skipdog172
First Post
I decided I needed to convince the players in our group that 4e combat would be fun. This is a group who has never used miniatures for D&D and most of them were opposed to the idea(primary complaint seemed to be that it took away from their "imagination"). I even had a hard time convincing our DM that does most of the campaigns to even play this adventure!
I used the following adventure called "Return of the Burning Plague" written by Chris Nightwing. You can find the adventure here.
Our characters chose a Wizard, Fighter, Paladin and Warlock as their 4 characters from the pre-made D&D Experience characters. They spent some time reading them and they seemed a bit more excited about the fact that their characters had more hitpoints than expected, as well as a decent variety of powers to use right off the bat.
After some research, I made the decision to purchase a new chessex "megamat" along with some wet-erase markers. I decided I wanted to do what I could to make our first experience with miniatures a good one. I drew up the various rooms on my brand new megamat(which worked VERY WELL btw, highly recommended!) as we went through them. As I said, this was our first time using miniatures with D&D, and we were all happy to see how quickly I was able to draw up rooms and room features on the mat. One of our concerns was that it would take a long time to set up the miniatures and draw various locations, but heck, when you already have your map printed out in front of you, it really doesn't take any time at all to draw up the room and its features!
After the first encounter, players were already warming up to the new system. I could see the excitement in their eyes! They all got to use a variety of different spells and powers as opposed to "attack him" and "well, I better not waste my magic missile so I'll just shoot my shortbow, argh".
The second encounter was a bit more dynamic, with a pack of kobolds leaping out of a pantry mid-fight with bags of flour in hand! This created some fun chaos while the wizard got to showcase his "scorching blast" power and take out three minions in one shot! The fighter was able to use his combat advantage to take some swings at the "shifty" kobolds. At this stage we couldn't figure out what kind of negative you have for shooting into melee so we just made it -2 for the rest of the adventure. Anybody know the rules on this and what the exact penalty is?
The party moved onto the third encounter. This one involved a boulder trap triggering right at the start of the fight. That one really hurt as it ended up dealing 2d6 damage to 3 of the 4 characters in the party! It sure made for an exciting encounter! There were three slingers and an archer at the top of a ledge that was only reachable via a slippery ramp(counted as difficult terrain). The fight was one of the most deadly with the wizard dropping twice during the encounter, but with the paladin managing to bring him back up with a lay on hands. They eventually trudged up the ramp and were able to assault the slingers and while doing this, more kobold minions and a warpriest showed up on the other side of the ledge! The wizard used his new favorite spell, scorching blast, and once again made short work of the minions. The warlock, who had barely rolled a single hit with his powers so far(and was a bit grumpy) decided to use his Daily Power, Curse of the Dark Dream, as the party was quite hurt, on the warpriest. This power causes your opponent to endure a "waking nightmare, where they cannot tell what is real and what is only in his mind". It also deals damage and slides the opponent three squares! He walked right off the ledge and fell 60 feet to his death, without even getting his chance to unleash some havoc on the party! That alone made the warlock feel pretty good about himself even with so many previous misses.
Since the characters had forgot to use their action points in the first three encounters thus far, I decided to give them each an action point for BOTH of the final 2 encounters.
The last 2 encounters were a bit uneventful(the wizard did go down against during the final encounter). The party ravaged some skeletons and defeated the leader with relative ease(it didn't help matters that the leader rolled 5 1-5's in a row hahaha). The party ended up using most of their healing surges when all was said and done. I felt like the encounters were quite balanced and the last 2 would have been a bit more interesting had the PCs not had action points for BOTH fights(and if the leader would have hit with some of his hugely damaging powers!).
As the game was coming to a close, the feel around the room was excitement and anticipation! Players wanted to know more about the new edition and plans were soon made to pre-order books! I was sooo very relieved that my group simply LOVED playing with miniatures. They said it didn't take away from their imagination, they all had their own images of how the fights and settings were playing out. We also noticed that combat seemed to go FASTER(contradictory to what we expected), and this was while we were looking stuff up and trying to figure certain things out. We goofed up a couple of things that we figured out by the end of the game(i.e. you can't have 2 allys on the same square and shifting is a MOVE action, not a minor action).
Overall, we had a LOT of fun. The combat was engaging, with many more combat options for all characters compared to 3.x combat. The casters got to cast spells, the melee got to do more than just "attack that one". Playing with the miniatures on the battle map gave us a more clear idea of what was going on compared to just using descriptions and not using miniatures(which resulted in some really stale combat, most turns consisted of "DM, can I hit this thing? DM, how many creatures will this fireball hit? Am I close enough to get to that orc?". Instead of all of these constant questions to the DM, we simply looked at the battle map! I almost feel bad that we never used miniatures before, but its ok, this is just another giant leap of FUN! The 4e "fears" in our group have gone away, and now we just impatiently sit and wait for the books to arrive. I think we will probably run another player-made adventure with a couple of the characters we weren't able to try, just to satisfy our urges and to hopefully get another couple potential players to give it a shot.
I also want to add that Chris Nightwing made an excellent adventure! We all had great fun, and the encounters were engaging, cinematic and balanced. Great work!!
I used the following adventure called "Return of the Burning Plague" written by Chris Nightwing. You can find the adventure here.
Our characters chose a Wizard, Fighter, Paladin and Warlock as their 4 characters from the pre-made D&D Experience characters. They spent some time reading them and they seemed a bit more excited about the fact that their characters had more hitpoints than expected, as well as a decent variety of powers to use right off the bat.
After some research, I made the decision to purchase a new chessex "megamat" along with some wet-erase markers. I decided I wanted to do what I could to make our first experience with miniatures a good one. I drew up the various rooms on my brand new megamat(which worked VERY WELL btw, highly recommended!) as we went through them. As I said, this was our first time using miniatures with D&D, and we were all happy to see how quickly I was able to draw up rooms and room features on the mat. One of our concerns was that it would take a long time to set up the miniatures and draw various locations, but heck, when you already have your map printed out in front of you, it really doesn't take any time at all to draw up the room and its features!
After the first encounter, players were already warming up to the new system. I could see the excitement in their eyes! They all got to use a variety of different spells and powers as opposed to "attack him" and "well, I better not waste my magic missile so I'll just shoot my shortbow, argh".
The second encounter was a bit more dynamic, with a pack of kobolds leaping out of a pantry mid-fight with bags of flour in hand! This created some fun chaos while the wizard got to showcase his "scorching blast" power and take out three minions in one shot! The fighter was able to use his combat advantage to take some swings at the "shifty" kobolds. At this stage we couldn't figure out what kind of negative you have for shooting into melee so we just made it -2 for the rest of the adventure. Anybody know the rules on this and what the exact penalty is?
The party moved onto the third encounter. This one involved a boulder trap triggering right at the start of the fight. That one really hurt as it ended up dealing 2d6 damage to 3 of the 4 characters in the party! It sure made for an exciting encounter! There were three slingers and an archer at the top of a ledge that was only reachable via a slippery ramp(counted as difficult terrain). The fight was one of the most deadly with the wizard dropping twice during the encounter, but with the paladin managing to bring him back up with a lay on hands. They eventually trudged up the ramp and were able to assault the slingers and while doing this, more kobold minions and a warpriest showed up on the other side of the ledge! The wizard used his new favorite spell, scorching blast, and once again made short work of the minions. The warlock, who had barely rolled a single hit with his powers so far(and was a bit grumpy) decided to use his Daily Power, Curse of the Dark Dream, as the party was quite hurt, on the warpriest. This power causes your opponent to endure a "waking nightmare, where they cannot tell what is real and what is only in his mind". It also deals damage and slides the opponent three squares! He walked right off the ledge and fell 60 feet to his death, without even getting his chance to unleash some havoc on the party! That alone made the warlock feel pretty good about himself even with so many previous misses.
Since the characters had forgot to use their action points in the first three encounters thus far, I decided to give them each an action point for BOTH of the final 2 encounters.
The last 2 encounters were a bit uneventful(the wizard did go down against during the final encounter). The party ravaged some skeletons and defeated the leader with relative ease(it didn't help matters that the leader rolled 5 1-5's in a row hahaha). The party ended up using most of their healing surges when all was said and done. I felt like the encounters were quite balanced and the last 2 would have been a bit more interesting had the PCs not had action points for BOTH fights(and if the leader would have hit with some of his hugely damaging powers!).
As the game was coming to a close, the feel around the room was excitement and anticipation! Players wanted to know more about the new edition and plans were soon made to pre-order books! I was sooo very relieved that my group simply LOVED playing with miniatures. They said it didn't take away from their imagination, they all had their own images of how the fights and settings were playing out. We also noticed that combat seemed to go FASTER(contradictory to what we expected), and this was while we were looking stuff up and trying to figure certain things out. We goofed up a couple of things that we figured out by the end of the game(i.e. you can't have 2 allys on the same square and shifting is a MOVE action, not a minor action).
Overall, we had a LOT of fun. The combat was engaging, with many more combat options for all characters compared to 3.x combat. The casters got to cast spells, the melee got to do more than just "attack that one". Playing with the miniatures on the battle map gave us a more clear idea of what was going on compared to just using descriptions and not using miniatures(which resulted in some really stale combat, most turns consisted of "DM, can I hit this thing? DM, how many creatures will this fireball hit? Am I close enough to get to that orc?". Instead of all of these constant questions to the DM, we simply looked at the battle map! I almost feel bad that we never used miniatures before, but its ok, this is just another giant leap of FUN! The 4e "fears" in our group have gone away, and now we just impatiently sit and wait for the books to arrive. I think we will probably run another player-made adventure with a couple of the characters we weren't able to try, just to satisfy our urges and to hopefully get another couple potential players to give it a shot.
I also want to add that Chris Nightwing made an excellent adventure! We all had great fun, and the encounters were engaging, cinematic and balanced. Great work!!
