Wednesday Night

We'll game at Jake & Angie's at least one more time - since we are gaming EARLIER in the night, I'm even considering offering up my basement again (until the Game Room at Wausau Comics is ready), but for now their excellent set up will do nicely.

I want us making characters TOGETHER Wednesday night, one at a time, so even if you pre-make your character you will be filling out a character sheet for the DM (for me) with everyone else contributing. Even if this takes most of the night.

What I want is for each and everyone one of the players to understand not only their character and their role in the party, but also to understand the characters and roles of the other players. I want some "built-in" associations between the PCs prior to the game restarting, like we tried before. But, again, I want to make sure we all understand the roles and abilities of the PCs.

A Defender stands in front of the other party members and absorbs damage, preventing to the best of his or her ability his comrades from being attacked.
A Striker targets individual opponents to eliminate, playing hit and run tactics mostly.
A Controller tries to manipulate the battlefield as a whole, tying down or eliminating numerous opponents (mainly minions) at a shot.
A Leader assists the rest of the party with heals and buffs.

Combat Encounters utilize maps and terrain features and miniatures for a specific reason - 4th Edition is very much a tactics game. And one of the most important, and I feel possibly overlooked so far in our gaming sessions to date, tactics is positioning. Making sure Defenders are BETWEEN the enemies and the squishier allies. Making sure cover and concealment is utilized to the party's advantage and the opposing group's disadvantage. Keeping softer targets on the move, like Strikers.

I know most of my players are more used to (if any gaming) the more RP oriented combat, often without any visual aides or maps. I, even though I've RP'd a lot for over twenty years, come more recently from miniature strategy games (Warhammer, Heroclix) and maybe have a better understanding of miniature combat tactics than some of group. The game SHOULD be far to the party's advantage - even with "tougher" opponents, I will not be going for the throat - my motivation as a DM is to provide fun for all. But we had two bad nights of party losses, and I've decided to take a huge step back and run most of the rest of this module as almost a 4th ED boot camp. There are still rules and such I don't have memorized for this game, some of which players like Jake and Benton know very well, but I do understand strategy gaming and will be stepping more out of the "running the opposition" role in combat and more into the "party leader" role I was hoping a party leader would take on its own, at least until I feel everyone has a better handle of this. I will be making suggestions and issuing warnings during combat for the time being during combat, letting options be known and when mistakes might be in the making.