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Message: <blockquote data-quote="phloog" data-source="post: 4247753" data-attributes="member: 59219">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"</blockquote>

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