DnD MapV1 Playtest

 Today was the test day for the first version of the DnD maps that we had. For the play test we split the class up into groups of three. The two people that were testing my map were Aidan L who played the rogue and Richard I who played the mage. Both individuals gave great feedback on my level. They mentioned both pros and cons on the level that were very helpful. Here is an image of my level:

Some things that went right with the playtest was the fact that it was a close game. I made the boss very strong and maxed out all of its stats. Even when I did that I was thinking the boss might be too powerful, but the players used the terrain to their advantage to make the game a lot closer to an ending than I could have imagined. Another thing that went well was that the players were able to navigate the map with very little difficulty. I threw in a bunch of different shapes in the map as well as fog to try to confuse the players. I was afraid that this would make it too difficult for the players, however, they seemed to have an easy time navigating. Some additional feedback that I got was that they liked how I hid the henchman in his own room because they thought that he was going to be the boss. They mentioned that this tricked them and made it for a better experience since I forced their curiosity to go into a room that would be an ambush.

Now for some things that went wrong with the gameplay. I mentioned it above, how I made the boss really strong and maxed out all of its capabilities. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake because it made the boss a little too powerful where it would kill one of the players almost instantly. It was still a close game in the end, but I got some feedback that the boss might just be a little too strong and I would have to agree with them on that. Something else that was mentioned was that the one henchman that I had was too weak and hardly did any damage to the players, so when it came to the boss fight, the players felt more confident and knew that they had a good amount of health to take on the boss. This is just not what I envisioned when I was making this map, so I know that I will definitely have to make improvements on the henchman. The last thing I will say here is that the players mentioned that the bottom left corner of my map is very open and I have to agree with them. I wasn’t too sure what to put there, so I decided not to put anything there. 

This brings me to the improvements that I will be making to my map for my second version. The first thing that I will do is make the boss a little weaker than he is right now. He is currently at 10hp and I was going to change that to be 8hp. I don’t want to make a big change, but just enough to give the players an advantage. The second improvement that I will do is to make more henchmen throughout the map. Like I mentioned before, I only had one henchman for the entire map and that made it a little too easy for the players in my opinion. So, I was going to add another 3 henchmen to the map to help spice things up a bit. I believe the last thing that I will do to improve the first version of my map is that I will add many different shapes in the bottom left corner of the map as well as a room with a henchman in it to discourage the players from going that way. 

Image of bottom left corner:

In the end, this was a very fun experience and I really enjoyed testing out people's maps as well as seeing the joy that I brought with my map and I can’t wait for the next playtest.