4e Home Encounters review – Sessions 1 and 2

I was able to kill two testing birds with one stone Monday night, as I tried out the D&D Virtual Table for the first time in playing the 4e Home Encounters adventures for the first time.  I will say right off the bat that there are some spoilers ahead, so if you don’t want to know what’s in the encounters, read no further!First, I’m pleased with the production values in the 4e Home Encounters PDFs.  I like that the authors made the effort to create nice page headers and page numbers, a title page and a regional map.  It definitely adds to the experience of using these adventures.  I’m disappointed that they used images instead of Rich Text for the monster stat blocks – that makes it harder for me to copy and paste information into my online tools for running the game – but that’s a minor issue.  The maps that have started coming out are good additions, too, and will be a big help for anyone who wants to run the encounters in a program like MapTool (though not the Virtual Table, which doesn’t allow for map importing – grr).

Next, I think the authors hit the amount of background information just about right.  They give you enough to tell the players where they are, how they got there, and what’s going on in the world, but not so much that they have to go searching for the action.  The action comes to them, and I think that’s the right approach for this type of adventure.

Once the players have accepted their quest, trouble finds them in the woods in the form of some wolves and a beastmaster orc.  The party I ran through this encounter had only four PCs, and I assume that the adventure is scaled for five, but the players said they wanted the challenge of the full-scale encounter.  (Note that the adventure doesn’t actually include scaling instructions for parties with more or fewer than five PCs – something that they should probably address).  That was a reasonable call, as they handled the wolves pretty easily.

I liked the wolves’ knockdown ability and the fact that they deal extra damage to prone creatures.  I wasn’t crazy about the fact that the trees on the map didn’t really have much impact on the battle (they provide some cover and concealment, but no hindrance to movement or anything like that).  It made it easier to run, sure, but I generally like terrain to make more of a difference.

After the encounter, the party finds a mysterious object in a tree that was surrounded by frost.  The players asked me if the frost was melting since the object that was causing the frost was described as non-functional.  Good question.  I said yes.  I would have liked to have had the answer in the adventure itself, but no biggie – DMs are supposed to ad lib.

The players were having fun and wanted to move on, so we went to encounter number two.  This one starts with a uniquely structured skill challenge.  The party has to get close to an orc camp without alerting the orcs to their presence.  This is handled in stages, with the party building up a Stealth score and the orcs building up an Alertness score.  I like the idea, but I missed the part that told me when I was supposed to move from one section of the challenge to the next (it’s after each PC has a chance to make a skill check, which makes sense).  In any case, the party ended up drawing too much attention to themselves, so they failed the skill challenge.

I forgot to give the orcs the initiative bonus that they were supposed to have from the PCs failing the skill challenge and I ended up not even adding the bonus damage they were supposed to get either because they were COMPLETELY OBLITERATING the PCs without any extra help.  Again, it was scaled for five PCs and we had only four, but that wasn’t the issue.

The battle contains three orc warriors and two orc warlocks.  The warriors are reasonably tough melee critters – nothing too amazing.  The warlocks, though… wow.  They each have a minor action (recharge) that lets them give enemies in an area burst 2 within 10 vulnerability 5 to cold and to necrotic damage until the end of the next turn.  They also have an encounter power that’s an area burst 3 (yes, burst 3) within 10 that 2d8+7 cold and necrotic damage on a hit and weakens the target (save ends).  Here’s how the encounter went:

  • Warriors win initiative.  They charge in to three of the PCs and swing at them, hitting two and doing some cleave damage.  Ouch, but not a huge deal – no one is bloodied.
  • Warlocks go next.  The first one does his minor action on three of the PCs to make them vulnerable to cold and necrotic, hitting two of them.  He follows up with his encounter power to blast all four PCs with cold and necrotic damage.  He hits three of them, two of which are vulnerable.  The vulnerable PCs take 2d8+17 damage (because they’re vulnerable 5 cold and vulnerable 5 necrotic, and this attack is both, they take 10 extra damage).  Ow.  I didn’t even bother with the weakened (save ends) from that attack.
  • The second warlock repeats the area burst 3 attack (not even bothering to try making the two non-vulnerable PCs vulnerable first).  He hits three of them, and two drop unconscious (including the party’s healer).
  • Now the PCs get to go…

Maybe it was just that my virtual dice were hot, but these warlocks completely wrecked the party.  I pulled my punches the rest of the way, having one warrior flee (thus scaling down the battle belatedly for four PCs), not having the warlocks use their best remaining power (choosing to slow rather than deal ongoing damage), not trying to make the PCs vulnerable again, etc.  With some easier enemy tactics and DM fiat ruling that there were some healing potions in the PCs’ packs, the party pulled through.

Most horrifyingly, had the PCs decided to take an extended rest before coming into this encounter, the adventure calls for there to be a THIRD warlock, plus an elite orc leader.  I believe that spells TPK. The adventure itself is slightly unclear on how many bad guys there are supposed to be.  It does specifically say to remove the leader and one warlock if the party didn’t take an extended rest, and the map shows that there are originally three warlocks (so with no extended rest there would be two left).  However, the opening of the battle describes there being only TWO warlocks and the leader, plus the warriors.  If this battle was supposed to only have one warlock in the event that the players didn’t take an extended rest, that would be more fair.  So perhaps it’s just a disconnect between the description and the map.

The aftermath of the second battle had some more interesting role playing and investigating, with the party getting more clues about what’s going on and what’s coming next.  I think that section was very well done.

I’m slightly disappointed in the way the monsters are presented in the adventures, both the fact that the monster blocks are images rather than text and the fact that they’re pretty sparse (no ability scores, trained skills or equipment are listed), but that’s a pretty minor quibble.  For a volunteer effort, 4e Home Encounters is amazingly professional-looking.  And maybe I was just too mean as a DM, trying to wipe out my table… but man, were those warlocks scary!  In the end, that might be a good thing.  We don’t want our players getting TOO comfortable at the game table.  Mwoo hah hah!

Virtual Table issues so far

Since getting my invitation to the Dungeons and Dragons Virtual Table beta a few days ago, I’ve had a chance to dig into the program a little bit more.  I’ve put together two encounters, and I plan to run one or both of them Monday evening at 7:00 PM Mountain Time (so if anyone is interested, feel free to join the game – look for 4e Home Encounters).  Keeping in mind that I’m spoiled by all of the features of MapTool, there are the issues I’ve discovered.

The obvious limitation at the moment is on the map creation side of things.  The Virtual Table has a few Dungeon Tiles to choose from, and I think it’s pretty clear that they plan to make Dungeon Tiles the main mapping tool in the future.  I won’t be surprised if they charge DMs to get access to new Dungeon Tile sets or something like that, but that might be overly pessimistic on my part.  The current Dungeon Tiles that are available are all for underground maps, and the maps I’m making right now are wilderness maps, so the tiles are useless for me at the moment.  The drawing tools that are available are… well, think “crayon drawing” and you’re on the right track.  I’m sure this will get better eventually, but it’s pretty painful right now.

The panels cannot be resized, which is a pain.  In MapTool, you can resize all of the various windows however you wish.  In Virtual Table you can either have the panel on the right side of the screen displayed or hidden, but not stretched or condensed.  That’s a big pain when you’re trying to select from multiple monsters in that panel that have similar names (Blackwinter Wolf, Blackwinter Wolf Pack Leader… they look very similar when their names are truncated).  Yes, you can get around it by abbreviating names, but it’s still a pain.

There’s no way to manipulate multiple tokens at once.  For instance, I’d like to be able to start with a map where all of the monsters are invisible (note: you CAN make monsters invisible, which is a good feature) and then highlight all of them and make them all visible at once, rather than having to click on each individual token and navigate through its menu to make that one token visible.  If the battlefield has a bunch of minions on it, this is just a pain in the butt.

On a related note, a useful MapTool feature that the Virtual Table currently lacks is a “View as player” option for the DM to look at the map.  When I’m drawing a map and I’ve set certain features to be visible to the players and others to be invisible, it’s VERY helpful to have a way for me to see what the map will look like to the players.  My Friday night players can tell you stories about the times that I’ve talked about the window that the bad guys are jumping out of or the wall of fire that’s coming toward them, only to find out that said window and wall of fire were invisible to my players!  Oops.  Not having a way to check that will make these issues crop up more frequently in the Virtual Table.  This is especially true since making parts of the map visible or invisible doesn’t discernably change anything that I’ve been able to see in the DM view.

Selecting a token is also a little strange.  You can click on a token and move it around and adjust its hit points, but its powers don’t show up on the right side unless you right click on the token and choose “View Token Detail” or select the token name from the monster drop-down.  This is something that should be automatic on a double-click or even a single-click.  Click the token, and its details should appear in the right panel (attacks, notes, etc.).

I like the fact that editing one copy of a token edits all of them.  If I add a new power to a token of which there are already five on the map and then save that change, all five of those tokens have the new power.  However, I believe it is impossible to edit a token’s image once you’ve created it.  I’m sure they’ll change this someday, but it’s a pain for now.

Finally, given that I like to run games in-person using MapTool and my projector, I would REALLY like a full-screen mode that I can run in a second window of the Virtual Table to put onto the table for the players to see.  There’s no full-screen mode right now, and even if there were I’m pretty sure I would need a second D&D Insider subscription in order to be able to run both the DM version of the campaign and the player version at the same time.  Obviously this is not the targeted use for the Virtual Table, but it would still be nice to have.  I’d also need to be able to run it without being connected to the internet (such as at a convention), which is probably never going to happen.

Overall impressions

So far, I’m impressed that there don’t seem to be many bugs per se in the Virtual Table.  Its features are limited, but the features that are in the tool all seem to work properly.  The features are SO limited, though, that playing with this program compared to something like MapTool is just a huge pain.  I’m going to keep playing with it just so I can get to know the tool, but there’s no way that I’m going to switch any of my regular games to it any time soon.

The killer features that the Virtual Table will probably be able to offer eventually are:

  • Automated character and monster importing from DDI tools
  • Full selection of Dungeon Tiles for quick map construction
  • An integrated lobby to find a game

Until these features come about, though, there’s no reason to use Virtual Table over MapTool except for curiosity and a desire to make the program better.  For those of you who don’t have beta invites yet and worry that you’re missing out – you’re not, unless you just like playtesting.  MapTool and its ilk are far better for now.  But the Virtual Table has potential to surpass them someday if those killer features get added.

In the mean time, I will keep playing with the program and posting updates here.  Actually running a game will be enlightening, I’m sure!

4e Home Encounters – first encounter

NewbieDM had an idea a few months ago: Wouldn’t it be great if there were a version of D&D Encounters that players could use at home?  Wizards of the Coast has this nifty weekly program on Wednesday nights where players can drop it at their local store and play a single encounter; as they come week after week, the encounters build into adventures and small campaigns.  Unfortunately, WotC does not release these encounters for home use, even after the season is over.

So, NewbieDM and his colleagues decided to start a program for those of us who can’t get to our store on Wednesday nights (for instance, I can’t ever go because that’s my bowling night).  They call it 4e Home Encounters, and the first encounter has just been posted.  It’s very cool that they’ve gotten this off the ground!

Now, the one thing that they wanted to have for the encounters was a map that players could use – an actual JPG that could be loaded into a program like MapTool or printed out on paper to lay on the table.  Unfortunately, their cartographer had to drop out of the program, so they’ve put together an encounter map using Dungeon Tiles (which, for copyright reasons, they can’t provide high-quality JPGs of).

If I ever run these encounters (and I certainly might), I’d obviously be re-creating the maps in MapTool.  So, as a service to the community, here is my attempt at a JPG version of the first 4e Home Encounters map as drawn by me in MapTool.  Feel free to use it in your own adventure if you like!

4e Home Encounters 1 Map - original scale

 

4e Home Encounters Map 1 - full one-inch square scale

And finally, a PDF of the map that’s printable for use at a home table.