Simple DnD Map v2 Postmortem (9/21/21)

Players: Owen G. as Rogue, Enrique C. as Warrior

    The playtest this time went much better this time around. As I was able to put more brain power into devising the new version of the map, the map was much more fleshed out. I am actually kind of proud of this one. For this map, I decided to split the players into different sides. They would have to defeat two easy enemies, avoid the Blue Eyes White Dragon, collect the keys on the other side, and defeat Big Boss. I figured the easy enemies would be easy challenges (I didn’t use them both to attack the players at once) so the real challenge would be to avoid or attack Blue Eyes White Dragon. The area is big enough for at least one chance of getting hit. I didn’t want it to be too much of a challenge, so I decided to roll for whether the dragon noticed you and attacked. I also wrote in text how the map worked, but I ended up having to explain it out anyway.
    Pretty much everything went alright, minus the fact that my lucky rolls killed all the players. The Warrior got killed by a minion and the Rogue got killed by a slime trying to revive the Warrior. The players were only going one on one with the enemies, which is pretty funny. While I was creating the map, I was intending to have both the slime and minion attack the player, but I straight up forgot about that during the playtest. Seems like that might have been too much of a challenge though. In the last playtest, the players were able to kill these enemies multiple times in one roll so I was not expecting this to happen. Although last time, the two players were together killing one enemy. I made the slime’s stats all equal to one. Was that already too much for an early challenge? Luckily, when I rolled for the Blue Eyes to attack, I rolled low, so it did not attack and thus the Rogue was able to avoid even more damage. On the flip side, since nothing happened with it, I wasn’t able to test whether the Blue Eyes was too much of a battle challenge. And once again, I was unable to test my Boss since none of the players were able to reach it. The Rogue could have actually gone to the Boss by himself, but he decided to go revive the dead Warrior. When I playtested other people’s maps, stats of 4 seemed to be pretty broken, so it’s probably a good idea I left my biggest enemies’ stats at 3.
    I think the main “problem” with my map is that it’s more suited for a 4-player game (even though the enemies don’t all come at the same time), so I will attempt to rectify that in the future. One thing that bothered me about my map was the wall shapes I made. It made the boss area feel smaller than it should be (even though no one is probably moving anyway). Since I was told to make my map smaller, I did so, but comparing it to my other groupmates’ maps, it seems a lot smaller. If my players didn’t get defeated so easily, the map would’ve probably been a breeze. So I think next time, I will try to add at least one more small challenge. I’d like to implement some puzzles or riddles in the future, but the problem with those is that I will probably make them too hard for a tutorial.

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