My group ran through the rest of the DMG's trial scenario a week ago. I gave them some time to think, and have collected their thoughts.

In general, the session ran smoothly. The second and third encounter of the scenario went well, with pleasing amounts of dynamic action - climbing walls, dodging, unforeseen enemies, and all. The final encounter, however, turned into a grinding slugfest.

It seemed the party and the BBEG settled into what, for each, seemed to be the optimal configuration. And everyone - PC and monster alike, rolled miserably. Several encounter and daily powers outright failed and were wasted. The BBEG's recharging power didn't, and when it did, it rolled poorly too. It turned into a grind - who could deal out more damage with basic attacks soonest. The party won by having their string of bad luck break before the BBEG's, not by any strategy or tactical failure on anyone's part.

Personally, I felt this showed a bit that the system has not really met all the claimed goals. While supposedly discouraging the "15-minute workday", this encounter was precisely that. The party had to go in fully charged to have a chance of winning, and burned through all their powers in the process. Not much different than what was supposedly a sub-optimal play experience in 3e that this edition was supposed to fix. YMMV, of course.

In general, the basic problem was that the introductory scenario was very combat-intensive, not leaving a whole lot of leeway for some of the more social or puzzle-solving activities my players like. A group that normally has only one fights per session didn't find it terribly satisfying, except as an adventure board game.

So, now the question - do I buy or try to design a more rounded adventure, or do we call it a wash and play another game. We shall see what the players decide. So far, it is a bit of a split decision, but not everyone's answered their e-mails yet.

Umbran

"Edition Wars" are not completely gone from EN World, but they have lessened somewhat. There are some things that I wish posters on the message boards would have learned earlier.

1)No edition of D&D (or any game), past or present, is a damsel in distress that it must be defended or rescued from the big bad Hate Dragons. Many the time it was when folks explained their aggressive behavior by claiming that if they personally did not defend its honor, it would cause some form of catastrophe in the gaming universe. Not a single one of the folks who made such claims ever seemed to grasp the idea that you aren't doing any good in saving the damsel, if your fight with the dragon lays waste to the kingdom - that the aggressive, rude, and general negative feelings spread around the messageboards did more harm to gaming than any good that may have been accomplished by the particular defense. You aren't helping anything if in proving that your particular game is good, you also prove that EN World is full of obnoxious jerks.

2)No, it is not, "TEH TROOF!" And even if it is, that doesn't justify you being a jerk. While occasionally someone in an Edition War would state something about the rules that was factually inaccurate, by and large folks claimed a whole lot more "truth" about gaming than has ever actually been known. The only large-scale survey data we in the general public have about D&D, or gaming in general, predates Third Edition D&D. The amount of over generalization from anecdotal evidence or personal experience, and simple pulling things out of the aether to support one side or another was amazing and disappointing.

3)That the other person likes other facets of gaming is okay. That the other person likes other things about the game does not make their opinion "stupid" anymore than preferring snickerdoodles over chocolate chip cookies reflect on someone's native intelligence. You would think that gamers, who all share the general like for RPGs (which are weird, different, and otherwise non-mainstream) would get the idea that it is okay to have your own individual preference, that going against the crowd was acceptable. Apparently, many folks just couldn't make that leap, and felt the need to attack those who were not of the One True Tribe.

4)You cannot claim the other guy is thin-skinned while at the same time getting riled up by small stuff yourself. And we are talking about a hobby game - so it is all small stuff. Hypocrisy is unbecoming. 'Nuff said.

I find it unfortunately that our collective jerkitude over the past months has driven away a whole bunch of people who had good minds, and good ideas. I hope that at least some of them will come back as things continue to cool down.

Umbran

Last weekend, my group took their first stab at 4e.

I'm the only one who has read the rulebooks, so we started by sitting down (with an apple-butter spice cake roll my wife had made for snacking - yum!) and going over some of the general design and mechanics of 4e, with a bit of a focus on where it differed from 3e. They were more open-minded about it than I expected, and asked lots of questions, which was a good thing, as I was working witout a set of notes, and the Q&A helped make sure I covered most of the territory.

I had planned out pregenerated characters, for a fairly iconic party. To make things easy for players to recognize and digest, I was using a highly iconic party (human fighter, dwarf fighter, eladrin wizard, human cleric, halfling rogue) to cover all the basic roles. To make it easy on myself, I was using the standard stat array, and choosing builds out of the PHB for skills, feats, and powers. I'd intended to have everything done out in advance, with powers typed out in full text on separate sheets for ease of reference, but driving home from a friend's bat mitzvah in a tropical storm the meant we got home at 2:30 AM the night before the game - I lost several hours of prep time, and didn't get the job done in full.

This turned out to be useful, though. Instead of handing out a fully-prepared sheet to each person, I handed out partially done sheets. Since I was the only person who had been through the PHB, and given the horrible indexing I've noted before, I figured the fastest thing would be for me to go over each power quickly, and let the players take notes. The upshot of this being that the players all got a bit of review of what each other could do. They got greater perspective than they might have with the sheets I'd originally planned, and got to ask several questions they'd not have thought of otherwise.

We then took these characters into the Kobold Hall in the back of the DMG. Prepping to run this was fairly simple - I found a photocopier that did 11"x17" copies - large enough to do facing pages in the rulebook. I did manage to do maps out on very large graph paper, so I could quickly swap in battle maps for each of the rooms. The encounters are fairly well-presented, the statblocks easy to read. Overall, prepping to run the module itself was a snap.

With the extra character generation time, we only managed to do the first couple of encounters in the adventure. However, since the adventure is designed to show off the basics of fights, and encounters seem to take more rounds than they would have for an equivalent 3e fight, they still got to play around a lot with the mechanics.

Overall, their impressions were a bit better than I expected. It was faster to pick up than they expected. The mechanics didn't really draw the players into the game by themselves, but they didn't seem to get in the way, either. One player (who plays a lot of the MMORPG "City Of Heroes") noted that he doesn't really like change, but the structure felt similar enough to what he sees his online game that he is made significantly more comfortable. I think that for me this comment rather puts to bed the idea that 4e is really unlike MMORPGs.

In the end, they felt that full judgment would call for a bit more play - they want to finish the Kobold Hall next weekend, and then follow on by making some characters of their own, and trying them through a full module, where they could stretch out away from just fights, and into some more role-play. I seem to have a bunch of pragmatic, team players - they don't expect to be thrilled by the system itself, but if it fails to stink, and makes my life as a DM significantly easier, they might find it a win by way of it freeing me up to do better plotting and such.

I'll have to spend some time reading up on the currently available modules (there aren't many, so that won't take long). My current understanding is that they are also pretty combat-heavy, so I may have to perform some alterations to inject some more variety into the encounters.

Umbran

Having now read through the functional parts of the 4e PHB and DMG, my thoughts continue in much the same vein...

My #1 gripe about the books at this point is the indexing. I used to think that original WoD books from White Wolf had poor indexing, but these have set the bar at a new low. Once play has begun, the book's primary value is as a reference work, and that demands logical organization displayed in the table of contents, and a solid index.

None of these volumes is well arranged. After reading the other two books, I flipped through the MM, looking for an old standard - the pseudodragon. It does not appear in the table of contents. There is no full alphabetical listing of all monsters. In order to find the pseudodragon, I have to wade through an index sorted first by monster level, then by role. Mind you, if I know the monster well enough to know it's level and role, I probably already know that it has been stuck away in the Drake section, and wouldn't have needed the index at all.

Similarly, I was looking at the Mind Flayer entry in the MM. A successful use of one of it's powers means the target is "Dominated". I've only read the rulebooks through once, so I don't recall everything, and I want to look up what "dominated" means in detail. It is not explained in the monster listing. It is not in the MM index. The term "dominated" does not appear in the index or table of contents of any of the core books. In order to find "dominated" you must yourself recall that it is a combat condition - and combat conditions, however important they may be, are not noted in the PHB's table of contents. They are instead only listed in the context-free index.

I originally felt that the core rulebooks were a bit opaque, and while the poor indexing didn't help matters, it is hardly the only issue on that score. I have managed to get a grasp on character abilities, but it took a goodly amount of work, reading, and re-reading to do so.

The sheer number of powers is part of the problem, along with their basic similarity in both function and presentation. So many of them are of the form "do damage and have some secondary effect" that they have no mnemonic presence whatsoever. The devil is in the details, here, and there are simply too many fiddly details to remember well on one or two readings.

My thought now is that the system is a bit too regimented. Uniformity makes it easier to balance, I'm sure, but aside from the mnemonic problem, there's the simple fact that idiosyncrasy flavors a system. In previous editions, people playing different classes did some mechanically different things. That is much less the case in 4e, and I think that leeches some flavor out of the classes, and thus out of the characters.

That being said, I am guessing the system is functional, and my players are good at colorful personalities. I am hoping my players find the mechanical sameness to be enough of an asset in game play that it overwhelms the loss of mechanical differentiation as role-play support.

Umbran

I am not what you'd call a 4e "early adopter". My group is a fairly archetypal set of the modern adult gamer - jobs, family, and other hobbies and interests often get in the way of scheduling gaming sessions. The sessions we do have need to count a lot, in both the social sense of getting friends together and in the gaming sense of getting things done that feel like fun. The end result is a group that isn't highly motivated to spend time learning a new system, as for most of them, the actual system-learning is not, in and of itself, a whole lot of fun.

Since they weren't pushing me to learn a new system, I didn't leap on it, either. Like many gamers, I have a small system collection habit, so eventually, when I had $60 of found money, I got a set of the core books. I skimmed over them at the time, but since then they've just sat on the shelf, while I did other things.

Now, my group has finally gotten around to the idea of actually trying the system out, so I'll be dragging the books off the shelf and reading them in more depth. I'll be keeping a set of impressions here, as I go through that process over the next couple of weeks, and through our playtests.

My impressions from the initial skim:

I'm a fairly old hand at RPGs, and I've worked with a bunch of systems, and read even more than I've worked with. So, aside from game design, I have a few thoughts on book-design as well. The 4e books don't impress me in that regard. Say what you will for or against the actual mechanics, the rulebooks themselves are... opaque.

With most systems, an experienced gamer can pick up a book for another system, and rather quickly ascertain what characters can do. A skim will reveal the basics of combat, races, class choices (if any) some idea of what the skills in the game do, and so on. The 4e books are, in my opinion, horrible at communicating this quickly.

I think that perhaps the idea was to organize the book for quick reference for those who have developed some expertise with the system, but they sacrificed learning in the process. A 4e character is largely defined by powers, and they are all in one big list. Until you familiarize yourself with the entire list (for all the classes) in detail, it is extremely difficult to tell what one character can do that others cannot.

There is no way I can pass my books around and have everyone digest them well enough to play on a reasonable timescale. I'll have to absorb the rules myself, and pre-generate some example characters, with their powers detailed out for the players in their sheets. This way, I can divorce the learning of the base play mechanics from learning all the different choices to be made in character creation. I'll probably start with a group of the old standbys - fighter, cleric, rogue, and wizard.

I'll give it my best shot, but I'm not expecting my players to prefer 4e. After the playtesting, I'll figure out what I want to do for my next campaign...

Umbran

Folks discussing RPGs on EN World, and elsewhere, often take themselves pretty seriously. They forget that they are discussing a game, a hobby. This place isn't about real-world injustice or something. But, we still tend to lose perspective and the ability to examine ourselves.

There are better writers than I that can peg us pretty well, though.

From Wired.com:


Alt Text: Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd, by Lore Sjöberg
...So how come cooking gets its own TV channel and role-playing games don't even get a show on G4? Maybe the population at large doesn't want to pretend to be a half-elf. Maybe RPGs take more imagination than most people have.

However, it just might have something to do with the role-playing community. If geeks talked about cookbooks the way they talk about RPG books, the results would not be pretty:...

Umbran