Getting to know pen & paper

My 4e starter kit arrived Thursday, and I've spent the last two nights reading through the solo adventure and the mechanics of the DM guide. It's been fun. I do like how you build a character through the narrative, and how it walks you through your character sheet. I just made a dwarven fighter, and he seems pretty effective--though I'd gladly exchange his greatsword for an sword/shield combo. This is not an option with the starter set.

I was surprised how many hp and such a first level character has (29 for my dwarf). I had read that level 1 is similar to level 5 of older dnd, and that seems about right. The monsters are pretty effective too, though. A goblin minion has a 15 AC, a +6 hit modifier, and does pretty significant damage.

After creating my fighter, I'm itching to work though Heroes and figure out how to roll up a character from scratch so I have more freedom and choice. Maybe later this weekend. I will probably make a cleric, rogue, and wizard using the starter set just to learn the rules of those classes, as they are nicely spelled out in the solo adventure.

The adventure that comes with the starter set seems fun. I will probably need to modify it, though. Counting my henchman, our crew will include three PC's--all novice players--and I'm worried that an adventure written for four PC's will be too hard. Fortunately, it looks like I will usually just need to pull out one npc per encounter to balance it for 3. Should be ok.

Mechanics of the encounters are fun. I see the reason for the power cards, because powers can become hard to track for a beginner like me. It looks like the standard (non-essentials) character sheets are designed to work better without cards, but I can see printing them for my players even after they have moved past the starter sets. Probably depends on how much time I have. I may be making monster tokens in that free time...

Anyway, I'm having fun. The dnd stuff has distracted me from Forbidden City, which is my current NWN mod that I'm playing. It's fun, but almost too open ended. At this point I'm just trying to find one last (I hope) boss to finish off the module, SP I'm scouring the city. I'm pretty ready to be done, so I hope I find it soon...