Why did he shine? It was a combination of a couple of different things. First, the encounter took place in a canyon of sorts, surrounded on most sides by twenty-foot-tall bluffs covered in thorny brambles. The enemies could fly from bluff to bluff, and attacked from atop them. Because only a few of the pre-generated PCs have ranged attacks, we had to get a little creative in order to take the fight to the bad guys.

The second reason was the DM. I played with a DM I had never played with, a guy named Andrew (I think; DM, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry if I’ve gotten your name wrong), and Andrew is my kind of DM. The DMGs talk about saying “yes” to your players, and Andrew really takes that advice to heart: if something has the potential to be awesome, he’ll let you try it. And in most cases, it was, indeed, awesome.

We were ambushed by some goblins (I think they were goblins; they were dressed in bone armor that disguised their features, and they may have been some Dark Sun equivalent to goblins, if goblins don’t exist in Dark Sun. I’ll just call them goblins.) and their pet drake. The goblins had flying contraptions strapped to their backs that allowed them to glide from bluff to bluff and the drake could, of course, fly. The combat started with the drake flying overhead, dropping a rope on our supplies, and landing on a nearby bluff. One of the goblins had the other end of the rope, and it was clear that they were going to try to steal our stuff.

The party quickly set out trying to attack the goblins, but I took a slightly different tactic: I picked up the rope and gave it a good, hard yank. The DM liked this idea, gave me an Athletics check (which I succeeded, what with my +9 to Athletics and all), and the goblin was pulled off the bluff and to his death (he was a minion). I then proceeded to use my move action to climb the bluff with the drake at the top, taking an opportunity attack and some damage from the brambles. The drake, however, flew away, back to one of the goblins, so I couldn’t attack it.

However, the goblin passed the drake another rope, so it was clear that they were going to make another attempt on our supplies. As such, I decided to prepare a trap for the drake. I backed up, to give myself a running start, and readied an action. My plan was to wait until the drake was over our supplies, about ten feet from the edge of the bluff, then charge forward, jump, and grab onto the drake. Andrew thought that was awesome, so he let me give it a try. And you know what? I succeeded. I grabbed the startled drake in mid-air, then twisted us as we fell so that I landed on top of the drake, minimizing my damage and maximizing its.

On its turn, the drake tried (and failed) to escape my grab. On my turn, I stood up, got a good hold on the drake, and then spun it around and slammed it into the bramble-covered wall of the nearby bluff. An ally then quickly finished it off.

Later, I spotted an archer on top of a bluff. I climbed a nearby bluff (failing my Athletics roll slightly, my first failed roll so far), and it cost me more movement than I had anticipated. No big deal. I traded my standard for a move to get into position, then spent my action point to charge, jump, and perform a flying tackle on the goblin archer. Andrew liked it and, once again, I pulled it off, knocking him prone, grabbing him, and landing on top of him. On his turn, he tried (and failed) to escape. On my turn, I picked him up, hurled him off the cliff, into the brambles on the side of an adjacent bluff, and that, combined with the falling damage he took when he hit the ground, killed him. Awesome.

At this point there were only two goblins left, both of them curse-chanters of some sort. They were both on the largest bluff, and there was a ten-foot gap between me and them. No problem. I leaped over the gap and, finally, drew my weapon and charged. And missed. Go figure, I finally make a normal weapon attack and I miss. The goblin tried to escape, though, provoking opportunity attacks while flying from both me and the party’s thri-kreen battlemind. We both hit, and because Yuka has Combat Agility, my hit knocked the goblin prone, causing him to fall out of the air and onto the ground below. The fall didn’t kill him, but our ardent did shortly afterward.

The DM, and the party, responded really well to all of my improvised actions. It helps that I only made two bad rolls the entire encounter; trying crazy things and pulling them off definitely encourages you to try crazy things in the future. And you know what? It encourages others to try crazy things, too. At one point, the ardent tried to make a lasso out of the rope and yank one of the goblins off the ledge. She didn’t quite make it, but at least she tried. At another point, the other fighter (also Yuka; we had seven at our table last night), knocked a guy off the cliff with Combat Agility, then used his shift to drop down on top of the enemy. The DM liked it, and ruled that all of Yuka number two’s falling damage would be transferred to the goblin that broke his fall.

It was a great session, and it really highlighted the fact that the system is capable of handling a wide variety of off-the-wall actions, not just what’s contained in your power cards. It also highlighted that, when the DM is inclined to say “yes” to awesome improvised actions, the game becomes more awesome for everybody.

At the end of the night, another player told me that one of his goals as a DM is to become better at handling improvised actions like that. I let him in on a dirty little secret: sometimes, you just let things happen and don’t worry about the rules. If one of my players wants to do something really, really cool, I’ll say, “give it a try, here’s the skill you need to roll.” The secret? Sometimes I don’t care what the result is. With these kinds of actions, sometimes I don’t bother setting a DC beforehand. I wait, I see what the PC rolled, and if it seems high enough, I go with it. Sometimes “high enough” doesn’t need to be all that high, if the action is cool enough. Because really, there’s nothing that takes the wind out of your sails more than trying something really cool and botching the roll. That kind of failure discourages future improvisation, and I’d rather there be more improvisation at the table than less. So, sometimes I hand-wave it.

This session was, in my opinion, a whole lot of fun. The encounters really clicked, and forced the players to really work together and use all of their resources.

The first encounter was actually meant to be two encounters but, as it turned out, the players split the party and were forced to play through two encounters simultaneously. The trap was great, and the beholder gauth complimented it extremely well. The puzzle in the other room was also good, though I had to allow the players to make some Insight checks to realize that they already had a clue for solving it (the cryptic piece of leather). The fact that the piece of leather and the only person in the party who spoke Goblin was trapped in a different room made things more interesting. I did allow the players to make Insight checks on their turns to get to look at the translation of the runes and the leather clue for five seconds apiece, which helped.

In the end, I decided to end the encounter once the puzzle was solved rather than playing it out to its conclusion. If I had played it out, the puzzle would not have deactivated the trap or gotten rid of any of the monsters, the encounter would have lasted for an hour or two more (it had already been about an hour and a half), and I don’t think it would have been as satisfying for the players. I saw an opportunity to allow them to feel like they’d really accomplished something, so I went with the Rule of Cool and let it happen.

The fight with the Tyrant was really hard for them, and was pretty brutal, which is just as a solo encounter should be, in my opinion. A beholder is something to be feared, and I think my players were pretty worried toward the end. Kryagin had gotten reduced below 0 twice, Chance had been downed once, and Sredni had been downed once (by Kragyin, actually, under the command of the Tyrant and with a damage bonus that Sredni, himself, had granted to Kraygin. Seriously. You can’t make this shit up.), and the party was pretty low on healing. I think they were glad that they had been storing up healing potions for so long. At 7th level, healing potions become sort of a last resort because you don’t get as much bang for your healing surge as most other healing powers will give you. However, when you’ve blown your second wind, your warlord and paladin and multiclass bard are all out of healing abilities, and you’re close to 0, you can’t afford to be that picky and you start drinking those potions and getting the hit points that you can out of them.

I ended this encounter early, too, because the players had already done 300 points of damage to the Tyrant and I saw the writing on the wall. However, I’m a little dissatisfied with the way I ended it. My reasoning was that the beholder would retreat because staying would mean certain death even if the PCs were killed (it was taking ongoing 20 damage at this point, that it couldn’t save against, because of the dimensional seal), and because self preservation is important to intelligent creatures like beholders. Also, I like recurring villains. However, I think the Tyrant’s retreat at a time when the players were not certain in their victory seemed a little artificial, a little bit like a deus ex machina. In retrospect, I wish I had simply had the beholder die the next time it took damage. It would have been a less obvious early end to the encounter and probably would have been more satisfying to the players.

I do, however, think that the players are going to have to get used to villains that don’t fight to the death, and who flee to fight another day.

For those who are interested, I will be posting the stats for the Tyrant and some guidelines for the encounter within the next couple of days.

I tried out the Renown Point system, and my players really seemed to like it. It didn’t overcomplicate things, and it’s always nice to be rewarded. I do think I need to adjust some of the reward values and tweak a few of the Renown achievements.

The second mechanic that I tried out was a system for allied characters, which was a big hit. The party now has group of nine NPCs (one of them a dire wolf) following them around and crewing their new airship, which I think they really like. They’ve gotten somewhat attached to a few of the NPCs, and I think they like having an entourage.

About an hour into it, though, when we had only succeeded in killing off the minions, it started to dawn on us that maybe things weren’t going so well. Then, people started to drop. The cleric, to her credit, managed to resuscitate us pretty regularly; I went into negatives at least three times over the course of the encounter. But when our only defender–a dwarven paladin–got completely obliterated, taken from being up and fighting to flat-out dead in one blow, we knew we were in trouble. There was no bringing him back, and the rest of us were pretty squishy.

I think we made some tactical blunders during the encounter. We spent too much time fighting the myconid guards, who were soaking up a lot of our strikers’ damage. They were, being myconids, shunting that damage off onto the myconid rot priests in the back ranks, who were just regenerating it since they weren’t being attacked. What we should have done was focus our strikers on them first; they would have gone done pretty quickly if we had, which would have made the guards easier to take out.

There was also the matter of a green slime. The slime wasn’t tough, but it kept on engulfing people, meaning it was taking half damage most of the time. We didn’t spend enough time attacking it when it wasn’t engulfing someone, choosing to react to its attacks rather than take a more proactive approach, which probably would have killed it quickly.

We also hung out in the hallway rather than going into the room and trying things out. I understand that there were some explody tables in the room that we could have made use of, and though the thought occurred to me (I used a very similar technique in my own campaign), we never really capitalized on it.

At any rate, Ash, my longtooth shifter seeker, has been brutally killed by fungus-people. I’ve decided that I’m going to make a different sort of character this time around and, rather than just making a character that I think is interesting, I’m going to try to make a character that benefits the party in a specific way.

I have two characters in mind right now. The first is Rafe, a genasi warlord. He’s the kind of character who stays at range (like my seeker), but I built him to maximize party damage output. He’s a resourceful warlord, meaning that when an ally succeeds with an action point attack, they get +4 damage. Add to this the fact that every single attack power I gave him (yes, every single one) grants at least a +4 to damage to someone (if not everyone), and I think our damage woes will be in the past. He’ll encourage people to focus fire on one target, and take that target out quickly.

The second character is Bulwark, a warforged fighter. I built him for extreme durability with pretty good damage output, going with the battlerager build for the temporary hit points it gave me. He’s got a pretty good AC at 18, but he can get as many as 6 temporary hit points from a successful attack with one of his powers, and a successful attack with any of his powers will net him 3 temporary hit points. Warforged resolve doesn’t hurt, either.

So, I’ll tell you how it goes. Hopefully one of these characters will prove to be a little more valuable, and a little harder to kill.

It was a good session, and ended with a dragon fight. It was my first dragon fight, and I learned a few things. First, dragons are complex to run, and it’s easy to forget some of their abilities. Second, dragons should be mobile; I made the mistake of having the dragon stay relatively stationary, and I think the encounter suffered as a result. Third, go easy on extremely debilitating conditions. The dragon was using a lot of darkness-themed powers, causing players to be blinded a lot. There were also some minions that I had created that immobilized the PCs with one attack, and with the other slid them and dazed them. The tactic I kept using was to slide a PC into the water, after which he would be dazed and have to spend his entire turn getting out of the water. This was effective at locking down certain PCs and keeping them from attacking the dragon. I don’t think it was that fun for those PCs.

In general, I think that conditions like blinded, stunned, dazed, and immobilized should be used sparingly; maybe one or two monsters in the group should be doing those things, and not every turn. The problem is, because those effects are fairly powerful, attacks that utilize them tend not to do that much damage. Because of this, you wind up with an encounter that is long and potentially frustrating to the players, but doesn’t make them feel like they’re ever in that much danger. I think it’s probably a better idea to use those kinds of abilities as window-dressing to harry one or two powerful PCs, and to focus more on monsters that have the potential to hit really hard. I’d rather have a quick encounter that makes the players afraid for their characters’ lives than a long one that doesn’t.

The first encounter of the session was just a fairly straightforward fight against some gnolls. It was fun, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The second encounter was where things got interesting. I’ll set it up for you.

The players were tasked by some druids to go and investigate a clearing that was imbued with an otherworldly presence. They got to the clearing, which contained a circle of standing stones, and saw that there was a large glyph on the ground in the center of the stone circle. Shortly afterward, some floating balls of light descended and attacked.

Ok, so the glyph was a prophecy mark, an idea that I lifted from Eberron. The balls of light were custom creatures called ‘prophecy motes’, and they didn’t so much attack as try to make you understand the prophecy, forcibly. The motes, themselves, were minions, and they had a ranged attack that did some psychic damage and dazed the target. The trick was that, if you killed a prophecy mote, two more appeared on their next turn. I had set this combat up so that a straightforward fight would not win the day; there was simply no way to beat it through strength of arms alone. In a way, the encounter was kind of a puzzle, and the players figured this out very quickly.

As soon as they saw additional prophecy motes appear, they decided to investigate the prophecy mark. I hadn’t anticipated how closely they would investigate it (they tried to read it), but I had enough prepared that I was able to easily improvise. And this really highlights one of the most useful rules of DMing that I’ve learned: whenever possible, say ‘yes’.

‘Can I read the prophecy mark?’ Sure. Here’s what you manage to decipher. And that allowed me to drop clues as to the nature of the mark. The players soon figured out that they were supposed to enter the mark, which they did, thus succeeding the encounter. It was a lot of fun.

The third and final encounter was actually two planned encounters that wound up happening concurrently because of the way the players planned out their ambush. They were trying to catch an assassin in the act of killing the Lord Warden of Fallcrest, and they all hid around the manor and laid in wait. It was a tough encounter–three elites and a solo, all of them higher level than the PCs–but I never really intended for it to continue until one side was dead. In this encounter, both sides had very specific goals. The PCs wanted to catch the assassin and save the Lord Warden, while the bad guys wanted to assassinate their target and escape. It became a very tense affair, with the fighter holding off the three elites downstairs (fade assassins, custom creatures modeled after the myrdraal of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) and everyone else focusing on the assassin and his target.

In the end, the assassin succeeded and escaped, and this highlights something else: recurring villains. I love recurring villains, mainly because I feel that players will get attached to their dislike of those villains. You don’t want every villain to be a recurring villain; that makes the players feel like they can’t seem to stop anyone for good. But if you do want a recurring villain, you can do a lot worse than use a solo and have him escape when he’s bloodied. If you’re going to do that, make sure he’s got an escape contingency. My assassin (Judgement, a warforged former avenger of the Raven Queen) had a long-range teleport ability that would take him 20 squares, provided he ended in an area of darkness or dim light. Because it was dark outside, he was able to teleport out the window and escape precisely when I needed him to. The reaction I got from my players was priceless; I can tell they really have a vested interest in stopping Judgement now, or at least confronting him again.

The recent session got me thinking about some stuff. One fight in particular, the one where the PCs were attacked by undead creatures, gave me some insight as far as what is and isn’t fun for solo monsters. I used a solo monster in that fight, a zombie abomination from an RPGA adventure (I got it from the Compendium). I used the monster as written, and I ran into some issues. First, it’s probably important to use a solo that is the same level as the party. This solo was a level behind, and its attack bonuses just weren’t up to par. Actually, I’m not sure why its attack bonuses were so low. It had trouble landing any hits on the part, and at one point it was marked by Chance, but in order to hit him it literally had to roll a natural 20. The abomination wound up being a big sack of hit points, but not really much of a credible threat.

Another issue with the abomination is its Rise Again power; basically, when the abomination is killed, it gets back up on the following round with half its max hit points. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this power; the zombie hulk from the monster manual has the same power. In the case of the zombie hulk, I think it’s okay. The hulk is a standard monster, with 88 hit points, meaning it’ll rise again with 44; a group with two strikers (like mine) should be able to take that out in a round or two, so you get some dramatic tension when it gets back up, but it doesn’t drag the combat out too much. With the abomination, though, has 232 hit points, so it gets back up with 116; that’s a lot of extra hit points. What I found is that the power made the combat drag on a little too long, after the party’s victory was already a foregone conclusion. In general, I think it’s a bad idea to give solos, and maybe even elites, abilities that make them harder to hit or give them too many hit points. You want them to last for a while, but you don’t want them to overstay their welcome or make the combat drag. Solos should also have pretty good attack bonuses, so that they actually feel like a big threat. As it was, I think the forsaken shell did more damage than the zombie abomination did.

I’ve also been reading the new Eberron Campaign Guide, and I’m definitely going to be stealing some ideas from it for my campaign. You may already have seen some of that in the newest session report, in my mention of a druidic sect known as the Wardens of the Wood. In that case, it’s basically just a name I liked, but there are other, more significant things that I’ll be borrowing and adapting for the campaign. Just wait and see.

The first fight of the day yesterday was against some hobgoblins (including a warcaster) and a cave troll. The party did a lot of planning going into it, and they wanted to try to bluff their way past the encounter. I ad-libbed a skill challenge, which they succeeded, and while they didn’t get to avoid the fight entirely, they did reduce the number of enemies they had to fight and they got a surprise round before the enemies got a chance to react. I thought that this fight would be very, very difficult. The cave troll, after all, is a level 7 brute with 99 hit points and regeneration 10; I thought he’d really give the guys a run for their money. Add to that the fact that there were other enemies to contend with, including a warcaster who I put in the fight specifically so he could throw PCs down a well in the middle of the room, and I figured it would be a challenge. I underestimated my party.

There were five hobgoblin minions, a hobgoblin soldier, the warcaster, and the troll. Sredni managed to push the soldier down the well by the first full round of combat, which did some damage and managed to delay the soldier for the rest of the fight (which only lasted 3 rounds plus the surprise round). The warcaster tried to throw Sredni down after the soldier but missed, and was brutally killed by Sredni, Chance, and Shava in a single round. Kraygin tied up the minions (as he’s very good at doing), taking them all out with a single dose of dragon breath (yes, that’s five enemies dead as the result of a single minor action). Then the party ganged up on the troll. Through judicious use of alchemist’s acid, a critical hit, and action points spent all around, the party managed to reduce the troll from 99 hit points to 15 in a single round, as well as negate its regeneration for a round. On the second round they dropped it, and Sredni finished it off with a coup-de-grace with his flaming glaive. Then they dropped the troll’s body down the well, on top of the hobgoblin soldier who had almost climbed all the way out. I think the troll managed to do about 20 points of damage total, and never got to use the ability that I put it in the fight for in the first place, the ability to pick PCs up and smack other PCs with them.

The PCs then proceeded to knock out two more encounters without taking a short rest between them; they knew they would be safe to take an extended rest once this part of the keep was cleared out (the defenders were running pretty low on healing surges), so they blew all their remaining dailies, which made the fights a lot easier.

Some things that I took away from this session, that I’ll have to keep in mind for future encounters:

Kragyin: this guy is a serious minion destroyer. If I want my minions to last more than a round or two, I need to keep them away from him, and keep them spread out instead of clumped up. If he manages to get into the thick of a minion mob, that mob will be dead very soon. Also, Kraygin is capable of some very impressive damage, so he’s almost like having a third striker in the party. That means I need to start using more solos, probably, in conjunction with other enemies.

Shava: she can really dish out the damage. Shava routinely does 15-20 points of damage per round, and probably gets critical hits more often than anyone else in the group. On a crit, with a single at-will attack, she can deal 2d6+18 points of damage, assuming she’s not getting additional bonuses from Sredni.

Silus: like Shava, this boy is a damage-dealing machine. He’s also a very slippery bugger. Between shadow walk and his cloak of distortion, he’s often imposing an attack penalty of -2 to -7 on his enemies. If they get close, he’s got a couple of powers that allow him to teleport out of Dodge. If he can’t, he’s got as many hit points and healing surges as Kraygin does, because of his high Constitution. He almost never uses those healing surges though, because he’s easily the least tempting target of the group.

Chance: boy is this guy durable. High AC plus lots of hit points and healing surges, and he’s got tons of self-healing abilities. Aside from second wind, he’s got lay on hands that he can use twice per day (either on himself or someone else), and warforged resolve is just a fantastic encounter power. He’s got improved warforged resolve, which grants him extra temporary hit points when he uses the power, and he generally waits until he’s bloodied to use it. He can go from bloodied to damn near full hit points with a single minor action. Also, when he charges he’s pretty devastating. He’s got a vanguard warhammer, which deals +1d8 when he charges, so he charges as often as he can. I can’t wait to see him fight some undead now that he’s leveled up. Between holy strike and cleansing challenge (both of which are nice abilities that deal radiant damage), he should mop them up pretty quickly.

Sredni: warlords may not have the healing capabilities of clerics, but they hand out bonuses like candy. The group loves to use action points because Sredni grants them a +5 bonus to damage when they hit, or some temporary hit points when they miss. That’s one of the reasons that the troll went down so quickly; almost everyone burned an action point on it. He’s also got several powers that grant either attack or damage bonuses, or temporary hit points. Add to that his wizard powers and, between him, Kraygin, and Silus, they’ve got the controller role pretty much filled. Minions just don’t stand a chance. Neither do brutes for that matter.

[Edit: dodge = Dodge]

In other news, I bought and subsequently read the Monster Manual 2, which was fantastic as expected. More so than in any previous edition, I love reading monster books in 4E. There are some great beasties in this book, and some returning classics like the frost giant, metallic dragons (which are all unaligned rather than good or lawful good), and (yay) the rust monster. I recommend this book highly.

Kraygin was once a two-handed weapon fighter. He still uses a halberd, but he ditched the +1 to attack with two-handed weapons in favor of the battlerager vigor class feature, and he swapped out reaping strike (4 damage on a miss) for crushing surge (has the invigorating keyword, which grants temporary hit points on a hit). Basically, now Kraygin gets a temporary hit point every time he gets hit with a melee or close attack, and he gets a temporary hit point every time he hits with crushing surge, and his temporary hit points from crushing surge (and any other invigorating powers) stack with all of his other temporary hit points. Oh, and he downgraded to chain mail, so now he gets a +2 damage bonus whenever he has temporary hit points. The net effect is that Kraygin’s AC is a point lower than it would be, but he compensates by being more durable, and he’s definitely leaning toward striker as a secondary role. He’s got a halberd, which is a pretty high-damage weapon. If he’s bloodied, he gets a +1 to attack (dragonborn fury) and a +2 to damage (dragonborn frenzy); if he also has temporary hit points (which he frequently does), that becomes a +4 to damage, for a total of 1d10+8 damage on a basic attack. If he uses his daily, villain’s menace, on an enemy, against that enemy he’d be at +3 attack and +8 damage (1d10+12). Pretty darned good, if you ask me. The image that this inspires is a warrior who thrives on battle and laughs at pain, who is at his peak when the chips are down and he’s running on pure adrenaline. Kraygin might want to think about picking up blinding smash as an encounter power at level 3, and depending on what you get from multiclassing into barbarian, he might want to do that eventually.

Shava used to be an archery ranger, but has dropped the archery combat style and prime shot in order to pick up beast mastery, along with a predatory bird as a companion. This bird gives her some nice versatility; she can use it to more carefully select her quarry by positioning it near her intended target, and if she’s in a sticky situation where she can’t get out of melee with an opponent, her companion can swoop in and attack for her (and deal hunter’s quarry damage to boot). Shava wants to play up the ranger’s connection to nature, so she may or may not multiclass into a primal class later on. Now, she still uses ranged attacks primarily, and her Strength isn’t that high, so many of the beast-themed powers won’t be all that useful to her, unless they’re powers that allow her beast to attack rather than her.

Sredni Vashtar, the warlord, used to have the tactical presence class feature, but traded it in for resourceful presence. Before, any time an ally spent an action point, that ally got a +1 to the attack roll. Now, they get a +4 to the damage roll if they hit, or 3 temporary hit points if they miss. The nice thing about this is that either is helpful, and it makes Sredni and Kraygin a great team because Kraygin either increases his already high damage bonus, or gets some temporary hit points, which are arguable much more useful to him than to anyone else. Sredni also traded out furious smash (4 damage, and a bonus to an ally’s damage) for opening shove, a much cooler power (in my opinion) that allows him to push an enemy and allow an ally to either attack or shift 4 squares. Between opening shove, wolf pack tactics, and knight’s move, Sredni has lots of powers that allow his allies to move around when it’s not their turn. Between resourceful presence and bastion of defense, he’s got lots of stuff that can grant temporary hit points.

Chance is the least changed character, mainly because he didn’t really have any new options available to him. He dropped bolstering strike because his Charisma is lower than his Strength (it’s a Charisma-based power), and it grants him only 1 temporary hit point when he uses it because of his relatively low Wisdom, making it a trade-off that’s usually not worth it. In its place he took valiant strike, an Strength-based power that grants him a +1 to attack for each enemy adjacent to him. This makes him a great defender, because it encourages him to really mix it up with big groups of bad guys. He’s got a pretty high AC, being the only party member who uses a shield (a magic shield, no less), and it might be to his advantage to make it even higher by picking up some plate mail. There’s also a feat that he’s got his eye on, cleansing challange, that makes to so that every time he uses his divine challenge power on an undead creature, he deals 2 radiant damage to it. This would be a good way to improve the party’s general offense against undead creatures, and would make Chance great at killing minions; even though divine challenge can be used only once per round, being able to automatically kill one undead minion per round with a minor action and no attack roll, as long as its within 5 squares, is pretty darned potent.

You can read the session report if you want to.

Second, I recently downloaded the beta version of the D&D Character Builder. I have to say, it’s very impressive. The program makes it really easy to make D&D characters, and it’s fantastic how they’ve got content from Dragon and other published products, like the Adventurer’s Vault right in there for you to use, even if you don’t own the physical product. It’ll automatically generate a character sheet for your character, which you can customize to a pretty great degree, and it’ll generate power cards, magic item cards, and reference cards for you, too. It’s pretty sweet.

It isn’t perfect, though; there are a few things it could use. The ability to create your own items would be really nice, since most DMs are going to be giving their PCs various things that aren’t in any published product. I’m not even talking about new weapons or magic items here; the ability to give a PC an item like “an old, tattered journal” or “a necklace depicting a skull with ram’s horns” would be fantastic. Similarly, it would be nice if you could edit the text in the character sheet and power cards. Most of it is pretty good, and there’s a lot of auto-calculation (though there could be more), but I would like to be able to type in my own notes in various places. There are also some issues with the personalized information that it puts on your power cards. The ranger’s Twin Strike, for example, allows you to attack with both your primary weapon and your off-hand weapon, but the power card only includes an attack bonus and damage for your primary weapon. It would be nice if your off-hand weapon were included, or if you could type that in yourself. Since many of the ranger’s powers allow you to attack with two weapons, this seems like a glaring omission.

It is, however, still in beta, and there’s time for it to be tweaked still. As it stands, even with a few things missing, it is a fantastic product, and when the full version comes out, I’ll be really happy to be a D&D Insider subscriber.

Settlers of Catan was the first game I played, and it was the second time I had played it. It was fun. I like the strategy of the game; even if you’re unfamiliar with it, strategies have a way of revealing themselves to you as you play. I got a settlement near some sheep early on, and also got a sheep-trading port. Through some lucky die rolls, I wound up getting tons and tons of sheep, which I promptly traded for resources that I needed more. I feel like maybe I should have bought a few more development cards, and I ultimately lost, but I had fun and I’d like to play again.

The Great Brain Robbery is a game that I actually own, and have played a couple of times before. It’s a fun diversion about zombies in the wild west robbing a passenger train full of government cheese (as zombies sometimes do). I like the game, but I think I’d get pretty tired of it if I played it too much. Still, it was a fun time.

Royal Turf is a game about betting on horse racing. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it at first, but it actually turned out to be a good little game. There’s a significant luck component with the racing of the actual horses, as well as some strategy and bluffing involved with the actual betting. Do you bet on the stable horse, or the crazy horse? Should you bet on the horse in first position, or maybe one further back that’s a bit faster sometimes?

The highlight of the night, however, was Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game, which we played twice. I’ve been wanting to play this game for a while now, and I was extremely excited to actually get to. On the first play through we had the full six players (two zombie players and four hero players); I played on the side of the heroes. We played the “Save the Townsfolk” scenario, in which the heroes have to survive the night with at least four townsfolk cards between them. We won, primarily I think because the zombies made some tactical errors (which was probably because nobody had ever played the game before), in that the horded their cards. Card-hording is a great strategy if you’re a hero, but for zombies, you generally want to use as many of your cards as you possibly can every turn, because your hand will be fully replenished at the beginning of your next turn.

In the second game we only had three players. I played as the zombies, while my to friends played as two heroes each. This game, I think, was more satisfying because we were more used to the rules. It was definitely more of a challenge for the heroes. We played the “Escape in the Truck” scenario, which encourages holing up in one location a lot less than “Save the Townsfolk” does. Also unlike the first scenario, if the time limit runs out, the zombies win rather than the heroes winning, so the heroes are fighting the clock. I had some good spawning rolls in the beginning, and wound up with my full compliment of zombies by the second or third round. I also burned through my cards as quickly as I could, and discarded cards that I couldn’t use immediately, and I think that helped a lot. There was one rule that I think we played incorrectly. According to the rules, I believe, any time a hero player loses his last hero, that hero returns as a zombie hero. We were playing such that every hero death resulted in a zombie hero, which I think was incorrect with two hero players (but would have been correct with four). I’m not entirely sure it influenced the outcome of the game, as there are numerous cards that I discarded that would have possibly netted me zombie heroes anyway, and I was killing heroes off at a prodigious rate without a lot of help from my zombie heroes. In the beginning, it seemed that the heroes might win, because the drew Keys and Gasoline right away (both items that they needed to bring to the truck in order to escape). However, I had some lucky card draws and managed to mob the truck and drive the heroes with the pertinent items into a building, then proceeded to corner them and kill them off one by one, forcing them to discard their keys and gasoline. In the end, I won because the round limit expired before the heroes could escape. We had also managed to go through every single hero character, with only two remaining heroes at the end of the game. It was a very good time, and I fully intend to buy this game as soon as I can; I can’t wait to play it again.

Session Two: The Road to Winterhaven

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.

There were four PCs: a fighter, a paladin, a ranger, and a warlock. They were approaching an enemy encampment at night time, from the cover of the shadows, effectively attacking from ambush. However, they were outnumbered in a fairly significant way. On the enemy side were two soldiers with halberds and crossbows, four skirmishers with maces, a pair of skeleton warriors, and Keltis Doran, an evil cleric of sorts (statistically, he was a hybrid of the hobgoblin warcaster and the kobold wyrmpriest, a controller-leader).

At first, the PCs seemed to be doing really well. The two defenders were drawing most of the attacks and weathering them pretty well, while the two strikers were attacking from range and dealing decent damage. However, things started to go against the players when the paladin fell, after being flanked and cornered by a pair of skirmishers and a skeleton (lots of sneak attack damage, and those skeletons have ridiculous attack bonuses; I actually wonder if those bonuses are correct). Shortly after the paladin fell, the warlock was taken down by a soldier and a skirmisher, even though the warlock had brought a lot of abilities to bear on them in an attempt to survive. That soldier simply did too much damage, and the warlock also got dazed for a round by the skirmisher, which didn’t help.

While all this had been happening, the ranger had been engaging in a ranged duel-cum-game of cat-and-mouse with Keltis Doran, while the fighter was soaking up attacks from a pair of skirmishers, a soldier, and a skeleton. The fighter actually managed to kill all of his opponents eventually, and the ranger bloodied Doran after a few rounds. The fighter ran to assist the ranger, but unfortunately all the bad guys who had taken out the paladin and warlock were new rounding on the remaining heroes. They took a few more out in the process (including Doran), but eventually the fighter fell, leaving the poor ranger to contend with a halberd-wielding soldier and his skirmisher ally–the only two enemies remaining. If the ranger hadn’t used Split the Tree earlier in the fight, he might have actually been able to take them out (assuming he stayed relatively mobile) and rescue his companions. As it was, though, a single strike of the halberd was all that was needed to sap his remaining hit points, and the party perished.

I learned some things from this game. One is that you have to be very careful when designing an encounter. There’s a fine line between “exciting and deadly” and “too damn deadly”, and as the DM you have to be careful not to cross it. I suspect that having experience point values for all of the monsters and experience point budgets for your encounters will help this considerably, though.

Another thing I learned is that, if the party leaves out a single role, it’s not a huge deal. If they leave out two, though, things can get hairy. Every character used his or her second wind, and the paladin burned through all of his Lay on Hands uses just trying to keep himself alive. If a cleric had been present, he might have survived longer, which would have helped everyone. Similarly, a well-placed Turn Undead, Force Orb, Acid Arrow, or Sleep would have done wonders for the heroes. When all you have is defenders and strikers, you have to be extra careful.

My last thought was that I maybe started the PCs a little too far away from where I wanted the fight to happen. The battlefield was pretty big, and I had included a lot of usable terrain. There was a field of crumbling columns that could be used for cover at the cost of movement. There were crumbling walls everywhere that could have been pushed over onto enemies. There was even a big fire that enemies could have been pushed into by the fighter, or by the warlock’s Curse of the Dark Dream, or even the paladin or ranger using a bull rush. Most of this stuff didn’t get used, though, because the players let the bad guys come to them, and most of this terrain was in their camp rather than where the players were.

So, in the end, I think this TPK–my first TPK, incidentally–came about as a result of some mistakes on my part in designing the encounter and some party design mistakes as well. Most of these things could probably have been avoided if a.) I knew the rules for designing a good encounter; and b.) I had known which of the six PCs were going to be in the party, and could have designed it with them in mind.

1. Re-purposing monsters is easy. I mean, really easy. On the one hand, monsters are pretty distinct from each other, and each have unique “schticks” that differentiate them. On the other hand, it’s easy to alter those schticks a little bit, change their flavor, and leave most of the mechanics the same in order to create a monster that feels different to the PCs but takes very little work to create. Many of the creatures that my PCs fought were re-purposed in this way, largely because they were fighting a lot of ratmen, and ratmen do not appear in any of the leaked 4E monster documents. A goblin picador became a ratman lasher, complete with barbed whip. An orc raider became a ratman mutant, using claws instead of a battle-axe but attacking twice as quickly (though they never actually got to this encounter). The hobgoblin warcaster became a human mage, a cult leader of considerable oomph. I even got to use the shadar-kai chainfighter, transmogrifying it into a ratman chain-fighter and replacing one of its abilities with a chain grapple attack (which it never actually got a chance to use). I even dabbled in creating new creatures; I created a non-combatant NPC, whom the PCs were escorting. She had a weak attack with a dagger that did only 1 point of damage and she had only 10 hit points and very low defenses (she was based loosely on minion rules). She did, however, have a recharging ability that allowed her to heal allies and grant them saving throws.

2. Encounter design seems easier. Granted, I don’t know the experience point value of all of the creatures I used (and some may have been more or less powerful after modification, which may have affected their XP value), and I don’t know how much XP a level X encounter should be worth. So, I eyeballed it. I put together encounters that I thought my PCs could handle, and some of the tougher encounters I made easier by making my bad guys flee when a certain condition was met. Overall, it seemed pretty easy to create encounters by just eyeballing them, and I really think it’s going to wind up being more art than science.

Now, that’s creating an adventure. I created an adventure with six encounters total, and many of them were designed to be quite challenging. I had two players, each controlling two of the six PCs. Mike played as the cleric and the ranger, while Cary played as the paladin and the warlock. One defender, two strikers, and a leader; no controller. At first I thought this might be a problem, but my players were savvy and picked up on some of the finer points of 4E combat quickly (even Cary, who had never played 3E), and the lack of a controller didn’t seem to disrupt the balance of the game. Here are some observations on the four encounters that we got through yesterday; I’ll go encounter by encounter.

Encounter 1: Ambush!
The PCs had been hired by a local lord to escort a healer, Illyria Jeren, to the town of Amber, where a plague was killing off the townsfolk. On their way to Amber, the party was ambushed by bandits hiding in the trees on either side of the road. The PCs were not surprised, however; the ranger spotted two of them and alerted everyone else–in elven–to their presence (thank you Passive Perception). This allowed everyone to make a Perception check to scan the area, and the cleric wound up spotting three more bandits. All told, there were two bandits with maces, two archers, and a bandit leader with a hand crossbow and a rapier (based on the defiant rake). Two level 1s, two level 2s, and a level 5.

The ranger managed to get the highest initiative roll, and promptly fired an arrow at the closest archer. The paladin wasn’t so lucky; a bandit charged him and got in a good hit with his mace, both dealing damage and causing the poor paladin to be dazed for one round. The other melee bandit charged the warlock, but ended up missing. The cleric moved to protect Illyria while the warlock cursed his foe and fired an eldritch blast, dealing significant damage. The two bandit archers took shots at the paladin and the ranger, while the bandit leader came out of the trees and advanced, firing his hand crossbow at the paladin. The battle continued in a similar manner; the closest archer was eventually bloodied, at which point he turned tail and ran. Next down was one of the bandits, also bloodied, and also fleeing. In the third round of combat, an unseen ally began firing arrows at the bandit leader from hiding; nobody managed to spot him during the combat. One of the bandits was killed, while the rest fled, but not before the leader took some significant damage: a critical hit from the ranger that almost took him from full hit points to bloodied in a single shot (1 more hit point would have done it), and a well-placed witchfire from the warlock.

Afterward, the unseen ally revealed himself and introduced himself as Erik, a local hunter. A few Diplomacy and Insight checks revealed information about the bandits, and their ties to the plague and the ratmen that had begun appearing in the area.

Observations: The paladin makes a really good defender. His marking ability is pretty potent in that it deals 8 points of damage when the enemy attacks someone else, so it provides a pretty good incentive for people to focus on the paladin. Combine that with the fact that the paladin had a really high AC and plenty of hit points, and it makes him a really good defender. The ranger and the warlock both did significant damage during the fight, and were probably most directly responsible for defeating most of the enemies. The cleric, unfortunately, wasn’t rolling very well and continually missed his targets. He did get in a Healing Word, which helped the injured ranger out.

From the bandits’ side, there was some unintentional teamwork built into the group. The mace-wielding bandits had the ability to daze opponents with their charge attacks, granting all of their allies Combat Advantage against the dazed character. Every single bandit present dealt extra damage, either 1d6 or 2d6, when they had Combat Advantage. A nasty combination that never actually wound up working, because only the paladin was dazed, and only once, and only for one round, and was never hit by anyone else during that time.

Encounter 2: Abduction
The PCs made their way to Amber and were let in despite the quarantine through a combination of Erik’s vouching for them and a letter produced by Illyria proclaiming what they were there to do. They stayed at a local inn, the Traveler’s Rest, for the night, allowing them to recover fully from the bandit attack. However, during the night, they suffered another surprise attack. This time, there were four melee bandits, one bandit mage, and two ratman lashers. So, four level 1s, two level 2s, and a level 3.

The ranger, being an eladrin, had only had to enter trance for four hours in order to rest fully, so he was awake and unsurprised. Everyone else had to take time to wake up. Had I know the specific values granted by armor and shields, I would have ruled that nobody was wearing their armor; lacking those things, and for the sake of simplicity, I allowed everyone to use their armor instead. The ranger was attacked by a lasher while everyone else was assaulted in their beds by bandits. The second lasher went after Illyria, binding her with his whip and pulling her toward the stairs down. The ranger bloodied the lasher he was facing, but as soon as he saw Illyria being taken away, he used his Fey Step ability to teleport out of the room he was trapped in by the lasher. Unfortunately, the lasher escaped with Illyria while a bandit pushed the unfortunate ranger back into a corner from which he could not escape without suffering an opportunity attack.

Meanwhile, the cleric rushed out into the hallway, ignoring the bandit that had engaged him, only to be knocked prone by a spell cast by the bandit mage. The paladin did a good job keeping one of the bandits focused on him, while the warlock used Eyebite and a curse to damage her bandit and vanish from his sight. That bandit, confused, went after the paladin (suffering an opportunity attack from the warlock in the process), unknowingly increasing the paladin’s AC in the process because of his Lost in the Crowd feat.

Once the lasher escaped with Illyria, the mage made a tactical retreat, his objective accomplished, and ordered the bandits and remaining lasher to stay behind and deal with the PCs. Through some clever positioning and good teamwork, the PCs were able to make quick work of the bad guys, and pursued the kidnappers. They found out from a witness that the kidnappers had fled to the west, and had been allowed to pass by the guard manning the gate. The PCs interrogated the guard (at arrow-point), and found out that he had been bribed, and that the villains were likely heading for an abandoned temple half an hour outside of town.

Observations: Teamwork and clever positioning can grant the PCs a healthy advantage. A defender in tight quarters is a dangerous thing. Eyebite is an extremely useful power to have when you’re cornered. The ranger’s Split the Tree daily power is extremely effective when it hits. The ability to teleport is very, very useful, but not unbalancing at low levels. Cornering a ranger is pretty darned effective.

Encounter 3: The Old Temple
The PCs followed tracks in the fresh mud to the old temple, and kicked the door in. Inside the found a bandit, the bandit mage they had faced in the inn, and a ratman with a vicious-looking spiked chain. One level 1, one level 3, and a level 6.

The ranger moved to attack the mage while the paladin quickly marked the chainfighter. This turned out to be an extremely effective tactic, because the chainfighter used an ability shortly afterward that allowed him to shift six squares and attack three different targets. One of these was the paladin, but the other two attacks, against the warlock and the cleric, both missed and caused the chainfighter a total of 16 points of damage. Combine that with a well-placed curse by the warlock, as well as a very effective witchfire, and the chainfighter only lasted until the second round. Once the chainfighter was down, the bandit and the mage soon followed. This fight could have been very difficult, but some good teamwork and clever tactics made it probably the easiest fight so far.

Once the fight was over, the PCs interrogated the dying mage and learned that Illyria was being held below the temple, beyond the crypt. They also learned that the cult was known as the Children of Pestilence, and that Amber’s plague was their way of offering up the town as a ritual sacrifice to their god, Ualath the Diseased One. They also learned about the cult’s leader, the Vermin King. After the interrogation, they searched the area and found some useful magic items that they took with them, as well as some healing potions. They also used a magic circle on the floor to regenerate their wounds, rather than using up their precious healing surges.

Observations: The paladin’s Divine Challenge is extremely effective when used against an enemy that can make multiple attacks against different people.

Encounter 4: The Crypt
The PCs then descended some spiral stairs into a darkened crypt. They had a sunrod that they used for light, but the skeletons waiting within had an advantage with their darkvision. There were three skeletons and a boneshard skeleton. Three level 3s and a level 5.

The cleric used his Turn Undead power and missed, but even the miss allowed him to do half damage, and since that damage was radiant, the skeleton that he affected with it took additional damage. The skeletons weren’t all that dangerous to the PCs, just hard to hit with their high defenses. At one point the warlock provoked an opportunity attack from a skeleton, and its Speed of the Dead ability allowed it to do some extra damage.

During the second round of combat, though, the boneshard skeleton came out and did a massive amount of damage to the ranger, dropping him to -1. A little while later, a skeleton attacked the warlock and dropped her to 0. Both of these situations were quickly remedied by the cleric’s Healing Word, but the crypt was extremely confined and the skeletons definitely had some advantages on their side.

The PCs wound up winning the day, but the boneshard skeleton’s boneshard burst hit them twice in the process, once when it was bloodied and once when it finally died. Because it did necrotic damage, the PCs took full damage while the skeletons were unscathed.

Observations: The paladin and the cleric were the stars in this fight, mainly because they both had abilities that did radiant damage, which the undead creatures were vulnerable to. This seemed to be a difficult fight, not simply because the creatures themselves were challenging, but because the close quarters made it very difficult to move around, and skeletons get some nice bonuses when they make opportunity attacks.

General observations: Overall, I think it went really well. PCs are clearly capable of taking on foes several levels higher than their own level, which opens up a wide array of enemy possibilities to the DM. This also means that fights can be big, and you shouldn’t be afraid to outnumber the PCs. It also means that you can have several relatively weak enemies and a single “boss” enemy in a fight three or for levels above the PCs’ level. Terrain is both more important in 4E and easier to adjudicate than it used to be. Simple conditions like Combat Advantage, Cover, and Difficult Terrain make it easy to deal with most types of terrain, and those conditions make good yardsticks for coming up with other things, as well. It’s not difficult to run an encounter with multiple different types of creatures. From the PCs side, Healing Surges are a great addition to the game. They make healing simplified and reliable, and they allow the PCs to recover from a difficult fight in a few minutes so that they can easily go into another difficult fight relatively fresh. Overall, this, and the previous proto-4E session that I ran, have both served to make me even more excited about the actual release.

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.