I ended up posting this on boardgame geek, and I thought folks might be interested in some thoughts on the system after I've run half of KotS:
Ran the first half of Keep on the Shadowfell last night. There's a quickstart, but it obviously can't cover everything, so I'm intuiting a few rules based on educated guesses. Generally however, I'm pretty impressed. As others have said, there will probably be some bumps to smooth over as 3.5 smoothed out 3.0's.
I've always played DnD as a story set around action/fighting setpieces (not to say this is the only way or the "right" way to play DnD, just how my friends and I have always played), and the combats in 4e are just really fun for players and the DM. Characters and monsters have lots of cool tactical options.
The elimination of save or die/suck spells and effects was a great idea. Especially at higher levels, there are so many 3.5 combats in which a party member is killed (or effectively removed from combat) in the first round and may as well go fire up the XBox because it's going to be 90 minutes before they are needed again. In 4e your character may go down or die, but its going to be towards the end of the fight. Characters are tougher and have many more healing options.
Is it "realistic"? Not really, but I don't particularly care. If I wanted something that felt more "realistic" I'd be playing GURPS or something.
Perhaps most important: My wife actually played and enjoyed it. I attempted to get her into 3.5 a number of times with groups of our friends and she was just lost, mechanics wise. With 4e, she was able to look at her character sheet and see, right there, what her character could do, without having to look up a bunch of stuff in books.
This is even better for the DM. Sure experienced 3.5 players are going to know their character's powers well enough that they will only rarely have to look anything up, but unless a DM is using the same monsters over and over, he'll constantly have to be looking up monster special abilities, spell effects, etc. In 4e, once you know the basic mechanics and have a list of conditions (stunned, dazed, prone, etc) and their effects, you don't really need much else.
I tried to run a couple of 3 and 3.5 games, and frankly, I just couldn't hack it. I felt constantly bogged down in details, always having to look things up. I felt more comfortable running the 4e game, even though I haven't even seen a full set of rules and have to adjudicate on the fly.
Wow. That was supposed to be a couple sentences, and it turned into kind of a rant. Suffice to say I like it. Fortunately, pretty much my whole group feels the same.
Ran the first half of Keep on the Shadowfell last night. There's a quickstart, but it obviously can't cover everything, so I'm intuiting a few rules based on educated guesses. Generally however, I'm pretty impressed. As others have said, there will probably be some bumps to smooth over as 3.5 smoothed out 3.0's.
I've always played DnD as a story set around action/fighting setpieces (not to say this is the only way or the "right" way to play DnD, just how my friends and I have always played), and the combats in 4e are just really fun for players and the DM. Characters and monsters have lots of cool tactical options.
The elimination of save or die/suck spells and effects was a great idea. Especially at higher levels, there are so many 3.5 combats in which a party member is killed (or effectively removed from combat) in the first round and may as well go fire up the XBox because it's going to be 90 minutes before they are needed again. In 4e your character may go down or die, but its going to be towards the end of the fight. Characters are tougher and have many more healing options.
Is it "realistic"? Not really, but I don't particularly care. If I wanted something that felt more "realistic" I'd be playing GURPS or something.
Perhaps most important: My wife actually played and enjoyed it. I attempted to get her into 3.5 a number of times with groups of our friends and she was just lost, mechanics wise. With 4e, she was able to look at her character sheet and see, right there, what her character could do, without having to look up a bunch of stuff in books.
This is even better for the DM. Sure experienced 3.5 players are going to know their character's powers well enough that they will only rarely have to look anything up, but unless a DM is using the same monsters over and over, he'll constantly have to be looking up monster special abilities, spell effects, etc. In 4e, once you know the basic mechanics and have a list of conditions (stunned, dazed, prone, etc) and their effects, you don't really need much else.
I tried to run a couple of 3 and 3.5 games, and frankly, I just couldn't hack it. I felt constantly bogged down in details, always having to look things up. I felt more comfortable running the 4e game, even though I haven't even seen a full set of rules and have to adjudicate on the fly.
Wow. That was supposed to be a couple sentences, and it turned into kind of a rant. Suffice to say I like it. Fortunately, pretty much my whole group feels the same.
