KotS #4

When playing Fourth Edition, I cannot stress enough that your players must know their PC’s and be 100% prepared.

A player can no longer afford to sit back and roll a d20 when it’s his initiative and then go back to reading his comic book.

With 4E you must know what your abilities are before you sit down at the table.

If you don’t then you’re going to be either forgoing a lot of your PC’s potential, or you’re going to be wasting everyone’s time at the table while you continuously look up some ability or power.

And if you’re anything like me, it gets old fast.

What I’ve done for Tornok is to create a simple Word document that has any and all powers listed out that he has. This includes his racial abilities, his feats, and all of his class abilities and powers – all separated into at-will, encounter, and daily. It’s all listed on a single page and slipped into a plastic protector that can be marked on with a dry-erase marker.

Oh dry-erase markers, where would our D&D games be without you?

Once again I’m about to talk about 4E’s promise of sped up combats.

The result – we’ve been lied to, mostly.

Any fight where you’re fighting flunkies can usually be completed in 20 minutes or less.

But if you’re up against a “solo” class monster, or any fight that involves the required use of your daily powers, expect the next hour and a half to be accounted for.

This doesn’t mean 4E isn’t fun. We’re still having fun with that.

Plus an hour and a half is still less than 2 hours that level 10 combats seemed to have taken with 3E that I remember not too fondly.

Next I want to crush and argument that 4E is just like World of Warcraft in gameplay.
I’ve recently got into WoW. I see no similarity beyond the cosmetic stuff and the standard “killing stuff and taking its treasure”.

Now if they claim it’s a miniatures game, they’re on better ground to argue. It’s kind of hard to argue against a point when there’s a D&D Miniatures game that all but emulates D&D combat.

This week we were finally back to a full house with all 6 of us at the table:
Dale, the DM
Me, playing Tornok, the level 2 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 2 eladrin rogue
Scott, playing Earl, the recently morphed into level 1 dragonborn paladin
Justin, playing Stout, the level 1 dwarven fighter
Brian, playing Hadarai, the level 1 eladrin wizard

This session started off more or less where we stopped last week, but we were able to meet up with our new PC companions and leave the dungeon and return to Winterhaven without issue.

The guards at Winterhaven did have trouble allowing a giant walking lizard into the town, especially one named Earl, but once Tornok vouched for him to Lord Padrag, it was ass good.

We did some quick, but non-consequential roleplaying before we declared ourselves rested and returned to the keep.

The first area we entered in our continued exploration of the keep’s dungeon was more natural than not, full with stalactites, stalagmites, and very large rats.

Our explorations ticked off the rats and an ochre jelly, which wanted us as food.
Now they don’t move no more.

Note #1: I definitely like how the ochre jelly split when it was bloodied, rather than based off of what kind of weapons hit it.

Note #2: Five points of acid damage every round can add up quick.

Note #3: Dale has something against Aaron’s PC. Lucky for Aaron that Dale can only hit his PC 25% of the time.

The next room we entered had a fungus covered door which someone had written on it “Stay out. No seriously, stay out.”

So we entered. We probably should have stayed out like Aaron wanted us to, but we’re adventurer’s damnit!

Inside were some stairs leading down to a room that had about 2/3 of it filled with murky water, just like in horror movies.

This time the monster in the water was a blue slime.

And that slime tore us up. I mean that thing beat the daylights out of us. Half of the group hit single digit hit points at lease once in the fight.

Most of us had used our daily powers.

By the end of the fight Tornok had used all of his expendable powers. That includes the daily power from the dwarven armor he found a few sessions back that allowed him to use a healing surge.

Valenae, not knowing how deep the water was, used his fey step to get flanking on the slime only to find that the water was 20’ deep. He was able to climb up on an adjacent “island” of floor and continue the fight.

And when we thought we were finally doing well, Balgron the Fat shows up to screw with our wizard who had been hanging out in the back.

Once we finally dropped to 200hp solo monster, we swarmed Balgron and slaughtered the fool.

Accordingly, we also took his treasure finding some messages about getting some creature wet, and an offer to Kalorel to buy slaves for duergars signed by the chief of the “Bloodreavers”.

Although we had been beaten up nicely, we weren’t ready to run back to town to rest and pushed on to search more of the cavernous rooms.

The next room had some pits, and fake pits that Valenae checked out.

The first pit had a dead goblin with a dead kruthik on it. Valenae went down into the pit and searched around. He found nothing of interest to the group, except a bag of coins that he sneaked (only Earl saw that part).

This week’s quote of the week: “Orangutans love monster trucks.”

For the rest of the area, we expected kruthiks.

We were not disappointed.

When we finally found them, we mostly fought them on our terms and kept them from swarming us with a Sleep spell and a front line of fighter-types until their numbers were reduced, then we swarmed their “mother” and put her down.

After that fight we needed to rest, and it was late, so we called it a night.

I believe we’re over half-way through the module, and are unsure if we’ll continue on to the next in the series or just cruise ahead on our own.