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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paka" data-source="post: 4290294" data-attributes="member: 100"><a href="http://judd-sonofbert.livejournal.com/388591.html" target="_blank">From my lj post about last night's game </a>We played 4e last night and it was fun. I didn't have a full grip on my kewl powerz just yet but I think I've got it now.We fought our own shadows that gained evil intent from a mostly buried Statue of Liberty size lich idol with glowing blue eyes after I talked mad <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> and prayed to the Raven Queen while staring the big guy down. That battle was rough for the rest of the group and Jeff had some serious wiff factor going on.Kobolds settled the area, a ruined city, formerly ruled by the Blue Lich Czars in days of old. This city is where our refugees were going to settle and I just felt odd going into the tunnels and slaughtering the bastards. So, it was a prolonged skill challenge before they agreed to keep to the tunnels and we'd keep to the above-ground.I think Bret was thinking it would be us fighting lots of kobolds and I certainly wanted some fights but slaughtering the folks who were here before us felt wrong, even to my unaligned paladin.After that we hired a kobold shepherd (giant fire belching beetles) to take us deep underground, to places the kobolds fear. We took on skeleton soldiers and their captain and really slammed the bastards hard. At one point I really got myself good and surrounded in order to rack up the bonuses (my Paladin get's +1 for every enemy surrounding him) but the party prevailed.There was other stuff: giant rocks falling from the sky that was kept away by the Blue Lich Czar's still active magics, a temple where the Kobolds had settled that had statues of Vecna, Orcus and the Raven Queen all together (gasp!) and Jeff's Dragonborn PC playing uncle to the hatchlings.Thoughts:Combat is really fun and dynamic. There is way more movement than I remember in 3.0 combat and Bob's Warlord is nifty as hell; he really makes a support position fun.The Skill Challenges are cool. I'm curious to read through the books more carefully in the next week and just get a better grip on the text. We played out our Skill Challenges very much like a funky Duel of Wits and Bret was cool about keeping the narration fresh so our ideas on how to succeed didn't stagnate.From what I did read of the Skill Challenges, I'm not thrilled with the advice or the examples but more on that with a more careful reading, complete with its own post dedicated to just this topic. In short, saying that DM's should be flexible and allow players to be imaginative about which skills they use is cool, saying some skills are auto-failures is not so cool.I'm a hero. If I want to try to intimidate the Duke, let me roll the dice and have my damned shot.Bret made up the shadow monsters and the skeleton combat encounters pretty much on the fly.I think we threw a real wrench in his works by not attacking the kobolds. We're just not the type of group to grope around looking for the Dungeon Master's adventure and Bret rolled with it well and the game helped him create fast and fun combats.Playing with D&D mythos toys is just damned fun. I like Bret's sense of play with the setting and the sense that these awful monsters from the MM are traipsing around, wreaking havoc. We have our work cut out for us.</blockquote>

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