As I threatened, D&D 4th edition
Tonight we ran our first 4th ed. session. We spent a good fraction of it creating several characters to get a feel for what was possible. We only have two players and a GM, so we were not going to get role coverage and we resolved to run strict rules with open rolls in order to see the gears mesh, as it were. We wound up with a paladin and a ranger.

Some fun role-playing opened up our session, introducing some NPCs that will be relevant to the broader story arc I have in mind, but soon got down to the nitty-gritty: the archaeology dig is beset by kobolds. Go root them out! Straight dungeon crawl: an excuse to test the combat system and little more, really.



Here I will point out that the rules for D&D 4th Edition are about combat. Okay I concede there are a couple of pages of non combat stuff in the player's handbook, and the DMG has a bunch of good advice unrelated to combat, but the vast majority of this game is about how to model fighting. Further, the player reward cycle is also about fighting. Lip service is given to granting XP for non combat victories, but dozens of pages are spent on how many fights should happen per level, how this is used to craft balanced combats, and how to reward pushing through resource depletion. There is no pretending this game is about anything but fighting.

It's really fucking good at fighting.

This is not just a tactical game in the sense that you have many combat options. This is a tactical game in the sense that your positioning matters hugely. It is tactical in the sense that if you play your role well you can set up relatively easy victories whereas if you buck your role you can get humped to death by tiny lizard folks. Seriously, playing well makes all the difference and playing well includes making sure to use the powers you have that make others shine. This is no longer a game of maximizing your own damage output -- that will not solve the rich encounters in this game.

If you like to play without precise positioning -- no battle maps, no minis, and so on, this game will no longer work for you. At least half of what makes any given class interesting will be unavailable to you without running the minis around. Seriously, this is unabashedly a miniatures wargaming system that you can role-play around. This is D&D circa 1976, but way way richer.

So anyway, we got to the first fight. I overloaded it by 50xp and the party had poor role coverage. 4 kobold minions and a kobold wyrmpriest (250xp against two 1st level characters) ambushed our hearty heroes and a desperate melee ensued. Everyone died. I mean everyone -- both player characters, all the minions, and just when it seemed that the priest would cackle his evil laugh and announce victory, the ranger's bear trap attack's ongoing damage ticked and killed him. Shakespearean tragedy time. All resources were expended -- second breaths, action points, encounter powers, and daily powers. I call that balanced.

We discussed tactics and roles for a while and decided to make some changes and re-run the same encounter with the same initiative order and see what happens. The paladin decided to embrace his role a little more -- he traded out his feat to add Toughness for the extra five hit points and changed his longspear for a war pick and a shield. That is to say, he decided to adopt the role of Defender and attract, absorb, and deflect attacks rather than do his own harm. The ranger decided to engage the dangerous caster immediately and with both barrels, ignoring the minions.

This time things went TOTALLY differently. The paladin used his challenges to force attacks from creaturs blocked by the ranger, forcing them to choose between taking damage or move past the ranger and take an opportunity attack. The ranger started out with his powerful encounter power on the priest right from the get go. The PCs made movement choices designed to force the enemy to move in ways that were disadvantageous and limit the use of their "shifty" power.

This fight took half as many rounds and ended with all foes dead. No action points were expended and the only healing surge was the paladin laying hands on the ranger once. Instead of avoiding opportunity attacks, the PCs accepted them as a necessary evil from the less dangerous opponents, and favoured effective maneuver. This was an overbalanced fight against a party with poor role coverage and they kicked ass when they got their shit together, played into their roles, and cooperated.

From the GM's perspective, combat is so damned easy. You WANT to run complicated encounters with multiple monster types. It's a snap and it's fun and it challenges the PCs. Rolling in the open is viable because the encounter balancing rules do not seem to be broken, so you don't really find yourself in "oops I killed the party" territory unless the luck is really bad or the PC tactics suck.

I'd talk about the role-playing but the game itself just doesn't impact the role-playing. When you're not fighting you're barely engaging the rules (which is pretty much what I remember about AD&D and previous anyway), so the game is not really in operation there. When you are fighting, there's as much visualization and hooting as there ever was. Certainly combat is a great deal more heroic at first level than in any prior version, which encourages hooting.

Some tweaks to consider: if you want to emphasize role-playing you should probably increase the XP rewards. Otherwise progress is very slow unless you fight non-stop, which isn't conducive to role-playing much. You could also add more non-combat XP, of course, though it would be a little odd to level off of non-combat XP and consequently get better at combat. The action point system begs to be elaborated. Right now it rewards urgency: the fewer rest breaks you take the more action points you accumulate and the more double actions you can take. That's kind of fun, but I can't help thinking there's a more interesting economy to be created.