My First 4e D&D Convention Game

 I’m organising a quick pop up D&D 4th Edition convention online at the moment. I’ve talked about the process and how easy it is to do. There’s been some great play at Con4eR so far and it is heart warming to see people getting together and playing this edition of the game.

Having been DMing a 4e campaign, I’ve become much stronger on the core game rules, which are some of the most straightforward and unambiguous versions of all the D&Ds. It’s a joy to run. A four hour convention slot comes with all the usual challenges, including new players to either the system, or the VTT, or both! I went with Role as it is the most familiar to me, and the Foundry 4e system isn’t quite there yet.

My setup on Role

I took a classic ‘Delve’ from the 4e Dungeon Delve book and set the game at 5th level, eschewing the obvious ploy to set your game at 1st level to streamline options. Mostly, the game went down really well for all at the table. There was a lot of fun in the session, but it was ‘full on’ throughout.

I started with a lightning tour round the VTT and player character sheets. I’ve setup clickable sheets for 4e that is designed to speed up dice rolling. There are currently limits to the flexibility of the sheet template system on Role, which they are addressing over the summer. For now, I have a character management sheet that looks after resources and dice rolls.

Inevitably, there is a trade off in providing succint and usable information on VTT function and getting into an actual game, and I was as quick as i could be, hoping that any kinks would be worked through during play. Again, mostly, I think I got the balance about right. I had offered an orientation session before the game day, but in the end i needed to do the walk through as part of the game introduction. understandably, some players clicked on the wrong things, due to the sheet not being completely intuitive. We got over that after the first time different things happened, so no biggie.

Another is the need to explicitly and manually clear a dice roll creates too many clicks in the process. One player started to shout “CLEAR” to remind him to do it, and I would respond “Dice in the hole!” The main problem is that uncleared rolls were merging with sheet created new rolls. It was unintuitive and slowed everything down.

As a Role long timer I’ve got used to this change, but I think it needs to be revised.

Acknowledging the usefulness of an uncleared dice roll perpetuating results on screen (we also now have the dice log), I would like to see a timer on dice rolls, so that they auto clear after an elapsed time. Given player ’rounds’ in 4e, the player switches from ‘to hit’ rolls ‘to damage’ quite quickly. If there isn’t a consensus on this then you could have this set as a parameter at the table info, where the game organiser can choose between immediately, never, or a time in seconds entered on screen. I think I would set it to about 10 seconds. I have provided this feedback to Role.

The game itself was a dungeon delve and thus accentuating the rich tactical combat that comes shining through in 4e.

The Barony of Harkenworld is in chaos. A raiding army from out of the carcass of the southern Empire of old have attacked and taken Harken, the castle and the Baron. The ‘Iron Circle’ have command of devils and all manner of evil has become emboldened, striding freely amongst the scattered settlements.

Heroes of the North, you have responded to a crisis out in the East of the Wold. One of the lieutenants of the Iron Circle, Tal Lorvas, has terrorised the settlements that nestle by the Briar Hills and is said to be uncovering some ancient magics in a rumoured tomb of a banished Empress, Nemeia of Bael Turath.

You are in pursuit to prevent Lorvas gain control of the cursed treasures of the tomb. Our adventure begins as you arrive at the uncovered maw of the tomb entrance, breathing a fetid stench from its long deep and dark throat…

#Dungeon Delve, #PG-13, #Co-operative play

Or, Delve 5 in the book!. I re-drew the maps in Dungeondraft so that they would pop out and scale well on the VTT. I was pleased with the results; it’s proving to be a really useful tool. 

Thanks Dungeondraft

Tokens were created using Token Tool and linked to images of the characters that were created from scratch using the offline character builder. The characters were exported through One Note out to images that were embeded in Google Docs to facilitate easy sharing. During the game I had tabs open with each of the character sheets to check on powers and rules questions. That seemed to work well, as the main challenge for players was to get on top of their power options in game. The players were awesome, picking up the variety very well and, on the whole, swung into the groove of working out what they wanted to do whilst they waited for their turns.

So much to explore and so little time

Worth checking out RPG Sounds