My awesome wife ordered the Player’s Handbook 2 for me for Father’s Day, so I’ll be getting that soon.

Tuesdays will be going back to Star Wars Miniatures again, which is pretty cool as I need to play with Chairpatine (Emperor on Throne).

The group came upon a group of kobolds made up mostly of minions. Unlike last session, he said he didn’t change the scenario, thinking we’d have a tougher time with the numbers. With the seven of us working together, we were able to do away with the enemies pretty quickly. I had a couple of opportunities to use my powers and a couple of times I got to roll initiative. It seems my dice wanted to betray me, so I didn’t roll over a 3 through the whole session except after the combat when I made an Arcana roll of 17 + my Arcana skill of 10 to identify a spell effect. Toward the end of the session, while making Stealth checks, I ended up rolling a 1 after everyone else seemed to make their’s with no problems. There’s nothing like feeling useless and sometimes even a detriment to the party.

One thing I did enjoy about this session over previous ones is Dave’s extra effort to make the game more immersive by calling us by our character names and describing some of the events during combat in a more flavorful way.

As I’ve said before, I think D&D of any edition is still a “role”playing game as long as the players and DM want it to be.

The way we ended last session, my character Fizwynn (gnome bard) was singing in the local tavern to an elf sitting in the corner of the room when the Dwarf Shaman and I decided to go over and talk to her. Since I had to leave, I don’t know what happened afterward. It seems we acquired a map to a dragon burial ground where the guy we’re looking for was last seen.

In this session we started off in the town and I agreed to entertain in the tavern occasionally. We went and visited the local lord and offered our services for the recent kobold bandit attacks. When we left town, we encountered more kobolds a little bit outside of town. The rest of the session was this one encounter.

With so many people in the party and the usual out-of-character chatter that goes on, not to mention Dave having to mind the store every so often, the combat went rather slowly. So far, I like the combat system. In 3.5, my gnome bard felt a little useless after a certain point as the “singing” he did during combat and the bonuses given just weren’t helping all that much. At least in 4th, I have a ton of options with the powers I have to be more of a participant in the combat. Fred ended up being the MVP in this encounter due to his Eldritch Blast and the ability to teleport when he kills something.

Dave has warned us that the next encounter is where the last time they played everyone died. I think with the number of people we have in the game and the want for all of us to work as a team, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Dave also told us that after next session we should be leveling to level 2. It’ll be interesting to see how difficult that process is in this edition.

I was invited by Dave, one of the employees at Games To Die For, to play in his 4th edition D&D game. Originally, I wasn’t too sure about it as all the opinions I’d heard about this edition so far have said it’s like World of Warcraft: The RPG; basically, it’s a video game on paper. I have so far watched a session and played in one and it seems like good ol’ D&D with a few enhancements. Granted, the whole “powers” thing can feel like the action bar in WoW, but D&D has had “once per encounter” and “at will” powers for a while, they just weren’t called that. “Marking” felt like WoW at first, but the difference is really plain when you look at it.

Now I will say I think the game has been simplified to a degree and has a clear attempt at drawing in the video game crowd. One thing that does kind of irritate me is that the “basic” races and classes are not included in the Player’s Handbook (PHB). I feel like Gnome is one of the “basic” races and the Dragonblooded are not. Personally, I think the Dragonblooded should have been in the PHB2 and Gnomes put in the PHB. Same with the Bard class. There are other examples, but those are the ones I can think of right now. There’s also the same syndrome with the Monster Manuals. It’s like they intentionally saved things for the second version of these books just so you’d have to buy them.

All in all, I think it will be a fun game. We have from 8-10 people as PCs in the group now, but I expect that will dwindle over time, just like my Star Wars Saga Edition game has.

Speaking of which, there are a couple of books for that game I need to pick up, but $35 each is a little steep, especially for the thin “Jedi Academy Training Guide”.