KOTS: The After Action Report

[Wormwood]

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.

"My grandfather's axe has had three new heads, and four new handles, but it's still the same old axe."

 

[Spatula]

I only quibble with the core of your negative criticisms, which seems to be that KotS didn't provide you with the full range of options that your normal, particular game sessions offer. As others pointed out, it's a limited, preview module designed to give a (combat-oriented) taste of the coming rules. It's a sort of deluxe dungeon-delve.

It's the first adventure in the 4e "adventure path." It's B1 Into the Unknown, it's T1 Village of Hommlet, it's Sunless Citadel. It's not a combat demo, it's not a "taste." Once the rules are out in a couple of weeks, KotS will continue to be published and exist and serve as people's intro playing D&D. There's plenty of roleplaying material in the adventure, possibly more than there is in most published adventures.

Hong's point about how Sunless Citadel was similarly hobbled was an important one.

Sunless Citadel wasn't hobbled. It was released with the rules and contained the information necessary to run it.

 

[Voss]

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 am, very much so (been playing Fantasy for 20 odd years, since third edition, and 40K pretty much from release), and... no, not really. Definitely not the warhammers. You could make a fairly reasonable case for similarities to Necromunda or Mordheim, but even that is a bit of a stretch, since they are largely going the opposite way- taking the Warhammer rules and trying to make a more D&D like skirmish game.

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.

Hmm. I wouldn't say a lot of stuff, but there is definitely some non-combat stuff. There isn't a lot of direct RP stuff, but there are some hooks. Dealing with the town could have been fleshed out more... So yeah, there could have been more, but I can see why there isn't. Rules for skill challenges would have eaten even more into the space for the actual module

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"

I see too much in common with older editions of D&D to really buy this argument, plus I think its honestly better. And of course, even if they had made only minor changes to 3rd edition, they still could have changed the OGL stuff. Thats an entirely different and unrelated issue.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Well I have found the thread and the review interesting and informative. Since I have just got my hands on the module but only had a quick flick through the DM part and read the players part, I would like to throw out some general observations to various points made in the thread.

Regarding skill challanges, I don't think the module need the rules. I reckon we know enough to make a good stab at a skill challange if necessary.

We also do not need rules for rp, we should know how to do that and as for npc stats, my solution will be (my players want to play asap ) take an appropiate level commoner/expert from the 3.5 DMG have give the relevant skill as level/2 + relevant stat.

Narration of marking, I guess I see as like marking in soccer with some added http://weirdpicturearchive.com/pics/vinniejones.php] Vinnie Jones style attention grabbing.

 

[Hussar]

It's the first adventure in the 4e "adventure path." It's B1 Into the Unknown, it's T1 Village of Hommlet, it's Sunless Citadel. It's not a combat demo, it's not a "taste." Once the rules are out in a couple of weeks, KotS will continue to be published and exist and serve as people's intro playing D&D. There's plenty of roleplaying material in the adventure, possibly more than there is in most published adventures.

Sunless Citadel wasn't hobbled. It was released with the rules and contained the information necessary to run it.

Interesting that you would compare it to B1. A module with pretty much nothing but combat information. Same as B2 really.

Now, Village of Hommlet had lots and lots of information about Hommlet, but, the adventure had little or nothing to do with the town and took place in the moathouse, where there is nothing but combat. So, unless the DM started creating his own stuff about Homlet, most of that information was superfluous to the adventure.

This is a limited product. It's very limited because it has to reprint a fair bit of information from the core rules, something that neither B1 nor T1 was forced to do. Even Sunless Citadel requires the Core 3 (according to WOTC anyway, I honestly never played it). So, we do have to accept that there is limited space and they want to present the stuff that most people will have fun with, in their opinion. That means killing stuff and taking its treasure.

Again, with pregen characters, limited page count, lack of core rules, how much can you honestly expect from the module in terms of depth of role play?