DM’s Journal: My first 4th Edition game
Posted on : 08-04-2008 | By : Brian | In : DM's Journal, Session Reports
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Last night I had my first 4th Edition D&D game, and I’m still jazzed from it. It was fantastic. I did a lot of initial prep work before the game, probably more than I needed to because most of it hasn’t been used yet. The players approached the initial set of encounters from a completely different angle than I had anticipated. I was afraid I’d have to just wing it and throw out everything I had prepared for these encounters, but as it happens, it was easy to alter them on the fly and still use them. The first encounter, a skill challenge representing a negotiation with a crime lord’s thugs in order to gain an audience with the crime lord, himself, became instead a negotiation with a merchant who had some pull with the crime lord. Instead of the thugs simply letting the PCs pass, the merchant set up a meeting with the crime lord under false pretenses.
The second skill challenge was a negotiation with the crime lord himself. That skill challenge didn’t change all that much mechanically, but the stakes of the challenge certainly did. The PCs had decided that they were going to attack this crime lord in any case, and they wanted to try and get his guard down and make the fight a little easier. That’s what they’d get if they won the challenge. If they lost, they’d have to fight the fight as-is, a fairly tough fight. They won, so the crime lord’s lieutenant and a couple of his thugs left before the fight began.
The combats were also really easy to run, and were a lot of fun. I must say, kobolds are a blast to run. The fact that they can shift as a minor action makes them really infuriating to PCs, and allows them to sort of herd the PCs to some extent. During the fight with the kobolds, the PCs started out on a wagon while the kobolds were on the ground. I gave the PCs combat advantage for being on higher ground, and I was somewhat afraid that they’d simply stay on that wagon for the whole fight, but the kobolds managed to draw them off of it by continually moving away after attacking in melee and by peppering them with ranged attacks. It worked really, really well.
At any rate, here is a link to my wife’s Flickr page, on which are posted some photos from the event. And here is my session report, posted on the campaign wiki.
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