We leveled up! And other stuff.

So we have been playing a new DnD Next playtest and last night was the second game in the adventure, and we leveled up. Thank you, thank you and congratulations to all, I couldn't have done it without you!

So why such excitement? Well because our playing group has in the past rarely had a chance to play regularly, and this has meant that games have either ground to a halt due to lack of time, or other new games/ideas have come up which have been played instead. This has in fact meant that leveling up in any game has become a true rarity . For a long while we have been stuck in the level one loop, and while each game has been fun that achievement of taking your character past the first steps has always been elusive. But no longer.

A quick welcome to our newest player Iain who contacted our resident Games Master a little while back having been looking for ages for a group to play with, and he had never played before. I'm not sure who was more excited in the first game, Iain for getting a chance to sit round a table and do some DnD role play or the rest of the group to have another new face. It was me the  last time who was the new guy though I had the advantage of being a veteran player. With a potential new guy on board we quickly arranged a new game to be run by GM Simon and we were able to arrange another night less than a week later. Now this is a rarity indeed for us!

A new game with new-ish characters. I say newish because a few weeks before Iain joined us we had a session where we had rolled up first level characters and I had mashed together a quick test scenario to try out non-combat skill checks and some combat encounters. It was only a couple of hours and no experience was awarded so it allowed the characters to be ported directly over to the new adventure.

Over the two sessions we have played about 8 hours and our party have battles elves, undead, and an Ettin! We also got so see an aerial battle between two Wyverns - beautifully described and scene set my the GM - a worthy opening to the game.

The party of 5 is made up of two fighters, a ranger, a druid and a sorcerer, and we have christened ourselves team #ankles, after the parties first kill where an elf was downed from a critical hit with an arrow to the ankle.
A well rounded group though a bit light on healing. What we have found out, players and GM alike is that we are pretty powerful and are quite capable of taking out stronger monsters in 3 or 4 rounds with little risk to ourselves. Obviously being first level anything other than the weakest hit against our characters risks an untimely death and there has been some good roleplaying and team tactics to heal on the fly or rescue downed comrades. The GM has admitted that he needed to up the Hit Points of the creatures we were facing to make the battles worthy, which seems to point initially to a problem with monster balance in the playtest.

From my perspective the hardest and most dangerous battle was where we were ambushed by elves and had 2 assailants each. Being outnumbered in this way where you cannot effectively use team tactics shows the weaknesses of the individual characters.

One of our best battles was the finale of last nights game. The previous game sessions fight vs the Ettin was impressive but this for me topped it. The scene was a room full of undead, and the GM had used normal creature stats as the base; so it was us vs a skeleton human, zombie human, zombie bugbear, zombie bullywug, zombie manticore. Now that manicore with its bite and two claw attacks could easily kill one of the fighters in a single round never mind the  weaker less armored spellcasters, and we didn't want to be facing all these beasts at once. So with the GM allowing us the chance of a careful retreat we rested up to regain spells and hit points and then formulated a plan.

The druid would cast entangle close to the entrance inside the room so when the undead approached they would have to battle through the spell to get to us. The sorcerer was going to then burning hands the hell out of them, but a quick check on the spells it was decided this would burn out the entangle spell, so she changed to a weaker ranged fire attack on the creatures still not entangled, leaving the burning hands in reserve if the druids spell failed. A wide enough gap was left to allow the fighter to enter the room to harass zombies that broke out of the druids spell, and the ranger held back and shot with his bow.

A well thought out plan, that easily adapted as the fight unfurled. One fighter was hit hard by the bugbear but the druid was able to heal him. What was supposed to be a hard and dangerous fights was managed and controlled by good player tactics and character cooperation. But I waffle on, leveling up...

Actually there is not much to say, the rules were easy to follow for leveling, the only question was how the Hit Dice worked and how this then worked for healing dice, everything was easy to understand. The player of the druid needed to spend some time reading up on what circle to choose and what beast forms she could have but everything else seemed to make sense. And so we are now all waiting in anticipation for the next time to level up.