1a. I highly doubt that we'll be facing more than D4's version of hellyfish. With the four of us, we should be able to take on an underground monkey or whatever the local mook is without any issue. And how would we need to pass them to get back to the Drop if we encounter them upon arrival? Am I missing something, or are you using non-Euclidean geometry?
1b. Also keep in mind our current sizeable SP supply. We have time.
1a. Assuming you mean Stone Dragon, since that's the tough enemy and hellyfishes are mooks. Yeah, we probably could. It just might be difficult, possibly more so than defeating the Stone Dragon.
1b. Meh. You might be right. I still think that going to Dungeon Level Four wouldn't be worth it, simply due to the fact that enemies are probably just as dangerous as the Great Stone Dragon, and there's more of them. As for how we would need to pass them to get back, look at it this way:
1: We Drop, and end up in the Drop room.
2: We walk into the room adjacent to the drop, Room A.
3: We find strong enemies in Room A and immediately run from this room into the next room, Room B.
4: For whatever reason, we need to get back to The Drop. As a result of this, we go to one of the rooms adjacent to Room A.
5: We walk through the doorway into Room A. We need to run past the monsters in order to get to The Drop.
Of course, if we've spent a long time on the DL4, we'd probably be able to defeat them easily. But the idea behind my argument as that we ran into trouble and needed to run.
Well, do you want me to copy-paste all of my arguments into my response to this point of yours or what?
...Yeah, probably.
I'm glad we agree on this.
1a. Very vague indeed. Your plans seem to rely on its main attack having a major weakness for no reason other than "it looks magicky, and obviously they can't do the stuff we do with our equipment!"
1b. What, tank it until it runs out of SP?
"3". Well, we will just have to not trigger any obvious traps or provoke any minibosses until we find D4's facilities then.
1a. Well, you have a point. But we know practically nothing about DL4. And it looked kind of like a special attack to me.
1b. Yep. Or use the other strategy somebody suggested, where Al tanks while everyone else shoots. Of course, how do we get it to shoot Al? I'm going to try to think up another plan.
4. Meh. We might find something unavoidable, but you do have a point. I still think we should at least attempt to kill the dragon, though.
1. That's the kind of metagaming freeform loves to punish.
2. Agreed. Iff we decide to stick around D3 for whatever reason, I approve of looking for the crabby guy.
1. I can't remember any examples of this style of metagaming being bad off the top of my head, and it seems like it would make sense even without metagaming. Cool Crab might want to stick around to reunite with Cherish and Proxxy, (probably not, since he wandered off in the first place) he might like it here, or he might dislike DL4 for some reason. If I'm right about it being ice-themed, it might be too cold for him. Or it might be unsuitable for some other reason.
Also, crabs like water. He may have wandered into the water. I wonder why this floor has water and DL2 didn't? Maybe the void-y areas were the DL2 equivalent. Or maybe there was a bunch of water, but we didn't find it; there was that one pond.