World Wide DnD Game Day 2009
Last Saturday I acted as a GM for WotC’s DnD Game Day.
I ran the adventure twice and things went quite well. The adventure consted of the party coming to a seemingly abandoned town and trying to figure out what happened. (The Town was called weeping briar, which is DnD for LV-426). The first encounter has the characters come upon a band of monsters looking for a little girl who should have been named Newt.
A fight ensues and we go directly to the second encounter a skill challenge that was way too easy. it had the players chasing down the little girl, cornering her and calming her down so she could tell them the story of what happened. She then asks the party to save her parents from the monsters. T
he party proceeds through two more combat encounters and frees the villagers.
Since this was supposed to be an introductory adventure I cut the hit points of the monsters in half. This was a good call as it allowed me to run the adventure in a shorter time and encounters ended while they were still fun and before tedium set in.
The pregenerated characters were weird. 4 of the 5 used classes from the new players hand book 2, yet only one used a new race from that book. The character sheets were also riddled with errors. Why didn’t WotC use their own character creator program to make the characters T
he maps were generated using the Streets of Shadow dungeon tiles and could have been done better. the map for the third encounter was really bad. it was hard to tell where things like the entrance was.
Overall I think the adventure could have been a lot better, and it felt like it was just thrown together by a WotC intern. If you are going to send out materials to promote your game shouldn’t those materials be top-notch?
The first group was not as mechanically inclined, one of them had never played 4e before, but they were still fun. The paladin got pinned down by the mezzodaemon and couldn’t do much for the whole last encounter, and curly the barbarian couldn’t hit anything to save his life. the gloomfell trap also got the avenger pretty good in the first group.
the second group was much more knowledgeable about the game mechanics and quickly figured out how the characters worked. they punked the main bad guy hard with the two strikers. One of the guys from the second group was also at game day last year.
Here are some of the awesome things that happened. Just like last years game day, another group playing an older version of DnD made some disparaging remarks about how 4e isn’t real DnD. I didn’t point out to him that the two tables hosting 4e games had a number of attractive women sitting at them (later in the day we had as many as 5 tables of people playing the game day adventure)
In my first group one player, one of the aforementioned women, pointed out to her boyfriend who was playing the bard that his power was to hurt peoples feelings. He kept using vicious mockery on the bad guys.
March 23, 2009 at 8:06 am
I thought they should have used one of the Dungeon Delve adventures for the game day….
March 23, 2009 at 8:24 am
I agree, although it basically was a delve. 3 combat encounters + a skill challenge that basically couldn’t be failed.
Using one of the Dungeon Delve adventures would have been good in that it would have been promoting 2 new books rather than just the PHB2.
March 28, 2009 at 1:26 am
Greetings,
I attended the D&D Game Day at my FLGS and while I’m not a big fan of 4e I will say I had a blast (what can I say, I just don’t like it enough to convert, but to play once in awhile is kinda cool). Though we had a different experience altogether. The GM was running the adventure by the book and while we had fun we had a good laugh at some of the utterly ridiculous aspects of the module. None of the people at the table were a fan of the Skill Challenge mechanic. I’m not sure how you ran it but our GM had us roll initiative and we had to make sure we didn’t use the same skill twice when our turn came around. It required 6 successes before 3 failures and, well, the dice weren’t with us. We had 4 successes in a row followed by three incredibly low roles. Maybe I’m old school but I’d like to kick whoever came up with skill challenges in the shins.
The game was supposed to take only 3 1/2 hours as advertised. I showed up at one, about a half hour after they had started, and didn’t get out of there until 7:30pm. If you subtracted the two breaks we took it would have been 6:30, almost double the time it was supposed to. Add to that certain things like puddles wherein moving through required a DC20 acrobatics check lest you fell prone. Suffice to say there were a lot of jokes about six foot deep pot holes.
Still, I figure that was just there to get people thinking tactically or something, Wizards wouldn’t put stuff like that in any real adventure modules… right?
Ah well, had fun though, after some drama with my normal table top group sitting around a table, rolling dice and having a good time made me remember why I games in the first place. That and having a Balasar the paladin make a successful will attack using Paladins call to draw the BBEG into the deepest part of the sewage and then finish him off with a nat 20 with Paladins Judgement (his last daily) was pure awesome. One of the aspects of D&D I love that goes beyond editions.
Sorry to hear there were hecklers. There were a few people in the store who weren’t keen on 4e but they were polite enough when the subject came up. I like to think the edition wars are behind us but whenever I talk about 4e my roommate still sniffs derisively and shakes his head as though I said something truly horrible, like I started playing Warcraft and chose to play Alliance or something.
Ah well, in my experience gamers can be some of the snobbiest and most opinionated people when it comes to their hobby.
Anyway, here’s hoping Wizards will make a better scenario next time.