 Goto [ Index ] |
Eight years ago, I started a fresh new 3rd edition D&D game after many years hiatus, excited by the new system. I posted a playtest review after the first few months of the new campaign to give a better idea to people of how the game actually played rather than how it read. I've decided to do this again with 4th edition. I hope it is helpful.
LEAD UP
My group has been intrigued by the new version of D&D since it was announced. The announcement came at a good time, too. I had just ended by Ptolus campaign out of sheer frustration with the 3.5 version and what we heard of the new edition seemed to specifically answer every problem that I had been experiencing. When enough bits were leaked to run a sample game, I did so and everyone became excited. When Keep of the Shadowfell came out, we tried that out and started really itching for the full game. I was informed that I would have a campaign read y to go the weekend after we got our books. I began working on the campaign based on the Wizards Presents preview books and then rushed to finish it in the scant week I was given to prepare before the first game.
CAMPAIGN PREP
In order take full advantage of the new system and all of its radical design changes, I approached the campaign utterly fresh and took the advice in the Dungeon Master's Guide to heart. I decided not to use a published setting but instead to take the Points of Light approach and start by detailing a small local area and grow it out as I need to. I've found this has cut down on my prep time considerably. I used the stated guidelines for building encounters, designed the arc of the campaign around the tiers, and incorporated every suggestion I could into my plans. I used a mix of quests, combat encounters, and skill challenges and put a lot of thought into making the fights interesting by combining complementary monsters with terrain well-suited to their combat style and which would give the party opportunities for heroic and memorable maneuvers. I was very excited by the new approach to treasure: the reduced reliance on magic items for both PCs and monsters, the use of treasure parcels to even out and regulate the amount given, and the shift of focus from picking items that made sense for the monsters to have to choosing those the party could use.
I found that preparations were both much easier and enjoyable. While I had initially found 3rd edition prep to be fun, it quickly became tedious number crunching and the design focus on single-monster encounters made it much less interesting than I had hoped. I really liked the ability to add classes and templates to monsters, but it was such hard work and most of the information (like skills) was never even used while other bits (feats) were easily forgotten. None of this was the case with 4th edition, where the variety of monsters of differing levels, the simplicity and focus of their design, and the ease of applying templates made the work much faster and the expansion of encounters to focus on multiple opponents made them more varied and interesting. On top of that, the mobility of combat in the new edition made terrain much more important and combats more dynamic. Designing them became more complicated in a good way (less number crunching, more ways to make them fun and memorable).
THE FIRST SESSION
The party in my game were veterans of a war with the orcs which occurred five years ago. For the first session, I decided on a flashback to the most memorable moment of the siege of their hometown. I did it to make their shared background more vivid and give them interesting stories to tell about it and to let everyone try out their characters and make adjustments before the bulk of the campaign began. It began with the party assigned to protect a square near the main gate of the town being used as a hospital just as the orcs were threatening to break through. The first combat involved a rush of orcs intent on entering the square and slaughtering the helpless wounded. The party had positioned themselves in alleys, on rooftops, and behind carts and obstacles. When the fight got underway, it was glorious. The ranged combatants ducked from cover to cover as their enemies advanced on them. The orcs charged in blood-thirsty rage while the PCs strikers attacked them as they passed from alleys and doorways. The wizard lay down area attacks whenever their enemies bunched up and picked off stragglers with magic missiles the rest of the time. Only one orc made it to the injured parties, where the cleric made a glorious stand, pushing it back again and again to prevent it from harming anyone. The whole fight was quick, exciting, and let me try out a large group of mixed minions and regular monsters.
Once the orcs were vanquished, the party barely had time to catch their breath and regain their encounter powers before they heard cries of alarm and the keen-eyed rangers spotted a young white dragon flying over the city wall. I was excited to see how solo creatures fared and just loved that I could pit a formidable dragon (not a baby) against a 1st level party. The combat turned out extremely well. The creature strafed the most visible member of the party, the archer on the rooftop, and then landed on the roof to attack her. The rest of the party was on the ground or on a rooftop across the street. The fight was epic, the ranger leaping over allies with the dragon in pursuit as those with ranged weapons did all they could to damage it from where they were while the melee ranger scaled the side of the building to get it from behind. When it leapt down into the street to attack the now-defenseless wizard and cleric, the two-bladed ranger jumped on its back to bury his swords into it. The stunting rules proved to work extremely well and I really liked how Acrobatics and Athletics maneuvers (like climbing and jumping) folded into regular move actions rather than being the focus of a turn. It really freed up the PCs to do some daring and dramatic things and they loved retelling the story in-character.
CONTINUING SESSIONS
Eight sessions have followed, generally with four to five hours of actual gaming. So far, the dispensing of money and magic items has worked out well. The players are having a little bit of culture shock, used to the truckloads of money and magic they used to get in previous editions, but they really value the stuff they get instead of dispensing of most of it and appreciate a lot that I'm giving them items they can use rather than stuff they need to sell to buy the things they really want. My one complain is that I have found that the choice of magic items is a bit limiting. It looks like a lot of stuff, but when you take into account levels and what people are using, the choices can be a little sparse. Of course, I should be getting Adventurer's Vault today, so that should cease to be an issue. The group is gaining a level pretty much every other session, which has been satisfying to all parties. Every level generally consists of a quest and eight encounters. Usually one of the encounters is a skill challenge and one or two are dealt with without combat, but these guys like to fight and that's what I give them. Still, they surprise me and have avoided combat on a few occasions through quick thinking, diplomacy, and cunning.
THE PLAYER EXPERIENCE
The composition of the group has proven very interesting. It consists of two rangers (an elven archer and a two-blade eladrin), a human wizard, a human cleric, and human paladin. They have learned to work together very well over the course of the past three months and nobody feels like they don't have something to offer the group. Even the paladin, whose player has abyssmal luck with dice, is content with his ability to hold back the hordes and soak up damage in order to protect the rest of the party. One thing I've enjoyed is how unique each monster feels. Fighting goblins is different than fighting orcs and the players hate each type of monsters for different reasons. They have learned to shudder at the sight of a line of hobgoblins (except the wizard, who cracks out the area effects) and despise those slippery little kobolds. Everybody seems very happy with their characters. They find all of the races and classes playable and intriguing. During our initial trial games, I really loved my tiefling warlord and the dragonborn paladin and halfling rogue were highly lauded. They also really like that interesting things are easier to do. The stunting system fully supports creativity and we have one player in particularly who loves coming up with fun stuff to try. Frustrated with a shadar-kai witch they were fighting, she decided to drop her bow, grab her, and drown her in the stream she was standing in. I love that stuff. Also, as noted, non-standard movement and stuff like hiding is all just folded into the regular move actions, encouraging more charging, jumping, climbing, tumbling, and swinging on chandeliers.
THE DUNGEON MASTER EXPERIENCE
I have really enjoyed how the progression of the game has gone and how easy it is to plan it. I designed the rough arc of the campaign at the very beginning, divided in scope by tiers. My prep is generally done one level at a time and takes me two or three hours to prep for about ten hours worth of play. I have been running the monsters right out of the book, which is surprisingly feasible in this edition. In 3rd edition, I was unable to run the game without tools like DM Genie to help track stuff and crunch numbers. Now, I have a spreadsheet that I run combat out of and everything is snappy and quick. I haven't grabbed the DM Screen yet, but the Condition Summary from Keep on the Shadowfell is all I've really needed to keep out for constant reference.
It is worth noting to that, while I have been running games since I started playing twenty-five years ago, I read the Dungeon Master's Guide from cover to cover and reference it constantly while I'm prepping. It is filled with good advice, guidelines, and options. I regularly flip through the sections on terrain, hazards, traps, and templates looking for interesting new elements to add to my encounters. Thus far, there haven't been a lot of misses. The encounters I intend to be hard usually are and only a few times have bad rolls or forgetfulness on my part made an encounter easier than it was intended. So far, nobody has died, though they've been damn close a few times. I feel confident that the rules as written make it easy for me to present challenges without risking total party annihilation just through a few lucky rolls.
As for non-combat challenges, I'm liking the Skill Challenge system though I haven't decided yet if the errata DCs are too low for my liking or not. I have resisted house-ruling anything because I like to try games “out of the box” before I go fiddling, so I'm giving all the rules a chance as written. I found the published rules a tad too high, but the adjustment seems like it might be too far in the other direction. However, as they've played out so far, they seem to work well, so I may be wrong. I've used the system for a number of different things: spying on an enemy encampment, convincing NPCs to help them, putting out a raging fire during a combat, sneaking by patrols, and tracking raiders through fey-infested woods. I like that I can use a Skill Challenge standalone or fold it into an encounter and found it generally very versatile. One thing I do differently from the system is that I assign the DC level (easy, normal, hard) based on the PC's approach rather than set it depending on the skill used. So, if they make what I consider a good argument, I make their Diplomacy roll easy. If they try to browbeat and just sound lame, I make their Intimidation roll hard.
One last bit that I've been having fun with lately: Artifacts. I absolutely love how artifacts work now. I like that they aren't just epic magic items, I love the system for reflecting their purpose and goals, I really love that they can be used in any tier and that they are temporary. I just sent the party on a quest to get a powerful artifact of the Raven Queen to use against the death knight leading the army that threatens their town. I wanted it to be used by the paladin in the party, so I simply made it so it wants to be wielded by a paladin of the Raven Queen and gave a hefty bonus to its Concordance if it is. Designing it from scratch was a piece of cake. And I love that I can introduce it for use at their relatively low level and not have it be unbalancing and have it play into a cool plot and have an exit strategy.
CONCLUSION
Overall, we are in love with the new edition. My players are satisfied at being able to be heroic characters with lots of cool things to do at the get-go and have the system support all of the crazy, wonderful stuff they want to try. I am happy that my prep work is brief, interesting, and that the game is fun and easy to run. We are all looking forward to the new options that future products will bring, one of our few complaints being that we want more. More races, more classes, more builds, more magic items, more paragon paths, and more epic destinies. What we have is good for now, but we want to be playing this for a long while.
