Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Heselbine" data-source="post: 4268490" data-attributes="member: 64878">I thought I would indulge myself and post a report on my first KotS session. A little background first.The players are using four of the DDXP pregens - Skamos, Corrin, Erais and Riardon. I've already run two previous adventures - a kobold caves adventure and a zombie-fest. Both went well.For KotS I added in Kathra, the dwarf fighter, to round them out a little. We played through the first encounter on the road and the players absolutely breezed through it. Despite carefully preparing, somehow I managed to forget that kobold dragonshields get the extra shift ability - I got confused with the normal kobold shift ability. I wonder whether that seriously impacted the encounter? I suspect it may have done a little. In any case, I'll remember it next time.What was really nice, though, after all this emphasis on combat and balancing power and character builds and stuff, the players then got down to some serious role-playing. Don't get me wrong - I love the tactical combat stuff - but it was thoroughly refreshing that most of the session was spent wandering around Winterhaven interacting with the characters. I turned getting past the guards at the inner gate into a level 1 skill challenge, and they loved it.For the next session, we'll all have the books. I want to give them the opportunity to start new characters, so what we've agreed is that the existing characters are going to be wiped out in some spectacular and interesting way, leaving the new adventurers to come in and sort things out. This is helped by the fact that Skamos' player wants to continue running him, so there will be a little bit of continuity.So, as I suspected, D&D 4e makes little difference to the role-playing aspects of the game. In fact they're a little enhanced by skill challenges and quests. I've been a bit bemused at times by the huge emphasis on these boards on combinations and balance and so on - as an old-time player I don't necessarily expect everything to balance perfectly, and I would rather hope that some players are taking sub-optimal choices sometimes simply because they suit their character.</blockquote>

Verification