Any tips for DMing PHB2 release day adventure?

[functionciccio]

I played yesterday (near Milan, Italy) and no one was really impressed. We had two new (to 4E) players in our group and they were quite confused and, despite our DM's efforts, bored to tears. The fights lasted too long.

Really, there's something wrong with monsters' HPs. If you miss with your dailies or encounter powers, you are left using your at wills for what seems forever.

The comments I gathered from the people at the venue were:

The monsters never felt really dangerous (apart from those nasty mutant roaches [the runespiral demons]) and the battles boiled down to the act of removing layer after layer of HPs.

Everyone quickly lost track of the various bonuse or maluses that were flying around, let alone their duration ("until the end of the turn of who?").

No character showed something that really changed the fights. Everyone did the same: some damage + minor or major rider effect.

No character showed something to do outside of combat.

The skill challenge felt quite mechanic and surreal ("I need to make ANOTHER acrobatics check to catch that litte glirl?").

Lots of people tried to find the warforged in the PHB2, failing, and wondering where the heck that race came from.

All in all, the adventure was not the best way to show the strength of 4E.
Quite the contrary, I believe.

 

[Belares]

I ran the game last night at our gameshop and it took forever! We started at around 5pm and there were some interuptions but we didnt even finish the first mill room fight and still stopped at 11pm. The other 2 tables got through the skill challenge and first encounter and stopped there. We have played 4E for a bit and that adventure took way longer than the scheduled 2 or 3 hours they wanted it to run in.

There are some issues with the characters that has been discussed. The big issue last night that everyone agreed was that there was too much missing(rolling to hit) in combat. Now I had to agree as far as DMing as I was on the average needing to hit the player's AC with a 15+ (due mostly to all the -2 to hit that was thrown out all the time by powers). The players werent any better as they missed so much. The HPs of everyone i thought were fine just needed more damage output from everyone.

The skill challenge was fine but (and i thought this was a huge problem) the DCs was 16 and NO ONE could really fail if they worked in tandem. I think we had one guy use a skill that he didnt need to roll (becausee they had a skill of 15+) and he rolled a 17 on the dice. I even gave a couple of people -2 due to certain reactions like the Barbarian used intimidate (LOL) to tell her everything was ok and to stop running away from the group.

Overall the adventure I think is good but the mechanics needs some reworking (or maybe different classes). Also I agree that having a warforged, Drow, Tiefling and a Dragonborn chasing a scared little girl around and convincing her that the "other" monsters are the bad guys is crazy. I think if everyone had been playing the characters from level 1 or so that it would have ran faster too.

 

[Belares]

Yeah, and now that I am examining them in detail, I am finding mistakes. For example, the Avenger has a Paladin Utility 10, the same one the Paladin has, but no M/C feats.


Smeelbo

This is actually the Barbarian not the avenger. We found it at the end of the adventure last night haha.

 

[Rechan]

I only sat through the first encounter and the skill challenge. The first encounter was heavily frustrating to me, namely because the bear just was a beast of a HP soak. Brutes should not be elite.

I was also playing the paladin. So the encounter was very annoying to me; no monsters caused (Save ends) powers, therefore half of my abilities were not useful.

 

[functionciccio]

I was also playing the paladin. So the encounter was very annoying to me; no monsters caused (Save ends) powers, therefore half of my abilities were not useful.

I was playing the paladin too, so I know what you mean.

Oh, and at least the dailies (that don't have a "miss:" section) should be "reliable", imho

 

[Herschel]

I liked the bear having a lot of HP. Not every encounter should be for ADHD teens. The bear served a purpose: tempting you to burn dailies and to wear down the party some.

The big problem rearing its head again today was 11th level. Newcomers were having a very hard time and kids interested in the game were just lost. At my table there was one youngster, and two adults that hadn't played 4E yet. Those familiar with earlier editions weren't prepared for all the choices. The table behind me was four youngsters under 13 and an adult. They ran the first encounter, and didn't get much farther because there was just so much going on, so I saw the DM pulled out a white dragon and had them fight it rather than finishing the adventure.

When the table had experienced players, the encounters went well enough, but when you are trying to also draw new players.......11th level was WAY too high.

The minis were all from Demonweb, no alt paint or base stamps either. There were three rares though, with the Dragonborn Paladin, Minotaur and Bearded Devil.

 

[Gorrstagg]

After running this yesterday... my observations.

That first encounter was a horrible idea. You've got a slogfest of hit points to work through, and you've got an unoptimized group of characters, who also incidently have lots of complicated options. And a lot of the sheets required a significant rewrite up to fix them.

The group I ran for, made it through the first encounter, and the super quick abbreviated version of the skill challenge, only to get a quarter way of the encounter inside the Mill before the session was forced to end. After 3.5 hours.

(One I wasn't aware at the time we were under a forced time limit so I let players take their time to learn their characters, though two of them turned out to be very slow, one cause he was just a douche-hammer, and the other cause he just wasn't grasping the avenger.)

And if I had to do it again.. I would of totally skipped that first encounter, started with the skill challenge, and then got to the last two encounters.

If anything I think it would of scaled much better.

And in a way I must be honest, I think the choices for classes and races were abyssmal. And were solely done based upon the miniatures they had available to give out.

And had I known that now, I would of built 5 characters before hand that would of complimented the game style much better.

Overall.. running Paragon level adventures isn't bad, but to do it cold cod, and with no way to guarantee the players were of sufficient experience to really grasp what each option did and how it functioned, was a bit much to ask. Especially with brand new classes.

I have to admit I felt a little bad for one player who had to play the Paladin, because he wanted to play a new "Class" and the only thing I could console him with was that it was kinda new in that parts of it came from Divine Powers.

Overall, meh.

This was not a great experience, and next time if the characters are so horrible, I'll just in advance create new ones that are fun and balanced. Better that then what we got this time.

Though I did have the Mill explode, and then every time a 1 was rolled to hit the players for the ongoing, I had it explode again. (It did 2 more times.) That seemed to really get them interested in the story.

Actually to be honest, once you got past that waste of time first encounter, it began to flow much smoother.

 

[Krensus]

I ran this adventure Saturday and really hated it. I'm finding all the free material WOTC gives out is pretty terrible, which is why I don't play Living Forgotten Realms anymore. The main reason I DM'd this was for the free minis for myself and my people, and there were 2 tables running at our game store (the Book Stan' in Beaumont, TX).

One of the biggest problems is starting at paragon level with brand new characters that we've only been able to look at since Tuesday. My group is experienced in 4th ed., and had we been given the option of just rolling our own level 11's for the event, there would have been much more familiarity with the powers.

The first encounter took FOREVER because everyone was sorting through their two pages of powers to decipher what exactly their character did. Everyone rolled pretty bad initiatives, so the bad guys charged in to the party's position, making it so we only used about 25 squares of the map the entire fight. The bear lingered for an hour of real time until he was finally taken down, and the other 3 monsters also had high amounts of HP, dragging out the fight even longer.

The skill challenge had a ridiculously low DC to succeed. Using their primary skills, the players couldn't fail to calm Solphi. Because of this, it literally took me longer to read her story to the players than it did for them to catch her.

On the subject of skill DCs, I don't think the players can help but notice the back entrance to the mill, since it's only Perception DC 10. My party climbed up to it and ambushed the artillery mobs, killing both and the armors before they got a second turn. The armors did nothing to help the other monsters, as they were the only devils in the fight, but I think this was an oversight on the part of the author as the Tactics section on each encounter with a troglodyte said it maneuvers to keep allies out of it's aura when it only affects living enemies. This encounter took about 30 minutes since my players knew their abilities better and were able to ambush the enemies.

The last encounter was pretty underwhelming and annoying. The floor traps were especially frustrating, as they had a high chance of hit, stunned, and did high damage. And as the paladin found out, going to neg hit points in them doesn't stop them from attacking. The main problem was that the monsters were weak. The two main bad guys (the bearded devil and the insect demon) just didn't do a lot of damage, and all the bug guy did was hold the paladin at arm's length while the barbarian wailed on him. He had high defenses, but no impressive attacks or allies to aide him, which made him even more boring than Kalarel.

The only enjoyment I got out of the final encounter was when the party got too close to the captives of the town and I had both the artillery mobs fire into the crowd of innocents simultaneously to rack up big damage because of the number of targets they hit. Not that it really mattered, as the party waded through the encounter in about 30 mins.

Entire play time for our table was about 3.5 hours, but the other table was not even half way through the second encounter when we finished up and left. It's understandable because they're less experienced with 4th ed., but it's also unfortunate that Wizards chose to have a big game day to (I assume) bring new people into the game, but they chose a scenario that even veteran players need a period of adjustment to play well.

I would DM a game day again, but only for the miniatures, which were plentiful. When it comes down to my game time, these canned adventures are just not as good as what my friends and I come up with.

 

[Smeelbo]

Did Gregory Marks actually get paid!? Did his EDITOR?

My experience was similar to the posts here. The characters were overly complex, poorly built, riddled with mistakes, and the players never really mastered more than a subset of their powers in the time allowed. There were over a dozen triggered abilities in the group, and they made use of less than a quarter of these. I could not unzip the RAR on the corrected sheets, so I corrected the sheets myself by hand.

I do not see what was gained by having paragon characters as opposed to mid-heroic. The choice of races was poor, but the choice of classes worked well enough in my experience. But then I wrote up a group guide with numerous suggestions on how the characters worked and how they might work together.

The combats were long, sloggy, although Jack worked well as a recurring villain in the first three encounters (see my options in the Wizard's thread). The skill challenge went quickly, and again, the threat of Jack lurking in the background added much needed tension. The mill did not explode, but only because of my option to suppress the explosive grain dust within two squares of the entrance, where most of the action was.

The adventure was very poorly written, and I hope never to see Gregory Marks name on any product Hasbro hopes to sell me. I wish I knew who Marks' editor was, so I could avoid him too.

Yes, the minis were very nice, thank you, but I'm expecting to put another 16 hours of prep for the next Game Day.

I'd like to thank all the posters who pointed out the numerous mistakes and made suggestions and corrections.

Smeelbo