Overall it went very well and we were excited. My inclusion of power cards & the full stats & macros for their characters gave them clear choices each round and they didn't have to worry about the mechanics of the numbers. They just moused over their character and saw the relevant stats - I had HP, AC, Reflex, Fortitude, and Willpower as the visible conditions. We used the label feature to keep track of damage done to enemies, special effects of powers (+2 to AC) and the marking ability of the Fighter (M:K for Marked:Kathra appended in the label) and the bloodied condition. Overall the label feature made it really easy to pay attention to any sort of oddities and was much easier than 3.5 in our opinion.
The initial kobolds went down alright, but I was initially worried that I was running it with two characters. Poor rolls on the players part and good rolls on mine soon found the PCs mobbed surrounded by 6 kobold minions and a kobold skirmisher with no damage to any of them and the PCs getting bled out. Timid to use action points or encounter powers, they finally started making headway with clever placement of the dwarf's push ability (sending a kobold into the fire) and luck of the cleave power to thin out the minion ranks while the Cleric finished off the skirmisher. Overall they went through it with no encounter powers.
Some more skirmishes went through and they finally started to stretch their legs - I think realizing that they weren't playing with straight Vancian spell casting and didn't have to hold onto that one good spell forever like they did with other 1st level characters. Erais the Cleric was knocked unconsicous and almost died, but luckily the fighter finished off the enemies and was able to pull her friend back from near death. A quick rest and some surges later they were off to fight the dragon.
It became clear very quickly that my tweaks with the dragon weren't enough so I dropped the tail slap (immediate reaction tail attack to any hit attack on the dragon) and dropped the hitpoints a bit more to 100. In the end a good combination of daily powers, action points, and combat advantage made them squeak by with one hit attack away from each of their deaths. Very close to TPK but I did fudge the dragon in their favor.
Our only real 4E downside was "shooting in the dark" about some numbers and how they'd work... we're hoping some of the questions about pushing character into walls, certain powers against objects, etc. might work. Of course I DM ruled anything and we moved on quickly... but will be interesting to see it fleshed out.
MapTool performance
Did great - I used the square VBL tool instead of the polyline and the new vision & light worked great. We even got a LITTLE test of the low-light vision of the dwarf, but in such cramped quarters it wasn't a full on test. Ran very quickly and manual fog remove made it not obvious that I was cheating with the VBL.
I love the new minisheet at the lower left. I didn't at first, but the fact I can have a lot more info and it doesn't get in the way is great. As I mentioned here, label visible on the mouseover minisheet would be nice to keep track of effects w/o needing to have token names visible. The label feature has turned up to be more useful and versatile than I ever expected it to be!
When I first edited the 4E campaign properties as a new set of properties, I didn't actually update it before I hit okay so they were lost. That was frustrating... but it's also very very easy to edit so it didn't last long at all before I just redid it.
The need for 1-1-1 movement was pretty apparent to my players - I had already got used to manually counting after playing Star Wars with my other group so frequently.
Inputting a lot of data into the campaign file - especially macros - really made me yearn for a textbox macro input. I just loved how easy it was to edit the campaign properties and would love to be able to quickly do the same for macros.
Thanks so much for your hard work, Trevor, and to Devin for great kobolds. Thanks to Xorn for the background map and Olgar Shiverstone for the module.
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