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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RealAlHazred" data-source="post: 8579417" data-attributes="member: 25818">This was more a misunderstanding than actual malice, but it still sticks in my memory. I was running games at a convention at the dawn of 4E D&D, and at one point I had to fill in a table for another DM (tables had to have a minimum of 4 players for Organized Play purposes, IIRC). It wasn't a module I was familiar with, so I thought it would be a fair game. Early in the scenario, the PCs heard a commotion in the stables of the building they were staying at, so they went out there to check. It turned out to have a bunch of undead in it. So, okay, no problem, right?The fight ended up taking the entire 4-hour slot. Afterwards, the DM chided us for not being very combat-capable. Since I was also DMing that convention, I picked up a copy of the module to see what had happened, because it was an incredibly irritating battle. The DM had made two key errors that I think came from the fact that 4E was a brand new system.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The enemies were supposed to be one "boss monster" and six "minions." In 4E, minion monsters have only a single hit point, and go down from any successful hit, or if they fail a saving throw against any damaging spell. The DM must have assumed that was a typo, because each of the 7 creatures had the full complement of the boss' hit points.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The boss monster had the ability to "raise" one of his downed minions, once during the fight. The DM must have misread this, because so long as any one creature was still up at the end of the round, the downed creatures would all stand back up at the beginning of the next round. He let this slip during one of the many rounds of the fight, that we had to down all of them in one round for the fight to end, but because he gave each of them the hit points of the boss, that was just not going to happen.</li> </ul>To my mind, the most egregious error he made was not moving the module ahead so the table could finish on-time. This fight was only the first encounter in the scenario, and the bad guys were only supposed to be there to kill the horses so nobody could outrun the Boss' forces if they fled. Even if the encounter had been designed to be that one-sided, if I was DMing I would have had the creatures withdraw once their mission was done.When I took over as director of the program a few years later, that DM was not asked back to DM 5E. He was one of the OSR track guys, and I understand he did a fine job there.</blockquote>

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