE is going to make money off this little gem, is that I strongly suspect the higher tier dungeons are going to be difficult to complete without buying premium companions with Zen.  We shall see.  The companions I do have are ranking up faster because of this game, and it makes them more useful in Neverwinter.  As they rank up, their special tokens become stronger (die faces worth more).  Companions have a maximum rank depending on their rarity.

I can definitely see the temptation to buy companions...