ePortfolio Post 1 (Simple DND tutorial map)

 The people who played the final iteration of my map were Ryan as the ranger, Chris as the rogue, and Jonny as the warrior. Originally the group was composed of myself, Chris, and Ryan so it was a little difficult to figure out how to scale the map appropriately as the map had only two active party members making cascading failures much more likely. 

It’s hard to say if items made my final DND level easier, for the first two iterations of our maps we were a group of three which meant even low-level enemies were difficult to fight if we had bad RNG which my group suffered from more often than not. Since we had such bad RNG it made it really easy to become overwhelmed by the enemies, as my group didn’t have a third party member to pick up the slack when an enemy consistently rolled high against us rolling low. One thing I noticed that was interesting is that even though I didn’t change any of the statistics of the enemies from Map 1 to Map 2, is that the success was more defined by the dice rolls rather than abilities such as the magic attack. Enemies that were defeated with one turn in week one ended up nearly killing the entire party in week 2 without a change in health, attack, or defense. 

The first iteration of the DnD map

One thing I really struggled with when making my maps was the size of it, because my group was so small it made it so a majority of our time was spent on combat and not necessarily testing how the map flowed. I didn’t make very many dead-end hallways preferring to have dead-end rooms that would either have an enemy or reward within it. When keys were first introduced I had the enemies drop the key once defeated so it would initiate at least one round of combat but when it came to combat my group sort of ran it like a Pokemon battle where if you were within range of sight of the enemy you had to engage but there was no way to guarantee that the players would go into one of the rooms that were off the main path. 

I think implementing doors sort of hurt my level because our group was so small a key was another thing we had to spend a turn to collect which made it harder to complete the map. While smaller maps with larger play groups needed the delay that the doors provided between the enemies, map size, and obstacles the doors were unnecessary to expand playtime. 

The bad RNG our group constantly suffered from made it difficult to give critiques outside of the map layout. Since we kept rolling so badly at least with my map we only made it as far as the first three enemies before all the players were dead or we ran out of playtesting time. 

Final Version of the DnD map

I think the critical path was fairly obvious as the dead ends were no longer than 2-3 squares in the later iterations, but I tried to keep the map as straight foward as possible. In my final iteration of the map I added two ways down, one of which was a short cut the possibility of only getting one chest while the other way was longer and had the opportunity of giving two chests. I always tried to make sure there was a reward/item in a room with an enemy to incentivise combat, which spawned from when the keys were first introduced and I had them be dropped by the monsters that “guarded” the door.