The Hall
Dungeons other people wrote
Every one of these was checked by the same solver that works out the daily’s par, so the difficulty on the card was measured rather than claimed. Somebody put each of them here by hand.
Write one of your own, or play tonight’s official one.
What makes a dungeon finishable
Almost no level editor can tell you your level is impossible. It can count your rooms and check your spelling, and then it has to hand the question to strangers and hope some of them come back and complain. This one can answer it exactly, and the reason is a quirk of the engine rather than anything clever: every room throws its die before the player chooses a door. There is no probability anywhere in the problem. The best line through a dungeon for a given character is a plain walk, not an expectation, so the solver can enumerate every character the author allows, play each one perfectly, and count who is standing at the bottom.
Which turns "is this any good" into arithmetic. A dungeon between 3 and 8 floors is solved in a fraction of a second, and the author is told, before anybody else sees it: what par is, how many of the characters they allow get out alive, and which floor the rest of them stop on. That last sentence is the one that fixes dungeons. An author almost always knows something is wrong and almost never knows where.
The floor rule underneath all of it is that a floor must be a price and never a wall. Every floor needs two ways to try it on two different abilities, and one way through that always works and always costs you. That last one cannot be locked behind anything you might not be carrying, because the whole point of it is that somebody who arrives with nothing and rolls badly still gets down. A dungeon where the guaranteed door needs the lamp is a dungeon with a dead end in it, and it does not publish.
What the solver actually checks
There are two kinds of finding and the difference matters. A block stops the dungeon going out. A warning is printed loudly and publishes anyway, because sometimes a meat grinder is the point and a validator that refuses taste is a validator people route around.
Blocked: it is not a dungeon
- Nobody gets out. The best character allowed, playing perfectly, runs out of Vigour partway down.
- Fewer than three kinds of person survive it. That is a lock, not a dungeon.
- A door that wants a mark nothing above it hands out. It can never open, and neither floor looks wrong on its own.
- A check with no target number, which is not merely hard: it goes catastrophically wrong every single time, at the top price.
- A shelf where nothing does anything. Some gear is a charge you spend at a table with other people at it, and a charge is inert down a hole.
Warned: it is a dungeon, but
- "Floor 3: everybody takes Cut the rope. The others are furniture." One door dominating is a floor that only looks like a choice.
- Two or more doors nobody would ever take. That floor is one choice wearing a hat.
- Everybody who does well is the same Calling. That is not a choice, it is a requirement, and a player deserves to know before they build.
- A mark handed out that no door ever reads. Legal, free, and nearly always a word spelled two ways.
- Over nine tenths get out, or under a tenth. Both are allowed and the card says which.
One cap is worth explaining because it looks arbitrary and is not. A dungeon may test at most 4 distinct marks, the things a floor leaves on you and a lower floor can ask about. Marks nothing tests are free and unlimited, because flavour cannot branch a search. Every mark a door actually reads can double the size of the solver's table, so 4 is fast and eight is a request that times out.
Why the difficulty word can be trusted
A walk, Fair, Stiff, Brutal, Barely possible. The word on a card is derived and never authored: it is the share of allowed characters that get out alive, banded. Nobody can label their walkover brutal to make it sound better, and nobody can call a meat grinder gentle to get more people to press it. It is the one thing on a browse card that is measured rather than claimed, and it is worth more than any star rating, because a star rating tells you how the people who liked it felt.
The ranking above works the same way. There is no most played tab, deliberately: popularity ranks whatever got seen first and keeps it there, and a board nothing new can climb is a board nobody submits to twice. What is ranked instead is the share of people who finished a dungeon and then said it was worth their time, and nothing is ranked at all until enough people have finished it, so one friendly vote tops nothing.
Everything in the Hall was shelved by hand by the person who wrote it. Unlisted is the default, so a draft or a private link never appears here. If you want to see what the report reads like on something of your own, the desk is open, and tonight's official dungeon is the same engine with the dice pinned to the date.