I've played this game for about an hour now and I really enjoy it. The storyline is interesting and keeps me playing to see where it leads. There is apparently a very intricate system with different level up perks and alignment, etc etc, so pretty impressive for a game jam title. My main problem is the randomness of battles. The main character isn't very tough except when nothing can hit her. Anything that can score a hit can then take away half or more of her HP. So all battles are just hoping for misses. The scrolls are generally useless unless you know the enemy isn't resistant against it, and that's a guessing game. It's not fun to waste an item and a turn using something that just arbitrarily won't work on that enemy. Maybe, eventually, there's more strategy to this game, but so far, it seems that all you can do is hope you have a better AC and thus the attack misses. It's a shame bc I really want to like the whole package, but so far, every battle has just been kind of tedious, and whether I win or not seems up to chance more than anything.
Viewing post in Rise of Myth jam comments
Thank you so much for playing and posting on it.
I wondered what I should say, because you're absolutely correct, and I need to address it, but RNG is the core of D&D combat. I think what I can try is making the items that are available at the beginning more apparent because there's a dagger that you can get in the ruins that make combat a lot easier. In the demo version, it's glitched in the player's favor. I forgot to assign a skill to it, so it's using VX Ace's basic attack skill. But even if it wasn't glitched, just the extra attack it gives demonstrably makes combat so much less frustrating (because at level four, one of the feats is Elven Finesse, and that also gives you an extra attack. So, even with a glitched dagger, I still have a feat that demonstrates what it would be to have a proper second attack.). But I know that if I'm not going to change the RNG (and I'm not), then I have to change something else. I had hoped that the no-death method I'm using would make the combat a little more tolerable, but it doesn't seem like it's helping as much as I hoped it would.
I found it mostly to be fairly easy, but not that enjoyable. I might have been missing something but my main complaint is having a lot of options that were mostly not useful. Every time I used a scroll, for instance, it did less damage than my attacks, in some cases, no damage at all bc the enemy was strong against that element (but there was no way to tell that). You never get enough money to buy more than one or two healing potions after your first bout of spending, so most of the time, if it was a tough fight, it just came down to RNG and if you died it was just a sprint back to the battle to try again. I really liked the game itself so this aspect was kind of a bummer. But I think with a few tweaks it could be a lot of fun. Here's what I would do: 1) either give the player more HP to start and make enemies able to at least do a point of damage some times or make a mechanic where you can choose to do a heavier attack that leaves you open to counters or a lighter attacker that makes you more defensive; 2) have a way to scan enemies to tell what they're weak against, or just not have them be immune to certain elements; 3) give the player a bit more gold so they can buy the occasional potion; 4) have a method for the player to counter, especially on attacks that miss, and make misses happen way less - this way the fights don't feel like a war of attrition as much. Those are just my thoughts, but I'm sure if you thought about it, you'd find a million other ways to make the battles more engaging. As it is, there's just not enough strategy to them, and the strategy that does exist is hidden behind trial and error.