My playtest results...

[Nightchilde-2]

I "playtested" using Return of the Burning Plague and the stuff we have available to us.

I like the way it plays. A lot.

I'm not too sure about running it via OpenRPG though. But then, I have to factor in that I was having a lot of technical issues on my end..error messages anytime someone moved their mini (my fault), Teamspeak kept cutting out (not my fault).

Lack of familiarity with the rules really didn't factor in all that much to be quite honest. There were almost no rules questions. This, I find, to be a good thing.

Skamos, our wizard, wasn't completely useless after three or four rounds. The cleric's healing word prayer is awesome. The tiefling racial power is just nasty.

Kobolds are vicious little bastiches that can gang up on you and bring the pain. Their ability to shift means they can come up and attack you in one round, then the next round they can shift away from you and get the hell away. At one point I had the party pinned down in a hallway/tunnel and was just wailing the crap out of the person in front (the ranger). Unfortunately, the (IMHO) most interesting battle we didn't get to.

I like the bloodied mechanic. Made it easy to tell which critters were hurt the most.

Overall, I think it was very good. Combats took more rounds, but went quicker and were less static. People (especially those shifty kobolds) were all over the battlefield.

The characters were able to take a good amount of damage (and they got hit quite a bit). It was nice not having to worry about the PCs being glass ninjas.

Also, when one of the players had to drop out due to being too sleepy, readjusting the encounter on the fly was WAY simple. "Oh, I'll just take out about 100XP worth of monsters. There. Done." Treasure, I'm sure, will be a little more difficult to adjust, but monsterwise, it's easy, breezy.

I definitely want to play it, it's just a matter of whether it's done in the OpenRPG group or the f2f group..

 

[Plane Sailing]

Kobolds are vicious little bastiches that can gang up on you and bring the pain. Their ability to shift means they can come up and attack you in one round, then the next round they can shift away from you and get the hell away.

I found this rarely came into play when I "playtested" it, because the Fighter was in the front line, and whenever a kobold attempted to shift away from him he got a free whack at it from his fighter abilities. Kobold minions died as soon as they attempted to shift!

 

[VBMEW-01]

I saw this too, and was disdained that the fighter could so easily derail the kobolds' greatest trait. But the fighter can only use his combat challenge once a round, so if there are enough kobolds around he still faces peril.

 

[med stud]

OTOH it's nice that the fighter has some real combat control. Against mainly kobolds it may be a bit out of hand, but still.

 

[Cadfan]

I see this not as kobolds being bad, but as fighters being good.

 

[Aegir]

I see this not as kobolds being bad, but as fighters being good.

Which is a nice change of pace, really.

 

[Plane Sailing]

But the fighter can only use his combat challenge once a round, so if there are enough kobolds around he still faces peril.

I think we overlooked the 'once a round' thing

 

[Connorsrpg]

Those poor kobolds were pasted in our playtest, even before the fighter could get to them

Awesome how you can have so many running around. Used all the kobolds from the playtest in same battle (though some arrived at different times)...and it felt like a lair. No to 3 here, 3 there, etc

 

[eleran]

I saw this too, and was disdained that the fighter could so easily derail the kobolds' greatest trait. But the fighter can only use his combat challenge once a round, so if there are enough kobolds around he still faces peril.

I just relooked at the Fighter's character sheet and I don't see anywhere that it says the fighter can use this ability only once per round. Where did you get that from?

 

[FireLance]

I just relooked at the Fighter's character sheet and I don't see anywhere that it says the fighter can use this ability only once per round. Where did you get that from?

It depends on whether you interpret the "immediate" in "immediate melee basic attack" to mean "at once" or "an immediate action". If the latter, you get only one immediate action per round.