D&D 4e Combat was AMAZING

Condensed Live Stream

Condensed Live Stream from October 26, 2023 where I did a demo of a combat encounter from D&D 4e. The encounter was the first encounter from the D&D 4e Essentials RedBox Starter Set..

The characters we used were from the Quick Start rules provided with Keep on the Shadowfell. You can download the ones I used in the stream from my website.

Playing through the encounter, there were a couple things that jumped out at me.

Opportunity Attacks

I will need to look into this further. The rule for Opportunity Attacks indicates that you give up such an attack anytime you leave a square adjacent to an enemy. I am used to the rule reading that you give up an attack when you move out of a threatened area.

If you give up an opportunity attack just by changing positions around an enemy, then that makes combat movement much more challenging. Maybe that is intention. I will have this sorted out before the next encounter.

Speed

I think the game moved fairly quickly. Granted we consumed the entire live stream with the single encounter, but we spent a lot of time talking about the rules and providing context for the decisions. We were moving much slower than a real game.

In the condensed version, the combat itself took about 15 minutes. That is about what I would expect for an encounter of this level. If the players are prepared, there is no reason that 4e combat needs to be any longer than other editions.

You can see all the conversations and interactions and errors in the Full Live Stream Replay.

Do you have some thoughts on what you would like to see in future live streams? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.

Join me next week as I play through an encounter from Keep on the Shadowfell which you can pick-up for FREE from DriveThruRPG.

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