Random Saturday Notes - Wrap-up of my First Run as a Player in 4E

We finished the adventure last night and the whole thing was quite a bit of fun. We only ran through two encounters but that was one more than last time so it was a little better. First was a pendulum trap/rat swarm combination that wasn't all that threatening and we plowed through it in about 3 rounds with little damage. Next was a gimmick encounter that  was very reminiscent of an AD&D module in a bunch of negative ways - more on that in a future post. Despite that we triumphed in the end, slew the evil cleric, rescued the girl, collected a bunch of loot, and returned to Phlan in triumph, and that's really all one can ask for.

Things I learned:

• Even in a party of 6 characters it's possible to have skills in which no one is trained
• Even in a party of 6 it's possible to have languages no one can speak
•  Leaders will spend about half of their time doing something other than attacking in any real fight so an over-emphasis on offense is something to watch out for, especially at low levels. My level 1 cleric had a choice for his one daily power of either a party-saving big area effect heal & ongoing healing boost, or a glorious triple-damage single-target weapon attack with his fullblade. I chose the heal and I'm glad I did but it's still very tempting as a battle cleric to go for the potential 30-40 point strike and blow something away in one mighty wallop.  
• MISSING SUCKS!

(Yeah, I rolled a few more single digits last night, including a 1 for initiative in the climactic battle. Brutallus' initiative mod: +0)

This was a one-shot so I'm not sure when I will play again. This same friend wants to run a full-weekend marathon D&D game in about a month as a birthday bash and Lady Blacksteel and I are trying to arrange things to take part. So far it looks like about 8 players are tentatively in so it could be a lot of fun and there is already some chatter about classes and roles within this super-party.

So Brutalus Maximus IV, Cleric of Tempus goes on the shelf for now. I can see us running some occasional one-offs with a different DM throughout the year so hopefully he will get another chance to take up his sword in 2011.