Session 1

Well, we have done it, we have finally played our first session of 4e. Three of the players have already blogged about the experience so much of what I am going to talk about here is likely to be a bit repetative.

First I want to give a brief overview of the game. We have 4 players, a Cleric, Paladin, Wizard and Ranger. They are about as iconic a party as you can get and have the perfect spread of class roles. As a small scale tactical team they have the potential to work extremely well. They are also a group of characters oozing with potential drama and conflict. Overall I am immensely pleased with the characters.

The first session was intentionally set up as a small scale exploration/dungeon delve, pretty linear without too much opportunity for the players to go "off rails". The players have been hired by the Rebellion who are anxious to recover a mythical gem from the tomb of the dead Sun God Ashura. The stone is to be used in a ritual to drive the Hounds of Shadow, supernatural agents of the Cabals secret police, out of the city.

Some may scream "railroad" and to an extent you would be right but for a first session of a totally new game I wanted to ease both myself and the players into things gently.

So, how did it go?

THE GOOD

The system is excellent. It does what I want a system to do, it mostly gets out of the way and when it does come into play things are resolved pretty quickly and easily. We referred to the books perhaps twice all night. Once I become more familiar with the rules and print out the status conditions effect page I think this will be reduced to nil.

In order to reduce player book referencing I produced a set of power cards for each character. These allow the players to see at a glance what each of their abilities do and to have pre calculated numbers for each of them. This is a great way to reduce player (in)decision time.

Combat ran smoothly, quickly and kept everyone engaged and interested in the game. Each players turn is passing so quickly that you know you will be getting a chance to act soon. We had three combats, one a small skirmish near the start which took about 15 minutes, a large battle in the Tomb Crypt which took about a hour and a 5 minute slaughter right at the end.

My players grasped the tactical issues fairly quickly. In the first fight they bottlenecked the opposition at a street entrance with the Paladin and the Cleric protecting the squishies. In the second they struggled with a teleporting bad guy and two decent ranged opponents. They managed reasonably well and only one of them went down during the fight. The third was pretty much a cakewalk.

The skill challenge system works well for us. We are used to the idea of more abstract conflict resolution and I ran with that idea adapting the skill challenge rules. I pretty much designed the entire session as an extended skill challenge including the tomb exploration. I broke it down into four scenes, getting to the tomb undetected, reaching the burial chamber, looting the gem and getting away undetected. As there was never any doubt the players would reach the burial chamber I set penalties for failure as added complications.

1. Get detected crossing the Plaza and the Cabal release Hounds of Shadow to hunt them down on their way out (increasing the DC's for scene 4).

2. Fail the tomb exploration and the spirit of Ashura would be awake and active, attacking with surprise as they enter the Tomb.

3. Fail the tomb looting phase and they wake up Ashura and have to deal with him.

4. Fail to get away after looting the gem and they are confronted by the Cabal Inquisitor and leader of the Secret Police.

Those were failure conditions for failing the challenges overall but I also set failure conditions for failing individual rolls in scenes 1, 2 and 4.

1. In the Plaza you encounter some angry ghosts or a demon patrol.

2. In the Tomb you wake some Guardian devil or blunder into a trap

4. In the getaway a Hound of Shadow tracks you down and attacks.

As we dont bother with xp I simply set the challenges at the PC's level and fix a number of successes for victory and failure as normal. I dont want to drag out these scenes with lots of dice rolling so I kept the number of successes fairly low at 2-3.

I am also a big fan of player narration so the players got to describe the scene and what happened on their successful rolls. For example, I had the Paladin and Wizard players describing how they worked together to disable glowing magical rune traps barring the entrance to the final chamber.

Props were also a very helpful part of the game experience. We had miniatures and dungeon tiles, something which is completely new to us as a group and had a blast using them. I only mapped out those areas where their was an encounter with the rest of the exploration being handled purely narratively.

The biggest plus in running this game was the sheer level of player enthusiasm. This may be simply because we havent been playing for a bit, because we are back to the same 5 people who started together 8 years ago or because we have an evocative setting generated by us all. In that time we have played a lot of games, D&D, Pendragon, Buffy, PTA, Exalted, Cthullu and others. We have had fun with all of them but I get the feeling that there is a freshness and a conherent focus about 4e which is playing to our current group desires.

THE BAD

The use of skills is excellent but it has some pitfalls. I need to make sure that I am challenging people to describe what they are doing when using their skills and to promote a bit more interaction. I need to emphasise the mechanical benefit for a decent description (+2 - 5 on the check) and make sure I push for them.

I was also a bit too free with the benefits of secondary skill use, allowing them to add +5. This probably made things too easy. In future I think this will be reduced to +2 which combined with description and the aid option should be enough secondary benefits.

I also need to remember to apply armour penalties to physical skills, especially as I effectively allow one persons stealth skill for example to apply for the group.

The props were good but we dont have enough. In particular we need some 3x3 and 5x5 templates for our Wizard player to mark his aoe effects.

I need to be much more careful about monster abilities. The group were level 1, the main encounter was a Level 4 elite and 2 normal level 4 monsters. This is within the expected encounter difficulties but might have been a bit much for a group totally new to the game. I had thought the group would have had a couple of encounters inside the tomb but they passed the skill challenge without a single failure.

The encounter was the spirit of the dead god Ashura and two of his fire balckened, skeletal priests. At one point I was worried it might be a tpk or we would lose someone (we dont do pointless random death).

When designing monsters I tend to either reskin stuff from the MM or tweak existing ones. I find myself doing a lot of level adjusting. We are aiming for a sword and sorcery genre so I want mad cultists, slavering demons, degenrate ape men and serpent priests not kobolds and goblins..

As a result I also tend to swap around monster powers and I gave Ashura quite a potent one, an aoe burst which damages and blinds his opponents and which had a recharge. I think this ability was probably pinched from a paragon tier monster so I need to be more careful as I ended up ignoring the recharge.

On the first round he gained initiative. The players had set up so the Paladin and Cleric protected the stairs with the squishies at the back of the room. Unfortuantely Ashura could teleport so he promptly moved into the middle of them, blasted away and blinded all of them! It didnt help that both Ashura and the priests also had abilities which inflicted ingoing fire damage.

At one point we decided to rename the encounter "Are you on fire" as we kept forgetting to apply the damage or make the saves.

One thing this encounter did do was to demonstrate just how important moving is in 4e. It also really helped to give my non wargamer players an excellent taste of tactical combat. While only one player went unconcious during the fight there was certainly a lot of tension in the room as the fight was a close run thing (damn that Paladin mark). At one point the players were seriosuly thinking of trying to kite Ashura around the room with Ray of Frost while the Ranger killed him at range.

THE UGLY

Nothing that comes to mind but I will wait and see how responsive the system is when I run something much more open ended in subsequent sessions. Can it survive the need to generate content on the fly? Only time will tell.