Darrin Drader
Explorer
I was one of the early skeptics. I didn't want to adopt because I have a 3rd edition collection that takes up most of a room in my house, and I wasn't too keen on having to ditch the old to make room for the new. Well, not really. I wouldn't ditch the old, but it becomes a lot less useful to me if I'm not playing 3.x anymore. Add to that all the months of my life that I've given up designing stuff for 3.x, and I was just more than a little grumpy about the whole thing.
However, given the fact that I do keep an open mind about things, I decided to try Keep on the Shadowfell on Friday night. I normally run games, but this time I wanted to experience things on the player side of the screen. One of the guys from my usual gaming group, who also runs events at the local FLGS ran the game.
I admit that my bias going in was that I didn't expect to like it. With all of the things I've read about it, there were elements of it that just seemed to me like they weren't D&D anymore. So I took the dwarven fighter (I named him Tordek, as a means of honoring my much missed 3rd edition), my wife took the halfling rogue named Ling, my friend John took the wizard (named him Johnny Magic.... he really needs to work on his character naming), and finally we used the tiefling warlord, and I forget the name we gave him. We soon started referring to Ling as Lidda-Ling.
So we went through the attack on the roadside with little difficulty. We were a bit beat up, but what do you expect from first level characters? The mechanics were easy to choose on the fly, easy to reference, and actually quite enjoyable. The thing that immediately occurred to me is that combat did indeed seem more dynamic than 3rd edition. This was a good sign.
Combat did seem as though it was taking just as long as in 3.x though. The main difference is that rather than arguing about how the mechanics worked, we were spending that time rolling dice and moving the game along. I think that with a little more practice, we can probably squeeze more than three combat encounters into a five hour session.
There were a couple spots where we found some equipment and wanted to use it, but the DM couldn't find the weapon stats in the adventure, and since we don't have those pirated PDFs that are floating around, I instead deferred to the 3.5 PHP to decide what the values should be. I think they were close enough.
But that brings me to another point. I realized as we were playing that it will probably be fairly easy to translate 3.5 adventures into 4th edition. A few things would need to be reclculated, but based on what I've heard, I don't think it will take long to do those conversions.
Getting back to the game, before the end of the night, all of our characters had gone down for the count at least once, and we did lose Lidda-Ling, as well as Mr.Warlord. Fortunately the DM let us res them after we got back to town. It was cool that there were attacks available that would allow a character to do a lot of damage. I used my per-day encounter a couple of times.
Overall, I give 4th edition a big thumbs up. I'm looking forward to our next session and it will be interesting to see how things play at higher level.
However, given the fact that I do keep an open mind about things, I decided to try Keep on the Shadowfell on Friday night. I normally run games, but this time I wanted to experience things on the player side of the screen. One of the guys from my usual gaming group, who also runs events at the local FLGS ran the game.
I admit that my bias going in was that I didn't expect to like it. With all of the things I've read about it, there were elements of it that just seemed to me like they weren't D&D anymore. So I took the dwarven fighter (I named him Tordek, as a means of honoring my much missed 3rd edition), my wife took the halfling rogue named Ling, my friend John took the wizard (named him Johnny Magic.... he really needs to work on his character naming), and finally we used the tiefling warlord, and I forget the name we gave him. We soon started referring to Ling as Lidda-Ling.
So we went through the attack on the roadside with little difficulty. We were a bit beat up, but what do you expect from first level characters? The mechanics were easy to choose on the fly, easy to reference, and actually quite enjoyable. The thing that immediately occurred to me is that combat did indeed seem more dynamic than 3rd edition. This was a good sign.
Combat did seem as though it was taking just as long as in 3.x though. The main difference is that rather than arguing about how the mechanics worked, we were spending that time rolling dice and moving the game along. I think that with a little more practice, we can probably squeeze more than three combat encounters into a five hour session.
There were a couple spots where we found some equipment and wanted to use it, but the DM couldn't find the weapon stats in the adventure, and since we don't have those pirated PDFs that are floating around, I instead deferred to the 3.5 PHP to decide what the values should be. I think they were close enough.
But that brings me to another point. I realized as we were playing that it will probably be fairly easy to translate 3.5 adventures into 4th edition. A few things would need to be reclculated, but based on what I've heard, I don't think it will take long to do those conversions.
Getting back to the game, before the end of the night, all of our characters had gone down for the count at least once, and we did lose Lidda-Ling, as well as Mr.Warlord. Fortunately the DM let us res them after we got back to town. It was cool that there were attacks available that would allow a character to do a lot of damage. I used my per-day encounter a couple of times.
Overall, I give 4th edition a big thumbs up. I'm looking forward to our next session and it will be interesting to see how things play at higher level.
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