Playing 4th ed for the first time - Interview with the GM Part I

This is where I interview myself after our first session of playing DnD 4th ed. It was a home made adventure that lasted one evening. The interview is split up in 4 parts.

So, I figure you have just run your first full game of DnD 4th?

That is correct. We ran a short module with a couple of encounters and two skill challenges.

Was this a pre-made module, or something that you created yourself.

This was something I wrote. We didn't have a module available, and also I wanted to see how 4th ed was to write modules for.

That's an interesting topic, and we'll get back to that later. Now, Can you in one sentence describe the overall impression with 4th ed?

That's a hard one... but I think I'll have to go with this: It's not a set of tools, it's a box of parts that fit together

Can you elaborate on that?

Well, many RPG's are labeled as toolboxes, with which you can build whatever you like in detail. My impression with 4th ed is more that it gives you a number of parts or modules. You can then combine these parts in a number of ways, but each of the parts are fairly ready-made.

What are the effects of this?

I'd say it's both good and bad. The bad thing is that you are more bound to how the creators of the game intended things to play out. The good thing is that it's a lot faster to prepare and run modules, or to build characters.

Can you give details on how this would effect character creation?

I'll do my very best. In DnD 3.5, and many other games, if you wanted to build a fighter, you built him from the ground up (more or less). You could choose if you wanted him to be fast or strong and so on. You had a lot more freedom in how to build the character. In 4th ed, the fighter is limited to what the game designers envisioned him to be. On the other hand, chargen is much quicker, you assign your stats, choose race and class, pick one or two feats, assign a few trained skills, pick your powers (four choices all in all), choose a weapon and armour and then you are ready to go.

Speaking of quicker. 4th ed is said to have been more streamlined and fast. What is your take on this.

To some extent I'd say they succeeded with this. The combats played out fairly fast, and as long as you had your power descriptions in front of you, even the more colorfull attacks where resolved in about a minute or so.

Did you get some comments from your players?

Yes. I think we all had a good time with a game, which is the most important thing. However, the number of new terms in the game caused some confusion at times.
Another comment was that 4th ed made roleplaying easier, because there where fewer die-rolls, so you could spend more time on actually playing the character.

Finally, I think that we where a little surprised on how it played out. I think we anticipated the "gamey" aspects of the game to be more noticable and up front, but on the contrary, the game felt more roleplaying-y than we thought it would

Interesting, I guess that we will come back to that more in part III of this interview. For now, thanks for your answers. We'll see each other again for part II of this interview, which looks at your experiences in preparing a game for DnD4.