Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures is a Facebook application-game based roughly on the RPG Dungeons & Dragons, by Wizards of the Coast. You play as an adventurer who goes on adventures seeking loot, gold, and experience to level up. After 11 levels, your character retires, and you can play as a new class/race/gender.
We’ll look at the Game Flavor, the Game Mechanics, and get into the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly aspects of this game, all to be recapped in a Final Review. So, is this game a game for casual gamers, hardcore gamers, or no gamers? Read on!
Game Flavor
D&D: Tiny Adventures is fairly true to the flavor of D&D, albeit a bit campy, in the good way which lends to its charm. You can find some hilarity ensue from fairly non-heroic behavior, which is made all the more comic when it’s the righteous paladin who abandons the poor peasants to the goblins. Unfortunately, you don’t get to make many choices, and everything is determined by the success or failure of each encounter in the adventure so the flavor becomes repetitive. The setting is Tolkien-est, medieval fantasy with standard D&Dish magic, equipment, and potions.
Game Mechanics
First things first. If you expect the game mechanics of D&D: Tiny Adventures to resemble the game mechanics of the pen & paper D&D, you will probably initially dislike this application because of the disparity between expectation and actuality. Loosely based around the 6 core D&D stats, attack, and armor class, Tiny Adventures departs from D&D in how these stats are used. Simply put, a random number between 1 and 20 is generated, and you add your bonus based stat, attack, and/or armor class.
Your adventurer goes on adventures, which are a series of slightly randomized encounters that your character progresses through, with several set story encounters. The chances of success and failure are modified by the encounter type – e.g., magical, trap, etc. – which are added onto the random d20 results. The damage, experience points, gold, and loot are based on the outcome of the encounter (success vs. failure). You friends can also heal you while your character rests, and buff you while you adventure. Otherwise, you character quests alone.
Setup: choose an adventure, have X number of encounters, rest, and repeat.
The Good
Easy to check back every 7-12 minutes to see how you are doing. You can use potions, and at higher levels you can also use special abilities based on class. Addicting enough as after you retire characters (once you hit level 11, you retire automatically) you sometimes get new rewards. Plus, quite a few character classes lend to repeat play, and help to keep the game engaging. The additional modes, such as Iron-man and Elite, combined with special class abilities keeps the game engaging from character to character, even as the encounters repeat.
The Bad
The game is about as close as you can come to being automated. The choices you make are fairly limited at times, and often everything comes down to pure chance. In addition, calling it “Dungeons & Dragons” is fairly misleading. At least they don’t call it “roleplaying” and they do live up to their goal of having a near-passive game, or at least a game you play on and off while doing other things. Sometimes, D&DTA is like the movie you put on in the background while doing more important things.
The Ugly
Up until recently, after many people received access to their second class ability, the game play was very well balanced. For the most part each class had a legitimate chance at getting onto the Global Retired Leadership Board. I hit the Global Retired Leadership Board twice, and at one brief point had both characters listed simultaneously. It was pretty awesome, and motivated me to play again quite a few times.
However, after receiving access to the second class abilities one character class outstrips all other classes in the ability to earn gold (i.e., points), and thus heavily favored to rank on the Global Retired Leadership Board: the Warlock. The problem is the Warlock’s second class ability (spoiler) is to receive both max damage and gold for 3 encounters. While this might not seem to be important (which on its own it isn’t) points are entirely calculated on the gold you earn through adventuring. Getting the picture yet?
As a result, the Global Retired Leadership Board has slowly became entirely populated by Warlocks. To this date, the entire list remains filled with Warlocks only.
Final Review
On its own, the game is engaging enough to play a few times around, but striving to hit high scores is what really pulls a player into the application. Without this slight competitive edge, the game really does become something you might as well automate (which the Greasemonkey DNDTA almost does). However, the game really excelled in the early stages at being balanced. Each class had a reason to be played, and a fair shot at excelling point-wise. However, as the entire game has become unbalanced with strong favoritism to Warlocks, the competitive edge is thrown out the window. Completely.
Because the only competitive class is now the Warlock, after receiving your second class ability there is little reason to play any other class and before that point there is virtually no chance as ranking on the Global Retired Leadership Board. As such, and because the adventures become very repetitive even before this point, the replay value of Tiny Adventures diminished significantly. Now the game really only has room for people who enjoy grinding their way through repeated character after repeated character. A decent “C” game, that could be better with some minor additional development/tweaks.
D&DTA – solid enough for a casual gamer to play a few times around, but lacks the subtlety and depth for a hardcore gamer – “C”
