What's this I see? A change of heart?

Two things to write about, here. First is that the iPhone OS 3.0 is a bit weird. I think I need to hunt down some documentation on it. And it killed my iPhone for pretty much the entirety of last night, which was worrying. All working now, though.

The second thing is Dungeons & Dragons 4E. As usual, I played it last night (while waiting for the Apple authentication server to start working properly), and I had a strange experience. I actually enjoyed playing it.

Okay, that may sound like a weird statement from an inveterate roleplayer, but anyone who's read my previous blog posts about it, or the huge comments I've made on Rockjaw's blog about it, will know that I've had reservations about 4E. Great big huge steaming reservations. And last night they didn't exist.

Let me just clarify - my Wednesday night games are not huge story-based epic adventures with in-depth character development and convoluted plotlines. They're a chance for some people to get round a table, chatter for a few hours, roll some dice and have fun. I'll also freely admit that I'm a bit of a rules-monkey, so I love being able to see how rules fit together, and I still believe that D&D3.5E is the pinnacle of rules for the D&D game.

So... what changed last night?

There have been a couple of alterations to the way we play the game, recently. The best is the addition of a whiteboard for tracking the status of the PCs. The information tracked on it is Character Name, Healing Surges Remaining, Total of Healing Surges, Healing Surge Value, Action Points, Total Hit Points, Current Hit Points and Conditions - all on a nice table, with enough space to make changes, and the best bit about it is that I don't keep track of it. I gave that job to one of my players. I now use index cards to track initiative order, too. I'm still writing down the initiative scores, because when a combat is in the offing I've got too much on my mind to shuffle index cards into order at that stage. But all I have to track on my "GM Combat Pad" are the bad guys. There's a good 50% of my work in combat delegated. Awesome!

So, those changes sped up combat no end. Another interesting thing that happened was that the PCs started working together a bit more. That's kind of a vague thing to assess, but they were pulling together more, bouncing plans and ideas off each other more, and it just seemed to be smoother. This did have an effect on combat, but it was most obvious in the course of some investigative conversations that they had as they tried to discover more about what was really going on.

I had fun, it was easier than it's ever been, and I could put the game system to one side and focus a lot more on the story than the rules... and so I enjoyed it.

I'm not a 4E convert, by any means, but I learned a valuable lesson about it - except in combat, throw out the rulebook. Honestly. The adventure stipulated a "Skill Challenge" for one part of last night's session... and I just utterly ignored the Skill Challenge mechanic, allowing a couple of quick skill rolls to settle things (which sounds a bit like a skill challenge, but isn't), and drove the adventure forward. It worked. We'll have to see if it can continue.