Just After Dawn (DoNA)

I felt that the first game session of the DoNA campaign was relatively successful. We had a party of five characters backed by five actual players. Players on hand were BobW (Merric), Becky (Mika), Mike (Torrin), Rob (Varis), and Cory (Baern). I believe that I was the only one who had read any more than a cursory amount of the Player's Handbook. We played from 12:30 pm to 12:00 am. That's eleven and a half hours.

We played five encounters in that time. The smallest encounter was five on five. The largest was five on thirteen. That's an average of 2.3 hours per combat. This is in a situation where only one participant has a basic knowledge of the rules and no one was familiar with their character or what it could do at the beginning of the day. There was also some role playing in a town. I didn't track that time, though I structured it in a way that kept the plot moving forward.

I generally felt that even though combats still took on average 2.3 hours, that they were livelier than 3.5E encounters. There were more rounds in each combat and each player had less time between their turns. Interestingly, I also noticed that there was almost no meta-discussion of combat tactics during play. I only saw one significant instance of it and I think when it happened it seemed so out of place even to the person who did it, that they immediately stopped themselves. I don't know if that's a result of the general quicker pace or the rounds or the fact that it's much clearer to everyone what they should be doing. It could also be that the games extensive use of conditions makes it much clearer to everyone what everyone else is doing and therefore meta discussion isn't really required.

I had to learn some new lessons about combat tactics. Twenty some years of training that the monsters should try to take down the fighters is hard to break. I had to quickly learn that the monsters should try very hard not to attack the fighters. Who, you might ask, should they actually be attacking? Wait for it...the rogue. Yes that's right. Any monster who has a reasonable choice should try to kill the rogue. Monsters with ranged attacks should try to kill the rogue or the wizard. Monsters can survive the fighters. But they're hard pressed to survive the rogue.

I made some mistakes. I scaled down one encounter because the net said it was a TPK. Maybe. I think the party could have taken the whole bunch, but maybe not. I was still learning how to play the monsters. When I scaled it I took out the Kobold Skirmishers. They're the roguish kobolds. So, when I did that I took away a lot of their damage potential. Again, this was lack of understanding on my part about how the new system works. In the future, I think the key to scaling an encounter is to preserve the ratio of monster types. Eliminating one was a mistake. It removed the monster's strikers. I'll know better next time.