uthoroc

We played our second session of DnD 4E on Wednesday night ... and I remain definitely underwhelmed.

I get the feeling that - at least for us - it is "neither fish nor meat" as we say in German. The role-playing veneer is extremely thin and cracks and blisters under the slightest stress, and the tactical combat aspect is done better in board games like Descent. The Hybrid that 4E attempts does not seem to work for me - although I admit that two sessions is probably not enough to give such a final verdict.

There's some specific criticisms I have though which I don't think time will be able to counteract:

1. As so many "modern" rpg designs, it demands that each player is fairly fluent in the game's mechanisms. A basic familiarity does not seem to be enough or the other players will be constantly telling you what to do or not to do. We have players that would rather say "I run up to him and swing my axe at him" as opposed to "with my move action I move these 5 spaces until I'm next to him, then as my standard action I use my encounter power Flashy Overhead Double-handed Power Strike to attack him." The game does not cater to this type of gamer.

2. The d20. *sighs* It's a nice die, sure. But its variance is way too high. There's nothing as demoralizing as using your super-duper, high-energy, once per-day, mega-power to give that master villain a good kick in the backside .... just to roll a 4. Oh, I missed. Well, better luck tomorrow. Yeah, the possibility of failure must be there, but with the spread of results on a d20 it's much too common.

Our DM had lost of fun it seems and I haven't talked with the other players about the session yet, but I'd rather play a session of Descent or a role-playing game like Delta Green or Savage Worlds next time...

So we played DnD on Friday...



... and it was pretty fun for what it was, i.e. a cliché-ridden, tactically-oriented, note-quite-role-playing game. Lots of jokes about the system (and the world it would create) flew across the table, and we had fun using the variety of powers even our 1st level characters had. Most players didn't get much into the role-playing mood, something I deplored a bit, because without it DnD 4e just seems an inferior version of a tactical dungeon crawl game like Descent.

We played two encounters, the opening one from the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure, and one from the free DnD Game Day introductory scenario. The maps created with CC3 and DD3 looked nice and worked well. Looks like we might continue the game to complete at least the introductory scenario - hopefully with a little more in-character play.

I'll be playing my first DnD session for 20 years or so on Friday. Of course it'll be the shiny new 4th edition, and of course it will use miniatures and battle mats.

As the resident map expert my DM asked me to whip up a few blank battle mats with generic backgrounds - and mentioned he also needed a road with trees on both sides, similar to this sketch:


( Look behind the cut to see the results. )