Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DeusExMachina" data-source="post: 4150549" data-attributes="member: 61405">Playtest of the Stone TableSo yesterday I tried out the Stone Table area from Oakhurst Reloaded for my first 4e trial session. We spend about an hour going over the rules and characters with my 6 players (so we had a full party) and then entered the cave. The ranger rolled extremely high on his stealth check while going up ahead and scouted out the 4 minions sitting around the fire, but did not find Ichi hiding out around the corner. Anyway, the rest of the aprty showed up and they managed to get a surprise round in.The fighter charged in and with cleave took down 2 minions, the other 2 went down in the same turn. The apaldin found Ichi Ichi and charged him, making it impossible for the kobold to ring the gong or us ethe caltrops. The wizard then disabled the gong.Then the next 4 minions showed up from the next round (I said they heard the battle going on) and the skirmisher and slinger from the area on the left. These went down in about 2 rounds and kind of made me wonder about minions and how many you exactly need for them to have some effect. Anyway, that battle was over with the kobolds having done only 10 damage in total or so.With a little exploring the ranger found one of the family quarters and told the rest. The warlock then went in and while the fighter blocked the door to keep the paladin from going in, the warlock proceeded to kill them all. So this nearly enede up in a party fight, but I just ruled that the paladinw ouldn't hurt the fighter while trying to get past him, but should just roll athletics vs fortitude to try and shoulder the fighter out of the way and save the last few kobolds. Unfortunately he succeeded in this too late.Meanwhile the ranger had found the other family quarters and managed to guide all of the females and young out while the rest was focused on the paladin/fighter argument.All in all I kind of liked this interaction.Anyway, we then went on to the next area, which was the shrine with the Kobold priest Morro andhis guards. This battle went totally different from the first one. First of all they split their forces to engage Morro and his guards in the shrine as well as the 2 guards in the guard room. Unfortunately for the players, I rolled extremely high in initiative and managed to get the priest to use his AoE power on 3 characters in the hallway and then block the hallway with a Dragonshield Soldier. It took a bit of time before the fighter could effectively use his Tide of Iron to move the Soldier so the rest of the party could get in and in the meantime the priest kept throwing orbs and doing some severe damage.Anyway, eventually the party did manage to do some damage, kill a few kobolds and drove Morro and one last kobold slinger back into Meepo's throne room. The fighter enthusiastically followed and promptly went down as Meepo started shotting his crossbow to deadly effect (I don't think I missed a single time with him). The rest of the party followed and started a series of very unlucky rolls. The kobold priest, stuck at 5 hitpoints, managed to survive at least another 8 rounds while everybody missed (the warlock even missed 11 attack rolls in a row). Ix the spider jumped around and chewed down on the party as well, while Meepo still usedhis crossbow while standing on his throne. The wizard then used his daily (sleep) and managed to hit Meepo, who fell asleep the next round and stayed asleep for 2 or 3 rounds, making combat a lot easier for a little while. However, the party was running out of second wind/healingwords/lay on hands and after a while our cleric died after a vicious bite of Ix (dealing 13 damage). Seeing how the battle wasn't going well for the party, they began to retreat, leaving the body of the dead cleric and the body of the dying fighter behind.This was the sign for Meepo to overeagerly take out his rapier and charge in, hoping to drive off the invaders. However, the paladin still had his daily left and whacked Meepo down to 5 hitpoints with it, who then promptly surrendered.They regrouped, stabilized the fighter and interrogated Meepo (though not very well), taking his items away from him, while he spilled his guts about the hobgoblins (but not the dragon) and then begged not to be killed. The party ran him out of the cave and yelled at him to never come back or they'd take care of him permanently.Anyway, at this time it was close to dinnertime (that second battle took a long time), so we decided to quit and kind of see what we liked and didn't like.First of all most of the players were enthusiastic about it. They felt the game flowed smoothly, that it was more tactical than 3.x and in general more fun.One of the players who is now running a heavily houseruled 3.5 campaign immediately wanted to convert it to 4e, but we put that on hold until we have the complete rules (we are at level 10 in that campaign and with all the houserules and homebrew classes it'll be impossible to convert it now).People liked the way the new classes worked. The wizard seemed genuinely excited about being able to use scorching burst at will, the fighter liked that even the fighter had tactical movement and attack options and the ranger did an awesome amount of damage during the battle.Some of the more controversial rules like 1-1-1 movement, healing surges and martial dailies seemed absolutely no problem for them and they took it mostly as is and enjoyed it.Only the paladin didn't seem to have much fun, which is probably two fold. Firstly he is not a very tactical thinker, so 4e might be less his cup of tea than for the others. I also think he hated getting stuck with the halfling paladin (usually plays evil sorceresses and such), but he'll probably come around when he gets to play a warlock or something like that.Also the ranger didn't like being a striker that much, but then he's probably one of the few people who likes playing a Tank in WoW and he is now enamoured with the abilities of the Fighter class and will probably play one of those.A thing I did notice was that even the starting room seemed fairly small with 6 characters and 8 kobolds running around in it. There wasn't a lot of room to maneuver and even if there was everybody could get pretty much everywhere with only 1 move action. This also meant that all the pushing/sliding/pulling wasn't very effective just yet, but maybe that will change in the other areas of this dungeon (like near the waterfall, or the room with the chasm and bridge in it).I think that if I keep playing with 6 players I will need to make the rooms a fair bit larger than the ones on the Stone Table map, but I ordered a Megamap from Paizo, which should allow me to take care of that.All in all we had a great time and are probably going to continue our Stone Table run in a few weeks and hopefully make it to the end then. In the meantime I think I made quite a few converts to 4e D&D.</blockquote>

Verification