Simple DnD Map V2 Feedback

 The players for the second playtest were Brandon, as the ranger, and James, as the mage.

The concept of my DnD map was to get the players to loot items from dead bodies that they needed in order to plant and grow a beanstalk that they, then, climb to reach the main boss and the treasure at the end. The changes I made were adding campfires to make the lighting in the cave make more sense, changing a bit of the layout to make the main path more linear with a spiral type path going inward, and adding items that players can pick up to help change their stats.

The things that went right were:

• The fire pits caused the players to explore a more linear critical path than before.

• The players could heal easier from the items that were added in the game.

• Players were very quick to think about looting the bodies of enemies they killed when I no longer took them off the map.

The things that went wrong:

• The enemy stats were changed, but adding items that increase player stats caused a bit of an imbalance in enemy difficulty and player ability. As players got stronger, enemies stayed the same.

• The items that the players gained for health weren’t needed when they were given.

• The overall aesthetic of the map still leaves a lot to be desired.

Ways to improve:

• The balance of players getting stronger and enemy difficulty needs to be balanced out more.

• An inventory for the players to see when they pick up items from the map.

The challenges were presented better for an introductory level; however the challenges were significantly easier and did not properly represent the difficulty that I would have wanted it to represent for a game like this as a whole.

The critical path was much more obvious than the original map. The firepits helped a lot with helping players choose paths of where to go, and making the critical parts of the map be part of the inward spiral was much better than having them be in turned out areas that weren’t part of the main organization pattern.

The overall flow of the game was a lot smoother than the previous time since the players didn’t have to backtrack in order to move on to the next area. There was one spot that they left unexplored when they initially passed it, and then later they both decided to go back to see what was there; that didn’t break the flow at all since going back to that spot was completely optional and wouldn’t have impacted the overall goal of the game. It would have simply made the goal easier to obtain.

The players knew where they were supposed to go because the fire pits helped lead the players in a certain direction. Making the map more round and much more linear, with a path that spiraled inward,c as before, rather than having side routes, also helped in having the players go in the correct direction. There were still small parts to explore, but they didn’t cause the players to get sidetracked from the main path.

Most of the mechanics of the game were taught just as well as before. The new mechanic of lighting fire pits was very easy for the players to figure out, as well as looting the enemies they just killed because I did not remove the enemies from the map. The only issue was that the players didn’t think about using the items they gained from exploring areas of the map when they needed health.