For what it's worth, I fully expect Delay rules to be one of the optional tactical combat rules that we will see in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It sounds like "first round only" Delay is probably a reasonable rule for tables that want more tactics.
This was also the case with the original 4th Edition version of Magic Missile (I believe they switched to the auto-hit version with Essentials).
Edit: Ninja'ed.
So far I've only personally run the Starter Set adventure, so no homebrew yet. What I'm really excited for is the Karthun Kickstarter as a campaign setting; that's the world that has me itching to run a game. Once it's out (sometime next year) I plan to run a game in that world.
As a big fan of 4e who played a LOT for two and a half years (2010 - 2012), my recommendations for the "on ramp" is pretty simple: Buy the Essentials books. Specifically:
Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms
Heroes of the Fallen Lands
Rules Compendium
Monster Vault
I suppose the Dungeon Master's...
Argh - thank you for letting me know. This happened before, and I took all sorts of steps to fix the problem, but it looks like it's back. Stupid spam link hacks...
Edit: It's fixed now (again). Grumble grumble...
I'm glad you found them to be useful! And thanks for adding the link to my Map Archive. The maps are in the adventures themselves, but it's nice to be able to browse through them in the archive, I agree.
Michael the OnlineDM
Those of you who have been around for a while may remember seeing these adventures when I originally wrote them. But now, inspired by a friend on the other side of the country who said he was planning to run these adventures for his group soon, I finally put all three adventures in a single...
Inspired in part by the excellent RPG Kids from NewbieDM, I created a simple role playing game for use with my 8 year old niece and 5 year old nephew. I'm calling it Kid-Friendly RPG (KFRPG for short), and it's freely available on my site...
There are still plenty of great virtual tables out there. I personally love MapTool - and it's free! I've blogged about using it to play D&D4e for years, and it's all set for D&D Next as well.
I believe you're thinking of the daily power of the Preservation Shield magic item:
You and each ally within 5 squares of you gain temporary hit points equal to the number of healing surges you have remaining.
My LFR paladin has been using this one for many levels.
I'll be there the whole time; my full schedule post is here.
Basically, I'm hoping to introduce as many people as possible to my card and dice game, Chaos & Alchemy. But I hope to play in other awesome games with awesome people, too.
Monte Cook's new RPG: Numenera
Monte Cook has finally announced some details about the RPG he's been working on. It's called Numenera, and it will be coming out in the summer of 2013.
Read Monte's announcement here.
The Numenera home page can be found here.