Message #195

[King_Barrowclaw]

Well, I'm not trying to be mysterious or anything, the games were just a debacle. I'll just start with my impressions as a DM.

4e is not the D&D I've known and enjoyed in it's several incarnations. It wants to be, but too many things have been changed. The way that the rules are set up and designed for combat and interaction it seems to be more of a type of board/miniatures game along the lines of say, Warhammerquest or Descent in its execution. Characters have specific Moves, Powers and Abilities that are all "key-worded" so that you know when you are allowed to use them. By "Key-worded" I mean like "interrupt", "at-will", etc. There are rules for how to know when each of these things get "triggered" by the actions of the other players or NPCs. And, let me tell you now that the secret to succeeding in this game is knowing your tactics cold and knowing your "place" in the "tactics chain triggers".  I'm reminded of playing "Final Fantasy Online" with a friend and finding out that there were these things called attack chains. When one person attacked with a special move, someone with another special move could use it at the right time and set off an "effect" like an energy blast or something that would do 10x the damage as normal. It reminds me of that.

Now, I know that we had incomplete rules, but holy cow, we had some serious scraps over interpretation. I have since visited other forums and found people arguing about the same things and expressing 5 differing opinions about how to run them. Like the kobold encounters. They have been given a "shifting" power that allows them to effectively move out of the way when attacked. We argued about that all night on or off each time we played. The rules were not clear enough for us to settle it conclusively and it caused some aggravation around the table.

More later.