A few weeks ago I ran my first public game at the monthly Tucson RPG Guild Gathering. It was only my second time as DM. I ran a modified version of the module Rescue at Rivenroar. This is a free adventure for D&D 4th edition put out by Wizards of the Coast and is the first adventure in the Scales of War adventure path.
The gathering was more sparsely attended than ones I’ve attended previously. I’m not sure why that is. It might be due to the success of the weekly 4th edition Living Forgotten Realms nights. Or it was summer. Or who knows? But, there were enough people there to have a full five players in my game and enough players for another game running. Only one of the players had ever played 4th edition before. The rest were RPG players with experience in the various other versions of D&D. This didn’t present too much of a problem since 4th edition is pretty easy to pick up. A couple of guys from my gaming group came out to play including my DM which was fun.
First of all, I’ll talk about what I think went well. I think I did a good job of keeping combat moving and flowing. One of the biggest problems with 4th edition in my (and many others) opinion is that combat can get really bogged down. I enjoy tactical, crunchy combat. I detest long, tedious combat. In my experience 4th edition can easily swing from one to the other especially in the hands of a poor DM and/or indecisive players. I think I succeeded in keeping the rounds quick and moving along. I used the initiative tracking method of writing all the PC names on slips of paper and hanging them on the DM screen. This worked well for me and helped keep things moving. I also tried to encourage creative thinking and players trying crazy things in combat. I gave bonuses for stunts and crazy ideas (after the appropriate skill check of course). I also played somewhat loose with the rules. For me, fun trumps rules. And with people new to 4th edition who are getting used to the new style of combat, I wanted to allow for some leeway on things.
Some things didn’t go quite as well. The session was very combat heavy and there wasn’t a lot of role playing. Partially this is due to being a public game with pre-generated characters. But, I think I could have done more to encourage RP and my RP skills aren’t exactly strong. RP one of things I struggle with at times in RPGs. Also, tThe session was very railroady. Again, it was a public game with a limited amount of time and I was running a module. My ability to encourage players to forge their own paths was very limited. It was also hotter than hell in the room where we played. Of course, I had no control over that, but it did make things a little uncomfortable.
One thing I was surprised about was how difficult the first two encounters were for the PCs. I ran the first two encounters as written in the module. Rescue at Rivenroar starts with an encounter in a bar and then an encounter in the street with a fire wielding ogre. These encounters are what drew me to the module in the first place because of interesting elements such as fire and they take place in interesting environments. In the first encounter, the cleric was dropped a couple of times. This was due to a unlucky placement of the cleric and some really bad rolls by the players and good rolls by me. Also, everybody was getting still settled in to their character and 4th edition combat in general. In the second encounter with the ogre a pc was actually killed. Like, killed killed. That really surprised me. He was taken down by a massive hit from the ogre. To keep things moving, I let that player jump back into the game as the PCs twin brother.
I ran the module pretty much as written (except for taking out the skill challenges which didn’t add anything) until the players got to the dungeon. The dungeon in the module is massive, rather grindy, and many of the rooms are really uninteresting. It would take multiple sessions to crawl through this dungeon, so I cherry picked and modified two encounters. I took one encounter and changed the layout a little. I used some 3D dungeon tiles from the Harrowing Halls to give the encounter some elevation. The last encounter was with Sinruth, the modules “Big Bad”. I completely changed the layout of this encounter. I lowered Sinruth’s AC a little because the players weren’t at level 2. I think the module assumes that the players are at level 2 when they get to this encounter. I also gave Sinruth a new power, an invocation to the god Tiamat that shook the room and created pits. It made things a little more interesting. These encounters went much more smoothly and the PCs had less trouble with these.
I had help modifying Sinruth and the module from the folks at RPG.net. Thanks to all the feedback in this thread.
Overall, I think things went well and I hope the players had fun.
I agree, the combat did flow pretty well and didn’t bog the game down especially considering I and a couple of the other players haven’t had experience with 4th ed. To be honest, the enemies felt pretty balanced with our PCs even though we had the one death – which I liked BTW. I’ve always heard that it’s hard to die in 4th ed. with all the layers of protected stats for the characters so, IMO, it was good to see a character die in game. Yeah, the ogre seemed tough but I didn’t think he was invincible – just a few bad rolls on our part.
The other encounters were fun too, especially the one with the tiered room. Good job with that. I also thought that we had a good group of players. A little more roll-playing would’ve been fun but it was just an afternoon 1 shot.
I agree that if we were to dungeon crawl this adventure it may get tedious and you made good decisions in compressing the adventure for the afternoon session.
I might note that I played a Magic-User and, quite in contrast to classic style MUs, this guy was pretty powerful for 1st level. I could toss magic missiles pretty much every round plus all my other little spells.
Overall an enjoyable afternoon and intro to 4th ed.