My review of my first D&D 4e session.

[Ichneumon]

Now, one of the first things that I noticed was that when you know how to make a character sheet the actual making becomes much faster in 4e than with 3.5. Our party (a human paladin, halfling warlock (who had made the character sheet at home already), an elf ranger and a dragonborn warlord) took about one and a half hour to create the character sheets, with only 2 Player Handbooks and 1 player who had never even played D&D before I think it acceptable.

Now for the actual game play. The first session we usually do not do much as much time is spend with making the characters, so I just put them in a room with 3 zombies (1 minion and 2 regular zombies). The player of the paladin had to go somewhere else after creating the characters so we were only with 3 characters. Even though I secretly lowered the amount of hit points of the two zombies the encounter did take us abit more than an hour, the ranger nearly died (when the zombie threw a spear through the ranger's chest and the warlords didn't notice), but they did seem to have a lot of fun. Over all I think 4e is a major improvement, but I really need to do something to decreaase the length of an encounter. Maybe use more minions and decreasing the amount of hitpoint even further.