Tomorrow is our next D&D session, which means that I’m two week slate posting the blog for our last session, but I think you will forgive me when I tell you that:
1. Our last session took place during the time when our site didn’t exist, so there was nowhere to post it even if I had written it.
And,
2. Our last session was more boring than you can possibly imagine. And you can probably imagine quite a lot.

So here’s the problem: the creatures in D&D 4E have a lot of hit points, and there are more of them. On the surface this seems like a good thing, because the creatures in D&D 3.5 were way too easy to kill. One of the problems with 3.5 was that there was no way to make a creature more survivable without also making it more deadly, so fights were inherently quick and brutal: something was going to die in the first or second round, and that’s just that. This was compounded by the fact that each combat round in 3.5 took about ten years of actual play time to complete. This resulted in combats that were simultaneously too short to be interesting (there was no time to maneuver, you just point and shoot) and too long to be bearable. A boss fight would last three round and eat up the entire evening.

The best solution to this problem, in my opinion, was to take a monster that was appropriately deadly (ie, it could put out enough damage to be a sensible threat to the party) and then bulk up its hit points artificially to make it appropriately durable (ie, it can last more than two rounds in combat against a pack of deadly PCs). This gave us fights that were exciting without being do-or-die; the monster could take a few hits, the PCs could take a few hits, and nobody was in any danger of being dropped by a one-shot.

The secondary solution to this problem (welcome to “the Dan Wells school of making your RPG fights interesting”) was to place the fights in a dynamic environment, which forces the players to consider the terrain instead of just emptying their clips (so to speak) into the baddies. Even if the environment doesn’t actually do anything dangerous or meaningful, the fact that it is doing anything at all is enough. I remember running a dungeon in Eberron—out of a published adventure, no less—where one corridor of a sewer was lined with water valves that would occasionally open and drench the characters with crap if they were standing in the wrong place. I can’t tell you anything else about that dungeon, including the amazingly wonderful thing they found at the end, but I remember those water valves because they made the fight interesting. The exact same fight in a plain stone hallway with no movement (you know, like 99% of the fights people have in dungeons) would have been fantastically boring and unmemorable.

So anyway, what was I talking about? The hideously boring fight we had two weeks ago in D&D 4E. The point I was trying to make in the last three paragraphs, before I got distracted by my “dynamic environments” pet peeve, is that extra hit points for monsters was always a good thing in 3.5, so we were kind of surprised at how horrible it was in 4E. The other culprit, of course, was the fact that there were SO MANY bad guys—we just couldn’t wade through them fast enough. Now, let’s be clear on one important thing: combat in 4E is indeed significantly faster than it was in 3.5, when you look at the individual combat rounds. A combat round in 3.5 took, as I mentioned before, ten full years to complete, by which I mean about an hour, and that is sadly not an exaggeration. Combat rounds in 3.5 took FOREVER. And combat rounds in 4E take about a minute, maybe two minutes if a couple of players are overanalyzing their options. So yes, that part of combat has been sped up. Unfortunately, the fights have been bulked out with five times as many bad guys, who have five times as many hit points, so the fights end up taking the same amount of total time—except that now you have to say “I fire Eldritch Blast” about 40 times a night, instead of two times a night, so it sometimes actually feels more onerous than before.

Let’s review: fights in 3.5 were boring because the bad guys were way too deadly and way too weak, and because combat took forever. Fights in 4E have bad guys who are more balanced, which makes fights more interesting and tactical, but they throw so many bad guys at you at once that killing them starts to feel like busywork instead of epic battle. Fortunately, there are solutions.

The first solution is built right into the game: minions. 4E is a system that wants a lot of bad guys, and those fights can actually be pretty interesting, because lots of sources of damage, and lots of targets, automatically make a fight more tactical and often do a good job, all on their own, of making an environment seem dynamic. But “lots of damage sources” doesn’t have to equal “lots of hit points to whittle down,” because the minion system allows you to have dangerous foes that drop in a single hit. They’re not deadly one-shot killers, nor are they pathetic thugs you can safely ignore, they’re somewhere in the middle.

(But wait, Dan, didn’t you say that overly weak bad guys are boring? I did, but that was in reference to a single bad guy—if he’s weak enough to go down in a couple of rounds, yet dangerous enough to pose a threat to the party, your fight will suck: the bad guy will be horrific, and then it will be dead. But imagine instead a whole group of people that functions as a single entity; you can drop one or two minions a round without actually removing the overall threat. You get to plan, coordinate with your teammates, and battle back and forth with an enemy that poses a solid danger, all while experiencing a string of minor victories and building up to a hefty battle with the minions’ boss.)

The second solution is, again, to create an interesting environment: give the players something to move through or over or around so it’s not just a case of “stand around and attack.” For example, in this fight we were jumped while camping for the night, so most of us were in tents, and the area was surrounded by trees, and there was a campfire in the middle. All you have to do is turn some of that terrain into points of obstacle and opportunity: say that anyone who stumbles into a fallen tent has a chance of tripping, and anyone who stumbles into the fire takes damage. Viola! All of a sudden the terrain is more than just cover, it’s an active participant in the battle: you can use it to maneuver around, set traps for the bad guys, and use some of 4E’s cool positional powers to hurt the enemy.

The third solution is simply to be very careful how many bad guys your use, minion or otherwise. You want enough to be cool without dragging things out. It’s a tricky balance, and I know our GM is still trying to find it. I imagine most GMs are still adjusting to the new system. The important thing to remember is that any given fight in a campaign, unless it’s a massive boss battle you’ve been building up to for weeks, is simply not a big deal, and you shouldn’t spend a ton of time on it. Keep your fights fun and interesting and short, and then get on with the story.

So we actually played a week early, so you get a bonus episode of I’m Not in There. Except it’s not really a bonus, because next week you won’t get one at all. Such is life.

This may well have been in every previous edition of D&D, but I didn’t notice it until 4E: almost every caster has one or more “word” spells that do something. Clerics have Healing Word, for example. And this is fine—that’s a great name for a spell—but the designers and writers did not see fit to actually say what those words are, which is practically begging us to come up with them ourselves. Thus it came to pass that, in honor of Kylie Silverbright the perpetually cheerful cleric, we have decided that the healing word is “Funshine.” I heartily recommend that all of you adopt this idea into your campaigns immediately, because it improves the play experience by an empirically-provable 73%. To illustrate, consider the following two scenarios:

1. You find a miner in the back of a dragon cave, wounded and near death. Your cleric says, “I cast Healing Word.”
2. You find a miner in the back of a dragon cave, wounded and near death. Your cleric says, “Yay! I love to Funshine miners!”

I think the evidence speaks for itself. This has proven to be so awesome, in fact, that we have further decided that the Warlock spell Dreadful Word is “Moist.” The flavor text for the spell says that the warlock whispers the word in the target’s ear, and “his mind reels in terror;” I know that if someone walked up to me and whispered “moist” in my ear, I would definitely take 2d8 damage. My Warlock isn’t even built to take ideal advantage of Dreadful Word—it’s the wrong pact—but I’m tempted to respec into it anyway purely for the shenanigans.

In this particular instance we actually did find a miner in the back of a cave, and we did indeed Funshine him, and in return he hired us for a job, got stinking drunk, and told a bar full of wererats that we were on our way to fortune and glory. Ahhhh…it’s so nice to finally be in a real Micah adventure instead of that silly DMG thing. Though as much as we like moving on to a real campaign, the DMG adventure was still valuable because it taught us things about 4E that we didn’t know. For example, you can now fight a dragon at first level. This is awesome, because the game is called “Dungeons & Dragons,” but in past editions it’s usually been “Dungeons & Maybe Some Dragons Later On, Like Around Level 14, But You’ll Probably Just Give Up And Roll New Characters at Level 12.” The boss fight with the dragon was actually pretty awesome, in part because we’d already burned all our daily powers, but mostly because the Dragon is actually designed, from the ground up, to be an interesting challenge to a full party of characters. He had extra action points, he had huge area effect things, he had triggered abilities that went off in the middle of combat—it was like fighting a whole swarm of little things, but in a big dragon-shaped package. I was well-pleased. The only downside was that my Warlock has come to specialize in teleporting all over the field and taking out stragglers, and there just wasn’t a lot of that going on in a fight with a single dragon. But the dragon thing was still fun, so I can live without my precious Misty Step for one fight.

The other thing the DMG adventure taught us is that fights need obstacles now. Every room in that dungeon had some kind of terrain feature we needed to work around: a pit, or a ledge, or a frozen pool, and so on. These made the environment more dynamic, they made battlefield positioning matter, and they actually gave us something cool to do with our plethora of positional powers—the fighter could knock people into pits, the rogue could flip off of walls, the cleric could push people in front of rolling boulders, and so on. Our first Micah fight had terrain, but most of it was on the edges, and it didn’t have a big effect on the battle. My Warlock has a daily spell that slides people 3 squares, anywhere I want, and there was just never a good opportunity to use it. Positioning was still important, and there was a lot of tactical maneuvering, but those specifically positional abilities never got used.

That fight did, however, finally illustrate just how good the new fighters are. If you get close to a fighter you need to either commit to it whole-heartedly or run for your life, because that fighter will mark you and then you will be his forever: if you try to move away he gets a free hit on you; if you try to attack someone else he gets a free hit on you. He can move you around for free, but if you try to move yourself around he gets a free hit on you. It’s great to finally have tanks that can tank.

At the end of the session we hit level 2, and began eagerly to level up. Even levels are cool because all your skills and saves go up, but I’m even more excited about level 3 because Kylie Silverbright will have access to a spell called Command. The flavor text says: “You utter a single word to your foe, a word that demands obedience.” What could such a word be? The mind reels in terror.

Ibroke your blog post but then I fixed something and it works now but I don't have the text.

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.

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.