Last Saturday, I had the guys over for D&D. The session was mainly combat against a bunch of kobolds and a goblin. In 3rd Edition, that probably wouldn’t have been all that interesting; kobolds and goblins are, after all, basically cannon fodder under that system (unless you give them class levels). These fights, however, were a lot of fun to play out, and made for a very satisfying session. The second fight, against Irontooth and his minions, was particularly satisfying, and came dangerously close to a total party kill (it was a 6th level encounter for my 2nd level party). Through clever tactics and skillful use of their powers, however, the party managed to survive without any casualties, even if they did burn through all of their dailies and most of their healing capabilities (they had a potion left, but everyone had used their second wind, and all healing powers had been used). At any rate, it was great fun.

You can read the session report if you want to.

Ok, I’ve got some stuff in the works, not for the next full session, but for a couple of side-sessions, if you will. First of all, I’m going to run my friend Mike (playing Shava) through a little solo adventure, since he missed the first session (and thus, his character was not present). Not only will this help to get him up to par as far as XP and treasure goes, but it’ll also help to explain what he’s doing in Winterhaven and why he’s joining up with the party without just hand-waving it all. Now, Shava’s a ranger who focuses on ranged combat, so I’m going to have to be a little careful with encounter design, I think. Her defenses aren’t that high, and she doesn’t have a defender’s hit points, so I’m going to try to stick with little enemies that go down quickly and enemies that fight from a distance, like Shava. I’m also going to rely heavily on skill challenges, since Shava has a few skills to bring to bear.

The other side-session is going to come about largely because Chris (playing Chance) will be out of the country for a while starting at the end of the month. I don’t want to wait too long without anything campaign-related going on, and some of my players have echoed that desire. And, since Chance is already present in the party and I don’t want to hand-wave his presence, or have someone else play him, I think that what I’m going to do is run a one-shot in which the players play some pregens in a discrete story line that folds into the main story line. In the first session, the PCs took down the crime lord Kalder Red-Eye, but Kalder’s lieutenant, Baris, got away. I’m thinking that Baris is going to gather some guys and try to free Kalder before he gets hanged, to set up a recurring villain. Here’s the thing: my players are going to play Baris and his cronies doing the freeing. That way, I get my recurring villain, my players get to see exactly how he got away, and we all get to do some more gaming. Everybody wins!

[Edit: tags and crap.]

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.

It may be simple, and it may be something that a lot of us have been doing for decades anyway, but I absolutely love quests in 4th Edition. The fact that the DM’s guide gives really good guidelines on how much experience to award for quests at different levels, and the fact that that experience is built into the leveling system, is all really good stuff. I’ve taken to designing Quest Cards (similar to my Power Cards) to track quests for the PCs. My plan is, when they trigger a quest’s start, they get the card for that quest. It’ll have a quest name, and a basic rundown of what they have to do (vague enough to allow for multiple solutions, generally), and it’ll say whether it’s a major or minor quest. Oh, and a nice space for the PCs to take notes.

I’ve already created a number of quests for Keep on the Shadowfell, so that I can hand out carrots that draw the PCs toward the parts of the adventure that (I think) are interesting and fun. But what’s really got me excited are the personal quests. See, I gave my players homework. I told them that I wanted them each to come up with a short-term goal for their characters, and that I’d turn that goal into a minor quest. The stuff they came up with is really great, and helps to flesh out their characters quite a lot more. Even better, it gives me an inclination of what they’re interested in doing in the future, which will make it that much easier to create adventures that engage them once KotS is done. I plan on telling them that, any time they think of something important that they’d like their character to do, they can tell me and I’ll make up a personal quest for them. I think that this sort of feedback and shared storytelling is important to RPGs, and it tickles me that D&D is finally incorporating it into the core rules. If you read through the Dungeon Master’s Guide it actually becomes clear that not only are they incorporating it, they’re actively encouraging it. It’s great.

The thing that got me thinking about all this and how cool it is was actually a conversation I had with one of my players over IM. He was the only one who hadn’t given me a personal quest yet, and it kind of felt like he didn’t really have any idea who his character was, other than a race-class combination. So I pestered him about it, and he asked for help. I asked him some questions about his character, and he answered them as best he could. Eventually we came up with a quest for him (a really cool one, too), but what’s even better is that I really feel like his character has become a unique individual, completely differentiated from all the other members of that particular race-class combination. You could actually see the character growing and taking shape in between the lines of text in the IM window, and I’ve gotta say, it’s a pretty rockin’ character. (Don’t worry, I think all of you other guys have pretty rockin’ characters, too.)

I just created my first encounters in 4th Edition D&D today. I actually created a series of connected encounters: two social encounters and a combat encounter that can be avoided entirely if the social encounters go well.

The social encounters were a breeze to create, and were a lot of fun, too. The skill challenge system allows for a lot of customization, such that these two encounters, both of which are basically negotiations, have different uses for the same, and different, skills. There are a couple of things that I really like about the tools given to craft non-combat encounters. First and foremost, I love the fact that I get to reward the PCs for their choice of skills, and encourage them to pick up more skills. If you read the Player’s Handbook, it’s not immediately apparent that skills have become more important in 4th Edition. Sure, the rogue has a lot of powers that key off of skills, and some of the other classes have utility powers that improve skill use, but it almost seems like an afterthought. Until you read the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and it all clicks into place. Between skill challenges and terrain effects, there are lots of ways for a DM who is so inclined to reward skill use in 4th Edition. When crafting these encounters, I made sure to include at least one skill that each PC had, so that everyone could feel useful, but I also included some other skills that nobody has, to nudge the PCs into picking up the Skill Training feat a couple of times in the future. I love that I have a tool to do that with.

The other thing that I like about the skill challenge system is that it gives me a way to take something like a negotiation and create an actual mechanical encounter out of it, with plenty of role-playing as well as plenty of die-rolling, and an XP reward at the end. Suddenly, non-combat encounters have become just as important as combat encounters.

The combat encounter that I created took a little bit more time, but it was still pretty easy, and it really served to highlight for me the things that I like about 4th Edition encounter and monster design.

Monster design in 4th Edition is great. Monsters are tactically and thematically interesting, with mechanics that both inform and are informed by the flavor of the monster. I also really like the idea behind minions, as well as the other end of the spectrum: elites and solos. I put a bunch of minions in this encounter, a couple of standard monsters, and an elite. The fight, itself, will be big, but I don’t think it will be difficult for me to manage.

Another thing that I like about monsters in 4th Edition is that they’re really easy to customize. Only one of the monsters that I used in the fight is straight out of the monster manual. The others have all be tweaked in some way. For the elite, I took a different elite, changed out some powers and characteristics, and reduced its level to be more in line with a 1st-level party. There are four different monster types in the fight, three of which have been customized, and it took me maybe 20 to 30 minutes to do the customization work for all three. Not too bad, really, when you compare it to 3rd Edition.

Something that I really like about encounter design in general is that terrain is a lot more important than it used to be. There are some really fantastic rules for creating terrain in the DM’s guide, and the DCs and Damage by Level chart on page 42 is absolutely invaluable for scattering all kinds of improvised attacks around the encounter for the PCs to make use of.

All in all, I’m very happy with encounter design in 4th Edition. There’s some work involved, but it feels like you get a lot of bang for your buck. And, truth to be told, I find the work to be a lot of fun in and of itself.