4th Edition D&D: experience after first outing

This past weekend I played my first outing of 4th Edition.  Yes, I know, I am late to the game.  You might notice from looking around this blog that I was a long time player of AD&D, then of 3.5E.

First off, it was a nice group of people I got to meet and play with for the first time.  We are playing the Zeitgeist adventure path.  I am not going to tell the adventure story, but there could be spoilers.

One of the complaints against 4E I have read repeatedly on the web is how it discourages or makes difficult role playing.  I just don't see it.  Sure, 4E is much more tactical, and I cannot see running a 4E game in Theater of the Mind.  However, you either will role play with the DM encouragement, or you will not.  I did not experience anything I found discouraging in the rule set to keep me from role playing.  Sure, I have been doing it for 30+ years anyway, so it would take a lot to keep me from role playing anyway.

As noted in a previous blog post, I have the controller role as a Wizard (arcanist).  In the first round of the first encounter I was able to use a spell to effectively end the encounter by pushing two of the three antagonists off a bridge and into the water.  The last antagonist, being outnumbered (and discovering he was facing a wizard as well) surrendered.  I found a first level character to be very powerful and the system to be very tactical.  I am not saying that is good or bad, it just is.

In the next encounter we were pretty much outgunned, and I think the DM pulled his punches.  Fair enough, two of the four players had never played 4E before, and this group had never played together.  Regardless, we just barely managed to come through.  As a controller I was able to knock prone, push (repeatedly) and render unconscious the bad guys until help arrived.  At that it was close as my Paladin ally was unconscious and on fire.  I don't recommend that combination.

Not surprisingly for any edition, I noticed quickly you need to make wise decisions about which spells to use against which opponents. A good variety of spells which attacked will, fortitude and reflex defenses proved essential to the limited success we saw.  Also, not surprisingly, splitting up the party creates hazardous conditions.  I can see the huge synergies already by having the well balanced and complimenting party all together.  Split us up and we are sadly lacking.

4E is quite a different game from its ancestors, but so far I don't see this as an obstacle to fun.

The dice never lie.

Harpoon Dark

Another one from the Harpoon Brewery.  It pours out a mahogany color with thick cream/mocha colored head which dissipates fairly quickly.  There is a yeasty smell which surprised me.  On the tongue is has a malty taste with dark roast and the faintest taste of chocolate. It is medium body with solid carbonation,
not really complex, but it ends clean and crisp and leaves your mouth watering.

I would have this again, but I don't find it spectacular.  I'll limit this to my 'on-sale' purchases.

Cheers!

Victorian Shadows Chiswick Tunnel

I ran my D20 Past Victorian Shadows game last weekend.  The evenings adventure revolved around an ancient Roman temple to Triva was discovered during tunnel excavation.  One of the recurring bad guys got wind of the discover and lusted after the potential of finding a magic book inside.

As we game masters all know, the party never does what you expect.  That is a good deal of the fun for me, watching them go where I am not prepared.  They did not disappoint me.

There was only three players for this outing, which is not an issue because I build adventures in this campaign to be readily scaled based on who shows up.  Starting at the British Museum, and working their way through an old pub they opted to jump right in and not take any opportunity to do additional research.  They created their own sense of urgency out of thin air.  Urgency keeps a game moving along which is good.  What was not so good, for them, was not preparing.  No knowledge, no supplies.  It was all I could do not to rub my hands in glee.

Once they determine the location of the tunnel, they must get past the lone constable guarding the entrance.  The come up with a simple plan which involves pummeling the poor man into unconsciousness.  These 'good guys' have a long history of making life painful for the hapless local police.  Of course now, they have created more urgency, they must get in and get out before the rest of the local constabulary comes down on them.
They spring one trap and manage to not take very much damage (they could have done research to learn this cult used to trap their temples), and then manage to disarm the next trap and take the valuable looking chalice from the alter.  Finding nothing else (they really didn't look for much else), they are about to leave when the bad guys show up.  Combat ensues.

At first, the intrepid group is handily eliminating the fodder the bad guy throws at them.  But, the bad guy (a swarthy Indian fellow with a tacky accent I had a hard sustaining correctly) sends the next wave at them and things don't look so good.  Indian bad guy hollers to them he will let them live if they give him the book.

Book?  They look at each other and shrug before one of them yells back, "We'll never give up the book." or some such thing.  Eventually they negotiate during the battle to surrender the book, and they place a book they have with them on the trap mechanism.  They step away from the trapped altar and watch with anticipation as the bad guy approaches, hoping the trap does something nasty to him and turns the tide in their favor.  Indian bad guy grabs the book, and yells out at them he is not fooled by this library book and the trap goes off.

Sadly for them, the trap was a pit trap and everyone in the room is affected, good and bad.  One of the party manages to make a save and grab the end of floor as everyone else falls into the pit, which has three feet of fetid water in the bottom.  The flare they were using for light falls into the water with a hiss and goes out.  Complete darkness, two good guys and two bad guys in the pit, at least one bad guy they believe can see in the dark and the tough fighter type they need to fight the bad guy is hanging from the floor.  Remember the lack of preparation mentioned earlier?  No one has any rope or other tools to get them out of the pit, and no one has brought any light except for the flares which are now out.  Internally, I am rubbing my hands with glee again.  They remember they carry a couple of magical amulets which provide some light and some efficacy against these bad guys.  There is still hope!

After a tough fight which nearly brings two of the characters to zero points (and in three feet of water falling unconscious is decidedly bad) they kill the monster and are about the converge on the Indian bad guy when he pulls out an ornate ceramic ball and threatens to smash it.  He claims it would be bad for him, but far worse for them.  After some tense moments when I am quite sure they are going to not believe him and attack (allowing me to break it and we all discover if he is bluffing or not), they instead decide to negotiate with him.  I am surprised, this is the group that tends to kill first and ask questions later.

The tense negotiations was quite enjoyable and both good and bad guys held up their ends of the negotiations.  They learned some valuable information about the nature of their opponents, gave me some adventure hooks, and made this recurring villain tremendously more interesting and complicated.  They separated with each side trying to recruit the other to their side.  A delicious outcome for which I had not any plan.

The dice never lie.

Barad is going to play 4E

Our 3.5 game is on hiatus until the current DM is motivated to run a session.  My d20 Past game is waiting for me to get off my own butt and put an adventure together (nearly ready).  Life was busy the last several months with house sale, moving, house purchase, moving, holidays, and all.  Enough of excuses, time to get playing.

I have been fortunate enough to connect up with a DM who is going to run the Zeitgeist adventure, and to be invited to play.  I have never played 4E before.  I read some material and decided it was not for my 3.5 group, though I did happily 'borrow' some ideas from 4E which became house rules.  So this will be an adventure on a couple of levels.  There will be no edition bashing found here, but I will write some about my experience mixed in with my other posts.

I am going to play a wizard (arcanist).  I am going to favor controlling the battlefield and team work over being a blaster.  Nothing wrong with blasting, I just decided I wanted to be supportive of my fellow players who I have never met.  Nothing says 'thanks for having me' like the new guy showing up and playing a character who could appear focused on his own fun and not so much on the group.

A couple of impressions I am getting before I even arrive at the first session.  This is a very different game and my previous edition experience is not necessarily guiding me to good decisions about character building. I don't find the relative usefulness of some of my powers is intuitively obvious.  I'll need to play in a few sessions to really grok how things work.  Next, I don't think the powers terminology is immersive.  It does not feel 'right'.  However I think this is easily rectified by my diligence in thinking of them as spells and using the word spell whenever I communicate about them.  I will report back on the feel when actually playing.

All in all I am excited by the chance to play, meet some new people, and learn the rule set.  In that order.

Harpoon Octoberfest Beer

It is well past time 'round these parts to put away the crisp, clean, refreshing beers of summer and head on into something with more character, flavor and body.  What better than an Octoberfest beer?

Red-brown in color, with a full creamy head, the Harpoon Octoberfest Beer makes my mouth water.  There is a hop aroma and a little bit of bitterness about this brew, but let me tell you it is the malt here that shines.  The bitterness is really at the end, and it is a soft finish just enough to balance out any residual malt sweetness.  What lingers is the rich malty tastes.  I do mean that in the plural.  If you take your time, there are a number of nuanced malty flavors wandering in and out of your taste buds.

I know it is an old joke, but this beer tastes like another one.  Many beers I like very much are good for one bottle/pint and you are ready to move on to another nice brew.  This study lad is ready to keep you entertained with its quality taste beer after beer.

So this so called Octoberfest probably has little to do with real Munich Octoberfest beer however it is a nice brew all the same. Harpoon is a local brew for me (local as in I am in New England and so are its two breweries) and I often forget how much I like their different brews.  It is usually an afterthought for me to pickup a box of Harpoon bottles, but I am nearly always glad I did.  Highly recommended.

Cheers!

D&D Next - First Encounter, First Impressions

I participated in my first play test of D&D Next last weekend.  I let my someone else have the DM duties as I was especially interested in seeing the player side.  As might be expected from folks who had played other editions previously, some folks immediately began dissecting the character sheets to understand how all the bonuses were generated.  I stressed we should just play it, after all it is a play test.  I will admit I will be there dissecting every rule with microscope and tweezers when the time comes.  However these first play tests should just be run as is, with an open mind, to get the feeling of how these rules would work in practice.

Let me set the scene.  There ended up being four of us, DM and three players.  I was the only long time player, the other folks were in their twenties.  I was also the only one who had every played/run the original Keep On The Borderland/Caves of Chaos.  (please note: there will be some spoilers below - that is if anyone interested in reading this could possibly not know what is in the Cave of Chaos)

First we set out as three characters: Dwarf Fighter, Human Cleric & Halfling Rogue.  After checking through some of the stands of trees in the center of the valley, we selected the goblin cave to explore (of course we did not know it was the goblin cave when we selected it).  The combining of the listen & spot skills into stealth was quicker, and it worked nicely without feeling like something was missing.  Skill mastery was powerful (minimum die result of 10 for skills where the rogue has training) and gave my rogue a minimum 16 for any stealth check.  I can see how the DM might preroll some opposed wisdom checks against stealth or just set some DCs and not bother with some rolls against the rogue to keep the game moving quickly.

Sneaking up on the cave month my rogue discovered 6 goblins just inside the opening.  He signaled to his companions (6 fingers), retreated to cover, and let fly with a sling stone from hiding; thanks to advantage and sneak attack damage there now were 5.  (Of course at this point I remembered about the ogre from the original running of the caves.  Since my character would not know, I played him blissfully unaware and careless: 8 wisdom).  We hoped they would come out and chase us.  It turns out they were smart and got the ogre to come out while they chased us.  We downed a few goblins.  Most from the rogue's sling and the cleric's radiant lance orison.  The fighter rolled abysmally and his crossbow did almost nothing.  As the goblins moved to cut us off from the mouth of the valley, we heard a large creature crashing through the trees behind us.  The others looked at me for confirmation we could take them (because all encounters are balanced, right?) and in response I did my best King Arthur imitation and yelled, "Run away!"  The goblins chased us into the forest where we managed to turn and pick off a few weak ones before the goblin archers went into hiding and we bolted before they could cut us down.  Hurt and embarrassed, we limped back to town.

I found it funny the other players looked to me to see if it was acceptable to run away.  I suppose the rules in third and fourth edition do not encourage that thinking.  I rather believe DMs need to encourage that thinking and spend less time blaming the rule set.

In this first encounter most of the combat was ranged, so the movement rule in melee did not get exercised much.  Combat did play pretty quick, and it was fun.  We learned quickly just how much disadvantage affects success in our long range missile attacks.  The crossbow should have been an effective weapon in the encounter but the dice would have none of that.  So far we have a favorable opinion of the advantage/disadvantage rule but we'll see if that holds up.

We went back to town to heal up and there was no time pressure, so we did not consider whether or not the long term rest rule was effective or lacked verisimilitude. 

I will share the last half of the evening and some overall thoughts in the next blog post but end this one with an observation from the ENworld boards.  Lots of folks there are already talking house rules for D&D Next, some were even talking house rules to be used in their first play test.  How in bloody Hades can you play test the rules if you do not use the rules?  I will gladly admit to using a generous amount of house rules in my games, however we did attempt to play them as written first and only after some reasonable amount of time not being able to get the game as we liked from them dove into house rules.  I guess my point is I feel that thinking is misguided and those folks are missing an opportunity to see the world from another side, and maybe get a better game from it.

The dice never lie.

Revisiting Classics: Alice In Wonderland

I had been vacillating over whether it was worth my purchasing a Kindle.  I tried my wife's Kindle on vacation and found it pleasant enough to use on a plane.  Not sure I really wanted to spend the money on it (being inclined towards frugality in some areas), I was, however, attracted by the Kindle convenience and the huge library of free books.  My lovely and talented wife put an end to my vacillation by giving me one.  Thanks Hon!

So on our most recent overseas trip I put a bunch of free books on my Kindle.  One of them was Alice In Wonderland.  Like many folks I have seen many characterizations of the Alice story, and seen a fair number of movie versions, both animated and populated with actors.  I figured I was long overdue in actually reading the story.

The free versions of classics in the Kindle library sometimes have editing errors and may be missing other elements.  In the case of Alice, it did not have the artwork.  I know many people would claim the book is not the same without the original pen and ink drawings.  I will not contest that view point, but say for my purposes I think I have probably seen all the original artwork over the years splattered here and there.  I did not notice many editing problems in the free Alice.

It was a quick read, and with very few surprises.  The differences between the book and the many characterizations and movies is subtle.  For example I think Alice comes across as less impertinent that in most characterizations, and more like a normal young girl who is not afraid to speak her mind.  One of the more interesting points is the assertion in the forward declaring Alice is just a fun story with no intent to have high morals; it is meant as purely entertainment.  Further the claim is there are plenty of other methods of providing moral teaching in this age (when the book was written) so there is no need to impart any morality training in this story, it is simply meant to be a fun imaginative romp.

The whole whether morality is useful or needed in a children's story like Alice could spawn some lengthy blog posts and much debate.  I'll pass on that.

If there are not morals within Alice, and I am not sure there are not and the Duchess would agree with me,

"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."

the book is certainly full of sage advice and lessons to ponder.  For example this famous exchange with the Cheshire Cat:


"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

 Or how about the almost Groucho Marx like follow on exchange with the Cheshire Cat:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

 And what about the bit of philosophical dialog at the tea party:

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"
"You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!"

Even the befuddle King does have a modicum of  common sense:

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.
"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

The book is literally littered with poking fun at Victorian society and education, and instead favors common sense and imagination.  Just because the book does not take itself too serious does not mean there is not seriously good advice contained within.  Just ask the Libertarian minded Duchess who says:

If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.

Lastly the book ends on a different tone than most characterizations as well.  Alice's sister wakes Alice from her dream, and after sending Alice to her tea muses on Alice's wonderful adventure.  There is no suggestion that this was more than a dream, and no hint that Alice's lively imagination is anything but good.

....she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make THEIR eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. 

Later this summer I'll have to read Through The Looking-Glass and see if my observations hold in that story as well.