CAGD 270 Simple DnDMap Feedback, February 7th 2019

Simple DnDMap Feedback, February 7^th, 2019

·         My map was called The Temple of Fury, it is a 3-floor temple where players fight to retrieve a long-lost gemstone from a temple in South America.

·         I was the second map to get played and I had a plan on where to guide them. I had one major problem, which was actually introducing the players to do things they were supposed to do. I printed out blank boards and was going to guide them like a dungeon master, but my map was a bunch of squares next to each other so it would get very confusing very quickly.

·         Not too much went right, but they liked that it was a multi-floor dungeon, and they liked how I would describe the rooms but that’s about it. When I was telling the story to the area, before I even got to fully think my players made their turns and they bypassed some squares that were walls and sometimes doors, this made it hard for me to speak up and say your doing it wrong, so I let them progress. 

·         Now for the things that they think I should improve next time. When going through the dungeon there were no enemy pieces, I had a copy map with the enemy spawns. This was a bad idea on my part because once I moved these enemies, I quickly lost track of them because I was engaged with my group. I wanted to play this map like a campaign so I tried to recreate an actual DnD match with the rules that we had. There was a major problem with that kind of idea, most DnD maps don’t do tutorials and when I made this map, I didn’t push the tutorial first even though that was the whole assignment, this overall screwed my players because I didn’t teach many things to them because I assumed. My 3 levels were not linear in the slightest, I always gave the players a few choices when they entered a floor, but this overall confused the players to the point where I had to tell them where to go because of the time restraint.  

·         So overall my map was pretty bad, I’m looking to improve it by adding in actual rooms and not just have lines of tiles. This would clear up the confusion problem and allow me to recreate my level to be very linear. This would allow me to actually create tutorials for everything without too much trouble.

·         Not all rule mechanics were covered inside of the playthrough, the only one I remember not putting in there was a use for the float rule.

·         I tried to introduce my group to new enemies on each floor while also mixing the old ones in. So, this was one thing that went right, I have enemy diversity with tanks and attackers. With their diverse stat pool, it made for an interesting fight, except it wasn’t because my group one hit everything up until the boss because of lucky rolls. I’ll need to balance my enemy stats more. Overall, I introduced them to a variety of encounters that scaled in difficulty, unfortunately, I didn’t balance the boss enough and my group died in the boss room.

·         The next floors entrance wasn’t really a clear goal to the players, because of that they explored until I had to tell them where to go, once they were told where to go, they found the rest out right away.

·         There were many corridors which caused many battles, but there weren’t really any open rooms besides the boss room. Because of this, it was battle after battle for the party, but because of the lucky dice rolls that they got, they ended up making it to the boss with no damage taken.

·         My map to put it bluntly really sucked, with a rework of the 3 boards it would be a great level, but I missed the mark by a good margin. My goal is to teach the players how to play in a fun interactive level.