A DM in the area is running D&D Encounters, and I figured, hey, what the hell, might as well give 4e a shot. I've been griping about it for years, so I suppose it couldn't hurt to see the system in play. I met up with a large group (7-8 players), we picked through a bunch of pregen characters, and we started the game. Now, before I go any further, let me talk about a few things that are going to be criticized once people respond.
• All the players (except the DM) are new. Sadly, despite never having played 4e, I'm the player who understands the most about the system. Having a whole set of new players is going to guarantee the game will run slowly.
• Party size is exceptionally large. I know that 4e is written for 4-5 players, and having more than that is going to make the game run less well.
• The players were not very tactically minded and did not really understand their powers. Battle went a lot less well than it should have because people did not understand the conceits of 4e (heavy emphasis on teamwork, use your encounter powers, etc.).
First, let me talk about selecting a pregen. The first character I picked was a thri-kreen battlemind because, hey, a psychic bug sounded nifty. As soon as I picked up the character sheet, however, I was inundated with powers. Despite being a fairly sharp guy--no matter what people on the Internet say!--I was overwhelmed by my character. As the battlemind, I had an ability to mark my enemies, two at-will powers (Bull's Strength and something else), a reaction that damaged my marked opponents, this ranged power called mind blast (or something, it didn't actually appear on the character sheet), Speed of Thought (encounter), the thri-kreen racial that attacks a lot of enemies, and one more encounter power. On top of all of this, I had the ability to augment these powers with my power points.
Even though I understand the basics of 4e and how the powers work, that was way too much to understand as a new player. I was also concerned with how much intraround bookkeeping there would be with my character, since my second at-will gave enemies a penalty to their defenses or something, and my mark would give them a penalty on their attack rolls. Fortunately, when it turned out that the mind blast power was MIA, the DM had me choose a different pregen. I picked the Essentials barbarian. That seemed okay, but its berserker ability wasn't explained well on the character sheet, and no powers were marked as primal (which would trigger the rage). The DM had me switch again, this time to Binwin Bronzebottom, dwarf fighter.
Well, there was no way to screw up Binwin (even though he had no ranged weapons), so that was that. Onto the adventure itself!
To my dismay, the adventure is poorly-written, and it involves a mad necromancer/nethermancer and an inn getting teleported into the Shadowfell. Fairly cheesy. We all started at the inn, in which there were some dwarves in the corner, a large and busty serving wench, a scholar, and some other NPCs that I can't name. (Greenfield?) I played the dwarfiest dwarf I could, drinking heavily (and boisterously). Meanwhile, the other players did their thing--the wizard kept bouncing colored balls of light off the wall, and the thief stole from the dwarves, and some other stuff happened--and it became clear we were supposed to investigate the ruins of the monastery because there were ghosts and dark sorcery or something.
I ran up to the scholarly fellow and yelled, "WHAT'S THIS ABOUT MONASTERIES?" The DM had me roll an Intimidate check. I didn't do very well, and the scholar charged me 5gp for the pleasure of his tour. The only real-life girl of the group (who was playing an ardent) came over and said she wanted to take the tour, too.
"IT'LL COST YOU FIVE GOLD," I shouted. The scholar informed me that the 5gp was a surcharge because my short stature would make it more difficult for him to navigate the ruins.
We went to bed and dark shadows attacked us. I think this point was a skill challenge, but Binwin Bronzebottom has no penchant for learning, so he smashed through the door and waddled down to the barroom. Everyone else joined up, and gargoyles attacked. So did shadows. ROLL INITIATIVE.
Binwin Bronzebottom was the very last to go, and the gargoyles first. The first attacked and critted, doing half my HP in damage on the first strike. The other gargoyles swarmed around us, tearing through into the other characters.
This is where I had an issue with the fighter (weaponsmaster). Because I had low initiative, I couldn't attack a monster until the end of the round. Because I couldn't attack a monster until the end of the round, I couldn't mark a monster. Because I couldn't mark a monster, I couldn't act as a defender and protect my teammates. Strongly disliked this aspect of the fighter, and I envied the knight's guardian aura that basically marked everyone around him. (The aura was also a lot simpler to use.)
Now, here came the problem with the players not understanding the conceits of 4e. I used my encounter power--covering strike--right away, because I wanted the damage boost to reduce the gargoyle's numbers right quick. The other players didn't grasp this. I tried to explain to the bard that he ought to use Ringing Strike, but he didn't "get it," and I didn't want to be That Guy, so I dropped it. The rogue didn't flank with me to get combat advantage/sneak attack, the wizard insisted on using magic missile each round, and the rest didn't do anything that I particularly remember. The poor ardent player--who knew nothing about D&D, not even how the dice worked--had to deal with the issues I faced with the battlemind, only compounded by her complete ignorance of how basic dice rolling worked. (She didn't grasp the 1d20 + modifiers or how 2d10 + 3 worked.) She defaulted to the basic attack and her healing ability.
At one point, a malign shadow started eating the rogue. He fell unconscious, so the bard ran over and attempted to make a Heal check to revive him. He failed twice (blowing an action point in the process) and finally succeeded on a third. Again, not wanting to be That Player, I didn't pressure him to use Ringing Strike to kill the shadow outright. This player also had trouble using his bard's singing abilities.
After nailing a gargoyle with covering strike (I was going to have the rogue shift to flank but he went down by that point), I finished off one gargoyle with my cleave power and smashed into another. For all the claims of "not resorting to 'I attack' each round," cleaving sure felt exactly like making an MBA, except it had something else attached to it. My thoughts were: couldn't we simplify this so that I don't have yet another power on my character sheet? I also had brash strike available, but that seemed stupid to me.
Also, due to the damage I had sustained from the gargoyle, I used my second wind as a minor action and crossed out a healing surge. As someone who has been extremely, ahem, vocal about his distaste for healing surges, I didn't actually hate this. In fact, the healing surge mechanic seemed palatable, but it did need to be renamed so it didn't suck.
Anyway, we mopped up the encounter, and the rogue almost died again due to poison (and there was some confusion about saving throws, which reinforces my irritation at tracking round-by-round stuff), at which point our allotted gametime was over, and I reflected on what I was going to write in this post. Some thoughts:
• The game is intimidating to new players. Simpler is better. Loads of mechanics to track at first level is not good; characters should "grow into" their classes as they progress.
• Round-by-round tracking needs to GTFO. Or, at the very least, be seldomly used.
• Special abilities need to do something beyond shifting numbers around. Brash strike sucks, and it will suck even more in a system of bounded accuracy. The likelihood of me caring about a +2 bonus on attack rolls is unlikely. (Likewise for "push one square.") Make mechanics feel unique and interesting. If brash strike did something like, "you get a +2 bonus and automatically crit, but your opponent gets to make a free attack against you," I might be more interested. As it stands, I don't like it.
• 4e's math seemed solid, at least at first level. Of the four attacks I made, three hit. (And I use Zocchi dice, so you know it's just not good luck.) However, I also felt that the monsters had too much HP, especially for the length of time that combat took. If I do 20 damage with an attack (especially at level one), it feels like the monster should be dead. It kind of sucks when I'm dropping that much damage and the monster is going to absorb another round or two of damage before it's toast.
• All the players (except the DM) are new. Sadly, despite never having played 4e, I'm the player who understands the most about the system. Having a whole set of new players is going to guarantee the game will run slowly.
• Party size is exceptionally large. I know that 4e is written for 4-5 players, and having more than that is going to make the game run less well.
• The players were not very tactically minded and did not really understand their powers. Battle went a lot less well than it should have because people did not understand the conceits of 4e (heavy emphasis on teamwork, use your encounter powers, etc.).
First, let me talk about selecting a pregen. The first character I picked was a thri-kreen battlemind because, hey, a psychic bug sounded nifty. As soon as I picked up the character sheet, however, I was inundated with powers. Despite being a fairly sharp guy--no matter what people on the Internet say!--I was overwhelmed by my character. As the battlemind, I had an ability to mark my enemies, two at-will powers (Bull's Strength and something else), a reaction that damaged my marked opponents, this ranged power called mind blast (or something, it didn't actually appear on the character sheet), Speed of Thought (encounter), the thri-kreen racial that attacks a lot of enemies, and one more encounter power. On top of all of this, I had the ability to augment these powers with my power points.
Even though I understand the basics of 4e and how the powers work, that was way too much to understand as a new player. I was also concerned with how much intraround bookkeeping there would be with my character, since my second at-will gave enemies a penalty to their defenses or something, and my mark would give them a penalty on their attack rolls. Fortunately, when it turned out that the mind blast power was MIA, the DM had me choose a different pregen. I picked the Essentials barbarian. That seemed okay, but its berserker ability wasn't explained well on the character sheet, and no powers were marked as primal (which would trigger the rage). The DM had me switch again, this time to Binwin Bronzebottom, dwarf fighter.
Well, there was no way to screw up Binwin (even though he had no ranged weapons), so that was that. Onto the adventure itself!
To my dismay, the adventure is poorly-written, and it involves a mad necromancer/nethermancer and an inn getting teleported into the Shadowfell. Fairly cheesy. We all started at the inn, in which there were some dwarves in the corner, a large and busty serving wench, a scholar, and some other NPCs that I can't name. (Greenfield?) I played the dwarfiest dwarf I could, drinking heavily (and boisterously). Meanwhile, the other players did their thing--the wizard kept bouncing colored balls of light off the wall, and the thief stole from the dwarves, and some other stuff happened--and it became clear we were supposed to investigate the ruins of the monastery because there were ghosts and dark sorcery or something.
I ran up to the scholarly fellow and yelled, "WHAT'S THIS ABOUT MONASTERIES?" The DM had me roll an Intimidate check. I didn't do very well, and the scholar charged me 5gp for the pleasure of his tour. The only real-life girl of the group (who was playing an ardent) came over and said she wanted to take the tour, too.
"IT'LL COST YOU FIVE GOLD," I shouted. The scholar informed me that the 5gp was a surcharge because my short stature would make it more difficult for him to navigate the ruins.
We went to bed and dark shadows attacked us. I think this point was a skill challenge, but Binwin Bronzebottom has no penchant for learning, so he smashed through the door and waddled down to the barroom. Everyone else joined up, and gargoyles attacked. So did shadows. ROLL INITIATIVE.
Binwin Bronzebottom was the very last to go, and the gargoyles first. The first attacked and critted, doing half my HP in damage on the first strike. The other gargoyles swarmed around us, tearing through into the other characters.
This is where I had an issue with the fighter (weaponsmaster). Because I had low initiative, I couldn't attack a monster until the end of the round. Because I couldn't attack a monster until the end of the round, I couldn't mark a monster. Because I couldn't mark a monster, I couldn't act as a defender and protect my teammates. Strongly disliked this aspect of the fighter, and I envied the knight's guardian aura that basically marked everyone around him. (The aura was also a lot simpler to use.)
Now, here came the problem with the players not understanding the conceits of 4e. I used my encounter power--covering strike--right away, because I wanted the damage boost to reduce the gargoyle's numbers right quick. The other players didn't grasp this. I tried to explain to the bard that he ought to use Ringing Strike, but he didn't "get it," and I didn't want to be That Guy, so I dropped it. The rogue didn't flank with me to get combat advantage/sneak attack, the wizard insisted on using magic missile each round, and the rest didn't do anything that I particularly remember. The poor ardent player--who knew nothing about D&D, not even how the dice worked--had to deal with the issues I faced with the battlemind, only compounded by her complete ignorance of how basic dice rolling worked. (She didn't grasp the 1d20 + modifiers or how 2d10 + 3 worked.) She defaulted to the basic attack and her healing ability.
At one point, a malign shadow started eating the rogue. He fell unconscious, so the bard ran over and attempted to make a Heal check to revive him. He failed twice (blowing an action point in the process) and finally succeeded on a third. Again, not wanting to be That Player, I didn't pressure him to use Ringing Strike to kill the shadow outright. This player also had trouble using his bard's singing abilities.
After nailing a gargoyle with covering strike (I was going to have the rogue shift to flank but he went down by that point), I finished off one gargoyle with my cleave power and smashed into another. For all the claims of "not resorting to 'I attack' each round," cleaving sure felt exactly like making an MBA, except it had something else attached to it. My thoughts were: couldn't we simplify this so that I don't have yet another power on my character sheet? I also had brash strike available, but that seemed stupid to me.
Also, due to the damage I had sustained from the gargoyle, I used my second wind as a minor action and crossed out a healing surge. As someone who has been extremely, ahem, vocal about his distaste for healing surges, I didn't actually hate this. In fact, the healing surge mechanic seemed palatable, but it did need to be renamed so it didn't suck.
Anyway, we mopped up the encounter, and the rogue almost died again due to poison (and there was some confusion about saving throws, which reinforces my irritation at tracking round-by-round stuff), at which point our allotted gametime was over, and I reflected on what I was going to write in this post. Some thoughts:
• The game is intimidating to new players. Simpler is better. Loads of mechanics to track at first level is not good; characters should "grow into" their classes as they progress.
• Round-by-round tracking needs to GTFO. Or, at the very least, be seldomly used.
• Special abilities need to do something beyond shifting numbers around. Brash strike sucks, and it will suck even more in a system of bounded accuracy. The likelihood of me caring about a +2 bonus on attack rolls is unlikely. (Likewise for "push one square.") Make mechanics feel unique and interesting. If brash strike did something like, "you get a +2 bonus and automatically crit, but your opponent gets to make a free attack against you," I might be more interested. As it stands, I don't like it.
• 4e's math seemed solid, at least at first level. Of the four attacks I made, three hit. (And I use Zocchi dice, so you know it's just not good luck.) However, I also felt that the monsters had too much HP, especially for the length of time that combat took. If I do 20 damage with an attack (especially at level one), it feels like the monster should be dead. It kind of sucks when I'm dropping that much damage and the monster is going to absorb another round or two of damage before it's toast.
