Sunday, June 15, 2008

Kobold Fury

We had some more 4th edition excitement tonight. Unfortunately, we only got through one more encounter, the second kobold fight on Kings Road. I was a little late, we had dinner right in the middle of it, people kept getting up to do stuff on their turn, people kept taking ages to decide what to do -- it happens. Most of the delays were decision and/or rules lookup based, so I have confidence that the situation will improve as we get more comfortable with the system.

That one encounter was pretty thrilling, though. Four of the five characters present (Brandis's player was not in attendance) were bloodied, and the fifth, Scourge, was an infernal pact warlock whose temporary hitpoint-related powers we misinterpreted. Thyme got knocked unconscious twice. And Takom, uh . . .

Turns out that, in fine D&D tradition, the getting surrounded by kobolds is pretty bad news for the wizard. The two crits didn't help much, either, but that main of it was just the familiar equation of three dragonshields vs. one 1st-level wizard. After a short period of mourning for the fallen (and a bit of gloating by the DM, because I actually managed not to wuss out and have the kobolds attack a different, better defended character) Takom's player has replaced him with Ubuntu, the tiefling paladin, which ought to be entertaining.

The most interesting thing about the affair is that while the kobolds were the proximate cause of his demise, the incident was really due to poor communication by the players. If Stonefist had realized what he was trying to do earlier, he would have been able to use his daily exploit, covering strike and move him out of range of the otherwise extremely difficult to get away from kobolds.

It'll be interesting to see if the players can learn to better co-ordinate their tactics. It occurs to me that it could just be that the system is too complicated, and requires the players to keep track of too many things -- their allies capabilities in addition to their own -- but right now I think it's an area where they could significantly improve if they just talked to each other more.

Of course, some of this is probably my fault. My 3rd edition fights tended to be way too easy -- and around here, I'm the DM who actually cares about combat -- so they're just executing the "charge in and start hitting things" routine that has always brought them success in the past. I may encourage them to go hit up the dragon graveyard before they invade the kobold lair (though as the module expects, they are now very enthusiastic about wiping out those damn shifty kobolds; so far they've been just exactly the right mix of vexing and smashable) so they can get some more practice with the edition's assumptions before taking on the allegedly killer Irontooth encounter.

2 comments:

  1. So many telling points here, I think.

    The most interesting thing about the affair is that while the kobolds were the proximate cause of his demise, the incident was really due to poor communication by the players.

    It occurs to me that it could just be that the system is too complicated, and requires the players to keep track of too many things -- their allies capabilities in addition to their own -- but right now I think it's an area where they could significantly improve if they just talked to each other more.

    ...they're just executing the "charge in and start hitting things" routine that has always brought them success in the past.


    I've probably got a blog post about this brewing in the back of my head, but this is really fascinating for me. 4e was supposed to shift the challenge even further from player to character, but that's not the case in combat. Fights are no longer about maximizing your ability to eat your foe's hit points, matching up with a foe, and then slugging it out until somebody drops. Maneuver is as much about coordinating with the rest of the party as it is just moving your mini. Understanding how powers can work together means you can't create an "optimal build" without knowing what the rest of your party is doing.

    4e might not be more complex than 3e, but it is complex in very different ways. It'll be interesting to see how well the casual D&D player handles these changes.

    - Brian

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think this is a key issue you've hit, here, and one that I've been thinking about -- as today's blog post should indicate. I'm definitely keeping an eye on this issue at the table. I'm hopeful that the teamwork is a learnable aspect of the game, and that character complexity has been toned down enough to compensate for it, but only play time will tell.

    ReplyDelete