So my regular group has been having scheduling problems, so some of us decided to do a quick one shoot last night to get our fix. We decided that I wouldn’t DM, to give me a chance to play and experience the other side of the screen for a bit. Now, our DM was also switching roles, as he is a player in my campaign and had never DM’d 4th ed., so it was a night of new experiences for us all. The other two players were also playing character classes they haven’t played yet, with some of us running two characters at the same time. All this in the paragon tier of play, as we were running Dungeon Delve #12. The characters were a Genasi Sorcerer, Half-Orc Babarian, Elf Avenger, Human Bard and Human Druid. I was playing the Avenger and the Bard. This was kind of our version of D&D Game Day from a few weeks ago.
Sadly, we found ourselves not having as much fun as we should have had playing D&D, and I believe it was for a variety of reasons, which I’ll go into here:
1. Length of combat. This has been talked about a gazillion times, so I won’t add to the discussion except to say that I experienced much of what others had complained about on D&D Game Day.
2. Starting at Paragon without previous experience. This is not a fault of the game, but rather our own. Now I am a firm believer that this system in particularely is not as friendly to players wishing to start at higher levels than other systems. My character sheets were 5 pages long, and I was running two guys at a time. I had so many options that I even got kind of confused for a while as to how to play the guys properly. If you bring a guy up from heoic a level at a time, I am sure it is a much smoother experience once you arrive at the paragon tier.
Don't worry Druid, we were all a little dazed... except you made your save.
3. About that lengthy character sheet: We made our characters using the DDI Character Builder, which is great. The output is fantastic and it’s very easy to use. I love it. But there are so many options! The sorcerer had abilites and features that spread out over four sources: PHB, PHB2, Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide, and a Dragon Magazine. We noticed that the character sheet didn’t include every bit of information on class abilities and so forth, so we had to reference the books. That means that for future reference, a lot of PDF cutting and pasting will have to be done to get stuff out of Dragon, for example.
I don’t want to blame the system itself for our less than stellar game last night because it would not be fair. We have to chalk most of it up to inexperience. We should not have been running two characters at a time. No way, and I probably would not allow it in my campaign after last night’s experience. One character is enough to keep a player concentrated on the different tactics and stuff available to him to have to worry about another character. Which brings up my next point: character death and new characters.
In my home campaign, eventually someone is going to die. It is inevitable, especially as I learn over time to run the monsters a little better and deadlier. When one of my player’s inevitably kicks the proverbial bucket… well, he’s going to have to roll up a new character, and the same sort of issues are going to creep up. We are almost out of heroic, mostly with the same characters since 1st level. The party is comfortable in their roles and play their characters with flair. As we approach paragon I can’t help but think what’s going to happen when someone has to roll a new 12th or 14th level guy, with all those powers and abilities? Interesting question. I predict that on his initiative turn it’ll grind the game to a halt.
So there, a little report on our experience on a paragon tier delve. It took forever, we skipped a whole encounter, and didn’t even finish the last battle. Mostly though, to be fair, blamed on our inexperience at that tier of play. I am now sold on starting play at heroic and learning to crawl before you can walk.
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Random plot hook of the day: An orc tribe has lived a few miles outside of town for years with virtually no problems, but now things are getting tense. An orc woman was found raped and murdered in the woods, and all things point towards a member of the town militia. Will the PC’s have to face the militia, or broker an uneasy peace with the orcs? They want revenge their way, the militia wants war for false accusations( they aren’t). Go negotiate!
www. Newbie DM .com 
Harlan
May 7, 2009
Yeah, I was stuck in sourcebook hell (for the record, it wasn’t Dragon, it was Arcane Powers). But I *DO* blame the character builder somewhat. It shouldn’t reference a mechanic without a brief description of what that mechanic does. It shouldn’t assume that everyone has the wherewithal to have 4 source books at the table.
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.
rjbs
May 7, 2009
When my players can’t all make it, we run backstory one-shots. As the PCs get more powerful and I make higher-level one-shot characters, I’m definitely seeing what you’re talking about here: learning a new first level character is hard enough; learning a new 8th level character is really taxing.
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.
Lou
May 7, 2009
I’d like to start off by saying I had a great time at last nights session regardless of the snags we ran into. I’d also like to thank you guys for your patience with my dm-ing a 4e session for the first time.
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!!!!!!!!
Alex
May 7, 2009
“…it’s just not conducive to playing two characters.”
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.
Mike Shea
May 9, 2009
I ran a 26th level Delve a couple of weeks ago for some old D&D friends. Our game wasn’t TOO bad but it was definitely too long. The “auto-generate” from the character builder works well at lower levels but gets worse as the levels get higher. Some of the things they choose just doesn’t make sense.
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
Simon Newman
September 25, 2009
You shouldn’t ever need replacement PCs for dead ones; just interpret the Raise Dead ritual generously – as long as the priest back in town has a lock of your hair and the cash, they’ll Raise you on death, a new body forming as your spirit reincarnates.