Since the D&D Experience hit, EN World has done an admirable job of keeping us all informed of the inner workings of 4th Edition as they are revealed. I won’t re-tread any of that. Instead, I’m going to relate my experiences running a reasonable facsimile of 4th Edition, using the aforementioned rules tidbits (by candlelight because the power was out for the first third of the session).

I thought about creating my own dungeon crawl for the occasion, but instead opted to save myself some time and use the Raiders of Oakhurst adventure that is circulating on the Interwebs. It fit my needs, and was better thought out and more thoroughly playtested than anything I could have created in the couple of hours I had to do so before my friends arrived. Three of us were present: myself, and my friends Tad and Chris. I was the DM, while each of them took control of three of the six pre-generated PCs. Tad took control of the ranger, wizard, and paladin, while Chris took the fighter, warlock, and cleric. Now, on to my observations.

1. If you’re passingly familiar with 3.0/3.5, picking up 4E requires some learning but is not that hard. Tad and Chris had played some, but not much, D&D, and while I think the vast array of powers at their disposal was overwhelming at first (a fact that was exacerbated by their control of three characters each instead of one), they learned the basics quickly. With a single character that you create yourself, it’s probably much easier.

2. The roles seem pretty well defined. The ranger and the warlock were both dealing large amounts of damage. The fighter and paladin were both soaking up a lot of attacks. The wizard was blasting foes from afar, and using a lot of area effect abilities. The cleric was bolstering his party a lot.

3. Some powers and abilities complement each other in fun ways. The ranger would frequently choose someone as his quarry and attack with a careful shot. This resulted in a +10 bonus to attack (by far the largest bonus in the group), along with a whopping 1d10 + 1d8 + 4 damage, or 6-22 for a single attack. The warlock’s curse, when combined with a well-placed eldritch blast, would frequently bring an opponent down, allowing the warlock to use misty step to teleport three spaces and gain a more advantageous position. At one point, the fighter moved adjacent to a hobgoblin archer, and his combination of abilities effectively gave him three options: use a ranged attack and provoke an opportunity attack, move away and provoke an opportunity attack (even if he shifted), or drop his bow and use his sub-par longsword attack. It’s all very good stuff when it works out well.

4. Some powers seemed like they would have been great, had they worked. In particular, I’m thinking of the ranger’s split the tree power. He gets to choose two targets to hit with his longbow, gets to roll twice, gets to take the better of the two rolls, and gets to do double weapon damage to each target. It would have been very, very effective, except that he rolled a 7 and a 3, missing completely.

5. Encounters are, in fact, pretty easy to run. Even when you don’t know all the rules. Monsters only have two or three signature abilities, which doesn’t sound like much at first blush, but winds up being plenty when you’ve got three or four different kinds of monsters on the board. Minions also allow you to have lots of critters with minimal complexity.

6. Using the environment to your advantage is a bigger deal. In the first encounter, there’s a big fire pit in the middle of the room; anyone who enters it takes 1d6 damage. At one point, the hobgoblin leader comes out into that encounter, launches a couple of spells, and retreats. The first spell that he launched allowed him to deal 2d6+4 points of damage and slide the character 3 spaces. He targeted the ranger, hit him, did significant damage, and slid him into the fire, dealing even more. The ranger hand lost 2 hit points previously to a minion attack; this attack dropped him to 0. Nasty stuff. I think the addition of push, pull, and slide effects will necessitate the design of more interesting areas to fight in, with more hazards to move enemies into. Also, on more than one occasion, the wizard used his minor action to lift a burning log from the fire pit and kill a minion with it. Clever. Not sure if it’s exactly kosher per the rules, but it was cool so I ran with it.

7. Coming up with rules for special cases is really easy. The fact that there are a few general conditions instead of a bunch of specific ones really helps. Need to move through a friend’s space? Difficult terrain. Standing up on a bed while attacking your enemies? Combat advantage. Easy peasy.

I may post more on this later. We didn’t finish the dungeon crawl, so I may post more after that, or I may add to this post as I think of additional observations. On the whole, though, I really enjoyed running my proto-4E dungeon crawl.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 12:07 am and is filed under 4th Edition, Links, Session Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.