Well, 12 years too late (it’s never too late), I am now a 4e D&D DM, having run my first session last night on the Role VTT with a great group of players. If you are only counting official D&D editions, then this is the first time that I have DM’d for 36 years. It went rather well.
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| D&D4e on the Role VTT |
The setup for the game was simple and directed to get us started in the Nentir Vale, the official setting for 4e. this is not a heavily lore infused setting, it is a lightly drawn place of danger as empires have fallen, leaving lots of space for heroes to make a difference between the fragile points of light in a shroud of many dangers. Having said that we have access to all the collated lore of the lifetime of 4e, as compiled by a dedicated fan. The PCs are nicely thought out and gelled well together.
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| The player characters (hoping Toitham will join next time) |
4th Edition is a ton of fun. Plenty of roleplay to get us started and introduction of some NPCs that either brough out elements of character or signposted to developments in the setting. The interations throughout helped bring the game into the setting, whilst also delivering a great game too.
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| Some of the opening cast of other characters |
We had our first tactical encounter battle, with the heroes fending off some buzzing stirges that swept into the line of settler caravans to feed hungrily on anything they could find, including the horses.
This edition is noted for its combat and this flowed very well, perhaps at first level the options are that bit more limited, but as far as I can tell all the good things held up in play. All characters had lots of good things to do and looked and felt heroic. The rules elements were tersley and clearly expressed, making interpretation quick and enabled us to move through the gears fairly quickly. No, the combat wasn’t that quick, it was our first time out and we were also getting used to Role, but it was exciting and meaningful and fun, which bodes well for the rest of the campaign. I really enjoyed running that fight. Some Daily powers were burned as were Action Points, those stirges were tricky.
Role VTT held up pretty well. We had some sound hiccups that required some reconnecting, but it was great to have large video boxes for all the players so that we could all see each other. It felt more like us being around a table as a consequence.
To help me manage multiple same monster tokens I have created a series of small tokens that are just numbers. I assign them onto other tokens to help me keep track. It’s a bit cumbersome and would be much easier to have a text box accessible from a token to keep track of status changes. Things worked well enough though.
A good start, and I now appreciate, in play, that I have a great edition of D&D on my hands. I’ll be running it at a convention this year, by request, and look forward to discovering more of the game through play.
On the way into the game yesterday I discovered the old Masterplan tool, which still runs and, with all the libraries included gives you the tools to design encounters, spending your XP budget, and output the monsters to HTML that can then be picked up elsewhere. Blimey, that is also going to be very useful indeed. I could also talk a bit about Notion (https://www.notion.so/), a great note taking and organisation app, but that is the subject of another post.