I only have a few observations about this session.
First, we finally talked our roommate, Vonnie, into playing D&D with us again, after she fell into the yawning chasm of MMORPGs a couple of years ago. She plays endless hours of City of Heroes, City of Villains, Age of Conan, and now World of Warcraft.
While helping her download the Character Building and start building, she volunteered, "Oh, this is just like WoW." Completely unprompted, uncoached, un-anythinged. "Just like WoW." Well okay.
She ended up building a swordmage and enjoying herself. (Though, due to a mix-up in our starting and ending time, she had to quit a little early for a "WoW raid," whatever that means.)
The second observation is that my hatred of 1-1-1 movement, if anything, is glowing hotter. Twice during the session I moved to place myself closest to an enemy. Looking at the map, ignoring the grid and just making spatial judgment, there's absolutely no doubt that I'm in the position I want.
But then you count the squares, and I'm not. ARGH!
Any time savings from not having to count diagonals differently is absolutely wasted in having to count from final intended position to enemy positions. Forget about judging distances on the map. In situations in which it matters, you
must count: from X1 to X2; from X2 to Y; from X2 to Z; oops, X2 is closer to Z, so let's start over; from X1 to X3, from X3 to Y; from X3 to Z, oh, okay, there we go.
Stupid, stupid,
stupid rules change. It would have been far better to go to hexes.
Anyway, slightly less fun this time (call it 6 out of 10), but I don't really think it was
4E's fault that the fun level diminished. (Except for the 1-1-1 thing, which frustrates most of us.) We had a player sitting in for an absent player, and though a nice guy, he decided to play the gnome bard like a hyperactive weasel from an old cartoon. He's also a little, ah, overly assertive when it comes to telling other people what to do, out of character.
The DM, though he had us cracking up with his (excellent) impression of an emo goth ranger girl (apparently a minor villain), also (of course) broke through the fourth wall by continuing with it throughout the encounter.
We leveled up to 2nd. I took Yield Ground and Distant Advantage for my ranger.
It's gonna be a month until the third session.
And yet another word from our sponsors
