| Dee Dee Ramone and Dee, 4e

In summation, fun. Highlights from our brief, one room, 4 kobold encounter, with some added insight from my Podcast listening and personal revelations from reading the books:

- Combat is fun! It is tactical, for sure, and benefits from the use of minis absolutely. Not to say you can't run the game without a grid, because it is still an RPG after all. Very much like a boardgame, which I like, of course this is after one play of one room.

- The DMG has a method for creating adventures, sort of like 3.x did, but this one makes more sense and is a little more formulaic, but I think that is okay. In essence, you multiply the number of PC's by the average creature XP for their level, and then use that number to 'buy' XP worth of monsters per encounter. Adding encounters with a -1/+3 to the character level works fine, they say. So, as a DM you are kind of 'building and army' per encounter, which is fun, and then WotC says every 8 - 10 encounters, the characters should level up.

Each monster type has a variety of iterations, so for example at first level, the basic monster is 100xp for like a kobold swordsmaster. THen, there are like 25xp versions of kobolds all the way up to 500xp.

Right now, this sort of mentally lends itself to dungeon crawls because it feels like the system is screaming for them, but I look at it as I did the PS2, and really most consoles: when it first comes out, developers and DM's just aren't sure how the system works and there is a learning curve before you can really make kickass games. The first few are gonna be straight forward, and sort of clunky. I gots no problem wit dat.

- The Penny Arcade podcast where they just record the game session is a good way to get a feel for the system. The PA guys are heathen goofballs like we are, so the play style is similar, and they seem to really be having fun. I was certainly inspired to play more DND listening to them. I would suggest it.

- MINIONS: are a kind of neat little addition to lower level games. Minions basically have 1HP and are designed to simply fill out encounters and make the PCs feel buff buy enabling them to cut swathes through the enemy fairly easily. A neat addition.

- Finally, I think the powers really allow all the players to have a valuable contribution to add to the game at all times. I remember sitting around and continually missing with my 3.0 fighter, Fared I think was his name. It was fun to roleplay, and goof off, and level up, but combat for a fighter that just keeps missing and can't do anything cool, kinda sux. Clerics were in a similar boat, I think. 4e allows each class to do all sorts of cool stuff every turn, and the basic attack of yore, is basically only used as a bonus attack due to other powers enabling bonus attacks.

It all seems very fun to me, and I am slowly getting my head around throwing together a game. Not that it is hard, it is just I am out of practice and lacking in the same amount of time and brainpower I used to have to burn. I totally think all AT members should play it wherever they are and whenever they can!