CAGD 270

Simple DnD Map v2 Postmortem

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.


Simple DnD Map v1 Postmortem


Players:

Owen G. as Warrior
Enrique C. as Mage

    As I was the first in the group to playtest a map, we were still learning how to play with the Roll20 format. Thus, things probably did not go as well as hoped, but it still went well nonetheless. For the most part, playtesters said that layout was alright, but very long. I had no idea what I was doing for this first project, so I used the entire 1750x1750 grid. Other than the size, everything was clear. Despite the fact that I used slimes (one of the most common starting enemies) and minions (the Despicable Me ones), playtesters were not sure if they were enemies. To be honest, there really is not that much to say about the first version of my map so far since most of it is just a blank space.

    Because of the extremely basic layout of the map, it was fairly easy to follow. Also since there is barely anything in the level, the rules were simple as well. I figured the stats were easy to tell because I used colors that were commonly associated with those stats; red for attack/magic, green for health, and blue for defense.  I had blue lines to represent doors that could only be opened by killing all enemies in the room. Playtesters only made it past the first two doors because I made the map too big. I didn’t get to test the boss, but at least one of my playtesters liked the joke (Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid as the boss). After getting through the first 2 doors, you have to kill (or get past) the two enemies that guard the green key. Then after that, you travel down and see (and unlock) the green door. There are some more enemies guarding the pink key, so you need to get past those too. And for a penultimate challenge, I had a minion station in front of the pink door. If you went down that path instead of going for the pink key, it could serve as a “you aren’t supposed to go here yet” signal.

    The first obvious thing I need to do to improve the map is to make it a lot smaller. And the next thing to do would be to add more stuff. At first, I was thinking of adding some terrain, but that’s not allowed. During the playtest, I was reminded you could add obstacles but I completely forgot about that beforehand since I was really confused about what to do. In the beginning, I was going to add a portal but I had no idea how to do that (but now I know that you probably don’t need anything to do it anyway). My map is bloated with a whole lot of nothing after all. I think something I could do is to make it more maze-like, and of course add more enemies. It’s much better when maps let you explore and all that. I noticed that one of my fellow playtesters used fog of war in their map so I think I’ll include that too. Maybe I could make the next map like the Camera Shy minigame from Mario Party DS. I also think I made my beginning enemies too weak, because 1 is awfully low and most of my slimes (which had 1 in every stat) were pretty much unable to deal any damage. I think I only got lucky with rolling when defending.

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