D&D 4th Edition
I thought I'd talked about this before in my journal, but apparently I never really did. Maybe it was just a lengthy comment in someone else's journal I'm remembering.
Anyway, several months ago I decided to start running a new game using the D&D 4th edition rules. The group is smaller than what I ran for Asmyl--a good thing, since I think part of my problem in that game was too many players--with 3 total. A mixed blessing is that 2 of the three players have little to no experience in table-top roleplaying before. umassdarkside (the most recent blog he's got, even if it's not updated), a co-worker, has done a little bit in the past, but mostly not seriously, and his fiancee, perseid85, has done none at all. Rounding out the group is aelana, who, of course, was also a player in Asmyl, and is actually significantly more experienced at gaming in general than I am, even if he hasn't GMed as long himself (not that my 18 months of experience is a vast wealth of knowledge or anything). The experience quotient is a mixed blessing because it means that I'm mostly not dealing with people who know too much about other systems to give this one a fair chance, but at the same time also don't necessarily have any knowledge of how the hobby works on a level that transcends the specific system. I figure the two balance out and are wash.
I was leery of investing a lot of time on my part in developing a whole new world to set it in, and I didn't want to re-use Asmyl for anything right now--I wanted to let that one lie fallow for a bit and revisit it later on with fresh eyes. Since one of the people who was going to be a player--and actually the main impetus to convince me to try my hand at GMing again after only a few months--had already bought the core books and had loaned them to me so I could read them, and he was willing to shell out yet more of his cash to buy additional material, I suggested he get a copy of the Keep on the Shadowfell, and I'd run that and see how things went. If we all had fun with it, we could go on to the next published module. If we liked the system but not the module, I could invest some effort at that point to develop something original. If we liked gaming together but not D&D, I could come up with something in GURPS. The whole thing was billed as basically an experiment.
The Dungeon Master's Guide includes a sort of mini-module at the end. Given that I was running a group that had a sub-optimal number of PCs (I had already decided to run a GM PC in the group to fill in whatever role gap was left by the players, but that's still only 4 when the theoretical recommended number is 5+), and given further that this mini-module is set in the same region as Keep on the Shadowfell and at least some of the following modules, making it easy to integrate them, I decided to start with that first, giving everyone a chance to get used to things before diving in fully, and giving them the advantage of an extra level or two before starting on the Keep.
I am prone to over-preparation, and since the Kobold Hall thing in the back of the DM Guide leaves several potentially significant areas for adventure undeveloped, I decided to take some time before we started fleshing those bits out. As I worked on it, I came up with a good way to get the PCs into the adventure that wasn't too hackneyed, and would allow me to explain throwing them together if they weren't already all good buddies. I wound up being ready to get everyone together for the first time at around the time when the holidays started to make everyone's free time difficult to schedule, and then umassdarkside and perseid85 were moving, so our first get-together didn't happen until March. We all got together at umassdarkside's new place for character creation.
This was something I wanted to handle differently from Asmyl for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I found I had a fairly hard time getting the various PCs into a single group in that game, and their disparate interests were a continuing thorn for me as the game went on. And, while a class/level system is far less prone to dramatically mismatched PCs (another problem that plagued me in Asmyl), I wanted to work with everyone at once to ensure the group fit together well on a mechanical level as well. As part of that, I wanted to make sure I didn't wind up with a group of 2 wizards, a ranger, and no melee fighters--the drawback of a class-based system being that roles are much more strictly defined, and a blank spot can be more difficult to work around. So, I wanted the players to co-ordinate on character creation as much as possible. Given that none of us had ever used this particular system before, I planned on that first session being devoted solely to character creation, since we'd all be figuring things out as we went along.
That went reasonably well, even if it was less organized than I'd have liked, and several things were missed and corrected later, regarding things like permitted feats and various calculations. One place the new edition really falls down is how the Player's Guide is organized. At first glance, it's fairly logical and seems like it would be easy to use to create a character, but there's a lot of important information that's scattered about. This wouldn't be a problem if the section that explicitly covers the sequence of character creation had page references to all the stuff you need to write down, but it doesn't, only the bigger elements. The official character creation software, of course, does all the calculations itself, but it also walks one through the process very well. It's actually a pretty good piece of software, but I hadn't demoed it yet at this point, so we were mostly doing it by hand.
Still, there were no major disasters, and we now had everything we needed to start playing. We scheduled our first play session, and I used the time in between to finalize the elements for the first game that I couldn't do before there were specific characters to tie into it.
Last weekend was our first session. Because of the way I wound up filling in those blank spaces in the mini-module, the opening mission was actually something I basically made up entirely. I created my own mini-dungeon (only a few rooms, nothing huge) with some monsters I also made up--though they were based on ones out of the Monster Manual. Things were going pretty well until the boss fight. I apparently made this battle a little too challenging, as the PCs barely won the day. 3 out of 4 of the party members, including my GM PC, dropped below 0 hit points at one point or another. I wound up simplifying the enemy's strategy significantly to allow them to survive. I think my mistake was primarily that it was really a fight with a level 2 solo monster (remembering the PCs are themselves level 1, so that's already moderately challenging) AND a trap, which I didn't properly account for--the trap was a last-minute addition I hadn't included in my original design, and I didn't properly stat it out like I should have. It was essentially another enemy in the room that could do a lot of nastiness, so I really should have. I really ought to have weakened the monster a bit, or made the trap less dangerous--getting hit by the thing is really what turned the tide of the battle against the party, and since there was no way to fully disable it--only avoid it--without killing the monster, that was too much. Something to keep in mind for the future. Still, they won the fight, got out alive, and saved the day, plus I was able to set up their next mission before we ended for the night. Our next session is scheduled for tomorrow, and I'm more confident of this one since I know I don't have anything up to the level of that challenge to throw at them this time. In fact, most of what I'm tossing at them is largely unaltered from the Monster Manual--far less customization this time around.
Speaking of which, I'd better do a bit of prep. Mostly just need to write some NPC dialog pointers for myself, but it does need to be done before tomorrow. Better get to it.
Anyway, several months ago I decided to start running a new game using the D&D 4th edition rules. The group is smaller than what I ran for Asmyl--a good thing, since I think part of my problem in that game was too many players--with 3 total. A mixed blessing is that 2 of the three players have little to no experience in table-top roleplaying before. umassdarkside (the most recent blog he's got, even if it's not updated), a co-worker, has done a little bit in the past, but mostly not seriously, and his fiancee, perseid85, has done none at all. Rounding out the group is aelana, who, of course, was also a player in Asmyl, and is actually significantly more experienced at gaming in general than I am, even if he hasn't GMed as long himself (not that my 18 months of experience is a vast wealth of knowledge or anything). The experience quotient is a mixed blessing because it means that I'm mostly not dealing with people who know too much about other systems to give this one a fair chance, but at the same time also don't necessarily have any knowledge of how the hobby works on a level that transcends the specific system. I figure the two balance out and are wash.
I was leery of investing a lot of time on my part in developing a whole new world to set it in, and I didn't want to re-use Asmyl for anything right now--I wanted to let that one lie fallow for a bit and revisit it later on with fresh eyes. Since one of the people who was going to be a player--and actually the main impetus to convince me to try my hand at GMing again after only a few months--had already bought the core books and had loaned them to me so I could read them, and he was willing to shell out yet more of his cash to buy additional material, I suggested he get a copy of the Keep on the Shadowfell, and I'd run that and see how things went. If we all had fun with it, we could go on to the next published module. If we liked the system but not the module, I could invest some effort at that point to develop something original. If we liked gaming together but not D&D, I could come up with something in GURPS. The whole thing was billed as basically an experiment.
The Dungeon Master's Guide includes a sort of mini-module at the end. Given that I was running a group that had a sub-optimal number of PCs (I had already decided to run a GM PC in the group to fill in whatever role gap was left by the players, but that's still only 4 when the theoretical recommended number is 5+), and given further that this mini-module is set in the same region as Keep on the Shadowfell and at least some of the following modules, making it easy to integrate them, I decided to start with that first, giving everyone a chance to get used to things before diving in fully, and giving them the advantage of an extra level or two before starting on the Keep.
I am prone to over-preparation, and since the Kobold Hall thing in the back of the DM Guide leaves several potentially significant areas for adventure undeveloped, I decided to take some time before we started fleshing those bits out. As I worked on it, I came up with a good way to get the PCs into the adventure that wasn't too hackneyed, and would allow me to explain throwing them together if they weren't already all good buddies. I wound up being ready to get everyone together for the first time at around the time when the holidays started to make everyone's free time difficult to schedule, and then umassdarkside and perseid85 were moving, so our first get-together didn't happen until March. We all got together at umassdarkside's new place for character creation.
This was something I wanted to handle differently from Asmyl for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I found I had a fairly hard time getting the various PCs into a single group in that game, and their disparate interests were a continuing thorn for me as the game went on. And, while a class/level system is far less prone to dramatically mismatched PCs (another problem that plagued me in Asmyl), I wanted to work with everyone at once to ensure the group fit together well on a mechanical level as well. As part of that, I wanted to make sure I didn't wind up with a group of 2 wizards, a ranger, and no melee fighters--the drawback of a class-based system being that roles are much more strictly defined, and a blank spot can be more difficult to work around. So, I wanted the players to co-ordinate on character creation as much as possible. Given that none of us had ever used this particular system before, I planned on that first session being devoted solely to character creation, since we'd all be figuring things out as we went along.
That went reasonably well, even if it was less organized than I'd have liked, and several things were missed and corrected later, regarding things like permitted feats and various calculations. One place the new edition really falls down is how the Player's Guide is organized. At first glance, it's fairly logical and seems like it would be easy to use to create a character, but there's a lot of important information that's scattered about. This wouldn't be a problem if the section that explicitly covers the sequence of character creation had page references to all the stuff you need to write down, but it doesn't, only the bigger elements. The official character creation software, of course, does all the calculations itself, but it also walks one through the process very well. It's actually a pretty good piece of software, but I hadn't demoed it yet at this point, so we were mostly doing it by hand.
Still, there were no major disasters, and we now had everything we needed to start playing. We scheduled our first play session, and I used the time in between to finalize the elements for the first game that I couldn't do before there were specific characters to tie into it.
Last weekend was our first session. Because of the way I wound up filling in those blank spaces in the mini-module, the opening mission was actually something I basically made up entirely. I created my own mini-dungeon (only a few rooms, nothing huge) with some monsters I also made up--though they were based on ones out of the Monster Manual. Things were going pretty well until the boss fight. I apparently made this battle a little too challenging, as the PCs barely won the day. 3 out of 4 of the party members, including my GM PC, dropped below 0 hit points at one point or another. I wound up simplifying the enemy's strategy significantly to allow them to survive. I think my mistake was primarily that it was really a fight with a level 2 solo monster (remembering the PCs are themselves level 1, so that's already moderately challenging) AND a trap, which I didn't properly account for--the trap was a last-minute addition I hadn't included in my original design, and I didn't properly stat it out like I should have. It was essentially another enemy in the room that could do a lot of nastiness, so I really should have. I really ought to have weakened the monster a bit, or made the trap less dangerous--getting hit by the thing is really what turned the tide of the battle against the party, and since there was no way to fully disable it--only avoid it--without killing the monster, that was too much. Something to keep in mind for the future. Still, they won the fight, got out alive, and saved the day, plus I was able to set up their next mission before we ended for the night. Our next session is scheduled for tomorrow, and I'm more confident of this one since I know I don't have anything up to the level of that challenge to throw at them this time. In fact, most of what I'm tossing at them is largely unaltered from the Monster Manual--far less customization this time around.
Speaking of which, I'd better do a bit of prep. Mostly just need to write some NPC dialog pointers for myself, but it does need to be done before tomorrow. Better get to it.