SimpleDnDMap V2 Feedback

 My playtest consisted of Jax playing as the Archer and Aidan playing the mage.  I think the thing that went right was being able to have a complete playtest without any major flaws. One particular thing that went wrong was that one of my bosses didn’t really have fair stats so that's one of the things I need to work on. The boss that I’m talking about is called a Wereboar and I gave it 7 health, 3 defense,  2 magic and 4 attack so I’m going to definitely reduce the health by 1 or two and also lower the attack to probably 2 just to balance it out a bit more. When it comes to the map Aidan and Jax mentioned that they liked the layout of my map because it kind of resembles a maze but one thing they think I should add is maybe some henchmen with very weak  stats and place them around the map to add more player interaction with the game instead of having just 2 enemies.

When it comes to the question, were the challenges presented appropriate to the tutorial nature of the level. I would say yes and no. No, because the enemies on the map were a little stronger than they should have been. I would say the critical path was obvious, however in my map I gave the player multiple options to decide which pathway they wanted to go which all led to the same ending point where enemies were placed. I think the overall flow of the map went very smoothly. There weren’t any issues as to where the player had to go or anything. They sort of just figured out the pathway on their own. I believe all the rule mechanics were taught to the player well and had no problems of where to go.

Looking back at my previous map it is definitely a big change but it was a good change in order to actually give the player a clear path of where to go. There are images below which compare the two maps to each other.

Looking back at this playtest there were a few spots that were left unexplored and that was just because I didn’t add any extra enemies. In total I should have probably added 5-7 extra little enemies as a way to actually protect the boss before the big boss battle but to also make the playtest a bit more interesting.

After the playtest was over and I got some reasonable feedback, two of the main things I will fix and add is adjusting the stats of my bosses so they’re actually beatable rather than them being overpowered. The other thing that I mentioned earlier in this post is being sure to add little henchmen around the map that maybe move to maybe surprise the opposing player. Some things I thought about when creating this map was that I wanted the player to have freedom of where they wanted to go so that was the main reason for creating multiple pathways to reach their objective.

One of the changes to the map that I might make is not making that right path one long path and probably connect it to the middle.

One thing I saw in Aidan’s map was adding some consumables which gave health to players if they needed it. I thought this was a great addition to the map and I will probably try something like that to mine in future map designs. In the end after playing their maps it helped me to see what I was missing and actually what I can do to improve my map in general.