Week 7 Practical: Review on Encounter of Typhon

Review on Our New Quest and The Encounter on Typhon

by Edmund Phoon Jian Cheng

A week after the first Microlite20 quest was completed by our team, we went on to create our own quest as part of the design to broaden up the RPG adventure in Microlite20. There, our customized quest summarizes on the players in a need to escape a castle owned by a pixie character, which turns out to be a relative of the slain pixie in the first quest that we did last week, hence serving as its sequel as a continuation. In this quest, treasures lie within the castle and the players have to go into the depths of the castle and obtain the gold while fighting against the orc and goblin guardians and avoiding traps and solving puzzles. The final boss is the pixie who shapeshifts into any powerful creature to match against the players, but it was not the main focus on our game. Instead, our team made it such that only one playable character would manage to get over the game’s outcomes and become the sole survivor. This is true since we have set the difficulties of the enemies encountered and traps hidden in the puzzles to be challenging to the point that the players’ Hit Points (HPs) gets depleted upon damage and unlucky fate.

This ‘sole survivor’ game is play-tested by another group in our class, so I could not explain how it went for the game, but I thought the gameplay turned out well for that team. However, our team played the other team’s own storyline termed “The Encounter of Typhon” and we get to review it too. In the game, playable characters enter a temple to retrieve a stolen sacred sword that has the ability to seal the monster named Typhon who lie dormant in the temple.

It was the playtest of “The Encounter of Typhon” that enabled me to understand more of the stats of my Microlite20 character and clarifying how to use the moves properly. The use of the dice roll, which is accompanied by the character statistics, will determine if the resolving of conflict is successful, making it a bonus in the attack. Dice rolls of different numbers are also initialized, depending on the type of weapon used to resolve the conflict; for example, a short sword requires a dice with 6 sides, and the number rolled represents the effect of the attack on the opponent. With this knowledge and the aid from my team mates, the conflict becomes more accurate and the opponent also has a chance to bring harm to the playable characters, depleting their HP.

The ‘Encounter on Typhon’ is somewhat better than our prototype storyline since most of the playable characters wouldn’t get killed off right at the end of the game. Still our team enjoyed the antics we did in the role-playing game, especially this time round I defeated several enemies of the game through strategy. It just takes a matter of luck or fate to determine the outcomes of your actions in the game, which makes the adventures in these customised quests more exciting.