Imperialus
Explorer
Well a month after the release of the corebooks and the splintering of my gaming group because of it (a few of us are also playing a Burning Wheel game) I finally sat down and played a game of 4E today.
We're a small group, consisting of a Halfling Rogue, an Eldran Wizard and a Dwarven Cleric of Kord (played by myself). We're going to be joined by a Dragonborn Paladin next week though so we'll have all the roles covered. Because the group is so small, and we're doing episodic style adventures I was doubling as the DM this week. We plan on rotating the screen around the table as inspiration strikes so everyone has a PC as well. Found it was really easy to run both a PC and a bunch of monsters at once, which was fantastic for such a small group.
We decided to run through the Kobold Hall adventure, just to get a taste for the combat system before moving on to KotS once it's done. By the time we got chargen out of the way, and dealt with the plothook to get everyone to the manor house it was 4:15 and we were only going to be able to play till around 6. I figured we'd get one encounter finished, maybe a bit of a second one before we had to call it a night on account of the BW group showing up.
We managed to get through the first 3 encounters in a little over an hour and a half and this included the time spent flipping through the books looking up condition modifiers and the like since we weren't familiar with the system. I was floored. The PC's were running around the battlefield, jockeying for position, all sorts of stuff. In the first encounter I even decided to try out the grab mechanics and managed to toss a Kobold into the goo pit. I managed it in a grand total of 3 rolls. We assumed that when the grab rules stated you could drag a guy around, I could toss him in the pit by dragging him overtop of it.
The second encounter went really fast. The wizard critted with her orb spell so I used Kords favor to give her another attack at which point she killed the kobold with a second attack. The other two dropped almost as fast.
The third encounter was a lot more tense. It was higher level than the party and there were only 3 PC's so it was a tough fight. My cleric rushed across the field and took the skull-skull stone to the head, dumping him in the pit. Then the two drakes came out and started bashing on the now unprotected rogue and wizard. The rogue used one of his powers to toss the drake down the pit with me while the wizard killed one of the slingers and a couple minions with her orb power.
Then things took a turn for the worse. My cleric took a crit from the Drake dropping him to 2 HP, used his action to spend a healing surge, and promptly got critted again dropping him to -3 HP. Fortunately the other two managed to clear the kobolds and whatnot topside and finish off the Drake in the pit before I died (I bombed the first two stabilization rolls). The wizard had (thank god) picked up the heal skill and managed to stabilize my character so the Paladin is going to walk in just in time to heal him up a bit.
All and all… chalk me up to loving 4E.
We're a small group, consisting of a Halfling Rogue, an Eldran Wizard and a Dwarven Cleric of Kord (played by myself). We're going to be joined by a Dragonborn Paladin next week though so we'll have all the roles covered. Because the group is so small, and we're doing episodic style adventures I was doubling as the DM this week. We plan on rotating the screen around the table as inspiration strikes so everyone has a PC as well. Found it was really easy to run both a PC and a bunch of monsters at once, which was fantastic for such a small group.
We decided to run through the Kobold Hall adventure, just to get a taste for the combat system before moving on to KotS once it's done. By the time we got chargen out of the way, and dealt with the plothook to get everyone to the manor house it was 4:15 and we were only going to be able to play till around 6. I figured we'd get one encounter finished, maybe a bit of a second one before we had to call it a night on account of the BW group showing up.
We managed to get through the first 3 encounters in a little over an hour and a half and this included the time spent flipping through the books looking up condition modifiers and the like since we weren't familiar with the system. I was floored. The PC's were running around the battlefield, jockeying for position, all sorts of stuff. In the first encounter I even decided to try out the grab mechanics and managed to toss a Kobold into the goo pit. I managed it in a grand total of 3 rolls. We assumed that when the grab rules stated you could drag a guy around, I could toss him in the pit by dragging him overtop of it.
The second encounter went really fast. The wizard critted with her orb spell so I used Kords favor to give her another attack at which point she killed the kobold with a second attack. The other two dropped almost as fast.
The third encounter was a lot more tense. It was higher level than the party and there were only 3 PC's so it was a tough fight. My cleric rushed across the field and took the skull-skull stone to the head, dumping him in the pit. Then the two drakes came out and started bashing on the now unprotected rogue and wizard. The rogue used one of his powers to toss the drake down the pit with me while the wizard killed one of the slingers and a couple minions with her orb power.
Then things took a turn for the worse. My cleric took a crit from the Drake dropping him to 2 HP, used his action to spend a healing surge, and promptly got critted again dropping him to -3 HP. Fortunately the other two managed to clear the kobolds and whatnot topside and finish off the Drake in the pit before I died (I bombed the first two stabilization rolls). The wizard had (thank god) picked up the heal skill and managed to stabilize my character so the Paladin is going to walk in just in time to heal him up a bit.
All and all… chalk me up to loving 4E.
