Alright, time for "Raiders of Oakhurst: Reloaded" redux.
I got another group of gamers together and tried to get this one played out. The group decided to do the whole adventure, not just kobold lair. It surprised me that they actually wanted to roleplay.
They did that for a bit, finding out about the town and other various things. One thing I noticed was that I felt the DCs for the information were too high - if I do this playtest again, I'm going to shift them down by 5.
The players chose the cleric, fighter, wizard, and rogue. The player of the cleric also played the ranger. The encounters were the kobolds at the farm, the skeletons in the tomb, and then Crag Keep.
The first "real" encounter was the skeletons (the kobolds at the farm was pretty easy). Before the fight, they found the trap and I let the wizard use mage hand to open the door. I liked the actual fight as well - the fighter and cleric each took one skeletal warrior, while the rogue, wizard, and ranger worked on another. Some bad rolls on the part of the ranger and wizard made them less effective. The rogue and cleric almost dropped, but a healing word by the cleric brought him up a bit, and he cast Turn Undead to great effect. Eventually the group beat them down.
The next encounter was at the Keep Crag. They dispatched the kobolds at the guard tower and tried to ambush the kobolds inside the inner building. The battle with the kobolds was a little rough (the rogue got flanked and jabbed in the back by a skirmisher). After the party killed all but one of the kobolds, the hobgoblins came down, and now the tough fight began. The hobgoblins managed the drop the rogue, knock the cleric prone, and drop the fighter. But Team Evil eventually got beat down.
I really liked how the game has played so far, as did the cleric's/ranger's player. He felt the game was pretty smooth. The wizard's player seemed unsatisfied by his power selection - he felt he was too "same-y." I guess this is similar to what others have said about "limited" choices. With multiple ways to Channel Divinity, the cleric did have more options than the other classes. But I guess it's not such a big deal to me. The rogue's player was *really* annoyed by 1-square diagonal movement. In fact, he kept making diagonal cracks all session long, saying he would never walk north, south, east or west, but would walk north-east, south-east, and so on
. He also said he had "power fatigue" by flipping his character sheet over to see what he could do. The fighter's player is a little slow, and he never really used his powers. But he said he had a good time anyways.
We'll complete the adventure next week. I printed out Xorn's Stone Table map on cardstock for the occasion (I've been wanting to pick up Skeleton Key's eVenture Tiles, and this was good practice).
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
