Thanks for all of the great advice! Some suggestions I already had in mind, while others helped me see things in a different way.
The session went reasonably well, and I think that everyone had fun, but within about half an hour it dawned on me that I should have done a few things differently (but it was too late at that point).
Preparation
Since none of the players who were present own or have read the 4e DMG,
I should have just started with the Kobold Hall adventure in that book. It's a straightforward, linear adventure that probably would have worked better as an intro than
Keep on the Shadowfell. Yeah, some people suggested that I shouldn't use it, and I probably should have listened. The module feels like it was designed for 3.x veterans to learn 4e, and the 2nd kobold ambush expended all of their encounter and daily powers and put the paladin unconscious 3 times and the fighter and ranger once each (I almost cut it, but they were wanting to exact vengeance on kobolds for the difficulty they had with the first encounter, so I tried to let them have their vengeance).
I should have created characters for everybody in the group for a one-shot game, despite the fact that they all wanted to create their own. Since my sister is a longtime D&D veteran (with a lot of 3.x experience), I thought that she'd be able to adapt quickly to the new rules, and that she and the one player with 4e experience would be able to create theirs quickly and then help everyone else. Well, it didn't work out that way, and I ended up taking a basic fantasy archetype given to me by each of the other 3 players and then quickly building characters with the Character Builder. I also ended up finishing off my sister's character with the CB, as she was struggling to find what she was looking for in the PH. I printed off everybody's character sheets and power cards... and found that I didn't "equip" their weapons and armor, so nobody's AC or weapon attacks were calculated properly. Which leads me to...
Character Builder and Power Cards
The advancement table in the PH shows that 1st-level characters get 2 at-will powers, 1 encounter power, and 1 daily power. Four powers seemed like a manageable number to me, so I didn't sweat it.
When I printed out character sheets for everyone from the Character Builder, I discovered that four powers had mushroomed into a set of 8 or 10 power cards. I really dislike the format of the power cards printed out by the CB. I can't fathom why they don't just use the same presentation as in the PH (even if the visual design were different).
The cleric's and paladin's Channel Divinity class features ended up being difficult to distinguish from encounter attack powers, and the fact that Channel Divinity is itself the encounter power was not clear until I was re-reading the PH after the game.
At-will class features look almost identical to at-will attack powers, and I wasn't able to keep everybody's class abilities straight on my own, so the guy playing the ranger (new to the game) wasn't actually using his Hunter's Quarry feature (with the damage brought up to d8 from a feat) until near the end of the session. I asked to see what other powers his characters had when I noticed that he had basically just been using
Twin Strike the entire time. They were both on the green-bordered cards, so he assumed that they were mutually exclusive options.
Most of the players ended up putting their character sheets aside during combat -- unless they were attacked and had to write down how much damage they took -- and just focused on the power cards. Even outside of combat, nobody even thought to look at what equipment they were carring, and the cleric and wizard never even mentioned the fact that they have rituals that they can cast.
The new players had a lot of trouble finding what they were looking for on their character sheets (printed out from the CB); there is too much visual noise on those sheets with fields that aren't going to be used until many levels later, if ever. Certainly for beginners, at the very least. So it seems like the impression left with the new players was that the character sheet is confusing and has a lot of unused space on it, and the power cards are the important part of the game.
I Sound Like a Technophobe
One of the players (new to D&D, but he's a video game designer and has played PC/console RPGs) suggested afterward that he'd like to make the game more visual and less abstract to make it more engaging for the players. He'd like the character inventory on the sheets to be more visual, like Ultima VII-style "paper dolls."
Half of the players didn't want to write with pencil on their character sheets when we could use the Character Builder program to handle all the math and just print it out.
I really hate wireless communication devices sometimes. I'm not out of line thinking that it's rude to keep checking your text messages every time your phone alerts you, am I? I think I'm going to have to take a couple of players aside and ask them to please set their phones to silent alert mode (one was so loud my wife could hear it on the other side of the house, and it was going off every couple of minutes for a while), and to wait until we have a break to respond to text messages. I didn't say anything at the time, but I got seriously annoyed when I was describing something and the player next to me (one of the totally new players) was reading and responding to a text message. It seems like common courtesy to me, but I don't want to come across as a control freak.
Now, I'm a software engineer by day (formerly a video game designer too), so I'm very comfortable with computers and technology, but -- and maybe I'm just turning into a grognard -- tabletop RPGs are meant to be played with paper, pencils, and dice, dammit. I would really enjoy being able to play a game without having to be on the computer.
What Went Right
Everyone seemed to have a good time, even if they didn't entirely understand what we were doing. That counts for something.
Nobody's character died. That rarely makes a good first impression with a new player.
The players enjoyed talking to townsfolk in Winterhaven, and getting to decide where they were going to go next (to the dragon's burial site, the kobold lair, or the Keep).
I ran the game pretty transparently, and I was actually barely sitting behind my DM's screen at all. I was moving around the table as players took their turns and making suggestions to the new players as to what ability they should use in this situation. I made all of my attack and damage rolls for the monsters so that they players could see (partly because I wasn't sitting behind the screen, and also to help demonstrate how the game works). When a new rule or concept came into play (i.e. minions, ongoing damage, death saves, etc), I gave a brief explanation of what it was and how it applied in this context.
They players really, really
hated those kobolds and their at-will shiftiness. I've never seen kobolds so thoroughly despised before. (I'm not counting
Tucker's Kobolds)
What I'm Going to do for the Next Game
...or if I need to introduce new players to the game again.
I'm going to re-design the next few encounters in the module to be able to highlight a narrower range of gameplay options in each encounter. I'll open it up again after the players are more comfortable with their abilities. In hindsight, I think it might have been better to have a simpler first combat encounter and introduce the powers one category at a time.
I will put together a customized, more streamlined character sheet for each player that highlights the most important information for that particular character, and which leaves out all of the "blank" fields from the standard character sheets. The power cards take up a lot of table space and seem to be distracting from the basic character sheet itself (and now leave me with having to store them and not get them mixed up), so I'll put together a list of powers (text pasted from the DDI Compendium) for each character. Attack powers and class/feat/race powers will be kept separate and distinct so that there is no confusion. I should have done exactly this to start with, but it didn't occur to me until we'd started playing.
There may be 2 or 3 more players joining, so I'll stat up a pregenerated character for each PH class, in the same format as I just mentioned, with the name, sex, and physical description left blank.
All of us had difficulty remembering who was marked by the fighter and the paladin. And by the kobold dragonshields. We need some sort of token to put under the minis.
I'd already told the players when I first scheduled the game that they could ignore the retraining rules for now; for the first few sessions, they can change anything they want, and I've already started writing private e-mails to each player highlighting stuff that we all missed, recommending some build changes, and making suggestions about where they might want to use abilities.
I'll be asking the players with some D&D experience (regardless of edition) to help me encourage a bit more role-playing. It was pretty mechanics-focused, which is understandable when everybody is learning, but I don't want the new players to get the impression that it's all about the mechanics. I tried to get some simple character back stories out of the players for the first session, but it wasn't really happening.
B/X D&D was so much easier to learn and teach to others.
