So once the council meeting was over, we started the first adventure. Since the players had minimal combat experience, I took the opportunity to throw a couple test encounters at the party on their way to the shipwreck.
The first encounter was basic terrain and included several Kobolds. The party had little problem. The second encounter once again contained kobolds. However this time I included a much more complicated map. It included rough terrain, cover, water, and a slope to a higher vantage point. It was a great battle that started to test the party. At one point, the halfing tried to cross the water and ran out of movement points. I gave him the option to ride the current and try to jump out downstream to get closer to the kobold slingers. He rode the current, but didn't exit it well and lost the rest of his turn. Still, it was a neat use of the new skill system. I made up a DC on the spot, he rolled, and he failed. It took less than a minute, but added some great flexibility to the encounter.
At this point, we finally got to what I considered the start of the adventure.
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3 comments:
That was definitely a good way to start us off, Josh. And I did like how we had to account for the terrain during the fight. I can see that movement and tactics will play a much bigger role in 4ed than it was in previous editions.
I also noted from this just how darned long a fight can last. If we had four fight encounters that night, it easily took us an hour per fight on average to complete.
Some of that time will speed up as everyone learns what their characters can do. But they're still pretty lengthy. Not that I'm complaining!
Also - another question: Did anyone feel that maybe the initial fights were maybe a little too easy? I'm not referring to the initial startup encounter or the two guards out front.
But at the end of the night, we had four fights. I think Alexander was the most wounded during any of the fights, getting reduced to 5 hit points. And maybe Half Pint was the second most wounded, getting reduced to 11 hit points. But I know by the end of the night, Alex had used only 4 of 9 healing surges. Not even halfway done.
And I didn't quite get the feeling anyone was ever in any serious danger. The cleric alone had the power to bring just about anyone back from the brink of death. :)
I am definitely NOT complaining, mind you! I think we needed some encounters like this to get a feel for how things work and what we can do. But I'm also thinking that our players are pretty clever. They're going to figure out how to max out their powers and coordinate tactics in the coming months. They've sort of shown that already.
And I'd bet you'd probably do just fine Josh if you wanted to throw even more monsters at us. :)
Does anyone disagree with me?
I disagree. We couldn't have taken much more abuse that we did on that second encounter. I think we need to look at combat healing rather than total healing.
Between the cleric and the warlord, we have 4 combat heals that can be used on others, and we each have our own second wind. Total combat heals is 10. For this discussion, I'm going to reduce that number to 8; if the wizard or warlock need to user their second wind, we're all but assured of a TPK. In the second encounter I know the cleric used both of her healing words, the warlord used 1 or 2 and I'm pretty sure Rudy used his second wind. That's half our available combat healing on a test encounter. I was very worried about Rudy in that encounter, and Alexander. I also had an internal debate with myself about trying to make a 3[W]+str hit, or heal myself on that last guy to go down. That's not a bad place to be, IMO. Maybe Josh could tune that encounter up a bit, but not much more than that.
The encounter inside the cave was ridiculously easy, but I don't think Josh planned on 6 of his 9 minions going down in the 1st round.
It's true that the balcony encounter worked out well for us, and we were lucky to take out a load of minions at the start. We might have been in a world of hurt, otherwise.
But also keep in mind that some of us have also trained the heal skill, and we can use that as many times as we like to let others take a healing surge during combat. We also had a pretty good pool of action points unused which we could combine with the heal skill (probably not the wisest way to use them) in a pinch. It means any one of us could use two healing surges on someone else in the same round if needed.
So I think we may have more combat healing available to us than just the 8. Potentially five free combat heals each round if we chose to do total defense plus 'heal' skill.
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