I did give LFR 4e another try and do enjoy it. I also ran this mod at a con (Flatcon) a few weeks later and completed it in under 4hours. Two of the players at my table had played with me in the game above, and they both said they had a blast, so it was more of a GM/DM issue than the game. The skill challenges still felt odd, but we worked through them in a more transparent manner that still used everyone in the party. I may write more about that later. I will be running LFR at Winter War in February.

-Shent

I was playing with a home-group, so we weren’t limited to slots. We did end up taking 2 nights to do this module, but 2 of out players had only played homebrewed games, and expected options to be available that generally don’t exist in modules (talking to npc’s from a backstory, for example). Also, I think everyone in the D&D meta community is still trying to figure out how to run skill challenges with everyone having fun.

Definitely give LFR another try.

That said, it sounds as though your GM was the problem. Failing to get across the feeling of the game, dwelling on minutiae, leaning heavily on the success of a single skill roll… these are all mistakes that are easy for inexperienced GMs to make. (Not that experienced ones are immune either, especially to that second one…)

And a combat encounter lasting nearly two hours, in a group of (mostly) experienced players? Yeah, something was wrong there. That might have been the players’ fault as much as the GM’s, though.

I think the living games take a lot away from the game in an effort to stabilize the game for such a wide and varied group of people. It’s good to have the persistent world, but eh…