It's alright
I think as a story generator, it's fine. Life is random, but as a game, it felt like there was a little to much randomness I couldn't really make much decisions unless I got lucky and bought some items and spells.
On my first playthrough, I did not land a shop once which you can imagine how frustrating that'd be lol.
Don't get me wrong, I like rolling dice but I want to fail because it's my fault, if you know what I mean.
One suggestion that comes to mind is to maybe have persistent money/items between games and before the start of each game, buy your equipment then. For the maps, you could have tiles that are more likely to be something good, but also something bad, or neutral. That way, if you take more risk getting money or loot, you also have a chance to get more/better gear later on.
To be honest, I didn't really know how to work the encounter tracker, lol. Maybe some suggestions on how to use it?
The Heirlooms are a pretty good idea, I think. Not sure if there's a way to balance it with my other suggestions.
But I understand the point of this game, rules light, don't have to do much, just roll and watch things happen. So don't feel as if you must implement what I've said. :)
Thanks for the details. I agree it is quite random. My desire for the game was to be pretty low-effort on the player side. I came at this game from the perspective of a player that is short on time and just wants to roll some dice one night they have some free time (aka pretty much me at the time). That being said, I have learned alot from this community as a result and think that some of the other adventures scratch that story itch a little bit. Red Death is pretty free form until you get to different parts where you can choose to utilize the dungeon generation mechanics from HQ. By no means are any of my games perfect and will always result from tweaks. One of my goals for 2022 is to issue a new version that refines from lessons learned that feedback.
The persistent money/items is good idea and I was trying to use the heirlooms to accomplish that, but those only work if you fail, and so I see what you mean about that.
The encounter tracker is basically boxes to write in AC and HP for your enemy then as HP goes down you write the next value below. Thanks again for your comments.