Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Limiate" data-source="post: 5616478" data-attributes="member: 88970">Hi all,Just came to report on the first play test of D&D – Defend the Dungeon.To create the dungeon, my players and I used MapTool, with the players using GM logins as well. Normally I will set my login to only see what a player can see but left it off since this is a play test and knew I would need to help clarify on certain questions.When the game unceremoniously began, they had 3 kobold skirmishers and 3 kobold slingers and a large wall of “dirt” that represented fresh dungeon turf for them to rip into. They also had a 2x3 room previously dug that was the kobold’s starting lair.Here is a brief summary of what they did:Branched off to the right and made a 2x3 room and designated that as their future kitchenBranched off from the kitchen to the right and made another 2x3 and designated that as the future workshopBranched off to the left and made another 2x2 lair to allow breedingMade 2 kobold “babies”, L0 NPCs, there after assigning them to “crap cleaning” aka Labor dutiesCrafted a chair, fireplace, 2x1 table and a 1x1 table to make a functional workshop and kitchenCrafted stone flooring, a door and wood paneling to make a dry storage roomExpanded the original lair to be 2x4, moved the 2 L0 kobolds into the lair with them to open up the 2x2 lair for recruitingWith the completed storage room, they stored 1 Food and with the open lair space, they recruited 1 GoblinLessons LearnedThe players seemed a little off with the fact that their spirits didn’t have any character sheets and as a fundamental part of D&D culture, I guess that was an oversight on my part. Once we started though, they got comfortable with possessing monsters and that seemed to work. We didn’t bother coming up with names for the monsters but in the future we will.The players started out by expanding their lair and we ran into the first snag. The “building” task was annoying. For example, they cleared a 2x3 room, added a fireplace, water basin and a table to it – the required furniture to make a kitchen. To them, that felt complete but the rules required the room to be “built.” So we’ve now removed building and rooms become functional the next turn once they have the needed space and furniture.We also found that the overseer task was pretty powerful but in a good way – we’ll see if this gets out of hand later, I can see the overseer being too powerful possibly. Instead of the Charisma bonus affecting all tasks that an overseer is involved with, I’ll probably change this to letting them divide their bonus out between tasks. Also, we decided that if someone rolls a “1” on their task, the overseer can sacrifice their bonus to all other groups and re-roll the critical failure.Mining was somewhat of a gamble in the way that the players couldn’t target their mining efforts. With the removal of building as a task, we’ll replace it with Excavating which will be specifically for expanding the dungeon. Excavation will no longer produce any materials. Mines will now be built as rooms and specifically targeted at a material – stone, fuel, treasure. I don’t like the idea of endless materials coming from mines but I don’t like the idea of having multiple mines or even tracking their growth. Right now as a placeholder, each mine will probably have 100 material available and reqire additional wood as supports to “expand the mine” when the 100 materials have been depleted.We’re making an additional number of small tweaks and adjustments that I won’t mention here but overall they’re not major changes. Overall FeedbackThe players really enjoyed themselves. They’ve asked to play again next week and I’m stuck between continuing this play test game or adjusting the rules and having them start over. I’m more inclined to continue the current game to allow them to start testing out the other mechanics available and the higher end rooms.They’re awfully worried about getting attacked and I’ve told them that currently it’s going to operate on a strictly a DM choice – ie I send them in when I want to. In the future, as a mechanic I have created but not implemented a mechanic that will essentially “Count down” till adventurers come with Reputation reducing the count down. So the more they make the world aware of their presence, the more adventurers will show up… that brings in countermeasures and all other kinds of choices – that’s for later.What they also want is to incorporate tracking options into the game – so using MapTool we’ll start tracking inventory and I need to get off my lazy ass and start making tokens, objects, room textures and traps – plus some sort of inventory tracking system that can be used in game.As always thanks for reading!</blockquote>

Verification