Jeff Wilder
First Post
MINOR SPOILERS FOR KEEP ON THE SHADOWFELL!
My buddy and I are both pretty anti-4E. We played 4E briefly at GenCon last year, and hated it, but we had a horrendous DM. Both of us wanted to give 4E a real chance, if only to be able to say that we had done so when we explain why we dislike it in the future.
So I got another buddy -- who is very pro-4E and pro-DDM skirmish game -- to agree to run Keep on the Shadowfell for us. He was enthusiastic, and aside from breaking the fourth wall a tad too much for my taste, a really good DM. Along with two other mildly anti-4E guys, and a guy who hasn't expressed any strong opinion, we made plans to play bi-weekly through 3rd level or so.
We put together a party of five. (Unfortunately, neither Neve nor Lacey showed up.) We had Flick, my razorclaw shifter archer ranger; Usjach, an extremely tough kobold warlock; Jinx, a halfling rogue; Kellyn, a gnome bard; and Ferros, a human wizard. After spending some time interweaving our backgrounds, Mike (the DM), launched into the adventure, with an ambush by kobolds on the King's Road.
I'm not going to recount the adventure, as that's not the purpose of this post.
I think all of us had a good time. I'd rank my experience as a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, with my best 3.5/Pathfinder experiences being a 10, and my worst being a 1.
There are two major knocks against 4E that I carried into the game:
(1) The diagonal movement rule change.
I came out of the game with my view slightly altered, but still about the same on the nagativity-positivity scale. While the counting -- or, more technically, the not-counting -- didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected (as long as I didn't think about it), the EXXXXXTREEEME (cue guttural voice) movement abilities of both the PCs and the enemies was very jarring, and I didn't like it at all. This is only in part to the diagonal movement rule, though.
(2) The lack of any injury that lasts longer than six hours.
Again, this bothered me less than I thought I would, and again, that's subject to "not thinking about it." My sense of narrative style would absolutely require me to make a house rule for this, if I were DMing (but I think doing so would be both trivial and elegant), and if the lack of it creeps up on me as I expect it will, over multiple sessions, the failure to house-rule it could be a deal-breaker for me.
Most of my other dislikes of 4E are "meta-dislikes." Just for example, having separate powers for everybody, when so many of them are so similar. It would have made much more sense to have a system for building powers. (But, of course, it wouldn't sell as many books.) I call this a meta-dislike because it isn't actually the powers I dislike -- not even for martial characters -- but rather the method of presenting them, and the clear reasons for choosing that method.
One big plus I took from the experience was how effective and how much fun a wizard was, right out of the gate. I like playing spellcasters in 3.5/Pathfinder, but I dread the first three or four levels. The spellcasters are so limited and fragile. I wasn't actually playing a wizard myself, so I don't know if this trade-off would be worth the lack of ridiculous flexibility 3.5/Pathfinder wizards have, but I actually suspect it would.
Overall, as I said, I rate this first real session of 4E as a positive. I'm surprised at how much so. I'll be updating this thread with each session, and I welcome comments.
My buddy and I are both pretty anti-4E. We played 4E briefly at GenCon last year, and hated it, but we had a horrendous DM. Both of us wanted to give 4E a real chance, if only to be able to say that we had done so when we explain why we dislike it in the future.
So I got another buddy -- who is very pro-4E and pro-DDM skirmish game -- to agree to run Keep on the Shadowfell for us. He was enthusiastic, and aside from breaking the fourth wall a tad too much for my taste, a really good DM. Along with two other mildly anti-4E guys, and a guy who hasn't expressed any strong opinion, we made plans to play bi-weekly through 3rd level or so.
We put together a party of five. (Unfortunately, neither Neve nor Lacey showed up.) We had Flick, my razorclaw shifter archer ranger; Usjach, an extremely tough kobold warlock; Jinx, a halfling rogue; Kellyn, a gnome bard; and Ferros, a human wizard. After spending some time interweaving our backgrounds, Mike (the DM), launched into the adventure, with an ambush by kobolds on the King's Road.
I'm not going to recount the adventure, as that's not the purpose of this post.
I think all of us had a good time. I'd rank my experience as a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, with my best 3.5/Pathfinder experiences being a 10, and my worst being a 1.
There are two major knocks against 4E that I carried into the game:
(1) The diagonal movement rule change.
I came out of the game with my view slightly altered, but still about the same on the nagativity-positivity scale. While the counting -- or, more technically, the not-counting -- didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected (as long as I didn't think about it), the EXXXXXTREEEME (cue guttural voice) movement abilities of both the PCs and the enemies was very jarring, and I didn't like it at all. This is only in part to the diagonal movement rule, though.
(2) The lack of any injury that lasts longer than six hours.
Again, this bothered me less than I thought I would, and again, that's subject to "not thinking about it." My sense of narrative style would absolutely require me to make a house rule for this, if I were DMing (but I think doing so would be both trivial and elegant), and if the lack of it creeps up on me as I expect it will, over multiple sessions, the failure to house-rule it could be a deal-breaker for me.
Most of my other dislikes of 4E are "meta-dislikes." Just for example, having separate powers for everybody, when so many of them are so similar. It would have made much more sense to have a system for building powers. (But, of course, it wouldn't sell as many books.) I call this a meta-dislike because it isn't actually the powers I dislike -- not even for martial characters -- but rather the method of presenting them, and the clear reasons for choosing that method.
One big plus I took from the experience was how effective and how much fun a wizard was, right out of the gate. I like playing spellcasters in 3.5/Pathfinder, but I dread the first three or four levels. The spellcasters are so limited and fragile. I wasn't actually playing a wizard myself, so I don't know if this trade-off would be worth the lack of ridiculous flexibility 3.5/Pathfinder wizards have, but I actually suspect it would.
Overall, as I said, I rate this first real session of 4E as a positive. I'm surprised at how much so. I'll be updating this thread with each session, and I welcome comments.
