Anyone else take part of World Wide Game Day

[Tough_Tonka]

For the first time in months I got to take part in D&D as a player during World Wide Play D&D Day or whatever WoTC calls the event. So did anyone else play the 4e adventure during this event? If so what were your feeling about the experience?

I'd say my game was a mixed experience that suffer from the usual problems of a one-shot game. We had regenerated characters none of us were particularly attached and the adventure was fairly lacking in depth. Also none of us really knew the rules all that well and at times it seems more like a competition than a cooperative game (people trying to show there characters were better or that other characters were useless).

Basically we were looking for some rich guys children that got kidnapped by a drow and few hobgoblins. They took them of to an ancient mausoleum they had desercrated and planned to sacrifice the kids in for no apparent reason. So we went in solve a puzzle fought some hobgoblins then a drow necromancer and his animated skeletons and statues. Then we rescued the kids and got out.

One neat detail that was pretty cool was this ghost of one of the crypts inhabitants that aided us fixing the parts of the tomb our enemies messed up. All and all I'd say the experience was pretty fun.

[TheOOB]

The adventure was pretty hard, I actually saw a group that split up and fought the two hardest encounters seperatly and survived.

The coolest thing though was the fire trap, not only did it trigger if the player triggered it, but it could also be used as a weapon(by the goblins or the players.)

[Ominous]

I played it and didn't find it too challenging. The drow wizard died quickly as the eladrin wizard teleported to the top of the pillar and thunderwaved the drow down into the middle of two fighters and a rogue. Another fighter and cleric held off the statues at the choke point until everyone else managed to join them and finish them up.

[Ent]

A friend and I were reverse engineering the character sheets after the game to learn how they came to some of the stats. Everything became clear (like the human Ftr having +8 to hit being a combination of being proficient and Ftr Weap. Talent, or the Ftr's unlisted armor check being -2 affecting Athletics and Endurance).

The only two errors we caught were the Cleric being short-changed 1 hp (we counted 30 even with Toughness) and the Ftr getting a +2 to opportunity attacks (Combat Superiority is supposed to give you a bonus based on Wis but this Ftr had no bonus).

I'm starting to think Dex is the new Con though.

[Recaiden]

I participated and found all the usual oneshot adventure problems, but it was fun and i learned a lot about 4e. My character did get knocked out and almost died in the last fight. Still fun.

[Jerthanis]

I think they could have made that module worse if they tried... but beyond that I can't really say much positive about my experience.

I had a lot of issues with the module, but I still had fun. My group was neat, and we did a good amount of roleplay considering we were at the dungeon door within the first 30 seconds of the module starting. It seemed to me like they made an encounter in a way to avoid showing off the awesome parts of 4th edition. The terrain limited what effects the characters could employ brutally, and some of the power choices were just bad for the characters, or the module. If you're going to give the fighter Passing Attack, why would you make the major battle likely take place on difficult terrain? Same with Icy Terrain on the wizard. Also, with the Hobgoblin battle being what it was, difficult terrain and prone would only HELP the Hobgoblins and their ranged attacks from cover... not that they were close enough to each other to target at the same time with anything. Giving Careful Strike to the Fighter was an enormous trap, that our fighter, who was pretty new to the game kept falling into. The difference of -4 damage for +2 to hit really doesn't even out when you already have +8 to hit at 1st level (or whatever he had), and Reaping Strike would have helped significantly more.

Really, the terrain and monsters being what they were, it reduced almost every round to moving and attacking, moving and attacking. The rogue was never able to get the positioning to sneak-attack because of this... the Fighter never had anywhere to push someone with Tide of Iron, it was difficult to utilize any wizard spells beyond Magic Missile since there wasn't enough area to avoid hitting allies, or get a better positioning to hit all possible enemies... Essentially, it felt like the module was trying to hide everything fun about the changes to the combat system, like it had something to prove... that 4e combat could be unexciting too if it tried. A friend of mine who has hated 4th edition since it was announced, and hates it on a deep level said after the first combat... "At least combat plays exactly like 3rd edition..."

Which is precisely the WRONG impression a 4th edition advertisement should be giving.

What seems like especially bad module design though is the fact that the battle is obscenely more difficult based on a simple choice to investigate one area before the other. If you investigate the extra room down the hallway before investigating the room with the children, you trigger both the final encounter and the statue encounter at the same time, which pins you between them in cramped quarters on difficult terrain. It's impossible to get good positioning and impossible to utilize powers effectively, so it was a lot of watching us get beaten up. If we had investigated the door first, we could have fought the statues on their own, and then fought the Necromancer on more even ground... I'm so glad that arbitrary choice decided we lose!

I publicly poo-pooed Keep on the Shadowfell for being not a very good module to sell 4th edition... that it was extremely generic, and parts of it were just a bunch of combat. I hereby take back those statements, because compared to this, Keep on the Shadowfell is literature... literature and grace personified. Or rather... Modulified.

[Kurald Galain]

I was unaware that it was called "world wide game day", but yeah, I was DM'ing the 4E intro module. Or, more accurately, threw the 4E intro module out of the window (because as Jerthanis points out, it contains way too many flaws) and did a homebrew quest to showcase 4E rules, involving an undead sorcerer thing, a psychic statue, and a handful of human-animal hybrid shapechangers.

Lots of fun and tense moments, and an extraordinary amount of crits and fumbles rolled. Lots of rivalry as the cleric and wizard tried to trump one another's arcana checks, and a rogue who tried to convince the others that there wasn't any loot, honestly.

[Saph]

For the first time in months I got to take part in D&D as a player during World Wide Play D&D Day or whatever WoTC calls the event. So did anyone else play the 4e adventure during this event? If so what were your feeling about the experience?

Yup, wrote about it two days ago in this thread here.

Like virtually everyone, we triggered the last two encouners at the same time. Three of the party died, but the remaining two survived, came back, and killed the enemy caster using Stealth cheese.

- Saph

[SamTheCleric]

My store didn't tell WotC in time that he was participating... so we had one table running Keep on Shadowfell and another running through an adventure that I wrote full of goblins, humans, traps, ochre jellys and hordes of undead.

It was a pretty good time.

[Bosaxon]

I played through with mostly employees at the Barnes and Noble. The DM was savvy enough to split up that last encounter, which made it a lot easier, and didn't use the pillar, instead having the fight outside the room where the kids were kept.

I played the rogue. Hobgoblin fight I was near useless, except demoing how the fire trips worked. The second battle with the statues I used my peircing strike to beat the oh so low reflexes of the statue. Then I easy targeted the mage with first strike combat advantage and from there, it was just a few shots with the handcrossbow.

My question is this: WTF was with weapon proficiency: Rapier for a feat? I know it's a pregen, but still.

[obliged_salmon]

I played the human fighter in a group of nine. One of the wizards chucked a statue of Pelor down the stairs and the ghost started wailing on him. No one in the party came to help except my character, who was more willing to side with a party member than the random ghost. I gave up the fight when the wizard died, and the ghost disappeared. Meanwhile the hobgoblins were tearing the rest of the party apart downstairs. I went down and soaked myself in oil (threw the lantern innocuously away first) to get to the hobbies beyond, missed my passing attack, and suddenly realized no at-wills were useful, so ended up doing basic attacks the rest of the fight. Anyway, that all took about 3 hours to get that far, so I decided to take off, it was getting late.

In sum: I like 4e, and I like fighters, but if I ever have to play in a group of nine people again, I'm going to bring reading material.

[Saph]

My question is this: WTF was with weapon proficiency: Rapier for a feat? I know it's a pregen, but still.

Yeah. Rogues have one of the only genuinely good feats in the heroic tier (Backstabber) and the pregen character doesn't take it? Why?

- Saph

[Kurald Galain]

Yeah. Rogues have one of the only genuinely good feats in the heroic tier (Backstabber) and the pregen character doesn't take it?

While it's surely better than a weapon prof, I don't think Backstabber is all that good, as it boils down to +2 damage when sneak attacking only. Improved Initiative and several of the multi-classing feats seem to be a much better deal to me...

[Skyserpent]

In our own way, we got together and played up a storm, giving 4e a real workout. It was hella-fun, with a fantastic battle ending with one character death, (mine) but it was freaking awesome because I couldn't stay for the rest of the campaign anyway and my death was a whole new flavor of epic. Taking a crit from a gigantic raging-deific engine of vengeance after dealing over 180hp of damage over the course of combat. That is good death.

[Bosaxon]

Yeah. Rogues have one of the only genuinely good feats in the heroic tier (Backstabber) and the pregen character doesn't take it? Why?

- Saph

I would have taken toughness over weapon prof. Anything really. The rapier was useful against the statues, I suppose, although the average is one more point above the short sword.

I have to give them some credit. They were smart enough to give eyebite as the half-elf dilettante. That was something I was considering until I fell in love with the concept of this prophet-esque warlock/wizard.

[Tough_Tonka]

I played it and didn't find it too challenging. The drow wizard died quickly as the eladrin wizard teleported to the top of the pillar and thunderwaved the drow down into the middle of two fighters and a rogue. Another fighter and cleric held off the statues at the choke point until everyone else managed to join them and finish them up.

I tried that trick too, but I rolled a nat 1 on my first attempt to thunderwave him and everytime we tried to knock him off he made his saving throw to just get knocked prone.

[Fredward]

I also attended. My group managed to fail pretty hard. The party wizard decided to try to disable the earthquake trap as soon as he saw it (without consulting anyone else), failed miserably, and decided that a second try was in order. The second try also failed miserably. So both fighters died in the cave-in because the cleric, rogue, and wizard ran (leaving both boys still chained, and both fighters taking damage from the cave-in and the statues). Long story short, the entire back line ran into the final encounter with skeletons and drow with no fighters. The wizard was down in one round, the rogue down the next, and the cleric only made it out alive because he ran from them immediately, and the DM was lenient.

[DeathQuaker]

I participated in WWGD... I played through an encounter with a large white dragon rather than the hobgoblin thing. It was fun, and a good way to experience first hand the system, which has a lot of similarities to 3.x but enough differences that we were a little slow on the uptake.

It was a tough encounter for first level characters, but we did a pretty good job of taking care of the monster. A group before us got slaughtered by the dragon, largely because they stayed too clustered together and got wiped out by breath weapon. Our group benefited I think by some experienced players as we all managed to teamwork it well--and I do think one thing 4E has going for it is that it is a little more transparent how to devise team strategies.

The fighters especially shone, using their abilities to keep the dragon from escaping melee to land on his healing circle--really, really made that class very effective.

People complain about the rogue, but I played him and had a lot of fun--and most of my problems were due to rolling 3s four times in succession--but my last roll was a 20 and I'd used my daily ability, which increased my damage. This ended up being the killing blow, so I got my turnaround from having so many die flops.

Generally, my overall impression of 4th Ed hasn't changed much... the mechanics are great, everything else beyond it just doesn't excite me very much. I'd definitely consider joining a 4th Ed campaign to get a better feel for it though. As far as being a GM I'm sticking to 3.5 for now, but that's as much as my campaign would be a pain in the ass to convert as anything else.

[Nikolai_II]

I tried that trick too, but I rolled a nat 1 on my first attempt to thunderwave him and everytime we tried to knock him off he made his saving throw to just get knocked prone.

I did that as well, and also failed at the first try. So I called in knowing about Action Points and tried thunderwaving again, successfully this time

Our store had decided that "Random Rescue" was no fun, so they made up background stories for all five characters to connect them to each others. They also made the kids to rescue into the human fighters own sons.

Me and my son had a lot of fun, but after snagging the adventure as I left I realize that the DM managed to miss on about half of it. No biggie, as that means I can rerun it as an intro to my own gaming group

(Yep, using this and the death of the Forgotten Realms to advance the campaign a century and an edition )

[Jack Mann]

I think the best part was when my dwarven fighter threw the lantern (picked up from the hobgoblin area) at the elf wizard.

[Leon]

I Dm'd it and had a fun time - not enough to make to even think about switching but enough to have a good day and for my players to have a good day

They worked together really well, apart from some minor kleptomania by the thief (they worked out the riddle to open the door and found a statue missing) at random points

Being the Dm that i am i skimed the text of the adventure and made up a lot on the fly as to where it was and why they were wanted, how the fights worked etc

They didn't attack the shadow and agreed to all its later demands and helped it achive its goal

The "unstable" Cavern caused a bit of controversy - they wouldn't let the wizard cast thunderwave any where near it just in case - but all was good.

They investigated the room with the boys first and heeded the warning, gave some food and drink to them before going out and Relocking the door

The rogue snuck ahead and got into a good spot to attack the Elf, the rest came in and started the encounter, the core of the party dealt massive damage to the Skellies while the rogue sneak attacked with his Daily power followed by a number of sly florishes to wear down the Elf (who seeminly counldnt hit with his spells) allowing the Shadow to lay the final blow

Meanwhile they had heard a sound coming from out in the other room and the wizard went to investigate - discovering that the doors were being torn open by the statues, she attracted the attention on them for a turn or 2 while the party focused fired one of them with massive amounts of damage to only still have it advance on them.

Once they were down, they rescused the boys, gathered up the loot and went back the Silversmith (there was some debate as to weather he was a Masochistic Werewolf or not....)

I chose to start them in the cliche tavern setting, given it was a demo one shot and not having time to get motivations etc

And the best thing of the day was that two of the players were interested in joining my Iron Kingdoms game that im starting in the next few weeks.

[Eurus]

Eh, it was all right. Nobody in the party I played in could roll well to save their lives (I, playing the wizard, hit maybe four times through the encounter), but we lived, despite triggering both final encounters at the same time. Managed to disable the cave-in, too. Only problem was the first riddle; we got what we had to do almost immediately, but we were kind of expecting a click, or a noise, or something, so when nothing happened, we started trying different things. Finally had to just make our rolls and skip it. Turned out all we had to do was look at the monolith after we got the statues situated and the door opens, but until you do, there's nothing to indicate that you're on the right track, apparently. I still think that should have counted as a success. XD

Nobody died, amazingly, though one person did hit -11 once. Teleporting onto the pillar and knocking the evil spellcaster off was definitely my best (and probably only) achievement, so that was fun. We managed to do something different to each of the sarcophagus-traps, too; the fighter triggered the first one, and the hobgoblin tipped the second one, so both fighters got together and tipped the third one on the goblins instead. So that was kind of neat too. But other than that, it was rather mediocre. I think I just hate pregenerated-character oneshots, though.

[Lycan 01]

I played Arkham Horror with 6 of my friends and 1 random guy who showed up at my house uninvited. I know that has very little to do with DnD, 3 of the players were my DnD group... *shrug*