Essentials..core..do they work together?

[Uller]

It appears at least some of the monsters have been upgraded. The blue slime Lvl 3 Brute Solo does 2d6+6 plus 5 on going acid now compared to the old 1d6+6 plus 5 og acid....

However the early encounters still look the same (the dragonshields are lvl 2 soldiers but only do 1d6+3 damage).

Like I said...if your party is going into this after the red box they will probably walk right through the early part so I'd abridge it.

 

[D'karr]

I tried building my first Essentials character in Character Builder, a clone of my son's Dragonborn Fighter, to get a feel for what I could do. I liked the Fighter/Knight setup, but I was surprised that it seemingly only let me choose Essentials feats and Essentials weapons? Namely, I didn't have access to the various Dragonborn breath feats and couldn't add a Sunblade. On the other side, it seemed to let me choose both Master at Arms feat and Weapon Expertise (Heavy Blade) and stacked the +1 attack (which doesn't seem right as they should both be feat bonuses).

Can someone describe how the Essentials characters should have access to non-Essentials feats and equipment?

If you're using the online character builder select a custom character instead of an essentials character to start up. The essentials character side is filtered to only show the stuff published in essentials books.

The feat would not stack for the + to attacks, but you should both get the minor action draw/sheath and the +2 to defenses against OAs.

The character builder software is good, and pretty accurate, but not infallible. You might want to report this as a "bug".

 

[JeffB]

It appears at least some of the monsters have been upgraded. The blue slime Lvl 3 Brute Solo does 2d6+6 plus 5 on going acid now compared to the old 1d6+6 plus 5 og acid....

However the early encounters still look the same (the dragonshields are lvl 2 soldiers but only do 1d6+3 damage).

Like I said...if your party is going into this after the red box they will probably walk right through the early part so I'd abridge it.

Yeah, I am seeing some of this now. My son will only be using the red box fighter stats/build and cards, starting at 0xp. I wont be running him through the solo, or twisted halls. I am going to be using the missing friend hook in KOTS. Probably will ignore some of the kobold encounters, get him quickly to the dig site (thanks Taed for the FYI on the dig site update!) back to Winterhaven for some plot reinforcement, then off to the Keep itself. Assuming he decides to "play along"...i won't railroad him.