I went ahead and did the whole tower going down. It turns out that it's actually a lot easier to go down, because if you fail a roll you start at the lower staircase of a previous floor, letting you go down 2 floors without having to roll again. At first it's rather confusing, but it makes sense. You don't get anything for going down afterwards, though.
This is particularly helpful because the exploit seems like it'd become exhausting past floor 11 going down - I don't know if the moment the first digit appears it'd be locked in and autosaved or if you'd have the chance to THINK you rolled a 1 but it was really an 11 or something. Either way, because you never have to double roll going down, it's easy to descend by simply looping back and forth and bashing your head against a single random number.
At first I thought that we'd be trapped in the tower, because the first rock obviously is impossible to fail (the lowest roll is 1, it passes on 1+) but I suppose that either way it would have disappeared regardless. However, since you start at the beginning of each floor when descending after a failed roll, you just need to fail the roll in floor 2 anyway (the hardest roll in the game, because floor 99 works with either 99 or 100) and you'll make it down.
I went ahead and turned the vfx back on a few times out of curiosity. The vfx seem to get much worse as you go higher, to a startling degree, along with probably the music effects? It's pretty interesting.
My favorite floors are: 99, 96, 93, 90, 88, the 81-83 complex, 78, 76, 69, 61, 58, 49, 45, 40, 37, 34, 33, 32, 24, 22, 20, 14, 11, 8, and 2.
It reminds me of laddering on a competitive game.