We did the first session of our two-part playtest this weekend! Let’s talk about how it went!

I’m writing a homebrew campaign in the style of a Hades-esque roguelike. I’m playtesting it with my group before I run it for real! These posts talk about my experience making a campaign like this from the ground up.

What went well

  • Pacing

The party was able to fight through the first floor—they even defeated the first boss! The first room was the slowest, but it also generated a pretty tough encounter for them (more on that later). I think that’s about the pacing we want for the group’s first few runs through the dungeon. As they get more powerful, they’ll be able to move through the first area quicker.

  • Difficulty

While there are a few things I could tweak here and there, I think the difficulty of the first floor is about where it should be. The varying difficulty between rooms helped with overall pacing. And, the more difficult rooms inspired creative thinking from the players for how to use the items/favors they’ve gained.

  • Item/favor tracking

One of my players suggested using a Google doc so that everyone could see who had what special items/power-ups that they’ve accumulated room by room. This worked great! I just copy-pasted the item’s description and added the name of the party member who had it. This also helped track the party’s current currency amounts.

  • Visual aids for combat

I was able to make a few graph paper-like visual aids for the group to use. We play over Discord, so this helped us articulate where creatures were and where people were trying to move. Here’s an example of one for a simple 20×20 square room:

So, each square represents 5 feet, and the asterisk represents where the group starts out. We used the numbers on the side and letters across the top to identify the different squares.

  • Fun

Everyone had fun! This was what I was worried the most about, so it was great to hear that people enjoyed the different format.

What could be improved on

  • Pacing

Even though pacing went well, I think this campaign relies on good pacing throughout combat—keeping everyone on track during combat and, as the DM, quickly making decisions so the session runs smoothly. So I don’t want to get complacent on this piece.

  • First room

The first room was the biggest slog—4 rust monsters and 2 gelatinous cubes. I decreased the cubes’ health because it seemed high, but maybe I’ll make it so that you could only encounter one gelatinous cube in a room. The rust monsters slowed people down because of the metal weapon damage penalty, so characters had to get creative with how they attacked them.

One player suggested that, like in Hades, characters may get access to an item/favor before tackling the first room. We may try that in the future, but I’ll have to think about it.

  • Item/favor “priority”

Many of these items can only be used by one person at a time. Many of them also require attunement (though we’re not worrying about attunement slots in this campaign). So, to help streamline the decision-making process, everyone rolled to determine who got first pick of a room’s item. This order changed every room. I might instead keep the order the same next time—and just move down that order to determine who gets “priority” next room. That way everyone would eventually get their chance to pick.

  • Experience tracking

My original idea was to calculate experience at the end of the session, and then any amount accumulated over what was necessary to level up would be discarded. But now that I look at the experience that the group gathered, they barely made it from 3rd to 4th level this time. So I may just track the overage as well.

  • DM organization

I felt somewhat disorganized during this session. I had to switch between a bunch of different tabs (my notes for the rooms, the mechanics, and the items/favors gained, not to mention the monsters’ stat blocks). I’m not sure how to improve this, but it’ll be something I’m thinking about for next time.

Next steps

The party can now level up to level 4. They’re looking at the “armory upgrades,” which are permanent additions to their equipment they can purchase with some of the currency they’ve earned on their dungeon run. We’ll see how that goes, and sometime next month will be their second run through to finish out the playtest!