5E Lost Mine of Phandelver: 4th game night

Our  4th game night of this module, and we have managed to have a session about every week to ten days.  Just enough to remember what happened on the previous outing.  So far it remains fun and relatively quick paced, though sometimes the players wanted to discuss to death what we should do next which does at times slow us done.  Role playing my character as described in the pregens, the Halfling Rogue, I have no use for plans anyway so easily agree to any plan and do whatever I want when we actually encounter difficulty.  It does sometimes create humorous party tension.

We take a long rest in town.  While on my watch I hear a woman scream in the distance.  I decide my Rogue would only care if it was his aunt in danger.  Since it does not sound like a halfling woman, I do not bother to wake the party.  I tell them they needed the rest.

We managed to get a surprise round on a group of 5 opponents.  Between the Surprise round, and those of us who rolled high initiative for the first round, we took out three and wounded one more before they even got to act.  The DM gave us advantage on the surprise round, and I believe that to be a mistake.  I will take it up with him next session and find out if that is supposed to be that way.

Once again, we had a character go down to 0 hit points.  This is not unexpected except we have had exactly one character each session go to 0 hit points.  I figured it would be my rogue this time, but it was not - the Noble fighter went down.  That puts him in the lead in the party for being dropped.  Maybe we should have a contest.

Again we have an NPC encounter who gives us a 'quest'.  It really does make this module seem like a video game.  Maybe I am just old school in that regard and this is what has come to be expected.  Granted, this module is supposed to be accessible to beginners, but it seems we do not have to work very hard to get leads which take us elsewhere.

I think I have my head straight about my Rogue's Cunning Action and the Disengage, Dash & Hide options.  I used them pretty effectively in the combat, and it did not take me long to call out my turn- I was pretty quick in rattling off my attack, move and bonus action.  In several cases I was in 5' hall combat and was able to shoot through cover and dash in and out effectively.  Not sure how realistic it is, but it seems to work in the game.    ... and yes I know it is a fantasy game so I am not hung up on realism or simulationism but more concerned with verisimilitude.

We scored some pretty good treasure, which lead to a short discussion about what do you do with all your gold in 5E.  We will see how that turns out as we have not focused much on costs of living, partly because we have only been in Phandalin for a few days, and partly because that is like accounting and who wants to do accounting in D&D?

That is it for now.  The dice never lie.