4e General First Impressions

So I got to play a proper session of 4e yesterday. This is opposed to the, supposedly, improper session I played last week. My group, separated by a couple hundred miles, plays over Skype. Skype was acting up last time due to the slow connection of one player, and so made the session not fun.

Anyway.

So the first 'real' session of Fourth Edition went pretty well. I've heard complaints from here and there about various game bits of 4e, and frankly I don't bother internalizing that sort of thing. I prefer to do something myself before I go and judge it. One thing that really struck me as different about 4e, on a fundamental level, is how differently the game plays in combat. My group has never been heavy into long conversations with NPCs, so basically the captain of the steamboat we were working for passage on lectured us about the nature of the world a while, and we sat in a bar and listened to other people apparently lecture each other on the nature of the world for a while, before attacking some goblins when we floated by a town that was getting attacked.

Ok, so at this point the PCs started actually paying attention. The Captain told us his nephew (in his twenties) was in a certain building, and that he'd be appreciative if we'd go help. The party Ranger/Rogue (Actually Ranger with one or two Rogue abilities, per 4e 'multiclassing') negotiated pay, a trifle silly given the circumstances, but eh. We marched into town and shortly were in a combat with a couple gobbos.

Now the setup was a little weird to start with. Level two party of five characters, fighting five goblins, three of which were minions, as we found out shortly. Suffice to say, it was not a terribly challenging fight. What was interesting, however, was that immediately everyone started helping each other. Now, this might sound trivial to some people, but it's a weird shift for my group. We end up, usually, by level ten or so, with a party of five individuals who act like they aren't even in a party. We've never had a team, per se. However, this time, every ability gave an ally some sort of bonus. Marks would help your ally as well as helping yourself. The goblins couldn't do what they wanted, because if they did, they'd take damage, miss terribly every time, or fail in a myriad of other ways. The teamwork surprised me, even in the stupid low-challenge first encounter.

After that, we continued down the railroad, to fight more goblins. The next group was three minions, three warrior guys of some variety (Skull splitters?) and two casters. This encounter took a while longer, but I still don't think anyone in the party was in any danger. What interested me in this encounter was the mobility everyone showed. In 3.5, combats tended to devolve, at least for fighters and their ilk, to "Ok, I swing again" at first level, to "Ok, I swing six times again" at 20th. In 4e's combat, people moved around. The goblins shifted from here to there, the players had enough HP to take an Opportunity Attack here and there for better positioning. The goblin casters could shift effects and attacks to their minions, which made it interesting to try to combat them. People were knocked prone commonly, but it wasn't unfun; you could get up and attack again readily. The combat felt much more dynamic.

The third encounter, as well as the penultimate of the evening (Which averages encounter time to roughly an hour and a half each, though that's not accurate since some were longer than others, as well as having noncombat time), was a combat against a pile of Hobgoblins, as well as their dozen minions scattering about. The party isn't built for stealth, so we ended up just running in and hitting things. The thing is, in the first round, everyone blew action points. All the minions died to our dragonborn as well as our Forgotten Realms spellsword guy. Area of effect knocked them all down. Then, everyone ganged the leader. I don't think the DM expected the number of horrible effects on the poor hobgobbo. Anyway, the combat was fast-paced, laced with teamwork and helping one another, and generally fun.

We talked to the nephew and he gave us some heirloom sword he had (Seventh level magic item, I got it as other people had decent weapons/didn't use swords), and we ended the session.

Overall take? 4e combat seems like a lot of fun, and I haven't run into the "Padded Sumo" issue I've heard people talk about. The combat was quick, fun, and generally well paced. So far, I'm fairly bully on 4e. I'll grant that from a simulationist perspective, a lot of the rules don't make sense, but the game is fun, so I'm fine with it. Just my two cents.

4e Organization

So I had the experience of creating a PC for a D&D 4e campaign recently. Our Night's Dawn Trilogy based World of Darkness game ended, somewhat abruptly, and we are on to the next game and system. I've poked through the books a few times for fourth edition, but I haven't really looked at it. After rolling up a character, I gotta say;

This book is a piece of crap.

Now don't take that as a slam against fourth edition in general. I haven't played it much. Sure, they made a lot of changes, and some of them seem to be just for the sake of making changes, but I'll reserve judgement until I've run a character to 30. You don't really know a system well enough to judge it until you've played it through and through. What I meant by the above statement is that the layout and design are awful. Simple things, like "How many powers do I start with?" are mentioned in sections that have nothing to do with powers and little to do with character creation. Information on character creation in general is spread all over the book, in nonsequential order, jumping from chapter to chapter. Nothing is fully explained in any one place, and doing the simplest of things requires looking on a half dozen pages.

God forbid you want to use the default character sheet to actually describe a character and his/her gear. There's no location on the sheet to write up mundane weapons, especially if you want something trivial like "Information about what it does" rather than just a name. There's a full column on the back of the sheet for magic items, but that doesn't help much for a first level character. Even so, it's worthless in the future because the most you can squeeze in is the item name and a page number. You expect to have space to write down what it does? Ha.

Now, with all that said, I do want to add a couple positives. The book has a lot of decent info for new players, rather than just rules. I've heard a lot of buzz about fourth edition being a miniatures game rather than a roleplaying game proper. Of course, I'll admit that most of the diplomacy is presented as rolling dice instead of talking. Bluffing, etc, the same way. Fine. However, unlike 3.x, this PHB has a large section (ten pages?) dedicated to fleshing out your character as more than an alignment and class/race combo. The book encourages you to pick a few personality traits, as well as some common mannerisms. It suggests you think about how your PC reacts to dangerous situations, and how decisive he/she is in such. That's a good thing to see, and helps new players realize that maybe it's not just WoW repackaged without a computer.

Anyway, just a shortish sort of rant/review on it. I don't care for lots of flamewars over edition changes. Play what you want to play. However, in the future, WotC should really put more effort into organization.