richardm
4th edition 4th edition game Last SundayI posted this on my livejournal, but thought I'd post it here too. No comic update today, hopefully soon. :)
So yesterday our first real 4th edition D&D campaign started. I'd been prepping my character for a few weeks and was a little worried the campaign wouldn't live up to my expectations. Happily, the game turned out better than I had thought.
My character, more or less, is here:
http://dndorks.com/4e/jondolarsulvak.xps its in Microsoft format because the pdf version only worked for people using non-adobe products (I use nitro pdf to create my pdfs forms and foxit to read my pdfs:
http://www.nitropdf.com/index.asp). Last minute before I showed up to game I decided to replace Alertness with Action Surge or whatever, I decided the alertness was a little too passive.
My character is Jondolar Sulvak, human wizard. Jondolar is the last scion of the Sulvak, his parents having been killed by the head servant m Klackus, and given to an old mage to have as an "apprentice" (ie servant). Luckily Jondolar turned out to have a better aptitude for magic than Klackus could have predicted and the old man was more fair and reasonable than one could hope for.
The adventure begins with Jondolar's master dying of old age (I guess he never hit lvl 30) and Jondolar finding out that Klackus has claimed the family's name for himself from some fictional grandmother. Of course Jondolar, now brimming with arcane might, can't allow this to happen. Jondolar also inherited the old man's items of power, but has to go pick them up from some small town to the north. Jondolar has dreams of great powerful artifacts with which he'll be able to smite Klackus down with, though the reality is that it'll probably be a ring of protection +1 or some similar junk. ;)
With him, Jondolar travels with a halfling troublemaker, Aleta (my gf Anna) and has recently met up with a regular circus of freaks...er heroes, 2 demonic tieflings (a warlock and a paladin), a dwarf cleric of the raven god, and a half-elf ranger. One of the tieflings is the son of my family's blacksmiths and has a reason to want vengeance on Klackus as well.
The dwarf is on some mission to discover the dwarven equivelent of Atlantis or some such thing, something I could care less about, though the cleric has hinted I can get access to some dwarven items of power so I'm definitely intrigued.
Finally, where we met, at a crossroads of merchants, we got attacked by an alliance of undead and goblins, so before we go off on our epic journeys we're going to go try to rid the world of this undead menace (and hopefully build up our power ;).
There were 2 combats and the rest roleplaying in a bit less than 4 hours. I think it was probably 40% combat to 60% RP, a lot of the RP was between characters and dealing with our backstories, which, to me, is a good sign.
Overall the game felt cool, with people seemingly more willing to do things they "thought" of doing rather than what the game said they "could" do. The fact that many skills are merged into larger meta-skills helps a lot because its much more likely the players will have a decent modifier to the roll when they decide to try and do something. No true skill challenges yet, and the combats were fairly linear, but its going to take the DM a while to fully get into the "spirit" of 4E, I know I don't have it quite down yet.
As an ending note, I "love" the new wizard cantrips. Being able to do them at will as often as I want is pretty cool. At one point as a bit of humor I made a wounded goblin smell like roasted meat and pointed a glowing red arrow at it when we left it to distract some wolves who were starting to threaten us. It amused me anyways... ;)