Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Impressions

I played Dungeons and Dragons from 1980 to 1986.  I started with the basic rules and moved to the 1st edition (1E) rule set early.  I was a player with a group of people older than me, and I was dungeon master for friends my age.  We played Grayhawk and a couple of custom campaigns I invented.  I stopped when I went to college and didn't pay much attention to D&D between then and now.

The 4th edition (4E) news online got me interested in the game again.  How do other people play D&D?  What's changed between 1st edition and 4th edition?  Would my kids (girls, 9 and 12) be interested in playing?  Suprisingly, it was hard to get good information on the Internet.  Most information related 4th edition to 3rd edition, and playstyle articles were scattered and disconnected.  There was also almost no information about how accessible 4th edition would be to casual players or young players new to the game.  It was pretty frustrating.

I had this week off from work, so I decided to answer these questions for myself.  I borrowed a copy of the rulebooks from a friend, bought a copy of Keep on the Shadowfell, and found some dice.  I talked about the game with the kids, they seemed interested, and we decided to play.  The rest of this post is a few notes from our experience.

The Encounter System

The encounter system in 4E is great.  There is a very deliberate separation between noninteractive storyline elements in the adventure and the encounters where the players get to take action.  The encounters can be combat or noncombat oriented.  Keep on the Shadowfell illustrates how encounters are set up and also gives story elements to transition players from encounter to encounter.  Story elements include NPCs and information they might give to players in response to questions as the players accumulate clues as to what's happening at the Keep.  It's a lot of detail, but the module is illustrating how to lay out a story and keep it moving.

I found myself wanting to use graphviz to make another kind of map: an encounter map.  If I had it, I could see a high-level structure to the story arc, and I could see at a glance what critical encounters were important to play before others.  In Keep on the Shadowfell, the early encounters are important to gather clues as to what's going on in the Keep.  If I were designing an adventure from scratch, I'd start with the encounter map to back the story and only then work the details of each encounter.  Sounds like a plot outline?  It is!

Combat

The combat mechanics make 4E almost a new game for me.  The mechanics are advertised as simple: you roll a 20-sided die and compare to a number.  The catch is the modifiers to the roll, and those modifiers can change from round to round and even turn to turn.  4E is also designed to be played on a grid with miniatures or tokens, i.e., space, location, and movement are important.  It makes the game far more tactical than 1E ever could be.  I like it.

The system doesn't have to be complex.  You can drop some rules, and all it affects are modifications to that d20 roll.  As an example, the kids and I ignored terrain and cover modifiers.  If you had line of sight, you were good.  The problem I had was knowing what rules I should drop being new to the game.

This is an important point.  I was overwhelmed when I first read the combat mechanics in the Players Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide.  They've developed a deep, tactical combat system that can be a lot of fun to play, but it's not an approachable system.  As it stands, I don't see how an unmentored 12-year-old could pick it up without tons of errors and an incredible will to wade through the rule books.  This is a see-one, do-one, teach-one game.

As a suggestion, it would have been nice to have a template worksheet for managing the bookkeeping.  There seems to be a list of stuff that can change dynamically: condition, combat advantage, continuing effects, etc.  A good worksheet for tracking this would have helped with the numbers and also served as a cue for what to track.

As for our personal experience, the kids and I made steady progress learning the combat mecahnics through the first three encounters.  In the first encounter I made us stick to basic melee and ranged attacks.  We didn't appeal to anything but at-will powers.  By the end of the third encounter, we were getting more teamwork, more variety in powers, and more interesting tactics.  The kids put themselves in a bad tactical position, and the party's paladin got knocked unconcious before the end of combat.  This made things exciting enough that they high-fived when the last enemy turned and fled.  Meanwhile, I was wondering how many mistakes I made with modifiers but kept that to myself.  If you can't bluff, you don't DM.

Roleplaying

The rule books and the Keep on the Shadowfell module make the roleplaying and storytelling explicit in their advice to players and especially the DM.  The first 30 pages of the DM guide is all about how to run a game.  Keep on the Shadowfell is almost a tutorial on how to run an adventure.  They are very well-written, which means they got a lot of attention in development.  WotC is taking this part of the game seriously, far more than TSR did with 1E.

I've got a theory about why this is so: Dungeons and Dragons has to differentiate itself from computer-based games.  The combat mechanics are interesting, but in the last twenty years, computer-based games have developed enough where these systems can be automated and made more fun on the computer.  The comparisons to World of Warcraft are apt: if you just care about stats and want a faster pace, then World of Warcraft is probably a more fun game.

Where World of Warcraft can't compete is in the social and story aspects of the game.  Online chat doesn't replace getting together with people in real life.  Telling your own stories and making your own adventures is a different reward from static, computer-based game content.  Dungeons and Dragons provides this.

Only because of the storytelling is there an opportunity for roleplaying.  How players want to express this is up to them.  It's important to have a your character's personality, because the DM can start to incorporate personalities into how adventures unfold.  There's a small taste of this in Keep on the Shadowfell when you encounter the undead remains of the Keep's last defender.

Here lies the rub.  Roleplaying and incorporating characters into storylines is work for the players and work for the DM.  Is there enough fun over computer-based games for people to pick up Dungeons and Dragons and stick with it?  Good question, it's for the player to decide, and I'm happy WotC is being clear in the rulebooks and this first adventure module about where they add value.

Coming back to our experience, the kids hadn't played a tabletop roleplaying game before, so they didn't understand the concept.  I had to prompt them to think in-character and in-story, but I could do this mostly in the way I asked questions and did setup.  They started to get the hang of it, but it's harder to learn than the mechanics.  Kids play tabletop games, they engage in pretend games, but they rarely do both together.

My Takeaways

I enjoyed playing 4E with my kids.  I've learned they can pick up complex game mechanics when they are interested, and cooperative games fit their style a lot better that competitive games.  Siblings have enough rivalries, after all...there's no need to add to it with a game.  We had lots of laughs and a great time.

Will we keep playing 4E?  Good question.  The girls pinned me down for one last session before they went to see their grandpa, and they'll want to keep playing when they get back.  They're enthusiastic.  If we keep playing, we'll have to make a regular family game night, and we'll want to mix in some other games, e.g., Settlers of Catan.  The prep time for 4E is scary, but using published adventures might make it manageable.  It still looks daunting.