How many practice sessions did you have?

[Stalker0]

I think trial sessions are a good idea for any edition. Rules changes, archetypes handle differently. It can take people a while to find what they like.

For me we started a campaign right away. Played my wizard for 3 sessions, didn't like him, then tried out a fighter and had a lot of fun.

 

[Wormwood]

Thursday Group: Practice Session w/premade characters. Next session kicked off the KotS adventure arc. This group was heavily invested in 3.5, so the practice skirmish was very important as a field test of the 4e rules.

Sunday Group: No practice session, just KotS---which led to the Scales of War adventure path (currently 15th level, playing 3 days/month). This group had abandoned 3.5 months before, and was therefore ready for 4e in a big way.

 

[Jack99]

Recently I've determined that a lot of my initial hatred of 4E stemmed from one source - not understanding the game.
This may seem like an obvious statement, but what I'm getting at, is the first character I created, I was stuck with for nearly a year. It got to the point where my character died, and I nearly rejoiced, until I was stunned to find that our 1st level party was able to raise him from the dead.
To his credit, my DM did allow characters to be rebuilt after the first session, but with only one session under my belt I still didn't understand just how badly I'd built my character (including overlooking the fact my cleric wasn't proficient in shields). Consequently I made no changes. I'd have been happier if there had been a few designated 'test' sessions, where we got to play a number of different characters, and got to really know the rules.

This brings me to wondering how many test sessions other groups had, and how that has affected their enjoyment of 4E.

Your story makes no sense. You claim to have played the same character for a whole year, yet the party was still level 1 when your character died? How does that work, playing for a year and not leveling once.. No wonder if you were tired of the character.

In the advent that I just misunderstood something here is your question - I ran beta 4e for about 3 months, doing Oakhurst, Burning Sons and the other fan-made adventures out there. That enabled my players to try out a few things. When the real campaign started (june 2008) they had a better idea of what they wanted to be. But we did have quite a few deaths during the first 6 levels especially, so some of them got to change character there as well. Since (almost a year now) its been the same characters and everyone seems happy.

 

[S'mon]

I recognised this could be a problem and so I'm allowing rebuilds after every session, we're now 6 sessions in. As long as you keep your race & sex and don't abuse it, I'm fine. We've actually seen few changes.

 

[Zustiur]

Your story makes no sense. You claim to have played the same character for a whole year, yet the party was still level 1 when your character died? How does that work, playing for a year and not leveling once.. No wonder if you were tired of the character.

We play monthly. My character died and was raised in session 4. It wasn't until session 10 that I got to try a different character. My character being killed wasn't the trigger to swap. Ending KOTS was the trigger to swap. My DM doesn't allow swaps mid-adventure. (not counting dying and not being raised - which is basically impossible from what I've seen of 4E). In other words, I stuck with my first character for 9 long sessions (9 months and about 9 hours per session) after having found in session 3 that I wasn't having much fun.

I apologise for the wording of my first post, I didn't realize it read as though we were at level 1 for a year. I think you will agree that ~81 hours is a long time to play a character that feels ineffective. We just completed our 13th session and I'm enjoying my ranger much more.

 

[Grydan]

It's certainly possible to die and not be raised in 4E. I wouldn't be on my fifth character in my first campaign otherwise...

---

In that campaign, which started right after the game released, we had no practice sessions, but jumped straight in. My DM let me swap my character out for the second session when I wanted to change to something else. He also let us make tweaks to our builds after a couple sessions, once we were more familiar with our characters, but all the events that had happened to that point were still part of the campaign, not out-of-continuity practice.

In the other campaign I play in, we also jumped straight in, though as it was much more recent, only one of the players had never played the system before.

For the group I DM, I used Kobold Hall as a trial run, telling my players (who were mostly complete beginners) not to worry about getting their builds completely right, that they'd be allowed to revamp, rebuild, or replace after. I also told them not to worry about character death. When the party ended up having a bit of misfortune (uh... TPK), we basically treated it as a dream and redid that part.

I guess you could consider the Kobold Hall as test sessions, though it's certainly considered part of our campaign continuity, as items and character injokes from it continue to shape events now, months later.

 

[vagabundo]

We play monthly. My character died and was raised in session 4. It wasn't until session 10 that I got to try a different character. My character being killed wasn't the trigger to swap. Ending KOTS was the trigger to swap. My DM doesn't allow swaps mid-adventure. (not counting dying and not being raised - which is basically impossible from what I've seen of 4E). In other words, I stuck with my first character for 9 long sessions (9 months and about 9 hours per session) after having found in session 3 that I wasn't having much fun.

I apologise for the wording of my first post, I didn't realize it read as though we were at level 1 for a year. I think you will agree that ~81 hours is a long time to play a character that feels ineffective. We just completed our 13th session and I'm enjoying my ranger much more.

You should have said that your characters soul refuses to return from the afterlife - perfectly acceptable; the soul has to want to be raised.

 

[Thanee]

Started right away (with KotS). Currently playing the 4th adventure (Trollhaunt Warrens).

Two characters died in one of the earlier sessions (Irontooth, I blame you! This was almost a TPK), but got raised (by that priest NPC in Winterfell). One (Half-Elf Fey Warlock) died quite a bit later (eaten by a shambling mound in the Pyramid of Shadows) and made a new character (Dwarf BigNastyAxe Fighter), which he is a lot happier with, too.

We allowed partial rebuilds (mostly a couple feat/power swaps) after arrival of the Martial/Arcane/Divine Power books and PHB2.

Bye
Thanee

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Two sessions, decided that my original opinion of the game was correct, if not overly optimistic, went back to 3.5, Spycraft 2.0, and other games that I actually enjoyed playing. I was very glad that I had not bought 4e.

The number one reason for not liking the game is not liking the game.

The Auld Grump

 

[wedgeski]

We didn't play any practice sessions, but I made it clear to my (then) new players at the time that I was flexible when it came to character choices. We were all learning at the time.

Initially, I "permitted" double the normal retraining on levelling up for the first three levels, but that was really just to codify the situation more than anything else. Ultimately, if someone came to me and said they weren't enjoying their class as much as they thought, or wanted to completely rebuild it, I simply allowed it. This resulted in one player swapping his PC out completely, and another player changing a Ranger-multiclass-Rogue into a Rogue-multiclass-Ranger, which better fit the idea in his head.

34+ sessions into the campaign, and I'll be a little more stern about it, but everyone seems very happy with their PC's and the normal retraining rules are good enough for them to fix any niggly little irritations that might develop.

At the request of one of my players, I have built a kind of "guest-shot" clause into the campaign, which will give my guys the chance to trial a completely different PC for a session or two, giving them a chance to experiment with the many options now open to them in 4E. The only stipulation I make is that this is a planned event, and must fit seamlessly into the campaign -- i.e. they can't turn up one week with a new character sheet and just expect to run it. So far no-one has taken me up on this, which I take as a good sign.