Prototype Name: Rasputin’s Dance Floor Production Cycle: Mar 2022
Rasputin’s Dance Floor was a small Unreal project I created for the purpose of an aid in a Dungeons and Dragons encounter, combining traditional tabletop with Unreal programming to create a memorable experience.
Background
I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons for many years, and had been running the game in question since 2020. The world was of my own design, full of pirates and adventure. One such pirate was Rasputin, a vampire pirate lord with a disco aesthetic. The players had gained his enmity through the course of the campaign, and decided to bring the fight to him on his ship.
Development
From the inception of his character, I knew I wanted to have Rasputin’s fight involve a disco floor. I thought of several ways of showing this through the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons, and eventually settled on creating an Unreal application that represented the dance floor. I created the blocks in Unreal, giving them an empty place for a material. I then set up a command that when a button was pressed, the block would choose one of eight materials randomly to be assigned to it. The command was repeatable, so every time the floor changed, new patterns emerged.
Blueprint example, the function I created for color changing
On the tabletop side, the dance floor program was represented as an eight by eight marked spot of the map. The dance floor acted as a lair action, changing each whole round of combat. Players that were on tiles when they changed would take additional damage or gain a status effect, while Rasputin would receive bonuses, all based on what tile they were on. For example, when the tile changed to red, players took fire damage, while Rasputin would receive bonus fire damage to his attacks. Players could turn off the dance floor by destroying the console that activated it. In addition to Rasputin himself, he had a crew of vampires, along with an imprisoned genie. The genie would turn on Rasputin if he was freed.
Conclusion
Revealing the map to my players was a delight to my players, who enjoyed both the use of Unreal to show the changing disco floor, and the entire encounter itself. I enjoyed the challenge of having the make something to constraints, even if they were the constraints I had made. The use of Unreal for other elements of my TTRPG games is something I will continue to look into as a DM.