Are you hungry for a review? Check Martin Ralya’s over at Gnome Stew, mine will come later (in one form or another).
I got to play a few hours of D&D 4e last night with the D&D Game Day adventure. We were 7 (1 DM, 6 players). Here are a few tidbits:
The Good
- From a fluff perspective, it feels like D&D to us. Fighting iconic monsters, getting hit by traps and solving riddles… yup same feeling.
- Mechanically, it feels like late D&D 3.5 with all characters playing from the Tome of Battle (which I loved).
- Players feel competent in regards to skills, like we did playing 1st level Iron Heroes.
- Critical hits are awesomely easy and fun.
- You understand what ‘striker’ means when a 1st level Rogue crits for 38 points of damage. So Cool.
- Combos!!!!!!!!! Sleep + Rogue Coup de Grace
- Simple Monster stats! I never opened the Monster Manual
- Monster powers are varied and gives each monster a specific flavor (my fear of monsters being stick figures with fluff rubber suits was unfounded) .
- The tactical fog of war caused by monsters readying actions when players don’t know what powers they have makes for great virtual control of the battlemap
- The Players Handbook organization is perfect for playing and reminds me of the Rules Compendium. We wasted very little time finding rules even though this was a new game! (Having 7 copies around the table helped).
- Traps are fiendish and stay a threat over a period of time.
- A trap in combat is evil!
- Clerics are cool to play again… being both helpful in combat and as a healer.
- Warlords are Dragon Shaman made right. A perfect mix of combat effectiveness and party interaction.
- Wizards are area effect machines. Waves of Thunder (I forget the proper term, my stuff is still in the car) is a great crowd control spell.
- Fighters and Paladins are true tanks that can dish out and absorb damage.
- Second wind, Healing Words, Healing Strike… ALL GOOD!
- Combat goes around faster as players adapt to the new rules and power.
- Bull rushing is easy!
- Crossing obstacles are now explained in the adventure itself. Ex: DC 15 atheltics and 4 squares of movement to climb a 10′ pedestal.
The Bad:
- Since fights last longer number of rounds, unlucky players feel that they miss all the time and it gets a bit frustrating. I had a few ‘what’s the use’ and ‘my bonus sucks’ events… usually right before a critical hit or a perfect sneak attack.
- Monsters have a gazzillion HP, that’s why fights take so many rounds. It’s not bad but two 86 hp monster in a level 1 fight is a concept that is hard to come with.
- Monsters dish out a LOT of damage and PCs can be dropped to bloodied in the first round in fights w/o minions.
- Players that open multiple doors in low level dynamic dungeons are asking for suicide… our 2 tanks explored a corridor while the rogue was opening a door… players had to do Boss fight and intermediate fight at the same time!!!
- Corollary to the last point, since all encounters are designed to be a challenge for a party, multiple encounters at the same time can be lethal.
- I killed a PC when a construct had an attack that sent a PC prone and a follow up one when he went down. I could not bring myself to do the gamist thing and skip the second attack on the already KO PC… and I killed him because he went over the ‘minus bloodied’ point.
- It remains unclear how powers affect non creatures. Can the Wave of Thunder area attack tip a sacrophagus where a DC15 Str check could? The power says ‘target creature’…. Can you blast a door with it?
- Players always assume that the second wind power is a minor action.
Conclusion
The game is a definitive winner. It remains to be seen if we will grow weary of fighting mechanics… I guess that if we do, this will foster more RPing .
That’s it for now. I’ll post my actual play later. Now people are getting up and I just realized that I slept only 5 hours (but then again, Graham has been playing for over 14 hours, see here)
About the monsters HP you put it in the bad but as I was coming back from the game with Eric, we where discussing it. I think that it was more of surprise about the monster HP.
The monster are really tough now and even though you had warned us it did not register until we saw its game impact.
Personally its one of the things I liked. Because of this, the combat where not over in 3 rounds. This in returns makes your misses less critical (since you’re not missing the fight) and allowed movement to matter a lot more.
Also warlord + rogue = best buddies!! Even though Mat had some crappy roll taht evening I could always set him up in some really potential killer strikes…
Without us knowing it, you had the two “brilliant tactician” oriented player playing class made for them allowing them to make for board positioning.
Although my warlord was not ditching that much damage I could always set up the other melee player to do something useful and i Had one hell of a fun time doing it.
Now if we only had a reset button for the knowledge of 3.X and avoid confusion between the old versus new opportunity attack… 😉
@Yan: Yeah.. Seen in that light High Monster HP is actually a ‘good’ thing.
I had forgotten about the increased movement of monsters and players. It is definitively a good thing and such a relief from the 3.x’s line fighting.
@Yan: I’m curious. I’ve been looking over the rules and I’m not sure what the difference between 3.x and 4e opportunity attacks would be. Is it just quantity?
I’m glad to hear that it was fun, and none of the complaints seem too major.
WWDDGD today. I’ll be running of the tables. Wish me luck.
@Felonius: Opportunity Attacks occur in very specific case:
You move (except shift) when adjacent to an enemy
You use a Ranged or Area Power when adjacent to an enemy.
And you can make one per turn (where a turn is any creature playing its round).
I’m leaving for WWDDGD RFN (RIght Freaking Now)
Nice summary — thank you for posting this. I haven’t played 4e yet, but everything you talked about here jibes with what I gleaned from reading the books, and it sounds like you had a great time.
And thanks for the link! I had a good time writing my review, although I’m pretty tired this morning.
It is quite obvious that you played “Into the Shadowhaunt”. The 86 HP Animated Statues surprised me too.
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Also warlord + rogue = best buddies!! Even though Mat had some crappy roll taht evening I could always set him up in some really potential killer strikes…
Yeah, if my wife and I play any 4e, I’m going to see if she’s interested in playing a brother & sister team of rogue and warlord eladrin. 5 square teleport + warlord bonuses to movement and healing combined with the rogue’s ability to dish out the hurt looks like murder on the NPCs’ backfield.
Our DM was,..um,..not so prepared,..and,…dare I say, not so good. He ignored our 2 attempts to talk to the shade (I think that’s what he called it) so we haad to fight the boss, the statues, and the shade. Can you guess the result? TPK.
I hope they make this adventure available. I really want it to take my girlfriend and some friends through. Tomorrow, I run a game…still don’t know what I am going to do about minis.
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@Martin: Thanks for link love back in your comments in your review post. I’ll say it again and again… Reading it and playing it are 2 different things, so I’m sure you’ll love it.
@Maikl: Was I that obvious? I wanted to practice it so I was more confortable today… I’m glad I did.
The Hobgoblin Coffin traps represents everything I like about that game… especially when players used it against the Hobbos.
@Brian: I was reading on your blog and I really don’t see why people are freaking out about a once an encounter teleport limited to a range of 5 squares and line of sight. (the Warlock does it often too)…
But it is a cool and interesting power that has been useful/cool but not broken every time I have seen it in action.
Expect Dimensional Anchor effects to crop up in adventures badly designed adventures soon… 🙂
@jeffx: That sucks… although the shade never was supposed to ‘talk’ to PCs… But if you missed the riddle (and the GM should have helped there) the group is basically screwed…
To get the adventure, go to your FLGS and ask for a copy… my store got 12 kits and we were 6 groups only… So check yours and be real nice with the manager… Tell him you’ll use it to convince a group to buy PHBs! 🙂
Riddle? What riddle? Now I’m really mad! There was no riddle given to us. I’m guessing that is the point where we did a little rearranging based on our history and religion roles. Now I have to get my hands on the adventure.
They used all the kits. They ran 3 waves of games.
jeffxs last blog post..The Nerd is Strong in This One
I went to our local Game Day… and guess what, that damned Construct is evil! Tons of HP, and the Prone, Kick when down, and opportunity attack when standing did me in when I was at full health! (I was playing the pre-made cleric). It sucked (especially since this was my first time playing D&D), but I understand that some monsters are just that powerful. Had a lot more fun next round against the Ice Dragon, which we Intimidated into giving up and won the encounter! So, while I didn’t appreciate the ass-kicking, it was still alot of fun.
Being able to teleport 25′ along line-of-sight every five minutes is a huge deal. It means bridge and cage and ledge puzzles are right out. You can break into any castle with ease by teleporting to the top of the wall, and any house that has a window. The implications for the world are huge.
I expect those implications to be ignored.
I also expect WotC to release at least one module with a puzzle or the like which is rendered less than a speed bump by having an eladrin in the party. 😉
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@ Jeffx: Ugh! Bad DM indeed. I hope the adventure gets released for you.
@Daniel: Welcome on the Blog. I refrained from following up attacks on KOed characters to give players a chance to experiment with the various healing/dying rules.
Also, for the ‘keep down’ attack, I applied the DMG’s suggestion to never spring “Gotcha!” attacks without warning PCs so I told them that the statues seemed ready to spring something unpleasant if the PC got up… that forced players to play it safe and crawl away or play dead…
I still managed to kill 4 out of 5 PCs, but that’s the next post.
@Brian: I really am more of the type to embrace the challenge of the crunch and the fluff of Eladrin TP. This basically means that the Fey can’t be imprisoned for long except in dimensional anchor prisons and plays in my perception of Fey petty thieves.
As for adventure design, you may be right, but I would actually make puzzles where teleportation is needed/helps a lot instead of making some that get completely destroyed by it…
Since a lot of people on the net have their panties in a bunch about this I’m sure it will be at the forefront of concerns when we write future adventures…
I ran a table at the WWDDGD. For the most part, it went really well. Strangely enough, it was the 4e Fan-Boy who was the biggest problem at the table. He spent a lot of time trying to tell other people what they were supposed to be doing (without actually paying attention to what they were doing. For example: The cleric was about to try “turn undead”, and the whole time FanBoy is yelling at him to “Turn Undead, already”), and then he would forget about his abilities until three turns later.
Even though I read through the adventure before-hand, I still found myself missing a lot of the creature’s abilities. For example, I missed the “Kick him when he’s down” ability of the Statues until a few opportunities had passed. The players had a pretty decent amount of success, but still each fight at least bloodied (though the human fighter was a major thorn and hardly ever got hit).
Probably my biggest annoyance was presence of FanBoy. Not just because he was there, but because I think he annoyed everyone else, and wasn’t a very effective 4e spokesperson. I had one player who started out relatively open-minded, but still anti-4e. At the end, he was “on the fence”. I really think 4e could have nabbed him if we’d removed some of the less desirable influences that day.
All told, everyone I’ve spoken to from our run of it had a good time. How many converts there’ll be, I couldn’t say.
On a side note: Are there disarm rules, and I’m missing them? Or did they migrate to a power? I didn’t notice until later in the session when the wizard was going to try to use Mage Hand to grab the book from the end guy (I told him that it wouldn’t work because Mage Hand wasn’t really strong enough, and didn’t have the precision, to actually pull something out of someone’s hands (as much as I hate telling players “no”, it seemed a reasonable conclusion)).
There was some general bitching and moaning from veterans regarding how “unbalanced” things were but in general I had a great time. I have a lot of questions on matters that were confusing to me but I’ll get to that later. I had several instances where I kept hitting myself (dwarven fighters are bad luck for me) but followed it up by sucessfully stabilizing my 3 down PC friends and critting the pants off the enemies.
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Brian
“It means bridge and cage and ledge puzzles are right out. You can break into any castle with ease by teleporting to the top of the wall”
Um, I’m not sure that follows.
It means that any bridge, cage, or ledge puzzle that doesn’t take into account a 25 foot line of sight teleportation power is right out, and that any wall that isn’t 26 feet from the base to the crenallations isn’t going to hold well against them, but in a fantasy setting where castle designs already needed to account for flying and incorporeal troops, I don’t see 26′ walls being an egregious issue.
Chatty-
eh, it wouldn’t be too hard to design an anti-eladrin jail cell. an old west cell with a tiny window and bars on the door wouldn’t work, but an underground cell with a slot on the door that locks from the outside with at least 30 feet of corridor between it and the door as well as a posted guard or two would do just fine.
Depending on how much you dislike your prisoner, there’s always a hot iron brand to the eyes. If they are blind, they won’t be able to use line of sight powers. (Bind their hands and cover their eyes for the same effect but a little less reliable. Keep them in total darkness.)
This particular movement power doesn’t make encounter and trap design any harder than it was for 3-7th level characters previously (depending on the specific trap that covers levitation through dimension door)
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PS – I ran the thing through 2x with different people and DMs and both times we somehow ended up with the boss man and cronies and the mobs in the other room all at the same time. No suicide but boy was it dicey.
Heathers last blog post..Enter Sandman
@Felonious: Ack, you got what I feared to have! A loudmouthed jerk! I’m still glad it went reasonably well. I too failed to convert three crusty 3.5 guys… even though you could see the thrill in their face. Thier argument was that they spent too much money on 3.5 to switch now.
There are no disarm rules because monsters more often than not don’t have secondary attacks.
I’d play disarm as a Str/Dex vs the best of Reflex or Fortitude attack if the disarm was made with weapons or by grabbing.
Since Mage Hand can only handle 20 lbs… that basically makes it as strong as a 6-7 year old so I’d say that it can’t rip something from someone’s hands unless that someone is surprised/distracted.
@Michael: Agreed on all accounts.
@Heather: How did you hit yourself? D&D 4e has no fumble or shoot your friends rules whatsoever… apart from getting caught in an area effect. A DM over at my store used Fumbles and but I disagree about those… monsters are challenging enough not to add fumbling!
The second DM was playing that natural 1s equal you being basically out of the action for a round and also potentially hitting yourself. I rolled quite a few of those suckers but thankfully only actually nailed myself once.
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Prison guards with darkvision and a “no light sources allowed” rule should become pretty popular. Kobolds, demons, undead, or golems can act as prison guards in complete darkness. For those unlucky fey who happen to be imprisoned and able to create light at will, blinding or repetitive beatings every time they cast Light are always options.
See how people can create their own fluff at the drop of a hat. That’s why I personally prefer light/vague fluff in a game… so that players get to feel free to fit the game to their universe…
I already imagine a city captain of the guard thumbing his dog eared copy of ‘Dealing with Fey Criminals’ …
..Cuz the printing press will exist in my version of D&D 🙂 I’ll even have a Rituals Best Sellers list up in the weekly newspaper!