Well, we have done it, we have finally played our first session of 4e. Three of the players have already blogged about the experience so much of what I am going to talk about here is likely to be a bit repetative.
First I want to give a brief overview of the game. We have 4 players, a Cleric, Paladin, Wizard and Ranger. They are about as iconic a party as you can get and have the perfect spread of class roles. As a small scale tactical team they have the potential to work extremely well. They are also a group of characters oozing with potential drama and conflict. Overall I am immensely pleased with the characters.
The first session was intentionally set up as a small scale exploration/dungeon delve, pretty linear without too much opportunity for the players to go "off rails". The players have been hired by the Rebellion who are anxious to recover a mythical gem from the tomb of the dead Sun God Ashura. The stone is to be used in a ritual to drive the Hounds of Shadow, supernatural agents of the Cabals secret police, out of the city.
Some may scream "railroad" and to an extent you would be right but for a first session of a totally new game I wanted to ease both myself and the players into things gently.
So, how did it go?
THE GOOD
The system is excellent. It does what I want a system to do, it mostly gets out of the way and when it does come into play things are resolved pretty quickly and easily. We referred to the books perhaps twice all night. Once I become more familiar with the rules and print out the status conditions effect page I think this will be reduced to nil.
In order to reduce player book referencing I produced a set of power cards for each character. These allow the players to see at a glance what each of their abilities do and to have pre calculated numbers for each of them. This is a great way to reduce player (in)decision time.
Combat ran smoothly, quickly and kept everyone engaged and interested in the game. Each players turn is passing so quickly that you know you will be getting a chance to act soon. We had three combats, one a small skirmish near the start which took about 15 minutes, a large battle in the Tomb Crypt which took about a hour and a 5 minute slaughter right at the end.
My players grasped the tactical issues fairly quickly. In the first fight they bottlenecked the opposition at a street entrance with the Paladin and the Cleric protecting the squishies. In the second they struggled with a teleporting bad guy and two decent ranged opponents. They managed reasonably well and only one of them went down during the fight. The third was pretty much a cakewalk.
The skill challenge system works well for us. We are used to the idea of more abstract conflict resolution and I ran with that idea adapting the skill challenge rules. I pretty much designed the entire session as an extended skill challenge including the tomb exploration. I broke it down into four scenes, getting to the tomb undetected, reaching the burial chamber, looting the gem and getting away undetected. As there was never any doubt the players would reach the burial chamber I set penalties for failure as added complications.
1. Get detected crossing the Plaza and the Cabal release Hounds of Shadow to hunt them down on their way out (increasing the DC's for scene 4).
2. Fail the tomb exploration and the spirit of Ashura would be awake and active, attacking with surprise as they enter the Tomb.
3. Fail the tomb looting phase and they wake up Ashura and have to deal with him.
4. Fail to get away after looting the gem and they are confronted by the Cabal Inquisitor and leader of the Secret Police.
Those were failure conditions for failing the challenges overall but I also set failure conditions for failing individual rolls in scenes 1, 2 and 4.
1. In the Plaza you encounter some angry ghosts or a demon patrol.
2. In the Tomb you wake some Guardian devil or blunder into a trap
4. In the getaway a Hound of Shadow tracks you down and attacks.
As we dont bother with xp I simply set the challenges at the PC's level and fix a number of successes for victory and failure as normal. I dont want to drag out these scenes with lots of dice rolling so I kept the number of successes fairly low at 2-3.
I am also a big fan of player narration so the players got to describe the scene and what happened on their successful rolls. For example, I had the Paladin and Wizard players describing how they worked together to disable glowing magical rune traps barring the entrance to the final chamber.
Props were also a very helpful part of the game experience. We had miniatures and dungeon tiles, something which is completely new to us as a group and had a blast using them. I only mapped out those areas where their was an encounter with the rest of the exploration being handled purely narratively.
The biggest plus in running this game was the sheer level of player enthusiasm. This may be simply because we havent been playing for a bit, because we are back to the same 5 people who started together 8 years ago or because we have an evocative setting generated by us all. In that time we have played a lot of games, D&D, Pendragon, Buffy, PTA, Exalted, Cthullu and others. We have had fun with all of them but I get the feeling that there is a freshness and a conherent focus about 4e which is playing to our current group desires.
THE BAD
The use of skills is excellent but it has some pitfalls. I need to make sure that I am challenging people to describe what they are doing when using their skills and to promote a bit more interaction. I need to emphasise the mechanical benefit for a decent description (+2 - 5 on the check) and make sure I push for them.
I was also a bit too free with the benefits of secondary skill use, allowing them to add +5. This probably made things too easy. In future I think this will be reduced to +2 which combined with description and the aid option should be enough secondary benefits. I also need to remember to apply armour penalties to physical skills, especially as I effectively allow one persons stealth skill for example to apply for the group.
The props were good but we dont have enough. In particular we need some 3x3 and 5x5 templates for our Wizard player to mark his aoe effects.
I need to be much more careful about monster abilities. The group were level 1, the main encounter was a Level 4 elite and 2 normal level 4 monsters. This is within the expected encounter difficulties but might have been a bit much for a group totally new to the game. I had thought the group would have had a couple of encounters inside the tomb but they passed the skill challenge without a single failure.
The encounter was the spirit of the dead god Ashura and two of his fire balckened, skeletal priests. At one point I was worried it might be a tpk or we would lose someone (we dont do pointless random death).
When designing monsters I tend to either reskin stuff from the MM or tweak existing ones. I find myself doing a lot of level adjusting. We are aiming for a sword and sorcery genre so I want mad cultists, slavering demons, degenrate ape men and serpent priests not kobolds and goblins..
As a result I also tend to swap around monster powers and I gave Ashura quite a potent one, an aoe burst which damages and blinds his opponents and which had a recharge. I think this ability was probably pinched from a paragon tier monster so I need to be more careful as I ended up ignoring the recharge.
On the first round he gained initiative. The players had set up so the Paladin and Cleric protected the stairs with the squishies at the back of the room. Unfortuantely Ashura could teleport so he promptly moved into the middle of them, blasted away and blinded all of them! It didnt help that both Ashura and the priests also had abilities which inflicted ingoing fire damage.
At one point we decided to rename the encounter "Are you on fire" as we kept forgetting to apply the damage or make the saves.
One thing this encounter did do was to demonstrate just how important moving is in 4e. It also really helped to give my non wargamer players an excellent taste of tactical combat. While only one player went unconcious during the fight there was certainly a lot of tension in the room as the fight was a close run thing (damn that Paladin mark). At one point the players were seriosuly thinking of trying to kite Ashura around the room with Ray of Frost while the Ranger killed him at range.
THE UGLY
Nothing that comes to mind but I will wait and see how responsive the system is when I run something much more open ended in subsequent sessions. Can it survive the need to generate content on the fly? Only time will tell.
Good stuff, as a fan of the S&S genre I am hoping 4e pulls it off better than just simple reskinning of monsters,but that the mechanics can provide a solid experiance when needed.
However I am confused about your use of 'secondary' skills. What exactly do you mean by that? (rerolling a skll check?)
I was not as pleased with my 4e experiences. I am my gaming group's DM, and I have been for 5 years now. I'll put it very bluntly. I was very resistant to 3e, I was more resistant to 3.5, and I dug my heels in on 4e. My books were purchased for me by one of my buddies, in hopes that I'd continue to DM. No harm, I am always happy when someone is willing to defer the massive cost of legally acquiring source material.
We played last night for the first time, to give a new DM a chance to learn the rules. Don't misunderstand my experience, I started playing in 1993 in good old 2e with my friend and her older brother. I made a cleric, because I verily despise 4e wizards. I worshiped the Raven Queen because she seemed to be well thought out, and not a rip off of various FR gods/arcanists ( Sehanine Moonbow, Congenio Ioun etc.)
To give credit, I like the throwbacks to 2e. I missed the Str. requirements for armor. But, riddle me this, why is full plate 50g? If it is made of aluminum foil, I could buy that. Full plate historically, and traditionally in high fantasy and D&D has been expensive, not something your Lvl. 1 creation can afford off the bat.
I had trouble finding feats as a first level cleric. I always played a support cleric. ALWAYS. I wore mid weight armor, chaimail or possibly scalemail. I stood on the back lines near the wizard or the archer to assist them if they were engaged in melee, and I waded into combat to heal the primary front line fighters. Now I don't have that option. I am a melee machine whether I want to be or not.
Archetype destruction does not jive well with me. 4e feels very much like an MMORPG. We all jokingly called it World of D&Dcraft. At Gen Con last year many of the developers talked about "killing the sacred cows of D&D" so to speak, and this was a wholesale slaughterhouse. The gritty feel of danger, and the feeling that you aren't terribly powerful didn't come into play AT ALL until I got torn up by a pseudodragon. I am certain it was a plot arc I destroyed, but I was not going to hunt food and pamper a critter as a stoic and grim cleric of the death goddess.
It took a solid 2 Handed Flail hit, and proceeded to absolutely annihilate me. It wasn't just the first hit, oh no. The 5 poison damage and the wonky way saving throws are done is what did it. I have a 50% chance roughly as a Lvl. 1 character without any special abilities or items that increase it. I took continuous poison damage enough to kill a dragon for several rounds until my d20 decided to be kind. Tiny useless creature - 1 Cleric - 0
I don't think it helped that the ONLY hit I made all night was with an improvised weapon to knock a flying creature out of the air. My only thought all night was, "Wow... why can't I stand back and just heal and bless, wade into combat and clunk a few things with my mace to help the wizard out"
The next blow was when I looked at multi classing. 2e was rough, we all know it. 4e means there is no reason to multi-class anything. It took me long enough to wrap the ideas around my mind that I decided, hmm... prime requ. requirements and racial restrictions are better.
All in all the general consensus, including the gung-ho 4e enthusiast was that for anyone who was introduced to D&D before MMORPGS and the console gaming systems defined RPG will be disappointed. 4e was designed for introductory play.
Even the terminology made me cringe. Many of the prayers, exploits and so on have names that make me want to yell: THESAURUS!!! They sound hokey, in a mid 1980's bad fantasy way. I half expected buxom amazons and burly barbarians to pop out of the book and start acting out the original music video for Holy Diver.
As much as gamers want to say 2e was difficult, give me my THAC0 back please, because having to make saving throws and have a saving AC is not exactly crystal clear either. Also, why is a 5 foot step called a shift? Why is movement done in squares, do we lack the cerebral integrity to calculate distance in feet?
For the newest generation of gamers, the "young-uns" so to speak this will probably be fun. They can make a paladin and wear full plate at 1st level. Wizards no longer can be the masters of utility. Yeah, I know that they had beautiful possibilities for abuse in 2e and 3e. But, they were frail and a few solid hits could topple even a high level wizard with ease, unless they were prepared with contingencies and various defensive spells.
Ritual Spells and utility spells are a joke. An absolute joke. As a cleric I have to choose between bless, sanctuary and cure light wounds. I get 1. When all three are staples. Knock is not guaranteed success, but its rather pricey to cast.
It feels to me like the game was neutered for the enjoyment of people who can't think. Which, is okay for them. I personally will be staying with my previous editions.
We haven't even gotten to my opinions about what is happening to my beloved Forgotten Realms, which I more than likely will never play in again unless it is modified to have all of the various Gods and NPCs that are being slaughtered restored.
I thought it was a cracking game. As always we were easing our way into the characters but I'm sure that next session is going to be a doozy.
I'll repeat here what I said at the table. For the sort of experience that 4e wants to deliver, it does it perfectly. I was hugely sceptical about minatures and dungeon tiles and such but they worked great for this game. When we play Burning Wheel in a weeks time, I wouldn't dream of using them, but for this - great.
Looking forward to the next game!
Neil
__________________
"A M.O.D.O.K. and a M.O.D.A.M. made sweet monkey love by the light of a rack of World of Warcraft servers, and I was the result!"
Playing: D&D 4e (The City of Kings), Primetime Adventures (Tales of the Prometheus Club), Spirit of the Century (Thrilling Tales) Running: Burning Wheel (The Water Margin) Designing: Duty & Honour (A Sharpe inspired game)
Ladymage: Give that buddy his or her books back if you haven't already.
Personally I can't fathom the whole 'Grah status quo!" position, or the argument that unrealistic core rules of earlier editions are more palatable or reasonable than unrealistic core rules in the new one. I compare the entertainment I have at the table in 4, and then my experiences in my 3.5 game (concurrently mind you). It's entirely different. One is action and story and closed books- more face time, etc.... the other is praying for good initiative, and then cheering or cringing after two minute calculations and 5 minute "let's check the rule again" book-fests where no one's doing anything except trying to find some errant sentence about a condition or situation that might be used to the player's advantage....
As I've said to my friends, perspective's a bitch. I'd have withstood the calculations a few months ago.
Clerics are certainly not restricted to being melee machines whether they want to be or not. In fact, it's entirely possible to build a first level cleric that never goes into melee at all:
Lance of Faith and Sacred Flame as your at-will abilities, Divine Glow as an encounter power, and Cascade of Light or Beacon of Hope as your daily. You blast enemies with divine power that helps your allies without ever drawing your weapon. Clerics also have healing word, which allows them to twice per encounter heal an ally for a quarter of their hit points + 1d6. It's thus -entirely- possible to build the sort of cleric you prefer.
For that matter, as a first level cleric, you can grant yourself a +1 bonus to saving throw rolls with channel divinity: Divine Fortune.
As a suggestion, insulting the intelligence of people who enjoy things you don't isn't the best way to go about things.
To give credit, I like the throwbacks to 2e. I missed the Str. requirements for armor. But, riddle me this, why is full plate 50g? If it is made of aluminum foil, I could buy that. Full plate historically, and traditionally in high fantasy and D&D has been expensive, not something your Lvl. 1 creation can afford off the bat.
It's part of the balancing of the classes, and done to let characters that can wear heavy armor use all of their abilities right out of the gate.
Quote:
I had trouble finding feats as a first level cleric. I always played a support cleric. ALWAYS. I wore mid weight armor, chaimail or possibly scalemail. I stood on the back lines near the wizard or the archer to assist them if they were engaged in melee, and I waded into combat to heal the primary front line fighters. Now I don't have that option. I am a melee machine whether I want to be or not.
Feats are sparse for clerics. At first level my human cleric of the Raven Queen has Raven Queen's Blessing (great when you've just dropped a minion), and Soldier of the Faith.
Why do you have to be a melee machine? Clerics have a ton of ranged and area of effect powers. My RQ cleric never gets into melee unless an enemy forces him to.
Quote:
It took a solid 2 Handed Flail hit, and proceeded to absolutely annihilate me. It wasn't just the first hit, oh no. The 5 poison damage and the wonky way saving throws are done is what did it. I have a 50% chance roughly as a Lvl. 1 character without any special abilities or items that increase it. I took continuous poison damage enough to kill a dragon for several rounds until my d20 decided to be kind. Tiny useless creature - 1 Cleric - 0
I'm guessing you haven't seen how many hit points dragons have these days.
Quote:
I don't think it helped that the ONLY hit I made all night was with an improvised weapon to knock a flying creature out of the air. My only thought all night was, "Wow... why can't I stand back and just heal and bless, wade into combat and clunk a few things with my mace to help the wizard out"
I don't know why. It's definitely an available option to clerics.
Quote:
The next blow was when I looked at multi classing. 2e was rough, we all know it. 4e means there is no reason to multi-class anything. It took me long enough to wrap the ideas around my mind that I decided, hmm... prime requ. requirements and racial restrictions are better.
Actually, there's little reason not to multiclass something. Skill training + a new power (daily or encounter) makes the first multiclassing feats the most powerful heroic tier feats around. You may not want to swap out power and fully multiclass, but that first dip (similar to grabbing a level of another class in 3.x) is a nice boost to anyone. Especially clerics looking for somewhere to put their feats.
Quote:
All in all the general consensus, including the gung-ho 4e enthusiast was that for anyone who was introduced to D&D before MMORPGS and the console gaming systems defined RPG will be disappointed. 4e was designed for introductory play.
I started with Red Box Basic in the early eighties. Everyone in my group has played since at least 2e, most of them since 1e, and one of them played Chainmail. we're all having a blast with 4e.
Quote:
Even the terminology made me cringe. Many of the prayers, exploits and so on have names that make me want to yell: THESAURUS!!! They sound hokey, in a mid 1980's bad fantasy way. I half expected buxom amazons and burly barbarians to pop out of the book and start acting out the original music video for Holy Diver.
True. Some names are wacky. But then again. . . Gygax was no slouch in the "using weird phrases" department.
Quote:
Also, why is a 5 foot step called a shift?
I assume because it's easier to say, and "5' step" might be confusing when everything is listed in squares. One of the players (the Chainmail guy) frequently says something like "move me five feet that way" and I start to slide him several squares.
Quote:
Why is movement done in squares, do we lack the cerebral integrity to calculate distance in feet?
Simpler != dumbed down. If the battlemat is always in squares, and you always count in squares, what's wrong with calling them squares? Distances are still used, but if it's something that will be in a fight, calling it a square cuts out the middle man.
Quote:
For the newest generation of gamers, the "young-uns" so to speak this will probably be fun. They can make a paladin and wear full plate at 1st level. Wizards no longer can be the masters of utility. Yeah, I know that they had beautiful possibilities for abuse in 2e and 3e. But, they were frail and a few solid hits could topple even a high level wizard with ease, unless they were prepared with contingencies and various defensive spells.
Old fogeys like you and I can enjoy it too. It's a very different game from the "good old days," but that just means it offers different types of fun and new challenges.
Quote:
It feels to me like the game was neutered for the enjoyment of people who can't think. Which, is okay for them. I personally will be staying with my previous editions.
Why the elitism? Must someone with a different idea of fun than you be an idiot?
Quote:
We haven't even gotten to my opinions about what is happening to my beloved Forgotten Realms, which I more than likely will never play in again unless it is modified to have all of the various Gods and NPCs that are being slaughtered restored.
I'm not disputing that you had a bad experience with 4E, or that the game probably just isn't for you, but I would like to dispute the following:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ladymage
All in all the general consensus, including the gung-ho 4e enthusiast was that for anyone who was introduced to D&D before MMORPGS and the console gaming systems defined RPG will be disappointed. 4e was designed for introductory play.
Quote:
For the newest generation of gamers, the "young-uns" so to speak this will probably be fun.
I'm 44 years old, been playing RPGs since 1976 (started AD&D 1E in 1978), and am definitely from the Pong generation, not the MMORPG one (hell, I barely know what that acronym means, and never play computer RPGs). I'm playing in a 4e game (the first time I've played any version of D&D aside form one session of 3.5 in over 25 years), and I love it. Rather than a "dumbed down" introductory game, 4E feels more to me like a return to D&D's roots. Early versions of the game were basically a minis combat system with loosey-goosey, freeform, hand-wavey role-playing stuff tacked on. Far from being dissapointed, I'm having some of the most fun gaming I've had in years, and I'm no "young'un".
Now this:
Quote:
It feels to me like the game was neutered for the enjoyment of people who can't think. Which, is okay for them. I personally will be staying with my previous editions.
is just needlessly insulting. I certainly believe that I have the capacity to think, and am enjoying 4E immensely.
For the OP, sounds like you guys went into the game with an open mind and enjoyed many aspects of it. The game isn't perfect nor will it appeal to all tastes or play styles, but it is solidly designed and, more importantly for us, lots of fun to play. The consensus in our group (split about 50/50 between crusty old grognards and pimple-faced kids who weren't born until long after I started gaming) was that it was nice to feel competent and cool at 1st level, that the fights are tense and tactically interesting, and that the powers system meant that everybody could contribute and had cool moves.
John
__________________
__________________
Playing: Nothing
Running: Trail of Dee, Judge Dee using Trail of Cthulhu
Just Finished: playing Reign of Midnight (Reign in the Midnight setting)
Reading: Trail of Cthulhu, 4E DMG2, WFRP 3E Designer Diaries, Judge Dee novels (again)
Planning: D&D 4E Fallcrest based campaign, or WFRP 3E
Lance of Faith and Sacred Flame as your at-will abilities, Divine Glow as an encounter power, and Cascade of Light or Beacon of Hope as your daily. You blast enemies with divine power that helps your allies without ever drawing your weapon. Clerics also have healing word, which allows them to twice per encounter heal an ally for a quarter of their hit points + 1d6. It's thus -entirely- possible to build the sort of cleric you prefer.
You left out the DC 10 Heal check to let someone else use their Second Wind. It can easily be fluffed into a variant of Cure Light Wounds when you do it.
Linear Mode
