KOTS: The After Action Report

[AllisterH]

f)Eight pregens -- one for each class. Ideally, every race would be in there, too. Include advice on making sure the PCs picked include a healer. (What surprised me was that even with both the Warlord and the Cleric in the party, there was still a lot of damage taken. Things I've learned: What looks like low damage numbers and high hit points plays out very differently due to more frequent AOOs and higher monster counts per encounter.)

re: Module review
Even though I've been on the pro-4E camp, there was no way I was buying this module until AFTER I got the PHB.

re:Combat length
This is what I wonder about. How did you think the combat played out? Many people were worried after DDXP that combat would quickly result in "use big guns and then grind it out". Did you find the length of combat to be interesting or boring at any one point?

 

[Pelenor]

Nice review, some of your concerns mirror mine. Keeping track of marks for us seemed to be one of something of a annoyance. Combats did seem to take a while for us but we chalked it up to inexperience with the new system.

I ran one group through the first combat and the ambush. The first combat went pretty fast and wasn't much of a challenge. I suspect this was due to most of the kobold's being minions. The second combat was more of a challenge but not much of one. This I think was for two reasons, bad tactics on my part in using the kobolds and the group went after the wyrm priest immediately.

I ran a second group the next night and the first combat with that one was still not all that hard for the group. The second combat was much more dangerous. I used better tactics and the group waited until near the end of the battle before going after that wyrmpriest. The learned that letting him sit their lobbing acid orbs is a bad!!!! idea.

Then we did the combat outside the lair and that was interested but not too dangerous. The combat inside the lair was the best one of the night and was very close to the wire for the party. The used good tactis and so did I (I think I did anyway). The first wave seemed to really serve the purpose of wearing down the party until the second wave stepped in. The second wave really did come close to wiping out the party. Especially the wyrmpriest and Irontooth. They went after the wyrmpriest really fast until irontooth reach melee range. The look on their faces was priceless when the realized the amount of damage irontooth was dealing and even better the amount of damage he was taking. If I remember one of them said "you mean he isn't bloodied YET?". The consensus was that Wyrmpriests are nasty as is irontooth.

All in all what I have seen so far I like, but I hold final judgment until reading and running a few sessions with the full rules. We all did agree it has a very first editon feel to the system though.

 

[Lizard]

re:Combat length
This is what I wonder about. How did you think the combat played out? Many people were worried after DDXP that combat would quickly result in "use big guns and then grind it out". Did you find the length of combat to be interesting or boring at any one point?

Overall, I liked the general pacing of combat. What I saw -- and it's hard to say if this is due to inexperience, the particular encounters, or the basic 'feel' of 4e -- is that combat starts with the monsters ahead, pounding on the players, showing off their tricks, and using their encounter powers, and then the players regroup and begin to fight back, with the depth of their power -- more encounter powers, more at wills, etc -- turning the tide, especially if they synergize. (And by "synergize", I mean, "Let the rogue flank".) The "feel" was what I'd want from a dramatic fight -- the heroes are driven back, they hold their ground, then they push forward and triumph. Obviously, there's plenty of variables and this isn't going to be the case all the time, but the pacing worked.

Only the last fight really dragged at the end. The rogue got knocked out early and the gnome and the slinger took potshots at everyone, with the slinger rolling really, really, well. The drake guards were tough bastiches that did a lot of damage as long as there were allies nearby. Encounter powers and dailies were all gone and it was down to at-wills, and there was a sense of "Why...won't...they...DIE!" by the end of it. (Of course, we'd also been playing for about 9 hours by then, counting "learn the rules" and "let's all just beat each other up for an hour" before the actual module.)

Overall, my feelings are that the pacing was good, but not perfect; it's hard to figure out if the flaws were due to inexperience, encounter design, systemic issues, or bits of all. I won't say I can't imagine some 4e fights turning into tedious slugfests, but some 3e fights are as well. (And some Hero fights, and some GURPS fights, and....). We've all been in games where what started as a cool battle turns into a sequence of botched die rolls, repeated attacks, and long, slow, attrition.

Another problem was, of course:
Fight 1:Attacked by kobolds.
Fight 2:Attacked by kobolds.

Not the best way to show off 4e's versatility.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

a)Decide that this module is aimed at active, and especially disgruntled, 3e players. It's not intended for noobs.

I think those advices are not bad at all.

Layout is nice, its helpful. I especially like the description part in the monster entries (hint: I would like to see this in the MM)... The more sad i am that they feel incomplete or wrong.

 

[keterys]

Another problem was, of course:
Fight 1:Attacked by kobolds.
Fight 2:Attacked by kobolds.

Not the best way to show off 4e's versatility.

Completely agree - if I run it, I'm almost positive I'll be juggling around the order of some things so that it's not oh my god hordes of kobolds up front.

I also plan on substituting in a couple different kobolds of my own and a trap in the lair.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Thanks for this write up, Lizard. From what you wrote, the areas I have had some concerns about seem to have some justification.

It will be interesting to see how it all comes together once the full rules are out and people start getting much more comfortable with them.

 

[Jack99]

Very nice review Lizard, I am glad you liked 4e.

Seems to me that many of the issues your group had with 4e are linked to KotS and it's form. Maybe the core rules will convert you all .

Cheers

 

[phloog]

Thanks for the review - - I've been going back and forth on 4e, and since I had a bunch of store credits from trading in old gaming books from the 80's, one of the things I picked up was KOTS. First note that I have NOT played it yet...just read through it.

I agree with a lot in this review, and I'm afraid that for me - a player of nearly all D&D versions since 1980 or so - this module has pretty much killed off most of my desire to take the ultimate gamble and buy a set of books.

I've heard all this stuff about how they'd turned D&D into WoW, and I think that's completely off base...to me there's a bit of that, but the biggest issue for me is it felt like they turned D&D into Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

Skirmishers and artillery with flaming pots and other gimmicky bits, a high reliance on combat and the grid, etc. I could think of nothing but WFB and thought 'Did they build this encounter with 500-1000 points of Artillery from Codex: Kobold?' Where's the Kobold Big Gruntz Chieftain with the HopSplat Blunderbuzz?

Not sure how many here are familiar with the GW minifigs games, but did anyone else get that feeling from the way the encounters were structured?

I don't think the story was bad at all, but I think either 4E is too big a departure for my group, or they did it a disservice with this module. I looked over the pregenerated PCs, and found a wizard that could blast things, or blast things, or blast things, or put things to sleep - - I've heard that there's a lot of options for wizards, but this module sure didn't make that clear. I think there was also a non-combat spell, but I don't remember what it was. Lots of fiddly push you around and shift and pop stuff...seems like the whole thing falls apart without a battlemat - or more properly, without one a LOT of the powers a player might have picked get loused up, making it bad for anyone who picked a lot of 'shift' powers.

I also didn't notice a lot of stuff that wasn't pure combat. I can reasonably assume, giving WOTC as much credit as possible, that there are rules for these other 'challenges', but by not putting quite a few of them in this demo module they're asking for a fairly large leap of faith in asking me to buy the books or more modules to find out if they work or not.

All in all, I can definitely see lots of gamers liking this game, but it does feel to me like a lot of this stuff was made deliberately different to a huge degree, and perhaps only so they could escape the OGL issue - - "this is what D&D is now - that OGL stuff is some other game"

 

[Harr]

How Lizard Would Have Done It:
a)Decide that this module is aimed at active, and especially disgruntled, 3e players. It's not intended for noobs.

(... etc etc)

That would have been awesome if it had been like that.

Unfortunately, "try to make something for some people, then change it around for some other people, then change it around once again, then mix it all up in a blender and end up with a bland not-this-or-that grey-pudding that doesn't really please anyone" is more than par for the course with WotC, it's their daily operational motto as far as I can see. They really need to hire someone who knows that the term 'targetted marketing' exists, let alone what it is.

(And lemme say, this is coming from a very big fan of 4e.)

I've already got the module, read it, and immediately sat my players down and set things straight: This is a barebones COMBAT PREVIEW of 4e. No roleplaying, no making characters, no choosing powers, no selling loot, no changing equipment, no nothing of that. You can just pick a character, and fight some monsters, and see how it is. You guys wanna play like that? They said Hells Yeah. So I'm confident I've sidestepped the majority of those types of problems already. It's all about communicating.

Not that I'm reproaching Lizard in any way; quite the contrary, there's really no way to know any of this from the module itself, other than reading someone else's bad experience.

 

[william_nova]

The general consensus among the mostly-positives was "It's not D&D, but it's a fun fantasy game", which mirrors comments I've made several times based on the pre-release information. The final test will be the full ruleset, and especially the support for out-of-the-dungeon action.

Thanks for the review

People have been saying "It's not D&D" every time there have significant rule changes ever since 1977, from the basic box set to AD&D, from that to the Unearthed Arcana era, from it to 2nd edition, and certainly from 2nd to 3ed. I know people who tell me they refuse to play 3.5 b/c that's not D&D compared to 3rd.

They're all D&D. And none of them are D&D. I think what constitutes what D&D is depends on your age, the era in which you first began playing, and how inured you are to change.