My experiences with last night's D&D Encounters

[Ktulu]

I'll chime in on my thoughts on D&D encounters thus far:

I'm running one table at our FLGS and a player in my group runs the other. I have had a 90% turnout at my table all 3 weeks, where he's had about a 60% (since Wednesday a number couldn't make it, but said they'd show up next week).

As far as the module is concerned, it's decent, but I do a lot to make it more engaging (I don't use the provided map, I build a replica using dungeon tiles (3-d ones when applicable). I also provide minis for all players and monsters.

As to the skill challenge, it was very good, but needed re-organizing for me to understand it. I had to read it about 3 times to realize that 1/2 of the first part is all in a town, where the second part is exploration. Once that was done, I gave the players a large hex-map that "Fayne" gave the PC's. They could determine the direction they wanted to explore, and thus allowed them to choose their path.

The best part was easily the icy prison. I had a huge displacer beast escape and played up the Syfy pictures original element to the creature, keeping it darting in and out of the shadows. The tension was high, and most though they might have to fight it.



I really enjoy the contrast between my weekly group and these players. It's far more varied. My group consists of all of us in our mid-late 20's who've been friends for 10-20 years. The Encounters group ranges from upper 40's through the teens, and includes no less than 3 women (one of which is my wife, who's tried gaming for the first time, ever).

It's a much better implementation than their regular game-days and delves were, imo. Our gamestore never ran any of that, but we're almost up to 3 tables worth of players with Encounters.

 

[Jdvn1]

Played D&D Encounters for the first time this week (we play on the following Monday, due to GM availability).

Warning: possibly slight spoilerage

We had a really hard time with our encounter! If earlier weeks were easy, they must be making up for them now. We were playing with pregen characters--of six available pregen characters, only two are melee characters, and our party (of five) only had one melee character. So when our battle was in a small, cramped room, we had a lot of trouble avoiding OAs, and I was taken down to 1 hp in the first round of combat. I did get the reward thing for taking 50 pts of damage in one encounter, though.

I'll agree with everything else, though: the player cards were great (though, not knowing they were marker-compatible beforehand, we didn't have enough markers to go around). My Warlock card had a Paladin power printed on it, though, by mistake. A full list of skills (maybe with trained ones bolded?) would have helped the new players in the skill challenges.

Our store had two tables of players, wildly diverse (except for only one female gamer). Some had never played D&D before, some hadn't played in 20 years, some were regular RPGA'ers. I had fun and will likely be going back.

 

[D'karr]

D&D Encounters Mania

Last week was an awesome experience, but not in the usual way.

I was going to run session 3 and had 6 players signed up to play. Most people were running late due to traffic, and when the dust settled there were 9 people that wanted to play. I called one of my DM buddies to see if he was available. She was not.

So we embarked in an expedition into Undermountain with 8 players, I wasn't about to turn anyone away, but one player just could not stay. So with 8 eager PCs, four of whom had never played 4e, we ventured into the depths of Downshadow and the tunnels beyond.

I completely ended up improvising the session. The skill challenge was handled as an improvisational roleplaying encounter to try to find a knowledgeable contact in Downshadow. When they finally encountered Slick Vinny from the shady side, a cross between "Jeff Spicoli" and "Fire Marshall Bill" that seemed to work. The whole session clicked. Since there were new people to the game I also had them have a modified combat that I kind of improvised by combining some of the monsters and giving them a story.

We had a blast. Running for such a large group and 4 newbies was interesting. I had to control the flow during the combat a lot more to keep it flowing and cut on the normal side chatter that happens but we moved rapidly and kept everyone engaged.

The skill challenge at the "door" was also much more freeform. I took the conversations that the players were having as they discussed the wards and used that as the skill challenge, having them roll as appropriate.

The night was such a success that even before we tallied the Renown Points, the players were already asking when they could sign up for the next game.

This coming week I already have a second DM scheduled... I did learn my lesson... LOL

 

[MerricB]

Saturday was a confusing day. It was my regular boardgaming day in town, but I was also set up to run a session of D&D Encounters if there were people wanting to play. Yes, it might be an unsanctioned "catch-up" session or something, but I've got my hands on the adventure so I might as well run it in the local store to help D&D along. This is a program to help stores, isn't it? Besides, I'm hearing enough about non-Wednesday sessions of D&D Encounters that I might as well have fun with the adventure.

So, come late afternoon on Saturday, I've got a few people interested... and then the regular store-based group of D&D players turn up. Without their DM. Now, I would be amiss if I said I wasn't expecting this, because I was. This year, these players have been cursed by not one but two completely unreliable DMs. Things were mostly ok last year, but this year it's been a real curse. Now, I thought that they'd have a DM tonight, and that I might be able to run the D&D Encounter for some of them before their session if they were amenable. But, with no DM for them, plans changed. I quickly resolved to run the first three D&D Encounters for them. That's as far as the campaign has run, so they wouldn't be getting ahead of the world.

While I think the Wednesday-only restriction is stupid, that doesn't mean I disagree with most of the other details of the campaign. It's entirely *because* I think it's a good idea that I've been arguing against that restriction.

It helped that only Rich was there of my regular boardgaming crew; he was more than happy to play some D&D. Nathaniel was also there, but he was mostly involved in a Magic draft. There was a time when I thought we'd have to have two groups, but when the numbers boiled down there were six players, me and Nate. Nate would have liked to play, but the Magic draft had taken *far* longer than he had expected and Aimee was waiting for him. He would have stayed if we'd needed him to run an extra table, but it didn't occur.

So, I found myself DMing a table of six players: Paul, and his son Ben, Rich, Jackson, Shane and Dakota. Those last two are quite new players, but Dakota has read a bunch of Forgotten Realms stuff and bought some of the books. I used my copy of the Character Builder to create a character for him (a Genasi Swordmage). Rich had spent part of the afternoon creating a Shardmind Wizard, and then the other players took some of the pregens: Jackson a Tiefling Psion; Shane a Elf Ranger, Paul the Githzerai Monk, and Ben the Tiefling Battlemind.

We had a lot of fun. I have a few issues with how the encounters are constructed, particularly the final set of skill challenges, but overall everything worked. Jackson's Psion got killed in the first encounter, came back to life, but he dropped out of the game midway through the third challenge; I'm not quite sure if he wasn't enjoying it or was just tired. Everyone else stayed. And I'm quite happy with how it went.

The skill challenge format? Not so much. Comments inside the tags:

[sblock]The First Skill Challenge
I haven't been reading a lot of 4E adventures, but the format of the first skill challenge was close to incomprehensible. Now I've run it (poorly), I know it works, but at first blush? Urgh.

Let's look at the stat block:
Level 1
Complexity 2
Primary Skills Diplomacy, Dungeoneering, Endurance...
Secondary Skills Arcana, History...

I can use Diplomacy to get through the dungeon? Cool - can I make a Diplomacy check DM, please? No... only once you've made an Insight check...

There's quite a bit of text here describing the challenge, but it seems that half the primary skills can't be used. In fact, some of the primary skills aren't meant to be player choice at all - they trigger based on something else. For the DM, it's extremely confusing which is which, and the summary block doesn't help at all.

We need a better system for this.

Level 1
Complexity 2
Initial Skills: (Primary) Dungeoneering, (Secondary) Arcana, History, Insight
Revealed Skills: (Primary) Diplomacy, Intimidate, Streetwise.
Triggered Skills: (Primary) Endurance, Stealth, Thievery

What is actually going on? The characters are using Dungeoneering to navigate through the dungeon towards their goal (possibly with the aid of a map). Every time they make a Dungeoneering roll, the DM* then chooses one of Endurance, Stealth or Thievery to get past the challenge they've discovered. If they're clever enough to use Insight, they realise they can talk to some of the denizens to help them get past these encounters. (*: In actual fact, perhaps the players choose between Endurance and Stealth if it's a monster; the DM chooses between Trap or Monster).

In actual fact, it's quite a clever skill challenge. Unfortunately, it needs a similar explanation as to what is going on! Please, for all you adventure writers out there, skill challenges, more than anything else, need a peek behind the curtain. (I've also a feeling that limiting Dungeoneering to 3 successes is a bit low; you should be able to do this without going for help. Do you tell your players when they can't get any more successes?)

The Second Skill Challenge
Hmm. This is another clever skill challenge, but it's got its problems. This is the chief one: It's proscriptive in what skills can be used. Why is this formatted as a skill challenge again?

You need 6 successes. How can you get them?
* Two successes from Arcana
* One success from either Dungeoneering or Insight
* One success from Perception
* One success from Religion
* Two successes from Thievery

That's it: 7 possible successes for a 6 success challenge. If no-one in the group is skilled in a couple of those skills (such as Thievery), it's extremely difficult. Acrobatics and Endurance *do* help a little, but are too easily wasted on "easy" checks. It's not like the players can see which skills help and how many times they can use them, unless you're a very nice DM.

I think that these are two of the better skill challenges I've seen - especially the first one - when they've been explained properly. Unfortunately, that explanation is dreadfully lacking for the first, whilst the second is a bit too restrictive on how it's handled.
[/sblock]

On the Wizards boards, Alphastream has written a very good post on Skill Challenges in D&D Encounters with tips and advice.

This week, I hope to run a single D&D Encounter. We'll see how it goes.

Cheers!

 

[Piratecat]

I both ran and played last night, and had a lot of fun.

Running, I had a full table of six. One player had never played 4e before. Despite his hatred of psionics he played the tiefling psion, skinning it as an enchanter -- and then proceeded to miss every single attack roll for the entire evening. My group did a good job roleplaying. The combat started badly for the heroes, but finished dramatically about 4 or 5 rounds in when two players (both monks) pulled out their dailies and wiped out every single enemy in the space of about 30 seconds.

And while playing? I got to attack four times with my goliath barbarian/bard. Three of those attacks were fumbles. *sob*

 

[the Jester]

I ran a full table- the other table's worth of people were all late, so their regular dm decided to play in my session instead, leaving them all out in the cold (the first pair of them showed up as their dm's first turn in combat came up).

The monk in my group had a moment of awesome worthy of extra renown points, slaying one enemy and bloodying both of the others that were still up (including almost dropping the imp in a single blow!).

My table consisted of:

Pat (the other dm)
Dave (one of my regular campaign players)
Joe (another of my regulars)
Nathan (yet another)
Donnie (last week was his first session of 4e, he'd only played D&D a couple of times with 2ed)
Troy (this session was his first time with 4e; again, I think he maybe played some Red Box or 1e back in the day)

It was good fun; Donnie has already loudly announced his intention to buy everything D&D related in the store and it sounded like Troy plans on being a regular on Encounter Night as well. Hurray, the hobby is growing!

 

[Ktulu]

Last night's encounter was awesome. I had fewer players this week due to some flu in the area, but the fight was still quite epic.

It started out simply enough, with the sorcerer attempting to speak with the imp. The dragonborn, however, has a hatred for devil-kin and struck out at it right away.

The warlord didn't move on his turn and took a big pile o'rocks right on his head (critical hit), nearly taking him down.

Both Sorcerer and fighter earned the take 50+ pts of damage due to going all the way down, being healed back nearly all the way up (potions, second wind, and inspiring word), and going back down again.

Moment of greatness - The warlord dropped furious smash on the iron defender, granting a huge boost to the monk, then action pointed and landed guarding strike on one of the other defenders, killing it out-right. The monk then dropped cranes wings and critted, dropping the iron defender.

The party nearly died, even requiring a full round of failed healing checks to stabilize (when one character has a +2, and the other has a -1 to the check, it's scary). Thankfully, the dragonborn fighter rolled a 20 and healed, and he was able to save the sorcerer, since he actually had the heal skill.


All in all, it was easily the deadliest fight of the night. The table across from us lost all but one character.


Excited for next week.



As an aside, on Merric's talk of skill challenge:

Spoiler

I found it to be horribly documented, as well. It was easy enough to grasp once you read it about 10 times, but it was not something that could be done "on the fly".

I reordered the challenge in a word doc, using tables to make everything flow. It was a bit of typing, but once I had everything on a nice one-page format, the whole thing was pretty easy to run.

The hardest part was handling the "random rooms". I rolled ahead of time and placed the loacations on a hex-map I drew up (the one that Fayne gave them). They could choose their direction (successes would lead them to the entrance) and got some information from the people of downshadow on what lurked through each of the corridors. This gave the players a good illusion of choice and allowed me to focus on the narrative.

 

[the Jester]

The one thing that I found jarring was the treasure (which is pretty much assumed to fall into your pack in most cases) vs. the boxed text that chases you away as soon as the last bad guy falls. BAD BOXED TEXT, BAD!!















Okay, readaloud, whatever.

 

[MerricB]

Chased away after the fourth encounter? Hmm; given you can now take an extended rest, that seems sort of wrong.

Cheers!

 

[mudbunny]

The one thing that I found jarring was the treasure (which is pretty much assumed to fall into your pack in most cases) vs. the boxed text that chases you away as soon as the last bad guy falls. BAD BOXED TEXT, BAD!!

There is actually a reason for that. Over on the WotC community D&D Group, the author of the adventure explained why he did it the way that he did. According to him, it makes sense at the beginning of next week.