Irregular Games: D&D 4E

What a weekend...

A group of my friends and I get together for some irregular gaming sessions every once in a while. We're currently playing a D&D 4E game, DM'd by my friend Matt, with myself and his two brothers Ian and Simon as the "core" players, and their friend Jim, my friend James and my friend Adam as additional players as and when they can turn up. We're going through the low-end published adventure "Keep on the Shadowfell" right now... and just had one hell of a weekend playing it.

There's a lot to say, and I'm frankly not all that inclined to go into the huge story of what's going on - play the adventure yourself, you lazy sod! - but there are a few things that have stuck in my mind about how it's gone.

1) 4E is a good miniatures game. It really is. Loads of fun options for the characters, in-depth combat choices, fast and simple tactical movement rules.

2) It's hard to actually roleplay in a dungeon crawl. 3 solid days of gaming. Total of all interaction encounters: Zero. Zip. Nadda. Total of intra-party RP as a result... naff-all.

3) The rules ain't finished, yet! I found not one, not two, but THREE distinct sets of rules about holding your breath. The first is in the PHB, and says that you must make an Endurance check every round after the 5th round of holding your breath, starting at DC 10, increasing by +1 every round thereafter. The second is in the DMG, where it says that after 3 minutes of holding your breath, you must make a DC 20 Endurance check, increasing by +5 every minute thereafter. The third is also in the DMG, on the same page as that second one, and says that if a character is exerting themselves, they must make a DC 20 Endurance check every round (note - there is no mention of this DC increasing over time, unlike the other two sets of rules). When you have characters in combat trying to hold their breath, it becomes quite important to have consistent rules. These ain't consistent. Okay, maybe there's something in the errata... but I don't want to have to have a printout of the errata document to hand when I'm playing.

4) It's a lot of fun, but most of that fun is social between the players. Cue the "chocolate finger" jokes that were flying around for most of the weekend. I won't explain that. But it was bloody hilarious. Rockjaw has waxed lyrical on this issue in the past - the game doesn't matter, the people are what's important. Given the good company I had over the weekend, we could have been playing live action Frogger (don't try this at home, kids!) and it would have been good fun.

Conclusion: I'm not a fan of D&D 4E. To me, it's just another roleplaying system, and has lost a lot of what made D&D my favourite, and has become so deeply integrated with miniatures that it's lost a lot of its spontanaeity and mental visualisation. I think this is a shame, even if it makes sense commercially.

I shall soldier on with my Wednesday night game for the duration of the current adventure... but after that I'm going to try to persuade my group that it might be an idea to try a different game for a while. Maybe a one-shot or three, just to take a break.