Our Further Adventures in 2E

We’re still having a good time with 2E.
We’ve played four sessions of it so far. The fights are definitely faster, but we bs a bit more so there’s a trade-off.

The 4th session had only one big fight, and I felt for a bit that I’d overdone it on the party on that one.
In the past couple of sessions I’ve thrown at them (in no intelligible order):
Buying a house in the town of Winter’s Respite (think of Aspen, Colorado – except nobility and rich merchants). They’ve spent much party gold fixing up the place when waiting for their only wizard to identify magic items.
Several run-ins with goblins and fake patrols. One patrol got them after they’d had a nasty series of fights and “taxed” the party for more gold than last time.
An ogre gave them a fair fight. It also had 4 potions that took the party a while to get identified. One potion was drunk blindly but had no effect (a potion of heroism drunk by a non-warrior type has no effect). Another was later determined to be a poison and destroyed by the identifier.
A cave of spiders and an ettercap that gave the party a nice fight.
A pair of ankhegs were discovered when the party was looking for a missing farmer. They also discovered a magical, and intelligent sword called Galamandrian. It is a two handed sword that hates evil magic and can only be wielded by a good person. It can also heal the wielder and detect magic items by touching it to them.
They met up with a businesslike adventuring party. It was a no nonsense group, but De’Aire struck a deal to trade spells with their mage. The group’s name “Company of Cold Steel” didn’t give the party any happy thoughts either.
They also met up with an elven adventuring party on its very last night in town. They had a fun evening and traded information. The elves told the party that the magical fey creatures of the forest had disappeared, which is what they were really in the area to check on. They showed the party on the map three places where the bandits’ base camp might be.
One of the locations was correct and the party faced off against the patrol that had been giving them trouble, several goblins and worgs, and the town’s ex-sheriff and a mage. The party succeeded in killing the sheriff and capturing several of the fake guards and the mage. In the end the guards were sent to work camps while the mage was beheaded by Stanley (Dale’s paladin) using Galamandrian.
While interrogating the captives the party had noted that the number of people were less than what their tracking had determined and the captives told them that most people went to “the golden shield”. Putting together various bits of information they received they looked for the likely place where this golden shield would be.
First they ran into some lizard men. A parlay later and the party left the lizard men’s home with stories of the area dying and people passing through their land.
Eventually the party found a convergence of foot traffic in a dead patch of land that led to a gold sphere, half in the ground that shimmered like water.
When they entered the sphere, it was huge on the inside, over a mile wide.
After grouping up (they didn’t enter in the exact same point when they entered the sphere, so the distance was greatly magnified on the other side), they headed toward the center of the sphere, expecting something to be there if it was going to be anywhere.
They were right. There was a huge wall, at least 500 feet to a side. There was had much damage to it, burn marks and damage from siege equipment. There were also things moving along the top of the wall. From the distance the party was at, they couldn’t tell exactly what. Nor was there a good way to get closer as there was no cover within 200 feet of the wall.
And that’s where we stopped for the evening.
I have some extra special fun for the party when we resume. Oh it will be a nice surprise for them.

If I recall correctly these are everyone’s characters and levels:
Aerol (Dale): level 3 human ranger
Items of note: Leather Armor +1

Stanley (Dale): level 3 human paladin
Items of note: Galamandrian The Enchantress’s Bane

Arya (Aaron): level 4 halfling rogue
Items of note: Short sword of Speed (unnamed), Boots of Elvenkind

Brandon (Aaron): level 3 human cleric
Items of note: Potion of Extra-healing

Grum (Will): level 3 dwarf fighter
Items of note: Nada

De’Aire (Will): level 1/1/2 fighter/mage/cleric
Items of note: Elixir of Health, Wand of Magic Missiles (10 charges)

My Short Experience With D&DNext

Last week I had the opportunity to play a game of D&D Next, or rather what I thought was D&D Next.
It was actually, I think, a game of D&D Encounters using the D&D Next rules (or it could be D&D Next Encounters…I really don’t know).
I played a level 4 dwarf paladin for this single fight, one-hour long session.
Since it was only an hour long I don’t feel I have a truly fair impression of it, but what I did experience was nothing special.
Let me first get this out of the way – the DM and other players were perfectly fine and these comments should in no way reflect upon them.
Since I expect 5E to not be out until late 2014 or early 2015, I assume that what I played will not be the final version.
I’m not sure what I can and can’t say, but what they changed about the game did very little to actually speed the game up:
- The advantage/disadvantage rules make things simpler than figuring out all of your +/-‘s every single turn. So that’s a plus.
- The skill system is simpler, but it’s neither better nor worse.
- Powers (other than casters’ spells) have reverted to earlier editions (Vancian style magic). So that’s a plus.
- Attacks of Opportunity…they still exist, though you can only do it once in between your turns rather than every person’s turn. This is a very minor change that in fact makes things more complicated since now you can game the system by trying to trigger targets to use their AoO’s on harder to hit targets so softer targets can slip by.
- Everyone has specials they can use, but it’s still just modifiers that add time to combat length.
- Combat chess is still alive and well. There are supposedly rules that make a battle-grid optional, but the system stills seems pretty focused on a grid being needed.

In my opinion, what I played was just an altered version of 4E. And anyone who’s read this blog for the past 5 years knows my opinion of 4E (it’s a piece of shit).
I guess what I’m saying is, fire the D&D developers, and start anew. Because if things don’t change I’ll be waiting until 6E comes out.