D&D 4E 4E group - first time playing

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[MENTION=54846]Rechan[/MENTION]
By my ancestor's beards, love the mastiff! Woof

[MENTION=6682807]Emka[/MENTION]
First about the party composition: Let him/her play a cleric, you'll be fine. Just encourage them to take some evasion oriented class features/feats/powers, follow Rechan's advice, and if you have it check out the "Party Building" article in Dragon#394.

About the pathfinding skill challenge: Be careful here, these sorts of things can be incredibly tedious for players. Here's my thinking...

1. You need a compelling reason to run overland travel/find the path as a skill challenge. If you can't think of anything beyond "get to the destination" either handwave it or reduce it to a group skill check (where if half the PCs succeed the group succeeds...perhaps allowing multiple checks). Examples of this would be a time limit to reach the destination or needing to keep a low profile while traveling.

2. A real feeling of travel and exploration that offers a development of the story/setting. Think of this as rich descriptions coupled with mini-hazards and challenges along the way. For example, traveling through the woods the PCs might stumble upon a faerie trod and it's mischievous thieving sprites, or pitch their tents at an old ranger's camp where they find an encoded military map.

3. Lastly, as you point out, what are the consequences of failure? And, as with the loss of surges, you've also identified that it's not about whether you reach the destination but under what conditions. Generally docking surges is boring and can feel arbitrarily punitive to players (others may disagree with me here). Loss of surges is fine when piggybacked on another more interesting consequence. For example, a fight against someone you really didn't want to fight (cause they're good-aligned or extremely powerful), or an NPC suffers, or the PCs learn misinformation/are deceived, etc.

There's a lot more to running skill challenges and criticisms/fixes to the RAW skill challenge rules out there, but the above should get you by to start.

 

[GameOgre]

Create a character like a normal pc,make him good at his job but give him some background issues and foils.

A Dwarf Defender who is rather simple in aims as well as not a deep thinker comes to mind. I know that playing a party npc is not all that fun and has been abused by Bad Dm's in the past but a good DM can make it all come together just right.

Just make sure he does his job but takes a back seat to the players 85% of the time....only 15% does his own wants and needs come into play or over ride what the party wants to do. This gives him character as well as gives the party a able defender!.


If its one thing 4E needs badly its more Dwarf Tanks with 6-8 int and wis running aorund!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think docking surges is OK when the challenge is about surviving some harsh conditions. OTOH the woods around Fallcrest aren't all that harsh an environment (maybe if the PCs are lost in them in the winter, but otherwise I'd say no).

Another option would be something like if the PCs fail, then they get ambushed by a few kobolds near the entrance to the hall. You could just steal the ambush scenario from Keep on the Shadowfell, maybe even cut it back some. If they succeed, then maybe have them find the dragon's 'back door', which probably should clue them into what they're up against.

I actually thought the encounters inside the hall were pretty decent. They're not brilliant, but they are designed to introduce various mechanics. Each encounter adds a bit of depth.

Note that the stats for the White Dragon in DMG are fairly obsolete. You might want to look at the MV version.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Just a thing to remember:

there are three cleric builds, that do fine as ghetto defenders:

The Strength templar and the earth or Torm battle cleric.
The earth battle cleric, has an at will, that gives a +2 bonus to you aor an ally as an effect as an effect, which effectively is nearly as good or sometimes better than marking in a small group. The Torm domain has a little punishment abiltiy that counts as a defender mechanism. The Strength templar has some options to aquire marking twice per encounter at level 1, and an at will, that acts just as a mark, by giving a +2 bonus to all defenses while adjacent to you. So having no defender, even with a cleric in the group is not the end of the world.

One last possibility is hybridizing the templar with a fighter, which actually makes for a very very tough defender that is also able to get a great marking benefit. So all in all, your problem is very easily remedied.

 

[Rechan]

Damn. I was going to redo the White dragon using the new math and make it more interesting, but I see they did that in MV.

Threats of the Nentir Vale is mostly organizations/groups of badguys. Here's a group of bandits. Here's a group of witches. Here's a group of tiefling scoundrels. So it's focused a little more specifically, and has more heroic monsters. The MV is more generic (it's like a normal MM with a spread of various heroic and paragon monsters). If you're wondering what monster manuals you should get (since there are three MMs and two Monster Vaults), here is a thread on that.

As far as your adventure is concerned, I think one thing that would improve it would be giving players someone to talk to. I imagine that's what's different from the Ravenloft boardgame - NPCs to interact with. The players could come across a wagon that was just attacked by kobolds, and the little guys ran off with the goods, and the poor farmers are irate.

Once you get into the Hall, I think the room with the darts is boring and confusing. I still am not quite sure how that trap works. For the encounter with the dragon itself, here is a bucket of advice on how to run that encounter - stuff to put in it to make it a lot more exciting than a slugfest where everyone stands still.

If you are looking to use pre-made adventures, avoid, avoid, avoid Keep on the Shadowfell. I hear really nice things about [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Slaying-Stone-Adventure-HS1-4th/dp/0786953888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316480012&sr=8-1"]The Slaying Stone[/ame] and the adventure that comes with the Dungeon Master's Kit.

All sound and useful advice. Thanks for cooking up a Companion, we might use it if all else fails. Obviously having a player control two characters would take away the immersion, especially for new players, but desperate times and all that.

You played 3e, right? Rangers and Druids had animal companions. They ran those animal companions. So it's not very different. There's even a few 4e builds that come with a pet/companion, so it's not far off, although they differ in 4e pet classes have the pets' actions on the PC's turn, and their power is lower. But the mastiff, after all, could belong to one of the characters, and they could roleplay it.

But do what works for you.

 

[jbear]

I'llhave to disagree that running a canine companion would break immersion. It might be nice for your leader to have an agressive attacking element to be able to play as well. As Rechan says, having an animal companion is a bit different than running a second companion character.

You could even have a backstory competition; whoever writes the most creative backstory of how they came to own the dwarven trained mastiff gets to control it.It will go a veeeeery long way to balancing the dragon encounter in favour of the PCs.

As for the adventure itself, I found my players enjoyed all the encounters. The first encounter the Wizard was able to get past the portcullis with Ghost Hand. The second (if i recall correctly) had lots of fun being knocked into a slime pit til the athletes could get up onto the ledge where the kobolds were throwing the knock-down balls at them. The third with the giant ball rolling around the entire combat kept PCs moving around the whole time, again the eladrin wizard shining with a teleport up and into safety. The dragon encounter was fun, run as is. It got the drop on the PCs and stunned all but the wise ranger who had seperated herself from the group. This was very tense. But they got through it, and boy did they feel good about beating a dragon! We had played 3.5 ed. previously and the PCs had struggled to splat a few infected rats. After this fight they were singing that now they felt like real heroes. It was great!

I think for an intro-adventure, it does a real good job. Short, sweet and fun with the right touch of deadly and heroic.

Adding in a fore-story sounds like a good idea, but I think if you are going to do skill challenges you need to work on them as much, if not a touch more, to make themintersting, exciting and challenging. A start to this is to make failure meaningful. What happens to the situation when a PC fails? I always use a fail as a chance to add a new, dangerous dynamic to the situation that the PCs have to resolve before they can proceed. Three fails means they have leapt from frying pan to fire. Having a series of events ready and prepared like a pick a path book will help you "improvise" and when and if your PCs put their foot in it you have an event to throw into the mix; these elements will send your challenge in the right direction, somewhere towards fun and memorable.

 

[Emka]

I let these posts run through my head during the night and it gave me some inspiration regarding the 'issues' I'm having.

The sole purpose of adding the encounter before the actual Keep - the meeting with Valek the Rogue - was so the PCs would indeed have some social interaction before actually setting out. I know I described this as a skill challenge in my first post but in reality it's a RP experience for them; I wouldn't tell them it's a skill challenge but I would make them roll stuff like Bluff or Intimidate during the conversation if the need arises. They can avoid this alltogether tho as Valek will make some rediculous offer, like him demanding 75% of all found riches in return for the map.
The party will most likely decline this and try to get the map another way, pickpocketing during the conversation perhaps, but if the party is indeed so naive that they accept it this will open up a nice encounter later on. Valek showing up with some thugs spouting that "it's time to collect".
If they mess up the disguised skill challenge Valek would run and the PCs get another (easy) skill challenge of an urban chase. Valek will try to shake them so Perception would come in handy, as would Acrobatics to jump over obstacles in hopes of being faster than him. This skill challenge would be more obvious, giving the players choices per junction in which skill they will try.
Might they fail this as well - I would find it unlikely, as someone already pointed out failing two easy skill challenges is an accomplishment in it's own right - they could always try and find the Hall themselves.

Which brings me to some more details I thought up regarding the Tracking skill challenge. When I proposed the loss of healing surges as consequence of failure, I indeed would explain it that they have been wandering the forest for two days and being exhausted because of it. Then I thought, wait these are supposed to be hardened adventurers one of them an experienced Ranger so having to sleep in the woods wouldn't be much of a problem for them.
Adding an extra combat encounter as consequence of failure sounds like a good plan. In my introduction I could describe the forest around Fallcrest to be dangerous as is, and doubly so at night. Failing the challenge means they are taking longer than needed, i.e. till nightfall. Nasty creatures come out during the night. Suppose that fixes that and fits the setting well enough, no?

Regarding KoTS. I have read that it is not regarded as the best adventure out there; very combat heavy and not very coherent. Have any of you tried Myrhdraak's version of KoTS? Whoops! Browser Settings Incompatible
It looks like there's some fun stuff added and a lot of things tied together.

I might think up some totally different story but stealing encounters from KoTS, plopping them in the next adventure whatever that might be. First we got to tackle the Kobold Hall

 

[Rechan]

Yeah I glossed over the Valek stuff. Oops.

Let us know how Kobold Hall goes!

 

[klofft]

I just wanted to add that I am a 1st time 4ed DM using Kobold Hall also. I have only one player. We are using Skype and Maptool and instead of looking for ways to resolve the number of PC problems, my player is just running 5 characters. Not ideal for RPing obviously (though all the PCs have fully developed backgrounds and personalities anyway), but there's no "delay" in combat and its a fast way for us to learn the rules!

We've been having an absolute blast.

We started with some role-playing in Fallcrest, but I let them get to the keep without any incident.

The dart room was fun, but they moved it fairly quickly. As we have 2 1/2 ranged combatants (including an Essentials Enchanter with Hypnotism), the skirmishers couldn't really lead them well into traps.

The skull-skull room was resolved by them charging forward without giving the kobolds more than one or two occasions to use the rock (though the Enchanter got hit hard by it every time it was used).

I was a little confused about the rolling rock room, so I'm glad I read some stuff here. I wish the room description better explained why this rock keeps rolling non-stop for the whole fight (e.g., a gully in the floor). I'm assuming it gets two move actions like a creature? It's not really clear.

Finally, while we haven't done it yet, I think using the MV dragon will keep the battle from being too static, what with its rampage every turn. Looking forward to it.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

I wouldn't really worry too much about the RP encounter. Just have the stats ready just in case the PCs do something unexpected, be open to allowing them to figure out other ways to resolve the situation especially if they think outside the box, and have fun with it.

I always like my gaming sessions most when my PCs do something that I don't expect and which turn out to be really good role playing sequences. Honestly I think that's the funnest thing about DM'ing games - I can't plan for everything and I like it when players do things that make me go "wow that was cool!"