Another Playtest Run...
Good Morning, All:
Yesterday I ran the 4E playtest adventure "Raiders of Oakhurst" for the local D&D Meetup group. Five players participated, covering all of the pregens save for the Halfling Paladin. We had a lot of fun, and the players enjoyed the game overall. More explicit feedback is given below.
As many of you have already read, ran or played through the adventure, I won't go into details on the overall plot. Essentially, the party came in to the first room, slaughtering the kobolds as well as Varkaze as they each came out. The non-minion did give them a little pause, but the players handled themselves with overall ease. As I had given a lengthy description of the rules and rule changes, the players spent a little time exploring their powers in this encounter. The tiefling, in particular, enjoyed her Curse power. (I fear that I probably ran that incorrectly, but as it read, you choose a target within 10 squares and they automatically take a d6 damage every round until dead. Seems to me that it should work more like Hunter's Quarry, in that it adds to the damage of successful attacks, but that should be clarified one way or the other when the rules come out in June.) It was during the fight, as well, that we noticed the ranger's trend of rolling low consistently. Like any other version of D&D, if you do not successfully hit your target, you can't do your damage, powers or otherwise. Still, they had fun, and they dropped the hobgoblin warcaster within one round (this includes the only shot from the ranger that hit anything that encounter.)
Following the river from which Varkaze came, they came around the bend to find the archers behind an overturned table and the soldier coming at them. I rolled a 20 on the soldier's initiative, and they were bottlenecked at the entrance to the chamber for a time. This caused a longer, drawn-out combat affair, with most attacks being focused on the soldier while the archers just picked away at people from a distance. The wizard used his Mage Hand power to set some of the chairs up and put them in the way of the archers as cover, which I thought was very creative. Once the soldiers finally fell, the party swarmed over the archers and dropped them within a round or two. This was also the first encounter in which we saw people taking enough damage to use Second Wind or the cleric's healing talents during the encounter itself, and about half the group used their Action Point to gain an additional action. It seems that this is where they came into their own in regards to starting to understand their powers.
Continuing up the river, of course, they ran into Nightscale, and as many have reported, the player-characters were hit hard here. It was a game of hide-and-seek in the beginning, and then the dwarf marked Nightscale, so she laid waste to the dwarf, breathing on the rest of the party occasionally as her breath weapon recharged. After the dwarf fell, the warlock was not far behind, followed by the cleric. At that point, the wizard took off back the way the party came, while the ranger fled down the passage towards the king's bedchambers. Nightscale followed the wizard, and dropped him in the stream halfway back to the site of the second encounter. Meanwhile, the ranger discovered Meepo hiding under hides, but was taken by surprise by the deathjump spider, which slew him with its "death from above" power.
Overall Impressions:
The players loved the adventure. The dragon at the end was a nasty surprise, and they didn't like the deadliness of it, but no one felt it was unfair or inappropriate. In fact, many of them got to try all of the powers in that encounter, as many of their encounters and dailies failed against the high defenses of the dragon. Dragons are truely nasty again.
They all felt that the adventure gave them a great taste of the new 4E rules, and I heard many positive comments about the system. Everyone felt that they all had something to do, save the ranger. Part of that was just his bad die rolls, and the other part was that he didn't use a good number of his powers, relying on Careful Attack for a majority of his actions. I don't know if that was a weakness of the ranger build or the player's frustrations with not hitting successfully. Despite that, he still had a good time.
Of particular note was the fact that they all enjoyed the lack of fragility in their 1st level characters. They enjoyed being able to act heroicly and be successful even at 1st Level, and yet the game still felt like D&D to them. I liked hearing that.
As the DM, I felt that I had a lot of fun and interesting powers to play with myself, and so I think it made the game fun to play for me as well. The only downfall was that having fun with monster powers in the dragon fight could promote a "GM vs PCs" perception, which may be a problem depending on the gamers involved. Beyond that, I really didn't find the gaming experience to be that different on my side of things. Most of the differences were with the players and their new extended options because of the healing surges and mix of powers.
Personal Conclusions:
As a first taste of 4E, I enjoyed the game immensely. The players had a good time, the monsters were fun to play, and it was a nice adventure that played out very well. It was quite entertaining. I am still not overly enthused about 4E (I've always been cautiously optimistic about it), but I think 4E will be a fun game to play, and I won't mind running it, I'm sure. It's a worthy successor, and I think the players will have a lot of fun with it. As I tend to fall into the DM role most often, I think it will be a reasonably easy transition to shift to 4E. It definitely captures some of the qualities I love about Savage Worlds, and that is a good thing. Easier prep time, fun and involved combats with interesting monsters, and a system that promotes teamplay and cinematic action (at least, as I like to run it) will make for good selling points in 4E's future. I think that Savage Worlds handles these points better, but I think that those who enjoy more gritty or detailed character powers and the like will probably be well served by 4E.
Thanks For An Enjoyable Afternoon,
Flynn