So this week was our second session of D&D 4E, and…it was all still in the same dungeon as before. And we didn’t even finish it! We’re getting better, though, and combat is getting quicker, and most of the blame for the slow going lies on the fact that A) this is a new game, and we still have to pause pretty frequently to figure out how healing surges work and stuff like that, and B) this is the starter adventure from the back of the DMG, and it’s really silly, and goes nowhere, and feels much longer than it is. Our GM, Micah, is excellent, and we’re only playing this intro dungeon as a way to teach ourselves the game. Once we get into the campaign that Micah’s creating on his own, it will be much better and more interesting.

So, what did we learn this week? For starters, we learned the same thing we learned last week: battlefield positioning is much more important in this edition than it was before. People who run out ahead to make early attacks usually get hammered really hard, so we all need to hang back and let our front-line fighters (Steadfast the fighter and Justice the paladin) actually form a front line and do their job. Most of us learned our lesson last week, but Kylie Silverbright the endlessly cheerful cleric managed to get herself into negative hit points TWICE this week because she kept trying to be a fighter. Clerics in 4E can do a fair amount of damage, and they can often heal at the same time, but they are still support classes and they need to hang back.

The biggest problem with waiting for the tanks is that none of the tank classes have a high dex, which means they always go last in the initiative. ALWAYS. And in this particular dungeon, which follows the worst of dungeon crawl stereotypes with hopeless enthusiasm, that means that most of us end up holding our actions for a turn, standing in the hallway twiddling our thumbs, while we wait for the slowpoke fighter and paladin to get their butts in gear and run out into each new room. In an ambush situation, where we’re already surrounded, or really in any situation other than “marching order, hallway, room, marching order, hallway, room,” this wouldn’t be as big of a deal. But it is funny.

This week we learned a lot more about how each character’s powers work, and how useful they really are. The fighter’s “Tide of Iron,” for example, is an at-will attack that hits a guy and then, if he lives, pushes him back and moves the fighter into his abandoned space. This proved remarkable useful because, as I mentioned, board positioning is so much more important now than it used to be. For the same reason, my warlock’s ability to teleport three squares every time a cursed enemy dies proved remarkably valuable—I could get into fights, get out of fights, take high ground, flank enemies, all essentially for free. There’s a feat that lets me teleport five squares instead of three, and I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it, but now I’m absolutely taking it as soon as we level.

One of the things we noticed, and really liked, was the lack of party downtime, and the highly-improved system of conserving resources from fight to fight. In a typical game of 3.5 you’d go through a couple of rooms, spend all your caster’s best spells, and then stop to rest and heal because you were completely out of resources for the next fight. This not only slowed the game down, but it felt really silly to stop and rest for eight hours halfway through a den of kobolds. With the new system, where you get most of your stuff back after only 5 minutes of rest, and with healing so much more available than ever before, you can keep going much longer—and you actually get rewarded for it with an extra action point. Very nice. On top of that, the interplay of at-will powers, encounter powers, and daily powers makes for a lot of interesting decisions. We learned last week that it’s often best to burn your encounter powers early, when they’ll be most effective, rather than rely on at-will powers alone. As soon as you start another encounter you get these powers back, so hooray. A more difficult decision, but a very fun one, was trying to decide when to burn your daily power. Assuming you go through an entire dungeon without pausing for more than five minutes here and there, you only get to use this once, so make the best of it. Most of us were saving our daily powers for the boss fight, and then we spent them in what we thought was the boss fight, but it turned out to just be a mini-boss, and now we’re out. Alas! But that will make the actual boss fight a lot more interesting, so that’s good.

I think my favorite innovation of 4E so far is the concept of minions: nameless hordes of enemies that go down as soon as they take any damage at all. D&D has needed this for a long time, in my opinion—enemies that are a real threat, but that are relatively easy to dispatch. It makes the fights more interesting without making them longer, and it raises the difficulty level in a good way (fights are harder) rather than a bad way (fights in 3.5 were often a war of attrition). It’s a nice system that they’ve balanced really well, and plays very cinematically. I’m impressed.

So there you go. Week 2. There actually won’t be a week 3 for another month, because some of us will be out of town for WorldCon, but I’m going to playing Dark Heresy in the car with my travelling buddies, so maybe I’m blog about that instead. Expect all of the characters to wind up insane, dead, or both.