Post by jacar on Aug 25, 2009 15:03:53 GMT -6
Here is a review of 4E after 5 play sessions.
So a group of us decided to give 4E a try. Our groups often are 6-8 players and for this test we had the full 8 players and the DM. We were playing the Kobold Adventure which was made for 5 players. The DM proportionately raised the numbers of monsters for our larger group (X1.6 for 8 players).
Character creation:
no dice are rolled to create a character in 4E. Instead, you are given a series of 6 numbers to arrange in each of your 6 stats. 16, 14, 13 12, 11 and 10. On top of that, you may get a racial bonus to these numbers. I chose Eladrin (High Elf) as my character race which gave me +2 in my intelligence. Add that to a 16 and you have 18 INT!
I chose wizard for my class.. I chose the Flaming Sphere as my Daily, the Ray of Frost for my Encounter and thunder wave ans several others for my at wills. A note about spells: These are not your DnD spells you are used to. They pretty much all do direct damage and some of them have an effect. The Flaming sphere, for instance, is a persistent spell that you can move around and burn people/critters with. It does guaranteed damage. Coupled with someone who can move characters around, this makes a pretty powerful combo as you can move enemies into the range. for my feat, i chose expanded spell book. This gives me an extra daily spell to choose from. I still can only cast 1 at 1st level.
Character creation, in general was pretty straight forward. I pretty much had my concept in my head going in and put everything together in a half hour. not as complicated as 3.5 for sure.
Gaming:
We were on our way to town when we were ambushed by Kobolds. The fight was pretty tough as these are not your father's Kobolds. generally, monsters are divided into 3 types, minions, grunts and bosses. Minions have 1 hit point and can be dispatched easily. Grunts have few special abilities but they sport as many hit points as the players. Bosses are really tough and have lots of hit points and abilities. This encounter had slingers, kobolds and minions. We did not concentrate firepower and fought more like DnD of old. While we won, we definitely were limping into town. That was the first night of gaming. The fight took 2.5 hours.
On the second session, we spent a little time in town gathering some information including the location of the dragon bone pile we were looking for. We were actually heading there to find a friend. On our way out of town, we were ambushed again! This is a rough place! We got beat upon pretty badly. The session lasted, 2.5 hours. While we won, we used up much of our resources.
In our 3rd session, we headed on rather than turn back. we figured, we were not going to get ambushed a 3rd time. We were right. We made it to the bone pile, where some unfriendlies were digging. When we asked them what they were doing there, they "invited" us down to see for our selves. As we made it into the pit, we were attacked by hounds of some sort. Fighting ensued. some of our characters were knocked down (early) and spent the rest of the battle sucking dirt. We, again, won after a 2+ hour encounter and found our friend! This time, we worked together and burned down the enemies like no tomorrow...well...maybe not so fast, but faster. 3 encounters in 7 hours of playing....not good so far.
we took our injured friend back to town. The next session was a role playing session. I was not there to play but others were. they could not get into the module for some reason. perhaps, the amount of detailed combat skewed their perception of what they were playing. So, I heard it was a fairly short game session and then they sat around chewing the fat fro the rest of the time.
The last encounter was the fight at the Kobold cave. This really tested the metal of the party. We really thought were were going to die in the first wave. The battle was joined when all the Kobolds in the world rained down on top of us. Both myself and another wizard threw out the heavies quickly. He used burning hands to wipe out about 6 minions and then used something called an action point to get another action. Action points are rewarded from adventure to adventure. You may use no more than 1 action point per encounter but it lets you do things like cast burning hands and then cast another spell, say, flaming sphere! In this fight we had two of them going. The first wave was dispatched pretty quickly and the fight lasted only about 1.75 hours. Long but better. We were missing both fighters/tanks this night so we had only 6 players. A friend joked that it went faster because we were not wasting time healing those stupid warriors!
That was phase 1.
Then phase two came....on the next game session. Another storm of Kobolds came from out of the cave. We handled them mightily. The flaming spheres were still in play and proved to be very effective. I did not waste my encounter spell because I sensed that this was the big fight. One of our tanks was back and help stave off this wave.
Round three was fit into the same night. Out came the boss along with 3 champions and a cleric. the cleric knocked down one of our wizards so his flaming sphere went pop! The warlord and fighter held up the boss and the thief sneaked around to get a telling shot on the boss. We were hitting the boss with everything we had. After 3 rounds, he fell! We were able to turn our attention to the rest of the Kobolds. During the fighting, the Warlord and the thief hit the ground unconscious. The thief especially thought he'd be all right since he started this particular fight with full hit points. He was at -3 in 1 round. In stead of bleeding a point per round, each player has to make something called a "death" roll. Basically you have to make an unmodified D20 roll of 11 or better. If you fail 3 times, you die. both the thief and the warlord went down to the 3rd roll. The thief lived and the warlord died. We managed to mop up the remaining Kobolds and loot the cavern. this is where we stopped. The last two rounds took a solid 3 hours. We were definitely getting more efficient. we later learned that this particular encounter was mentioned on the 4e message boards as a TPW fight.
Final analysis:
Character creation is simplified compared to 3.5e. I saw on these boards that folks had some trouble making characters. I found the creation system to be pretty straight forward and pretty easy to do.
The non-combat rules are pretty limited. The game does not seem to add a lot of detail in that department. It is just about right as far as I am concerned. Roll a die, add a few mods and beat a target number to get a result.
The combat is VERY detailed. there are rules for moves and powers and such. This can slow the game down a lot as you have to stop and think about what you will do next to benefit the team as a whole.
A word about turn length. Our game seemed to go fast in terms of player involvement. Each player was able to get something done in about 2 minutes more or less. The game master probably took anywhere between 4 and 6 minutes total depending on how many monster groups he had. That does not seem like a lot when you glance at it but it adds up. There are 8 players. That's 2 minutes per player so that's 16 minutes for one turn of combat. There is the DM. Lets say he takes 4 minutes per turn. So the total average length of a combat turn is 20 minutes. If you go 7 rounds (our fights seemed to end around then) that's 2 hours and 20 minutes per encounter! Now, the module is only built for 5 players. That's 10 minutes for players and 4 minutes for the DM so 14 minutes per turn or 1 hour and 40 (or so) minutes per encounter. Smaller groups can coordinate better so i suspect things would move slightly faster than that.
Final thoughts and impressions. It is a fun combat game but I do not think DnD 4e makes a very efficient RPG. It is definitely more "power" oriented and less "equipment" oriented. I did not feel that anyone was using weapons but were continually casting spells whether they were a fighter, a rogue or a wizard. Speaking of wizards, I think spell casters are not very subtle in this game. A spell's primary focus is on damage with an occasional effect like knocking a critter back or weakening the creature for a round. As a whole, the game felt more like a Super hero game than a fantasy game. Like I say, it is a fun game for combat but it is over blown with too many moving parts that slow the game down.
A note about MMORPG:
Some players complain that 4e similar to online games like Warcraft. There are certain similarities and they are not coincidence. Wizards was trying to capture the Online RPG community with the redesign. They figured that making a game similar to WoW, they might get 1%, which would be something like 100,000 new gamers.
In conclusion, players that want high fantasy and a fairly involved combat game will like this game. For me, it is too slow and fiddly. I prefer low fantasy where there is some bearing on reality. I like the dark Age themes like Lord of the Rings, something that 4e probably could not do very well.
John
So a group of us decided to give 4E a try. Our groups often are 6-8 players and for this test we had the full 8 players and the DM. We were playing the Kobold Adventure which was made for 5 players. The DM proportionately raised the numbers of monsters for our larger group (X1.6 for 8 players).
Character creation:
no dice are rolled to create a character in 4E. Instead, you are given a series of 6 numbers to arrange in each of your 6 stats. 16, 14, 13 12, 11 and 10. On top of that, you may get a racial bonus to these numbers. I chose Eladrin (High Elf) as my character race which gave me +2 in my intelligence. Add that to a 16 and you have 18 INT!
I chose wizard for my class.. I chose the Flaming Sphere as my Daily, the Ray of Frost for my Encounter and thunder wave ans several others for my at wills. A note about spells: These are not your DnD spells you are used to. They pretty much all do direct damage and some of them have an effect. The Flaming sphere, for instance, is a persistent spell that you can move around and burn people/critters with. It does guaranteed damage. Coupled with someone who can move characters around, this makes a pretty powerful combo as you can move enemies into the range. for my feat, i chose expanded spell book. This gives me an extra daily spell to choose from. I still can only cast 1 at 1st level.
Character creation, in general was pretty straight forward. I pretty much had my concept in my head going in and put everything together in a half hour. not as complicated as 3.5 for sure.
Gaming:
We were on our way to town when we were ambushed by Kobolds. The fight was pretty tough as these are not your father's Kobolds. generally, monsters are divided into 3 types, minions, grunts and bosses. Minions have 1 hit point and can be dispatched easily. Grunts have few special abilities but they sport as many hit points as the players. Bosses are really tough and have lots of hit points and abilities. This encounter had slingers, kobolds and minions. We did not concentrate firepower and fought more like DnD of old. While we won, we definitely were limping into town. That was the first night of gaming. The fight took 2.5 hours.
On the second session, we spent a little time in town gathering some information including the location of the dragon bone pile we were looking for. We were actually heading there to find a friend. On our way out of town, we were ambushed again! This is a rough place! We got beat upon pretty badly. The session lasted, 2.5 hours. While we won, we used up much of our resources.
In our 3rd session, we headed on rather than turn back. we figured, we were not going to get ambushed a 3rd time. We were right. We made it to the bone pile, where some unfriendlies were digging. When we asked them what they were doing there, they "invited" us down to see for our selves. As we made it into the pit, we were attacked by hounds of some sort. Fighting ensued. some of our characters were knocked down (early) and spent the rest of the battle sucking dirt. We, again, won after a 2+ hour encounter and found our friend! This time, we worked together and burned down the enemies like no tomorrow...well...maybe not so fast, but faster. 3 encounters in 7 hours of playing....not good so far.
we took our injured friend back to town. The next session was a role playing session. I was not there to play but others were. they could not get into the module for some reason. perhaps, the amount of detailed combat skewed their perception of what they were playing. So, I heard it was a fairly short game session and then they sat around chewing the fat fro the rest of the time.
The last encounter was the fight at the Kobold cave. This really tested the metal of the party. We really thought were were going to die in the first wave. The battle was joined when all the Kobolds in the world rained down on top of us. Both myself and another wizard threw out the heavies quickly. He used burning hands to wipe out about 6 minions and then used something called an action point to get another action. Action points are rewarded from adventure to adventure. You may use no more than 1 action point per encounter but it lets you do things like cast burning hands and then cast another spell, say, flaming sphere! In this fight we had two of them going. The first wave was dispatched pretty quickly and the fight lasted only about 1.75 hours. Long but better. We were missing both fighters/tanks this night so we had only 6 players. A friend joked that it went faster because we were not wasting time healing those stupid warriors!
That was phase 1.Then phase two came....on the next game session. Another storm of Kobolds came from out of the cave. We handled them mightily. The flaming spheres were still in play and proved to be very effective. I did not waste my encounter spell because I sensed that this was the big fight. One of our tanks was back and help stave off this wave.
Round three was fit into the same night. Out came the boss along with 3 champions and a cleric. the cleric knocked down one of our wizards so his flaming sphere went pop! The warlord and fighter held up the boss and the thief sneaked around to get a telling shot on the boss. We were hitting the boss with everything we had. After 3 rounds, he fell! We were able to turn our attention to the rest of the Kobolds. During the fighting, the Warlord and the thief hit the ground unconscious. The thief especially thought he'd be all right since he started this particular fight with full hit points. He was at -3 in 1 round. In stead of bleeding a point per round, each player has to make something called a "death" roll. Basically you have to make an unmodified D20 roll of 11 or better. If you fail 3 times, you die. both the thief and the warlord went down to the 3rd roll. The thief lived and the warlord died. We managed to mop up the remaining Kobolds and loot the cavern. this is where we stopped. The last two rounds took a solid 3 hours. We were definitely getting more efficient. we later learned that this particular encounter was mentioned on the 4e message boards as a TPW fight.
Final analysis:
Character creation is simplified compared to 3.5e. I saw on these boards that folks had some trouble making characters. I found the creation system to be pretty straight forward and pretty easy to do.
The non-combat rules are pretty limited. The game does not seem to add a lot of detail in that department. It is just about right as far as I am concerned. Roll a die, add a few mods and beat a target number to get a result.
The combat is VERY detailed. there are rules for moves and powers and such. This can slow the game down a lot as you have to stop and think about what you will do next to benefit the team as a whole.
A word about turn length. Our game seemed to go fast in terms of player involvement. Each player was able to get something done in about 2 minutes more or less. The game master probably took anywhere between 4 and 6 minutes total depending on how many monster groups he had. That does not seem like a lot when you glance at it but it adds up. There are 8 players. That's 2 minutes per player so that's 16 minutes for one turn of combat. There is the DM. Lets say he takes 4 minutes per turn. So the total average length of a combat turn is 20 minutes. If you go 7 rounds (our fights seemed to end around then) that's 2 hours and 20 minutes per encounter! Now, the module is only built for 5 players. That's 10 minutes for players and 4 minutes for the DM so 14 minutes per turn or 1 hour and 40 (or so) minutes per encounter. Smaller groups can coordinate better so i suspect things would move slightly faster than that.
Final thoughts and impressions. It is a fun combat game but I do not think DnD 4e makes a very efficient RPG. It is definitely more "power" oriented and less "equipment" oriented. I did not feel that anyone was using weapons but were continually casting spells whether they were a fighter, a rogue or a wizard. Speaking of wizards, I think spell casters are not very subtle in this game. A spell's primary focus is on damage with an occasional effect like knocking a critter back or weakening the creature for a round. As a whole, the game felt more like a Super hero game than a fantasy game. Like I say, it is a fun game for combat but it is over blown with too many moving parts that slow the game down.
A note about MMORPG:
Some players complain that 4e similar to online games like Warcraft. There are certain similarities and they are not coincidence. Wizards was trying to capture the Online RPG community with the redesign. They figured that making a game similar to WoW, they might get 1%, which would be something like 100,000 new gamers.
In conclusion, players that want high fantasy and a fairly involved combat game will like this game. For me, it is too slow and fiddly. I prefer low fantasy where there is some bearing on reality. I like the dark Age themes like Lord of the Rings, something that 4e probably could not do very well.
John
