It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted a blog. I'm going to probably ramble a bit here.

Since I've never really blogged before I'm not sure if there are "rules" to what goes here. I'm fairly certain there are no real "rules" when it comes to blogging but here are some of my thoughts.

Is it bad form to go a long time between blog posts? I have no central AC (only in the bedroom where the computer is not) and for the past few weeks it's been too hot in the Northeast to sit in front of the computer at home to type something up. It takes me a while to write one of these things up (45 minutes to write this one). I'm always rethinking my wording. [There used be a another section here but it wasn't really related to the topic on hand so I removed it. See, always rethinking].

It's tough to determine (for me at least) if something should go into this blog or in the forums. The other night I was watching Robin Hood on BBC America and thinking how much I was enjoying this season (2). The first episode with the sheriff's sister had me thinking of giving up the show but it really picked up after that. There has been a lot of interesting storylines and some good character development. I was thinking that there really had been no forum posts about this season (I don't remember seeing any). I debated starting one but, unlike a Lost or Battlestar Galactica, I'm not sure how much discussion would happen. Robin Hood doesn't really get into a lot of issues, it's just an enjoyable show. Most shows I watch probably fall into that category.

I went to Barnes and Noble the other night, picked up about $30 of paperbacks to add to my growing out of control to be read pile (~50 novels and ~25 RPG books. I picked up a lot, if not all, of the RPG books on eBay). While browsing, I noticed B&N had a lot of 4E stuff and about the same amount of 3E. I wondered if the 4E stuff was or was not moving and how much the big discounts at Amazon and Buy.com kept those books on the shelves. I was also surprised by how much 3E goodness was still there to be had. Were these observations blog-worthy or post-worthy (I have no idea). Because I keep internally debating to post or not to post eventually nothing happens. It's interesting because at work I much more decisive, much more of a 'go for it and damn the consequences' type person (that's what database backups are for).

Another internal debate is to post or not to post my thoughts on the various RPG books as I finish reading them. I own and have read all of the 3E Forgotten Realms stuff, every Necromancer Games adventure (just the general outlines with these as Dave collects these and may want to use them for his campaign) and a lot of the WotC splatbooks and supplements. I'm currently reading through Eberron, Paizo's Pathfinder Modules, some Green Ronin books (including thieves world), some d20 modern and more splatbooks. Just finished Dungeonscape and am about halfway though the Players Guide to Eberron.

Of course, there's the natural shyness thing to overcome (even when posting semi-anonymously on message boards). I've mentioned previously how I send an email 'blog' to all my former coworkers I want to keep in touch with and have found it somewhat therapeutic to put word to (electronic) paper. I've been complemented on my writing style because I write how I talk. I just need to get over the hump here and post.

Enough rambling for now.


As for the three of you following my group's experiences with 4E, not to worry I have most of sessions 3 and 4 written, I just need to finish writing up session 2 (I'm working on it now, I swear).

Elodan

A warning. There may be potential spoilers for Keep on the Shadowfell with these summaries.

A summary of our first session exploring the Keep on the Shadowfell. In attendance:

• me - DM
• Kevin - eladrin wizard
• Dave - elf ranger
• Ed - human cleric
• Bob - dragonborn paladin

The list above includes who I would consider the core players of our group.

As an aside we all used to live in either the Boston or South Shore areas of MA. Due to job and family reasons some moved out to the Metro West area (not too far from Worcester). We usually rotate between my house (South Shore) and my brother's (Metro West). It's a 45 - 60 minute drive between the two so we carpool. This gives Dave and I a fair amount of time to discuss the state of D&D and the group's various campaigns in addition to talking about sports, TV, etc.

We had decided to do a character creation session and then start the adventure. On the way to Kevin's I tell Dave, "Bob's going to show with a dragonborn, probably a fighter or paladin with the enlarge breath feat. He saw dragon breath and thought it was the most powerful racial ability out there." Bob shows up with 3 characters and the one he wants to play is a dragonborn paladin. Dave turns to me and says, "Tom, I owe you a Coke." As we eat the rest of the guys make the characters listed above.

While making the characters Kevin mentioned that he's not a fan of 3E. He had read some of the 4E stuff and felt it would be more enjoyable. 3E had too many rules. 4E was more like 1st edition where the class roles were more defined and things weren't so codified. I was totally caught off guard. I had no idea he felt this way. He had changed his D&D campaign to HackMaster a while back, but I figured it was more for "old school" feel than a dissatisfaction with the rules.

I go with the 'Investigate the Rumors of a Death Cult' hook. Ed and the guys roleplay the cleric recruiting the others to help with the investigation. 4E allows roleplaying, check. A little while later the characters are on the road near Winterhaven.

I decided to go with a house rule where Allies provide cover as I think it's a bit too unbelievable otherwise (it'll be a number of sessions before I realize these somewhat hoses the ranged attacks of the PCs but more importantly, those of my bad guys).

Here comes the first battle. The players are ambushed by a couple of kobolds. Ed goes first and delays. Bob's paladin runs up and lets loose his mighty breath weapon on the 3 kobolds (no minions) in from of him. He does 4 points of damage and looks pretty sad (he does hit a good number of the bad guys). All of a sudden Ed mentions that he didn't know he could move and attack, could he do something now. I have no idea why he didn't think he could move and attack. We went over the action types (and a couple more of the basics) during character creation. Plus, it was pretty much the same as 3E. By the third or fourth round the guys had pretty much got a hang of the basics and they kill my wyrmpriest before I remember to use most of its more interesting abilities. The guys end up spending a healing surge or two plus an action point before finally defeating the kobolds.

The characters were never really in danger during this encounter but I thought it did a good job getting the players used to the new system.

The guys take a short rest and heal up.

In Winterhaven, the party explores the town, interacts with the citizens and eventually accept a commission from the town mayor to stop the kobold menace that's been attacking caravans.

Outside the village, the party was subject to another kobold ambush. This battle was over quickly. The guys had figured out their powers and how to use them to best help the party as a whole. Bob took the most time to figure out what he was going to do each round, but everyone else had there action ready when it was their turn. Overall, combat doesn't seem any faster than 3E. At low levels it seems longer, but (aside from Bob) I didn't have to wait minutes on end for someone do decide what they were going to do. It seems that overall combat may take longer but the individual rounds go by quickly. It seems like high level combat will take about the same amount of time in 4E as low levels and not exponentially longer like 3E. We'll see when we get there.

At this point, I'm a little worried that it'll be really difficult to hurt the PCs (the next session will change that). Neither combat provided a real challenge to the party. We prefer a game where characters can die.

After this battle it was quitting time. Going around the table the guys decided that they want to continue playing KotS. Everyone said they had a lot of fun and, so far, liked it better than 3E (except Dave). Ed was more involved in the game for the first time in a long time. Kevin said he enjoyed 4E more than 3E. Bob wanted to continue but wanted to play a fighter instead of a paladin. Dave preferred 3E and called 4E a board game but was willing to play again. At this point, I was willing to play/run whatever the majority wanted. I enjoyed myself a lot running 4E. Monster design was one of the things I liked during the previews and they really shine in play.

On the way home, Dave and I discussed what we saw as the new paradigm with 4E. In 3E you maximized your character's abilities, but in 4E you maximized the party's abilities. We figured that was why Bob was taking so long to decide what to do. Dave said he didn't hate 4E but felt it was on the same level as board game night. He also stated he was not going to buy any more of the 4E books than the core three. Dave was a huge collector of 3E and prior editions. If we wanted to look at a book (WotC or 3pp) he usually had it.

I think it helped that we didn't worry about what was in previous editions and not in 4E and vice versa. We just decided to play and let the game either win us over on its own merits or not.

Elodan

At GenCon 2007 it is announced that Dungeons and Dragons 4E will be released in the first half of 2008.

For the most part, my group meets this news with ambivalence.

I'm excited and hesitant at the same time. I had spent the past year or three putting together the pieces of various rule sets to get to my ultimate version of the D&D game (an Arcana Evolved/D&D hybrid). There was a lot of good 3E stuff out there and I was using it, why should I upgrade? On the other hand, I liked some of the newer things introduced at the tail end of 3E like the alternate class abilities in the PHB II and magic item levels in the MIC and these were sure to be in 4E. Also, it was a pain to convert existing adventures to my hybrid. I don't have the time to make my own adventures which is why I buy them. It was taking a lot of time to convert so it was getting to the point of little return.

Dave was pretty much anti-4E from the start. He loved the modularity of 3E. He could pull rules from source X and source Y to make his ultimate version of D&D.

The marketing didn't help. As far as we were concerned it came across as "all of your D&D before us sucked and you're not having fun." Then there was the overuse of "cool" with nothing really substantial to give us a reason to upgrade.


March 2008 - Got to play two 4E scenarios at ConnCon.

Bob, Dave and I attended ConnCon (in CT, duh) and got to play Scalegloom Hall and Escape from Sembia there. Dave was going to give it a try to he could hate it based on playing it (a joke).

Unfortunately, our DM for Scalegloom Hall was unfamiliar with the rules and reverted back to 3E for things he didn't know. I played the dwarf fighter, Dave the halfling paladin and Bob the half elf cleric. I remember being pretty frustrated with the game because my powers relied on taking down multiple enemies but there was never more than one kobold around by the time I got to them. Bob felt the cleric got nerfed. I tried to explain that casting cause fear once an encounter was much more powerful than once a day, but he focused on the fact that it only lasted one round. No change in Dave's attitude. He did complain that he had like 18 powers at 1st level.

Luckily, our DM for Escape from Sembia had a much better understanding of the rules (we later found out he was a playtester). I took the eladrin ranger, Dave took the half elf cleric and Bob had the dwarf fighter. This session was a lot more enjoyable. Unfortunately, the DM tried to sell us on Skill Challenges by using the "all your D&D before us sucked" marketing. It annoyed me (as skill challenges didn't seem like all that great an innovation. It was something easily done in 3E) and pissed off Dave. There was a point were I was surrounded by a bunch of skeletons and *BAMFed* myself outta there. I have to admit, that was cool.

In the end, I enjoyed 4E more than I thought, Bob seemed anti-4E and Dave remained anti-4E. Although he did like a few 4E ideas and decided he was going to pick up the books.


April 2008 - Preview Articles

In April, WotC started releasing a lot of preview articles. I would read the commentary on ENWorld, check out the article itself on WotC's website, and then post a link to the article with a brief summary as well as my thoughts on the preview to our Yahoo group. Generally, for every change I liked (such as the death and dying rules) there was one I didn't like (like epic destinies). I pretty much got no reaction to these. I figured no one was really paying attention but I would later find out I was wrong.


Late May / Early June 2008

At this point, I was fully expecting us to continue playing 3E, HackMaster and d20 future.

I was getting the 4E books as a gift for my birthday from my wife. Even if my group wasn't going to play 4E, I was going to steal ideas from it. My brother decided to use a gift certificate he got to buy the books as well. We knew Dave was buying them as well.

Since three of us were getting the book anyway, I began pushing for our group at least play one session of 4E so we can judge the game on its play. Surprisingly, everyone agreed.

I was planning on using Necomancer Games's Winter's Tomb freebie as our introduction. To be honest, Clark's enthusiasm for 4E and his planned 4E products were the only things that had me paying attention to 4E for a long time. Unfortunately, the GSL had pushed out that release but I was willing to wait.

In the meantime, Bob had picked up the PHB and Keep on the Shadowfell. Since all of our current running campaigns were at a good stopping point, we decided to give 4E a try. We had heard that the module wasn't all that great but it was supposed to be designed to make us want to convert to 4E. We decided to use it to get a feel for the new rules. We figured we could roleplay with any version.

Elodan

Before we get to our first experiences with 4E, I'm going to try and give a brief history of my group. We're all currently local to the greater Boston (MA) area.

The current group (with their general Robin's player type) consists of

• Tom (me) - the butt kicker, rotating DM
• Kevin (my brother) - hard to classify as he runs the gamut, rotating DM
• Lance - the tactician
• Ed - the causal gamer
• Bob - the power gamer
• Dave - the specialist (rogues), rotating DM
• Murph - the causal gamer

The Beginning
Around 1980 (maybe earlier, maybe later - I did say around) when I was in either 5th or 6th grade, my brother Kevin (11 months younger, Irish twins) went to a school in Cambridge that had a mentor/tutor-like thing with their students and some students at Harvard. He introduced Kevin to D&D who then introduced me to it. Soon we were playing OD&D with Kevin's friend Lance. Not long after we moved to 1E AD&D. A few others joined us on occasion. At this time, Kevin was our only DM. His campaign was in his own home-brewed world. Kevin's a good DM. I'd say his one weakness is that he'll throw a challenge at us and refuse to acknowledge we're not getting it.


Hiatus
We stopped playing while I was in college. No real reason for us to stop as we were all still local. We just did.


Getting the Band Back Together
About a year after I graduated Kevin mentioned playing D&D again. Some time before a new version (2E) had been released. Kevin's roommate Ed and his friend Bob and wanted to give it a try. Lance and I were back in. While Kevin was in basic training for the naval reserve, Bob became DM. Bob does a good job of running things but eventually his campaigns tend to become monty hauls.

A few years later, at a Con in NH, Dave ran us though the Tomb of Horrors. Our play styles meshed well. We found out he lived close to the rest of us and invited him to join the group. We're lucky because Dave is another good DM. I'd say his weakness is that once in while he needs prodding with his pacing (damn dwarf riding halflings). Now we had two campaigns to rotate between. Dave's is grim 'n gritty based in pre-wars Greyhawk and Kevin's more standard based in his world.

During his time in the reserves, Kevin met Murph who lived in the same area as the rest of us and joined our campaigns.

At this time I gave running a game a try. I went with high fantasy based in the Forgotten Realms. I'd say my biggest weaknesses are running NPCs and PC killing. I became known as the spiteful DM. If the players beat my bad guys or such, I'd throw a spite monster out there (my favorite was the mimic. the guys started saying my favorite monster was the spiteful mimic). For some reason, they still let me run a campaign.

Our most memorably adventures and characters were born in this era.


The Arrival of d20
Eventually, news of 3E came out. We were all pretty excited, we liked what we were hearing in the previews. We actually made out first ever trip to GenCon.

We switched all of our campaigns to 3E and Kevin added a d20 Modern (not too distant future) one to our rotation. After a few years, Kevin stopped his D&D campaign and began running more one-offs using HackMaster (a fun and well done off shoot of AD&D). A hint about his feelings about 3E none of us picked up on. He kept his d20 future one going. I also started a mixed Arcana Evolved/D&D high fantasy campaign based in the Realms (hold the spite).

Good gaming all around and four different campaigns to enjoy.

Elodan

As you can see by my post count, I don't usually post a lot to these forums (or any online forums really). Before some board troubles, I had a good (IMO) thread as to the reasons I posted so infrequently.

I'm going to sort of rehash some of them here so you know where I'm coming from. Generally, I'm a very shy person. Even posting anonymously, it's very hard to break out of your shell. Although once I'm comfortable with you, watch out. By the time I built up the courage to post, someone else had chimed in with my thoughts on the issue but worded so much better. If something pissed me off, I would refrain from posting until I could cool down and by then, see previous reason. Then there were the times you would start or participate in a thread and be ignored, so the next time you'd have "why bother" in the back of your head. Some board have cliques which make it daunting for outsiders. Luckily, ENWorld is one of the most welcoming boards out there (which is why I feel comfortable attempting this blog).

This is my first online blog. For a few years now, I've sent an email to my former co-workers (those I want to keep in touch with) with what I would consider a blog detailing my (and the wife's) latest doings and happenings. I do find writing things out to be therapeutic-like and a good way to keep people informed. Here, I plan on blogging about my group's experiences converting/playing 4E D&D, general gaming thoughts (role playing and board) as well as feelings about sci-fi/fantasy books, movies and tv.

Hopefully, this blog won't be too rambling and will be an interesting read. Speaking of which, how do you know if anyone is paying attention to this thing?

We're 3 sessions into a 4E tryout. I'll post thoughts on the first one soon. Until next time.

Elodan