The Curmudgeons’ Initial 4e Experience Part I

It has been an interesting few weeks here that has led to little posting but some time to look at the new 4e rules which were leaked to the internet within the past week.  Word spread like wildfire and forums are crammed with opinions of both the initial adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell and the core rulebooks themselves. 

Those of you who have read some of my earlier posts know that most of my group were not very enthusiastic about the new edition based on the information that was released throughout the year by WotC.  We agreed to give the new rules a shot and my pre-order from my local FLGS will be filled on Friday.   This is the first of series of posts as the group works it way through the first module provided by WotC.

THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY!!!!

We started playing the Keep on Shadowfell two weeks ago on our regular Friday night session.  My group consists of Darren, Todd, Kevin and Denis.  Darren wasn’t available that week but an old gaming buddy of mine and Todd’s, Greg, stopped by for a visit so he played instead.  Greg was an interesting addition because he hadn’t played D&D since 2nd edition so he was exactly the type of person supposedly WotC wanted to bring back into the fold with their new streamlined ruleset.

The group picked through the pre-gen characters with Greg taking the Wizard, Todd taking the Fighter, Kevin taking the Cleric and Denis taking the Rogue.  We took a bit of time to get Greg up to speed on some of the game norms that were established in 3e that were carried over to 4e such as always roll high and skills/feats.  He caught onto that stuff quickly and we were off.

As DM, I found giving an initial set-up a bit difficult since the really good information at the start of the module would have given away major plot points.  So, I gave the standard points of light background setting and quickly moved the party to the road where they were travelling together to find their lost mentor at the behest of his worried wife.  The group set up on the road and waited for the inevitable ambush.  With the cat out of the bag, I launched into the combat with battlemat and markers in hand. 

The group didn’t care much for the kobold minions but thought their shifty power was pretty neat.  The fighter quickly got mired in minion battles while the wizard started blasting away.  The rogue flitted around the battlefield setting up his flourish attack and keeping the dragonshield kobolds from being as effective as they could have been.  The poor kobold slinger got blasted by the wizard and then gutted by the rogue after only shooting one of his special pots which missed.  The fighter got quite beat up by the minions and the dragonshields before the rogue was able to provide some relief.  Todd missed some of his powers on his sheet and complained that it wasn’t laid out the way he would like.  Todd is also notorious for rolling so poorly so often that others don’t let him touch their dice.

The party made their way through the encounter with only the fighter and the rogue taking any real significant damage.  With healing surges and some assistance from the cleric, the party was ready to move on.  Greg had to leave at this point so we thought we would stop there for the night.  Even though we had only gotten through one encounter, the evening had gone by quickly as we learned the rules and the roles of the characters.

After the session we talked about our thoughts and gut feelings about what we had just played.  Todd is still the most annoyed by the video game aspects of the system and felt that this just didn’t feel like D&D to him so he was treating it as a whole new system.  Denis moved more towards liking the system as he enjoyed the rogue’s fighting ability and having lots of things to do at first level.  Greg enjoyed the wizard but said that he would need more time to really get a sense of things.  He also commented on it feeling like a video game.   Kevin, who has been looking forward to the system the most, like the powers but didn’t like the healing system at all.

My initial reaction is that I have to wrap my head around how to DM this system.  I found it difficult to get the role-playing out front of the crunch.  It occurred to me that this system would be next to impossible to run by play-by-post or e-mail.  There seem to be so many mechanics that depend on interrupts or discussion of the mechanics that I think role-playing will fade further into the background. Perhaps I’ll explore that idea more as I get more familiar with the system to see if it still a problem.  As for the mechanics, as DM I liked the encounter set-up for the ambush with the tactics of each creature.  The minions were fun to run and watch the players reactions as they did stuff they didn’t expect.  That ‘newness’ is fun to unleash and I look forward to trying out other creatures and powers in the early days of 4e when everyone doesn’t have all this stuff memorized.

So, a final thought is that the group seems to be moving to more average opinion.  Kevin is not quite as enthusiastic while Todd and Denis moved a little more towards possibly liking it.