Thema: 4E - Playtest Reports (War Kampf mit einem Drachen)

[Schwarzie]

• It's gradually dawning on the PCs that traveling with a 9,700-year-old dwarf may impose some new restraints on their "Here's the plan...get 'em!" combat style.

9700???Fragezeichen?? Zwei Nullen zuviel? Oder haben die Amis neben ihren kaputten Längen- und Gewichtsmaßen nun auch eine abweichende Zeitrechnung erfunden?

[Jadephoenix]

Wenn ichs richtig verstanden hat, hat er nur das Bewusstsein seiner Familie bis vor 9700 Jahren

[Zechi]

Wenn ichs richtig verstanden hat, hat er nur das Bewusstsein seiner Familie bis vor 9700 Jahren

Richtig, das wird weiter oben ausdrücklich gesagt

[Jilocasin]

Heut erreichte mich eine sehr interessante Mail von "DNDinsider" <DNDinsider@wizards.com>

Hi! We’re starting a playtest wave for the 4th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game, and we’d like you to help us make the game better.

We're looking for groups of six players (including DM) that can commit to about four gaming sessions over a four-week period starting in early October, and who are willing to provide playtest feedback in the formats we supply.

If you're interested and have a group of players available to playtest and provide feedback, reply to this email and we'll add you to the pool of interested playtesters.

If you aren't interested or if you don't have a group of players to playtest with you, don't do anything. Just delete this email and get on with your gaming. Pretty easy, huh?

But let's assume you're interested. Here's how it'll work: We'll be picking a number of you from the pool of interested playtesters, and we'll send you a Non-Disclosure Agreement as a pdf. Print out six copies--one for yourself and five for the other playtesters at the table. (For this round of testing, we want five players and one Dungeon Master.) You'll fax that NDA back to the phone number we'll give you. Once we have NDAs in hand from everyone at your table, we'll Fedex you a playtest packet, and you're off to the races.

The NDA is pretty standard stuff. There is a proviso against participating if you work for a competitor of Wizards, so keep that in mind.

One final note: If you can't participate, that doesn't preclude you from playtesting for us later. It just means that you aren't doing it right now. We may ask again at a later time.

Thanks!

David Noonan

Ähnliche Mails ebenfalls erhalten?
Ich werde auf jedenfall versuchen so ein "Playtest Packet" zu ergattern  

[Zechi]

Ich würde sagen, da hast du großes Glück gehabt und bist einer der wenigen die die Chance haben beneidswerter Playtester zu werden

Bete dafür das sie auch Leute zulassen die keinen Wohnsitz in den USA haben.

Gruß Zechi

[Jilocasin]

Bete dafür das sie auch Leute zulassen die keinen Wohnsitz in den USA haben.

Denke schon, sonst hätten sie nicht an meine .de Emailaddy geschrieben  
Nein, ernsthaft - es wäre schade, wenn sie solche "Beta-Tests" nur dem amerikanischen Publikum vorenthalten würden. Hätte irgendwie eine fahlen Nachgeschmack. Und so klein ist doch unsere deutsche Community nun auch wieder nicht.

[Zechi]

Bete dafür das sie auch Leute zulassen die keinen Wohnsitz in den USA haben.

Denke schon, sonst hätten sie nicht an meine .de Emailaddy geschrieben  
Nein, ernsthaft - es wäre schade, wenn sie solche "Beta-Tests" nur dem amerikanischen Publikum vorenthalten würden. Hätte irgendwie eine fahlen Nachgeschmack. Und so klein ist doch unsere deutsche Community nun auch wieder nicht.

Ja, aber bisher hat WotC bei diversen Contests usw. dies immer wieder nur für Leute mti WOhnsitz in den USA zugelassen. auf EN-World gibt es folgendes Aussage:

Scott Rouse -- "We are not excluding Canadians (or other non-USA residents for that matter) as we discuss the plans. The only hitch I can foresee is because testers will be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement I am not sure how it would work with people outside the USA

Ich bezweifle, dass sie die E-Mail Addy geprüft haben, zudem kannst du auch eine deutsche E-Mail Adresse haben und in den USA wohnen

[Lagrange]

Es gab auch bei der 3E Spieltestests auf deutschem Boden. Es ist nur so, dass es im Verhältnis viiiiel weniger deutsche D&D-Spieler als amerikanische gibt und somit die Wahrscheinlichkeit ausgewählt zu werden einfach geringer ist. Außerdem gibt es da diese Sprachbarriere, schließlich nützen Spieltests nur, wenn ausführliche und verständliche Berichte an WotC gehen.
Die NDA von Wizards wurde auch schon immer an ausländische Personen gegeben und war in der Regel kein Problem. Wizards mögen Schwierigkeiten haben, einen bei Bruch der NDA auf $1Mrd. in Deutschland zu verklagen, aber sie haben damit die Handhabe zu drohen und einen von zukünftigen Goodies auszuschließen und das wird bei den meisten reichen...
Achja: alleine öffentlich zu erzählen, dass man ausgewählt wurde, mag schon ein Ausschlußkriterium sein, denn Wizards hat das glaube ich lieber etwas diskreter...

[Jilocasin]

Achja: alleine öffentlich zu erzählen, dass man ausgewählt wurde, mag schon ein Ausschlußkriterium sein, denn Wizards hat das glaube ich lieber etwas diskreter...

Noch ist ja niemand ausgewählt worden und die Fragestellung zielte darauf, ob Jeder mit einem DndInsider-Account diese Mail erhalten hat  

[AlexH]

Ich komme Zechi zuvor und poste den nächsten Report:

Thursday Night, Wizards Conference Room (Wayne Manor).
Campaign Arc: Castle Smoulderthorn
DM: Dave Noonan
Players: Bruce Cordell, Richard Baker, Logan Bonner, and Toby Latin

By now, you’ve probably read playtest reports from Bruce Cordell, Logan Bonner, and Rich Baker. They’re all players in my Thursday night Eberron game. And they’re really good at capturing feedback—good, bad, and ugly—so I won’t duplicate what they’re trying to do. But I have a perspective they lack. Because I’m the DM, I’m also “playtesting” how the game functions away from the table. It’s crucial to get the game itself to work, of course. But it’s also important to get NPC creation, encounter design, and adventure-building right.

That’s the subject of this playtest report: How the game is functioning when the dice aren’t rolling.
Session One: Welcome to 4th Edition

My Thursday night group is about half Wizards game designers (including the aforementioned Rich, Logan, and Bruce), and half guys and gals in their thirties who work in various high-tech jobs here in the Seattle area. It’s a big table—seven regulars, and we get five or six of ‘em for every single session.

For years, they’ve been a personal testbed for whatever my day-job design task was. They played the Player’s Handbook II classes before anyone else, battled their way through Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde, and faced off against the denizens of Monster Manual V. So back in June, they were among the first groups to try out the new rules.

At the time, the new rules weren’t complete, and they sure weren’t pretty. I dropped a lot of three-ring binders in the middle of the table on that first night, gave a little lecture (complete with whiteboard diagrams) about some of the overarching rules changes, and said, “Create a new version of your character that’s as faithful to your existing character as you can manage.”

It took about 90 minutes, because this iteration of the rules is fiendishly complex. (We’re paring it down as I write this, actually.) There were a couple of pieces I knew I’d be missing. The gnome and warforged races hadn’t been written yet, but Logan and fellow designer Chris Sims came to my rescue with serviceable versions. Bruce’s character, Infandous, used both a race (élan) and a class (psion) that we hadn’t written yet. In his case, we punted. We’re using the mechanics for a human wizard, but Infandous is still acting like an élan and describing his abilities in psionic terms. For now, that’ll do.

I suppose the good news is that we pulled it off. We got rolling again that night, using the new rules. We only played two encounters, but my players were drinking from the proverbial fire hose, so that was probably for the best.

And the first session cheered me in another way. I felt like I probably saw a process that’ll be replicated in basements everywhere come next year. It’s probably inevitable that early on, other gaming groups are going to have to “reinterpret” their characters rather than slavishly “convert” them. There’s just no way that on release day, we’ll have the same amount of character options that it took us eight years to write in Third Edition.

But if we could do it with fragmentary rules in three-ring binders, you can do it with the nicely polished rules we’re going to deliver next year.
Session Two: Lots of Prep Time

My players had to get used to the idea of reinterpretation rather than strict conversion. Like Bruce’s “I’m a psion, not a wizard” character, they had to use one rules element but pretend it was another. That was a technique I needed to employ, too.

When we started out playtesting, we had 139 pages of monsters. That sounds like a lot, but spread out over the entire level spectrum, it really isn’t. And when you apply the “monsters you’d realistically find in Castle Smoulderthorn, a Blood of Vol fortress floating over Karrnath” filter, the number of available monsters shrinks even further.

A small monster supply was my first dilemma. But I wasn’t sure just how small the monster supply was, because (forgive me if this seems obvious) no one had playtested yet. I didn’t know how far up or down the level scale I could travel and still build fun encounters for my 7th-level PCs. Could I run 9th-level monsters? 11th? 13th? Where does it become just too hard? We have answers we think are right based on the fundamental numbers of the game, but no actual at-the-table yet.

But I had enough monsters to work with for that first session:
Azer minions and a magma brute for the fire level? Check. That’s a pretty easy swap for the azers and fire elementals I had planned there.


Bonecrusher zombies and a zombie hulk go into the reliquary. That’s a bit different than the Blood of Vol clerics I’d slotted in there, but I wanted to put the new monsters through their paces. (And a robust NPC creation system is something we don’t have… yet.) I had to knock back some of the walls to give the zombie hulk room to maneuver, but that’s an easy architectural change. But I didn’t stop there, coming up with some shaky ceilings that just might collapse if the zombie hulk rampages too close to the pillars.


The ossuary has wraiths and rot scarab swarms. That’s an upgrade from my 3.5 design, which had just wraiths in there. I added some alcoves for the rot scarab swarms to scurry out from, and built a little positional/timing tactical puzzle. PCs that kept their wits about them could avoid inciting the rot scarabs for a few rounds, but PCs that rushed in pell-mell would have to face all the monsters at once.


I saved the entrance platform for last. There I originally had a bunch of Emerald Claw elite soldiers backed up by some Blood of Vol warlocks. I spent a lot of my prep time rebuilding those soldiers and warlocks, because I knew that work would pay dividends for future sessions. Those soldiers and warlocks are spinkled all across Castle Smoulderthorn. I built them as monsters—after all, my players would never know the difference, right? And at this point in the game’s design, monster creation is much more a function of benchmarking than a function of deriving statistics by formula (which is pretty much the 3.5 design technique). I begin with the end in mind in terms of AC, hit points, and all the other salient statistics. I add cool attacks, plugging in relevant numbers there, too. And voila! I’ve got my soldiers and warlocks.

The most exciting part of my four-room redesign was that in each case, I was adding more monster variety to the mix and some more complex environmental nuances. With 4th Edition, I can get away with that now because the inherent “processor load” on the DM is much, much lower than it is in 3.5. Because I have only a fraction of the bookkeeping/information management duties, I can add that complexity back in fun ways. For this session, I’m going to run lots of heterogeneous monster encounters. I’m keeping everything right at level 7; nothing but strictly level-appropriate encounters.
Session Three: Holy Hannah, I’ve Got a Game Tonight

Let’s fast-forward a week. Suffice it to say that my four rooms worked like a charm. During the second session, I found myself with extra time on my hands—I think I was actually burdened less by minutiae than my players were. (And like I said, we’re working on the player complexity issue.)

But my day job kept me busy. So busy, in fact, that I found myself at 5 p.m. on Thursday asking myself, “How can I come up with a whole session of material in less than an hour?”

My answer: Be like Bruce.

In the previous session, I’d used up a lot of the monsters that would be “appropriate” for Castle Smoulderthorn. But that left all the inappropriate ones, which I could probably put to work if I just put them into some Eberron- and Smoulderthorn-appropriate clothing.
The hellsword cambions from the monster three-ring binder? Now they’re my “fire minotaurs.”


I filed the serial numbers off the githzerai monks and githzerai zerth and turned them into Vol’s “Sentinels of the Ancestral Bloodline.”


The yuan-ti assassins became Blood of Vol assassins, and I merely moved the poison from their fangs to their weapons, and pretended like they had legs all along.

And at the table, I totally got away with it. This isn’t a technique I recommend as a matter of course, but when you’re dealing with both time constraints and monster-supply constraints, it worked like a charm. I had the whole session buttoned up and ready to go with time to spare.

Quelle:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drpr/20070921a&authentic=true

[Zechi]

Noch ein kleiner Playtest Report:

Ran through an internal 4E playtest session last night, and had great fun bull rushing a goblin off a cliff. Unfortunately, it was a short cliff and the little bugger managed to survive; Steve Winter’s character then finished him off before I could leap after and crush him with falling damage.

Without getting into the mechanics of two relatively small areas, I personally really love what’s being done with a) hit points, and b) critical hits.

On a fairly random note, I also had a little fun flipping back through the 1st Edition Monster Manual (its illustrations colored in by a younger me), my nostalgia for which has never, ever lessoned. Specifically, I needed to reference the original flesh, clay, stone and iron set of golems (and their particular set of abilities and spell interactions).

The flesh golem (As Julia Martin pointed out) derives from Frankenstein, thus it's affinity for lightning. I assume Jewish folklore inspired the clay golem, created not by magic-users but instead by clerics; a reference to Rabbi Loeb. And the iron golem looks straight out of a movie poster for 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, the illustration resembling Talos, the (bronze) golem; though where its poisonous breath ability came from, I’m not quite sure.

I really happen to enjoy the cultural references that help make up this game (and wikipedia, for quick research). The 1st Edition iron golem may have resembled Talos, but the bronze golem from the 1st edition Expert Set even more clearly did. In one version, Talos heated up red-hot in order to burn his foes—an ability the 1st edition bronze golem also possessed. Crete (which Talos originally guarded) was also the island where prisoners were supposedly burned alive inside the belly of a brazen bull, and where the myth of the minotaur derived; not coincidentally, the 3rd edition brass golem resembles a bull-headed minotaur (well, that’s a bit redundant; it resembles a minotaur, period). And Talos himself later returns in literature, in Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen, now made of iron and wielding an iron flail—so casting the 1st edition Monster Manual as an iron golem instead of bronze wasn't such an inadvertent departure after all.

I also happen to enjoy trying to find which elements of the game derive from cultural references, and which are unique to the game itself. Can anyone tell me where the concept of a gorgon as a steely-scaled bull came from? (My assumption has always been that this version of "gorgon" is unique to the game.)

In any case, Andy Collins answers golem questions in next week’s Sage Advice (can golems be dispelled? Stone shaped? Blindfolded? And the next podcast (“Monsters, Monsters, Monsters”) is being put together as I write this. Next blog entry, I’ll post the podcast questions Dave Noonan uses to quiz Mike Mearls and James Wyatt… including, what was the criteria for which monsters made the cut into the 4E Monster Manual?

Scheinbar gibt es den Bull-Rush noch und was viel wichtiger ist, scheinbar gibt es Regeln um sich auf einen Gegner zu werfen. Das ist nämlich etwas, was bisher gefehlt hat. Mich hat es schon immer genervt, dass große Monster wie z.B. Riesen sich nicht einfach auf ein Opfer werfen können oder es zumindes probieren können, um durch ihr Gewicht es zu erdrücken. Das gabe es zwar als Spezialmanöver für Drachen einer bestimmten Alterskategorie, hat aber definitiv gefehlt. Ich hoffe obige Aussage ist so zu verstehen

Der Kommentar mit den Hp und den Crits ist auch interessant. Was ist wohl damit gemeint?

Gruß Zechi

[Zechi]

Noch ein Report:

Well crap. I can't tell yet if I've failed or not. First 4th Edition playtest that I've run, and zero (ZERO!!!) PC fatalities. I think I was set up.

Here I was told this was a group of mostly inexperienced players. These were people from marketing, for crying out loud. They weren't hardcore. They were noobs -- easy pickings. Right. A bunch of ringers is what they are.  

So here's the first encounter, and what happens? The ranger scouts the enemies, takes advantage of a surprise round, and attacks the two guys he sees, while warning the rest of the group about the ones he doesn't. What follows is almost textbook tactics. Two of the heavies establish a front line, the ranger scampers back to sit near the wizard, and the cleric stays close, lending some mace work and occassional healing to the battle.

But the MVP of the fight? A well-placed sleep spell, cast by none other than Ms. Mazzanoble's new character. One spell, three slept drakes, and two coup de graces later, and the bad guys were down two of their best hitters (while the third was awakened by an ally just in time to be surrounded -- that feels like my Mondays). Do I lose my DM license if the best I do is 5 points of damage to the pally and 12 to the ranger? Gah!

Well, there's always next week. I've learned my lesson, and the gloves are off. No more Mr. Nice DM. You hear that players? I've got your number!

Need to calm down. Take a breather. Talk about work.

Tomorrow you'll see a Design & Development column on the new Cosmology. Personally, I think we're letting too much out of the bag, but Bill says it's cool. I'm a huge, huge fan of planar adventure -- anything I can use as a DM to throw curveballs at my players is a good thing. One of the best things about the planes is that it really lets you change the pace of your game. You can be adventuring in normal old fantasy world one day, then you zap to another plane, and suddenly you're fighting fiends along an icescape in Hell.

We spent this morning planning the rollout of content for Dragon #360 and Dungeon #151. This is our first real issue of online content. We really wanted to give issues #359 and #150 their time in the sun. It's been a challenge to get content together, because we're trying to focus on content that helps everyone continue to play, but without giving too much content you won't be able to use in a few months. I think we're pulling it off. But I'm sure we'll hear about it if we don't.

Last thought: Today's playtest made me realize something. Our design, development, and editing teams rock. I've played every iteration of 4th Edition. I can easily say, this is the best, by far. Every class did something cool, on every round. And each class approached the game in a different way. The paladin was exacting divine retribution, the ranger was blasting the crap out of stuff with his bow, and the wizard was blowing bad guys up with very cool spells (and that damn sleep spell). It felt just like D&D should. Oh, and the monster stat blocks? Cake. My round to round management was incredibly easy, and each monster had something interesting to do, without burdening me with useless information. I'm really looking forward to the next few encounters, to get more experience under my belt.

Other last thought: I've heard several people, especially new players, say that in a turn-based game like D&D, it's easy to lose focus when it's not your turn. I agree, and I think I want to run an article that gives suggestions for avoiding the "ADD kicking in," as one of my players put it so succinctly. The problem with advice articles, of course, is coming up with practical advice that people can actually use at the table. And the obvious gimicks should just stay out. If you have any ideas, feel free to send them to submissions@wizards.com.

Suprise Round gibt es wohl noch, ebenso wie den Schlafzauber und den CdG. Zudem scheinen die Monster Stat-Blocks wirklich überarbeitet worden zu sein. Darauf bin ich besonders gespannt und das ist meien große Hoffnung, endlich wieder kurze Stat-Blocks und dennoch Komplexität.

Gruß Zechi

[Jilocasin]

Evtl. kommt ihr auch bald von meiner Seite in den Genuss eines sog. Playtest-Reports.
Eine weitere Mail von den Küstenmagiern traf gestern abend ein.
Noch ist das ganze nicht unter Dach und Fach, denn es könnte noch an ein paar logistischen Faktoren scheitern.

Abhängig davon was in der NDA erlaubt bzw. nicht erlaubt ist, werde ich versuchen wöchentlich eine Bericht abzuliefern.

[AlexH]

Und noch ein Report:

October 2, Tuesday Night, Wizards Conference Room (Graceland)
Campaign Arc: Prophecy of the Priestess
DM: Greg Bilsland
Players: Logan Bonner, Sammy, Peter Schaefer, Chris Tulach

Before I dive into an account of what happened during my first session running a 4th Edition game, a little about the players and their characters:

Logan Bonner is a designer at Wizards of the Coast and is playing a dwarf rogue with some background in the divine and fighting arts. His character’s name is Kriv Hartsfire. Kriv is from a religious mercantile family in the southern lands of Ionia, and has recently journeyed into the human middlelands to seek fame, fortune, and a spiritual purpose.

Peter Schaefer is a developer at Wizards and is playing a half-elf fighter named Wilbur Hammermeister. Wilbur has led a troubled life, having been displaced from his home, and spent time traveling the middlelands with mercenaries. He is a skilled and heavily armored fighter who has a penchant for provoking people despite any supposed half-elf social acumen.

Sammy is a senior customer service representative at Wizards and is playing a tiefling warlord named Malazreal, or simply, “Mal.” He believes that a destiny lies in store for him and that if he is to meet it, he must travel and seize fate—as it were—by the horns. He has a commanding presence, yet demonstrates a clear value and concern for his allies.

Chris Tulach is an RPGA content manager at Wizards and is playing a human wizard named Gerhart Draken. Gerhart, at the disappearance of a member of his family, took up the arcane arts and then ventured forth into the world. Although cool and composed on the outside, a fire burns inside him—a fire reflected in his preferred arcane powers.

I’ll forewarn anyone hoping for a rules-crunchy playtest report—this isn’t it. The first session was an introduction to the setting and campaign, both of which are very story-driven. Still, there are undoubtedly some elements of gameplay that are elucidated here.


The campaign begins with the adventurers’ arrival in the city of Telder, a city of commerce and culture in the center of the human province of Teluvia. They arrive separately, for as of yet, the adventurers know nothing of each other or the imminent crossing of their fates. Despite arriving on the holiday of Autumn’s Birth, the adventurers find the town empty and quiet, devoid of the celebration one would expect. The players use their skills to deduce what might be the source of this strange absence of celebration. They learn a little, but because they are foreigners to Teluvia, they cannot pinpoint an explanation.

They hear the clamor of voices near the center of the city and, following the sound, they discover a crowd of peasants circled around a statue. They exchange minor acknowledgments to each other, for they have apparently all arrived fortuitously into a situation of which they know nothing. With caution, they approach the crowd and soon observe the source of the crowd’s fervor.

A woman, clad in little more than rags, stands chained upon the statue of a dragon, sticks piled below her. A priest incites the crowd with zealous words and looks beseechingly at a group of people sitting high above the city square. The PCs take a quick moment to appraise each of the people who are part of this dramatic situation. There is little to distinguish the woman besides her long auburn locks and pale skin. She is obviously a foreigner, and, the PCs reason, must be of some importance, for she bears a seal upon one finger. What the seal indicates, the adventurers fail to discern. Men, nobles by appearance, comprise the group that is perched high above the city square. Two wear crowns; the others are more difficult to distinguish.

Looking over these people, the players use a combination of skills and logic to try and deduce what the situation is. Gerhart, with his knowledge of this land, manages to reason that this is not the work of a mob but instead a lawful execution. Similarly, Mal manages to observe something of the exchange between the priest and nobles—he discerns a questioning look upon the priest, one that seeks approval from the nobles. Although he is distant from the group, he moves closer and succeeds in reading the expression of the two crowned men; one bears a hardened, grim expression; the other watches stoically except for a hint of sorrow in his eyes.

The PCs have not yet communicated with each other besides an exchange of serious, questioning glances. They position themselves amidst the crowd, watching as the priest gives the sign to ignite the wood beneath the woman. The adventurers train their eyes upon the woman, who carries no fear in her eyes—only a fire as fierce and angry as the flames that begin to lick her flesh.

As the conflagration consumes her, she gives a curdling scream with an otherworldly quality to it. The strident scream is short, and despite the obvious pain, she speaks out: “I lay a prophecy before you—you who act from fear. Before Spring’s Birth, the middlelands shall look into the eye of change, and there shall see an end to all nations. Behold a fragment of the Hellstone, the source of your destruction.”

The PCs strain to see amidst the crowd; both Kriv and Wilbur have moved to the middle ranks of the mob. Gerhart and Mal stand back further. None of them succeed in perceiving exactly what happens next, besides to say that Kriv notices the woman give a flick of her wrist, which results in an explosion of force that washes through peasants and adventurers alike.

The force appears like a swirling opalescent fog. Tendrils of it snake outward from the woman, splitting into the composite colors of the opalescence, ranging the whole spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. The tide of gray knocks all but Mal and Kriv from their feet. As the currents of what can only be magic wash over the common folk, some begin to twist and writhe.

The PCs make a quick appraisal of the situation around them. The woman, consumed in flames, seems wrapped in a fog of the opalescent gray smoke. He flesh bulges and twists. Beside her, tendrils of darkness wrap about the guards; under the effect, their flesh sloughs from their bodies. Near the PCs, a cord of putrid green light strikes a pair of peasants, whose bodies seem immediately to rot away, becoming like living corpses. Last among these hideous transformations are several villagers whose bodies contort, becoming gnarly and sinewy, their skin taking a deep umber color.

The PCs now face four skeletons, two zombies, and two goblins.

Gerhart makes a quick check on his knowledge of such arcane transformations, but despite scoring an excellent roll, finds that this is unlike anything he’s ever encountered. None of the PCs have ever seen anything like this. Gerhart can only speculate that the chaotic energies of magic have warped these people into monsters.

One player makes the quip, “I always wondered where goblins came from.”

Time for Initiative! Battle begins and the players all score better initiative than the monsters. For both monsters and players, the first round is spent mostly standing up. A few that are close enough are able to stand up and attack. The players that succeeded in maintaining their balance against the magical force immediately engage the creatures.

Despite the complexity of the battle, events move quickly. In the midst of combat though, these chaotic magical energies begin warping the terrain as well. Using several suggestions from the playtest document, including some interesting and exciting new terrain features, the battlefield becomes dreamscapelike, with the ground shifting and changing color, spontaneous fogs of poison appearing, and the like. Incidentally, a fog of poisonous gas appeared on a pair of horses who, having already succeeded against fear, also managed to fend off the poison. Go horses!

The PCs manage well, despite a critical hit from a zombie and goblin. They focus on the weaker undead first before launching after the goblins who, in the meantime, slay several fleeing peasants. The nobles rush to aid the adventurers, but several swift and skillful blows manage to eliminate the threats before the nobles can reach them.

The classes work well together, with Mal lending aid to his allies in need, Kriv taking advantage of his movement and flanking (not to mention getting a critical with a great axe), Wilbur controlling the movement of his foes as well as himself, and Gerhart supporting them with the precision and consistency of his arcane powers.

Success is bittersweet, however, for several townsfolk die amid the violence of battle, and the woman strapped to the statue escapes. However, before escaping, she undergoes a hideous transformation, sprouting wings from her hands and arms, and taking on the mutated form of some half-beast. Mal makes a valiant effort to stop her, but the result is a release of the chaotic energies pulsating inside her. After seeing the violent effect this magic has on the terrain around, he turns his attention to helping his new allies and saving the townspeople.

The mechanics of battle ran smoothly. Having just played through 3.5 battles this weekend, the difference was noticeable. I found myself infrequently referring to the stat blocks, for I was able to remember, even with three creatures, what the monsters were capable of. I was able to keep my head in battle instead of behind a piece of paper or in my computer, and I think this improved the drama of the events. The first encounter was designed as a dramatic introduction to the varying effects of magic and as an opportunity to get the PCs working together, but it also succeeded in acquainting everyone with the pace of gameplay and mechanics of combat.

Quelle(D&D Insider, Dragon Section):http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drpr/20071012a&authentic=true

[Berandor]

Das ist einer der Dragon-Artikel?