Post Mortem - DnD Map v3

Goodbye, DnD! This was the last map I was obligated to make for tabletop games, this time including an annotation map and some form of art direction. Unfortunately, due to time constraints coming in from other classes, I couldn't make the best out of the art that I chose. It'd be an easy fix to improve it next time. 

I came at this level with the understanding that enemies would have to be way more lethal than they were last time. I was already not impressed with the softballs I was throwing at the party already; and now they were going to have checkpoints; this is practically an invitation to kill players. I am relatively proud to say that of the three games my group played, mine was the only one where a player died and even then I felt like I did too little. I was hoping for every checkpoint placed to be used and I only had 1/3 used in total. 

In general, I had to drastically change my approach to level design to accommodate the rule changes, which overall demand more from the level designer. In order for the rule system to function successfully, the level must have checkpoints, must have items for the magic-user class, and all enemies have to be created in a way that they have the potential to hit all players (realized unfortunately due to the fact that one enemy in a game we played was mathematically incapable of harming me, which is unfortunate to find out in the middle of the game). While this is extra work, it allows for a better balancing of magic users which had a tendency to take over the game.

Now, level designers can create a power curve for magic-users, where they have the ability to naturally grow in power through picking up items over time. This allows for a lot of interesting changes to their power level over time; they can become more powerful through picking up items from enemy bodies (which is a good feedback loop; kill a thing to become more powerful), they can be limited in power through providing limited use items (which puts a severe damper on healing, increasing the lethality of the game further), and they can be given a power boost to make impossible-to-kill bosses quite mortal. 

I tried to incorporate all these elements into the game by ensuring that all enemies dropped an item to be used by both melee and ranged classes. Additionally, I limited restoratives to an optional path, as checkpoints largely negated the need for restoratives and I didn't want players to sit around healing; especially considering the runtime requirement of 20 minutes.

Additionally, the level was designed with the 20 minute runtime in mind; I understood that the five room dungeon model was still inadequate for that length, so I really tried to boil it down to three necessary rooms, with two mandatory combat encounters before the boss fight itself. I especially didn't want to give my players many small, unsatisfying, fights, which would essentially serve no purpose other than to artificially extend the length of corridors, which is obviously undesirable in a scenario where we're trying to create a twenty minute long highlights reel of what the rules can do.

Overall, I'm unimpressed with how everything came together. It was rushed and basic, but I did feel like I got somewhere with the rules considering how I was the only person in the playgroup to kill a player; not that adversarial DMing is good, but if we're looking at rules where there's checkpoints set up to accommodate player death, something has to happen.