It’s always better to let the players build the characters.

The biggest problem I had was the length of combat and underpowered monsters. I just couldn’t really hurt anyone. Between resistances, temporary hitpoints, and other forms of damage mitigation, the monster damage just wasn’t coming out.

I believe I could have solved this and sped up combat by cutting their hitpoints down to 3/4 and increasing their damage by +1/2 their level. This would have gotten around most of their resistances and damage mitigation so they actually feel threatened.

I’m hoping we figure out better ways to do one-shot games at higher levels. It seems like a waste to not be able to run quick battles at high level.

Good article!

Mike

It’s the price you pay for more options, I think. 3rd edition was easy as pie to play two characters in, because you had feats, and possibly spells, to worry about. That’s it. The powers in 4th edition add another game dynamic that I love and I think makes a lot of sense for characters that are supposed to be a cut above the rest (even those who are supposed to be zero-to-hero characters, actually). Unfortunately, with that comes the complexity of having to keep track of all of these new things.

I agree that rolling a high level character to begin with would be confusing at best (I haven’t tried it yet), but I think if you went about it by yourself, rather than through the character generator, it would lend itself to ease of use significantly. You’d be able to write down what you needed to know rather than relying on the skimpy info given to you. Using the MSE power card sets and a good 3rd party character sheet, I don’t think I’d be too daunted by the prospect of helping one of my players roll a 14th level character. It would take a bit longer, but that’s simply by virtue of there being more options at that level.

It would be nice if the character generator would have all of the details needed for powers and feats be on the character sheet. This would greatly cut down on the at the table research time and speed up the game.

I agree newbie, playing two characters in 4e is a bit of a task due to all of the options one has. I’m not bashing 4e, it’s actually my favorate edition of the game, it’s just not conducive to playing two characters.

Orcs living peacefully next to humans? BAH!!!!!!!!

Also, lately I have been running two NPCs. One was a PC, but the player dropped out and I haven’t dealt with the situation yet. I’ve found it /sort of/ fun to optimize the NPCs powers for really simple ones that I can run without thinking. “Do 3d6+3 Damage” is easy. “Target is semi-immobilized until next turn, minor action to sustain with an Intimidate check against DC of target’s Fortitude or AC (whichever has fewer prime factors)” is to be avoided.

What’s worse, there’s no indication on the character sheet of what book the feat, class ability, or racial ability came from. Every time I was unsure, I had to delve through 4 books.

BTW, I take a firm and principled stand against orc-rape.