Trial Run
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.
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.
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