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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pukunui" data-source="post: 4120416" data-attributes="member: 54629">I ran this adventure for my group tonight. We had a lot of fun. There were four players. They chose the wizard, paladin, cleric and ranger.I wanted to try out the chillborn zombies, so I threw two at them in an isolated encounter at the very beginning. A bit tough. The players were rolling abysmally again (I ran the first two encounters of the Second Son adventure last week and the players just kept rolling really really badly ... the guy playing the ranger missed with his Careful Attack power so many times that he started calling it his Careless Attack instead ...). Near TPK. So we reset and went straight for the kobolds.That bit was fun. I could see how the kobolds work well together, although the slinger missed horribly both times he tried to use special shot ... Also, the PCs concentrated their fire on Varkaze when he appeared and killed him really quickly.They managed to talk to Meepo and ended up deciding that they would send him and his people back to the town to do community service ... LOL.Then they went and took on Varkaze's hobgoblin minions.I realized that there's really no incentive or hook for them to go further up the stream to encounter the dragon. It was late and the guys were starting to want to go home but I begged them to just go explore the final room ... so they decided to rest for a day to get all their stuff back and then I read out the description, complete with the pictures on the wall, and one player immediately said, "OK so where's the dragon?"Now, because it had been a day, I probably should have had the dragon sleeping on the island or something but I decided to have it in the water. She missed with both breath weapon attacks but cast her zone of darkness and then burst out of it the next round and managed to frighten all four PCs. She then disappeared back into the water and they pretty much all made their saves so they turned and ran and that was the end of it.The only real issue I had was whether or not the wizard's light spell or any of the cleric's radiant prayers would have any effect on the dragon's cloud of darkness. The guy playing the wizard hoped it might still be like 3.5, so he cast the spell on a caltrop and tossed it into the darkness. I figured it was too low-level and the dragon too powerful so I had there be no effect.Another issue was that my players are still very much in a 3.5 mindset where they pretty much all hang around near the entrance to the room and stand and fight there. Not a lot of movement going on from them. The fact that allies never seem to get in the way and there's no penalties for firing into melee and that sort of thing means they can just hang around the entrance and attack stuff at range and if one of their buddies happens to be in front of them or, shock horror, actually goes into the room to attack an enemy, it's not an issue. So that was a bit disappointing.Another thing was saving throws. They seem too easy. I can see the point of it but it just seems like unless the player (or the DM in the case of affected monsters) has really bad luck with his d20, no effects are going to stick around for more than a round or two. I'm not sure I like this.I've also noticed quite a few monster abilities (and I think some of the warlord's powers are like this too) that involve being adjacent to an ally. So despite all the talk about 4e being all about movement, it seems like 4e is also encouraging people to group together in little clumps that are perfect fireball targets ... The kobold skirmisher's "mob attack" ability and the hobgoblin soldier's "phalanx fighting" ability are two examples of this.</blockquote>

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