So: last night our gaming group had our first session of D&D 4E.

It’s taken us a while, because we schedule D&D for every other week (off weeks are Brandon Sanderson’s “Big House” game, which is crazy with a capital K), and stuff kept coming up—half the group would be out of town, or dying of the plague, or eaten by monkeys—and we never had the chance to sit down and play. Now that we finally had our chance, we decided that we liked it pretty well overall; our first game was essentially just a “figure out how it all works” session, and we’re looking forward to seeing what it can do at full scale.

Our group was the same motley collection of friends that’s been playing together for years, with the re-addition of former group member Jeff. We just finished a massive 3.5 campaign that lasted almost three years, and got us all the way to level 20, so it was fun to make new characters and break out of our previous roles a bit. Our group tends to be very jokey when we play, though this group ended up a little sillier than most. I’ve included each player’s forum name; my way of “outing” them for the nerds they are.

Brandon (EUOL): Justice, a Dragonborn paladin who worships the god Koravir. (Koravir is not an official 4E god, he’s a running theme in our D&D sessions who’s been around for years, stemming from my old character in our Savage Species campaign where we all played monsters. I wanted to be a mummy, because I love the undead, and because it was funny I decided to be a mummy paladin—and because it was even funnier, I decided to be a paladin of myself, as a former god who somehow lost his powers and all his worshippers and was now mysteriously returned to unlife and trying to regain godhood. So I was Koravir the non-divine mummy god of justice, and eventually regained divinity, and then in our next campaign Koravir was lost again—he has the worst luck—and the party had to find and gather his lost implements. Now Brandon’s cleric worships Koravir is a world where virtually nobody believes in him anymore, and it is up to us, once again, to restore Koravir to his occasional glory.) (Sorry, that was a really huge parenthetical.) Brandon was not immediately sold on 4E—he actually disliked it quite a bit, thanks to the complete removal of all the tricky non-combat powers like illusions and shrink and so on. Brandon is the kind of player who likes to play dark, mysterious magic-users with a vast repertoire of seemingly non-useful powers, and then he uses those powers in ways so devious and clever that they break the game in half. 4E makes that kind of character literally impossible, and he was very sad. He’s always wanted to play a Paladin, however, and the promise that 4E would actually melee characters more interesting was enough to get him to take the plunge. His paladin is a very stalwart, honorable, naïve young warrior who’s trying to follow in his parent’s footsteps as the leader of an adventuring company; we’re part mercenaries, part bodyguards, part salvagers, and he is our inexperienced yet enthusiastic leader.

Me (Fellfrosch): Barakas, a Tiefling Warlock with a Fey Pact, who is half eladrin rather than half human. We didn’t make any rules changes to my race, just a background one: my mother is a princess in a haughty and decadent court in the feywild, who was seduced at a ball by an Incubus and gave birth to an illegitimate half-demon. I’m the group’s main talker and trickster, which is a big departure from my previous character Logan, who was essentially a semi-feral alcoholic desperate to insult the mothers of every bad guy we came across. One of the quirks of our RPG group is that Brandon and I almost always play wacko character who have plunged far off the deep end, and since we play off of each other very well this can make things downright insane for any GM to try to keep control of. Somehow, in this campaign, we both ended up with fairly normal characters, and with the de facto leaders of the group. Please don’t assume that this will make the group normal: all four of the other characters are nuts, which is an interesting reversal.

Matt (Zokai): Kylie Silverbright, a human cleric of…one of the gods. Sehanine maybe? Or Pelor? It didn’t come up during our first adventure, so I don’t remember, but the main point here is that he played a cheerful, bubbly girl who, in the modern world, would be an airheaded blonde cheerleader from a nice preppie family in the rich part of town. Matt is also playing a girl in our “Big House” campaign so we don’t know what’s wrong with him. Kylie spends all her time being excited about going on adventures, and being excited about healing people, and being excited about how the rest of us get chopped up by bad guys because then she gets to heal us again. She doesn’t know the meaning of disappointment, sadness, or negativity, both in the sense that she’s always happy and in the sense that she’s not very bright.

Jordo (Spriggan): Golden Lightfoot, aka Raven Darkshadow, a half-elf rogue. Jordo had initially planned to be an escaped circus clown with a deep love of knives and a well-developed sense of homicidal rage, but the concept just wasn’t coming together and at the last minute we decided to make him an angst-ridden goth girl who hates her parents and hangs out in coffee shops writing poetry about the crushing sadness of life. She hates being related to the bright, perky world of elves, with their staid wisdom and their stupid names and she does everything she can to rebel against her parents. She was the childhood friend of Kylie, and despite having gone in completely opposite directions they’re still more or less inseparable. Golden (who insists on being called Raven) works as the receptionist for our agency, and Justice tries to leave her behind all the time because a monster-filled dungeon is no place for his teenage receptionist. And he has a good point, but since she’s also an expert acrobat and knife-thrower, we find increasingly bizarre excuses to bring her along.

Jeff (42): Ziggy Stardust, an elf wizard. Let us be specific in this case: “elf” is listed as not only his race but his gender. You can think of Ziggy as David Bowie steeped in the thickest essence of 80s glam rock; he has tight leather pants, wildly androgynous grooming habits, and, thanks to the Wizards’ new ability to cast Light, Ghost Sound, and Prestidigitation at will, he is constantly surrounded by an aura of disco balls, psychedelic lights, and the sound of applause. Every move he makes is theatrical, and ever spell he casts is several definitions of “fabulous.” Ziggy used to work in a traveling circus, but he was getting antsy about actually traveling to a big city and hitting the big time, and was planning to quit the same day that Barakas showed up, closely followed by a pack of eladrin hunters who destroyed the circus and left poor Ziggy destitute. He hired on to Justice’s agency, taking Barakas with him, but only until he can get a good agent and make a real name for himself.

Ben (Tage): Steadfast, a dwarf fighter. You might wonder how a dwarf fighter named Steadfast could be anything out of the ordinary, but Ben assured his place in Crazytown when he (perhaps accidentally) said that I could create his character background. So: Steadfast is a former child star, playing the dwarven vaudeville circuit under the name “Little Helga Sunshine.” He gained great fame as a sort of lounge singer Shirley Temple, but when puberty struck his voice dropped and he grew a beard, which destroyed his career and alienated him from his driven stage mother; he was already well and truly alienated from his redneck war vet father, but decided to try to prove his manliness by becoming a soldier and signing up with a group of glorious warriors. Unfortunately for him, Justice’s agency is the only place that would hire him, so here he is. Just don’t tell him you think you recognize him from somewhere, and don’t be surprised if you see a bra strap fall out of his armor.

So yeah. Ben doesn’t let me do his character background anymore.

The group’s backstory, and presumably the central arc of the storyline, is this: Justice’s parents led a glorious group of skilled adventurers, dedicated to finding and restoring the lost god Koravir, but one day while they were out on a mission Raven came in to work and found two statues of them, perfect likenesses in every way; the parents themselves have never been heard form since, and it remains unknown where they are, where the statues came from, and whether or not they are actually statues or the parents themselves turned to stone. Raven sent a letter to Justice, who was away at a seminary learning the ways of paladinhood, and he immediately grabbed his classmate Kylie and returned to investigate. He knew he’d need a group of skilled warriors to help him find the truth, so he posted bills and hired Ziggy and Steadfast; Barakas followed along mostly to stay hidden from his grandfather’s hunters, but has managed to talk himself into prominence within the group. The general lack of serious backstory has more or less assured that our frustrated GM, Micah (Tigermoux), will focus most of the story on Justice and Barakas. I suppose we might have a sidequest or two dealing with Steadfast’s former fame, or Raven’s hatred of her parents, but it’s not likely.

Our first adventure was really just a test run of the rules so we could see how they worked; we ran through most of the adventure in the back of the Player’s Handbook, made a few skill rolls, killed a few Kobolds, and generally wrapped our minds around the new game. The adventure is pretty well designed for this purpose, with a smattering of interaction at the beginning (which is pretty much identical to how it was before, and therefore doesn’t need much introduction) and then a few dungeon encounters that illustrate perfectly the three new tenets of D&D combat: 1) there are more bad guys than before, 2) positioning is more important than it used to be, and 3) fights are supposed to be quicker, with less downtime between them. We were pleased to discover that combat is, indeed, smoother, and will likely get much smoother in the future as we better understand the rules and our abilities. We were also very pleased to see that the non-casters are all a lot more interesting than they used to be; that change was pretty much the driving force behind the 4E changes, and we liked what we saw on paper, but playing it out proved to us that they’d actually pulled it off in practice as well. So huzzah. Casters themselves are actually more boring than before, which was also evident on paper, because they lack all the wacky spells that used to define them: no more casting Grease on the bad guy’s sword, you just have to throw a bolt of something and be done with it. What we saw in play, though, is that the lack of tricky options for the casters sped the game up significantly because they didn’t have to spend ten minutes per turn deciding which of their thirty spells to use in a given situation. This makes it a little more boring for the casters, like I said, but much better for the group as a whole.

So there you go: way more than you actually wanted to read about my D&D game. Come back in two weeks when I’ll probably (maybe) post a report on the next session.