Simple DnDMap v1 Feedback

12 February 2023

Bennie Ksiazek and Pablo Flores Moran played my first DnD Map. Bennie chose to play as Mage and Pablo played as Ranger. I think that something that went well was that both players did not face any major challenge in progressing through the level. Normally, the aim would be to introduce challenges to the players and force decisions, but the role of this map was to act as a tutorial for the players to get acquainted with the game system.




The progression of the map was good–the players were forced to interact with the environment, by way of breaking through locks and choosing which way to move at forks in the road. However, there still was room for improvement. The player was given the choice between three different paths towards the middle portion of the map. That opportunity of choice itself was a good implementation. The players had an opportunity to have a different gameplay experience based on which path they took. But, because the main objective was to introduce the players to gameplay mechanics, it was not actually a positive that they did not have a uniform experience. They never had to use the jump skill to cross a gap, and they faced fewer overall enemies as there were two more monsters in the paths which they did not take.







I felt that something that could have been improved for the players was the variation of monsters, in both numbers and form. There were only two monster types within the level, three if I count the goblins being ranged and melee. I could have introduced more types of monsters into the game, with different sprites and attack powers. There were also not that many monsters per encounter. This was intentional on my end as I did not want to risk the players dying in the tutorial level. However, the challenges proved too easy which just worked against me in the end.




I am going to improve my map by increasing the number of monsters, and adding more diversity to the way they can attack the players. I am also going to improve my map by at least trying to incorporate more physical obstacles for the players to overcome in each route, rather than just upping the monster count.




I do feel that the challenges that I presented to the players were appropriate to the nature of the level, if not a bit simple. The critical path was made obvious as the paths did not diverge too often. Instead, the path started out as a simple path which diverged into three paths, which all pointed towards the end of the level. During the playtest, there were no questions about where the player could or should go.




There were a handful of circulation elements which I utilized when I was designing the map. I tried to stray away from corridors, but I inevitably had to include a handful because I did not want the tutorial level to be very vast or wide open. In a sense, the paths that went unexplored were a type of entrance which would not necessarily be interacted with but would still allow the player to feel like they are changing their gameplay experience by choosing which way to go.




I felt that I was able to teach all of the rule mechanics to the player in an understandable way. By having them face obstacles and then undergo easy monster fights, eventually culminating in a boss fight, they were able to take in the core elements of the DnD rulesheet in a hands on manner without me having to directly tell them what to do.