helium3
First Post
A couple of things I've noted to date:
(1) Terrain really matters. Life get's very difficult if the PC's manage to get themselves on the wrong side of some terrain. They've started figuring out that it's a bad idea to let themselves get bottlenecked in most situations. Sometimes it works to their advantage, but most times it doesn't. Right now, I have to repeat what the terrain does multiple times over the course of the encounter because they still aren't in the habit of treating terrain like it matters.
(2) The game seems to actively punish parties that try to use the standard "charge and chop" strategy of 3E. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, but I think it has to do with monsters not scaling the way they did in 3E. Now, if you see five monsters you can't just assume they'll go down real quick like and charge in.
(3) Getting dropped is still pretty lethal. If you go below zero and you don't have a second win to be triggered by a healing check, there are no potions available and the party is out of healing powers there's a good chance you're going to die. Rolling ten or below three times (doesn't have to be in a row) isn't hard to do when the only thing that stops the pain is rolling a 20. Sure you can get a DC 15 healing check to stabilize, but when the rest of the party is fighting just to stay alive, spending an action to keep another PC from dying becomes a very expensive proposition.
(4) It's very difficult to tell ahead of time that the encounter is going to swing against the party, but when it does swing it happens VERY QUICKLY. In the one "tpk" I've had so far, the party seemed to be doing okay and then two rounds later half the party had dropped. Maybe it was just the rolling, but I suspect that more importantly the party wasn't really keeping track of how they were doing and announcing that to the rest of the group. We'd gotten pretty good in 3E about being somewhat vague about status so as to reduce meta-gaming. 4E (at least as beginners) seems to assume that we'll meta-game that aspect pretty hard.
(5) There are a lot of easy to miss but very useful and important rules. I've had multiple PC's miss the "your starting hit points are you con SCORE plus the class base" rule. There's been issues with not knowing about or forgetting heal checks and there's been forgetting about using action points and not adding the various bonuses to defenses and what not you get from situational rules.
(6) PC's failing to remember that they haven't used the "we run away" per encounter power. Seriously, the game really seems to assume that the players will retreat and regroup the minute things go wrong. And seriously, why wouldn't you? If I were fighting a bunch of horrible creatures and something unexpectedly bad occured, the first thing I'd do is consider whether retreating and regrouping might be advantageous.
