Okay, I have the books in hand.  Now for some playtesting…

My impression of the 4th edition D&D rulebooks is pretty strong.  I like the art in the books quite a bit.  The big splash page pictures of various D&D parties engaged in heated battles remind me of the kind of things that really got my imagination going when I was a kid.  These books actually make me wish I could be 14 again to appreciate that rush, that joy, the potentials and the possibilities, in the same way that I did when I was that age.

But, on to serious business.  Since I’ve had the books, I’ve rolled up three characters and put them through a few battles in “playtest” mode to get a feel for the new system.

I chose to run my playtest battles with three PCs just to make it easier for me to manage, but this is also a real-world possibility of the group size that I might end up GMing in the near future.  The 4th edition rules are HEAVILY DEPENDENT on the number of characters in the party.  The rules scale extremely well, but it is very important to realize that the way the underlying math of the system works is affected by the size of the player party – for example, a solo monster is geared towards keeping a party of four or five PCs busy, and there are other activities which will only get easier with more characters chipping in to help (more characters = greater available range of skills, for example).

Now, some quick class evaluations.  The warlord and the wizard are both character types that are better suited to 5 or 6 man parties.  The wizard is going to just prove too “squishy” unless he’s got something like fighter-paladin for backup in a 3 man team.  The warlord’s features get directly better the more people you have in your party.  With only 3 PCs, there are better options for frontline fighter type characters.

How important is it to have a cleric?  One of the goals of 4e was to make the cleric a little less mandatory, and a little more fun to play, while also nerfing the very deep spellbook that clerics enjoyed in 3e.  No, clerics didn’t actually have spellbooks in 3e.  They could pray for ANY FRIKKIN SPELL that had ever been published, GM permitting.  The ability of clerics to buff up a party and protect the PCs from specific damage types, along with healing on demand, is precisely what made clerics the uber-class in 3e, even though they weren’t necessarily fun to play.

In 4^th edition, the cleric is an average melee fighter.  He’s doesn’t hit as often or as hard as a fighter in melee.  He’s not really a defender, because his best armor is chain mail, and he doesn’t start with shield proficiency unless he burns a feat.  Thus, you will see a lot of first level clerics running around with two-handed warhammers.  However, the cleric does get some useful healing abilities.  The cleric gets a “healing word” power which gives the party two extra “free” healing surges per combat, along with some extra sauce (d6+Wis bonus per surge).  The healing word seems to work outside of combat as well, allowing a wounded party to rest up while using fewer surges overall, as long as the cleric keeps getting “5 minutes” to reset the use of this power.

I think that you will always be glad to have a cleric in your party, even if the character is pretty average in some respects.  Over time the cleric can learn to use bigger “ritual” spells which might prove very useful, and/ or he can build up his armor skills to give himself more defense and thus a little more survivability in combat.

Anyway, my three man team for playtesting was a dwarf cleric using a two-handed warhammer, a human fighter with a greatsword, and an eladrin feypact warlock.  The feypact warlock is not the most reliable damage dealer (average “to hit” rolls, even against reflex defense) but good at avoiding damage, especially with the fighter drawing a lot of attention to himself with his “mark” abilty.

Now, on to the testing…

With three “starter” PCs at level one, the GM has an encounter budget of 300XP to work with for a “standard” encounter.  Traps and terrain features can add to the difficulty of an encounter, and can be used to “spice up” an encounter with less total XP worth of monsters.

The recommended encounter recipe for 4e is to use one monster per PC of the same level.  Thus, I should design combats against 3 level one monsters.  Turns out, there really isn’t a wide variety of monsters in the level one bracket in the new Monster Manual (but a fantastic variety from monster level 3 up to about monster level 14).  Thus, you start off with kobolds, dire rats, and medium-sized scorpions.  However, the DMG also makes it very easy to “tune up” or “detune” your monsters, adding and subtracting levels (up to plus or minus 5 levels, so they say). 

What’s the difference between fighting three monsters worth 100Xp and one monster worth 300XP?  Turns out, quite a lot.  A standard monster worth 300xp is a level 7 monster.  Such a monster is meant to be a match for a 7^th level PC, including that PC’s magic armor, magic weapons, and better attack rolls overall.  Even in 3rd edition, a 5^th level fighter would always triumph over five 1^st level characters, even though the group of five can “gang up” and get more attack rolls during the early part of the combat.  All the attack rolls in the world don’t matter if you can’t hit the AC of the higher level combatant.

Some examples.  I put my party up against an ochre jelly.  This is a level 3 elite worth 300XP.  This ran like a pretty well balanced encounter.  Without burning any special daily powers or action points, the party was able to get through this, but the cleric took one or two hits and the fighter actually dropped below zero HP on the final round of combat.  It was a little tense as the dwarf had to make a healing check to give the fighter one more saving throw against his ongoing acid damage in order to save his life.  Party wound up using something like seven healing surges overall, making this fight fair but just a little on the tough side.

I also ran a battle involving 4 level 2 monsters (two human bandits with two pet drakes).  Even though this battle featured 500XP worth of badness, my 3 level one PCs weren’t phased and didn’t take too much damage, although I think one character did spend an action point.

Then I pushed the group a little harder.  The third test fight was against a level 5 wraith and two level 2 zombies.  The wraith is 200XP by itself, and the zombies were worth 125 XP each, for a total of 450XP in the encounter.  Even though the PCs did not roll especially well during this third test, it was pretty much a total party kill (TPK).  Now, this is a party which had a cleric capable of inflicting radiant damage, which the wraith has vulnerability against, and which stops the wraith’s regeneration.  However, the first level cleric simply couldn’t roll high enough to hit the reflex save of the level 5 wraith.  The same combat with 3rd level PCs would have been much, much easier.

As a game master, my goal is always to find a sweet spot where I can challenge the players with a dramatic encounter that seems a little “harder” than normal, one where death is a possibility, but where smart team tactics should tip things in favor of the PCs.  In third edition, you could do this with 3 monsters of the “correct” CR for your party of 4, or one monster with a CR of the party’s level plus three.  Obviously, a lot depends on the PCs, their equipment, and just precisely which monsters we are talking about, but that was a good starting point for a “difficult” encounter.

In fourth edition, after a battle, if the party has used up one or two surges, on average, per player, but no daily powers or action points, then you’ve hit the right difficulty for a “normal” encounter.  Obviously, you would like to schedule an encounter or two near the end of the day (end of the dungeon) where the PCs feel compelled to use action points as well as daily powers.  The trick is to find the sweet spot where the players use their best “stuff”, but still live.  Finding this sweet spot is not super-obvious, especially with a smaller party size.

So, here’s the early advice that I can give to game masters out there.  In short, be very careful anytime you drop in a monster more than 3 levels higher than the party level, especially if you are dealing with a smaller party size.  It is almost always going to be a better idea to increase challenge by adding more combatants of the correct level, or only one or two levels higher than the current party level. 

Please feel free to use your comments to discuss your first impressions of the 4e rulebooks.