4e Extreme Basic Play Revisited
July 14, 2009 by shent_lodge
Filed under 4e, Game Design
On the weekend of the 4th of July. I test played a very fast way to introduce players to the game. I had players pick characters out of the 4e Monster Manual and play them as written. Everyone had fun, but they did not like my method for power regeneration. They made a convincing argument to just roll a d6 and every round just as it says in the Monster Manual to see if they can use that power again. The players had fun running through a quick dungeon. In the end, only one player said they would never play the full version of the game; too many books was the major complaint.
I tested on my relatives who don’t play RPGs as rule. The beta testers were my brother, his wife and their two boys, plus my wife. My brother is a sceptic of any game that does not involve the winning of money as a goal. My sister in law had fun with the quick play, but basically said “you got be $%&#ing kidding me” when I showed her the books needed to play the actual game. She said she had no problem just pulling a prebuilt PC from the monster manual and playing that again.
She kinda gave me a hard time the whole way. She wanted to play a displacer beast, but I said she had to play something mostly human in size and proportion.
She picked a halfling prowler. My wife went with shadar-kai witch.
Everyone stayed in the Monster Manual 1 for the game. The others were:
a Human Mage, a Longtooth Hunter and a Tiefling Darkblade. I gave each player a potion of healing and off they went exploring the bottom a new well in a small town where a worker had recently disappeared after the wall near the bottom of the well had collapsed revealing a dark cavern. They beat up some dark creepers and some skeletons; found pieces of the missing worker’s body, a flaming sword and enough gold to help pay for the celebration/funeral of the well worker. Not too shabby for four hours on a rainy day in July. Like I said, my nephews want to play the full version of the game some day, my brother was a maybe and the sister in law, well, she’s not a big fan of the playing a game that requires a whole library of rule books to run.
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Brilliant intro idea! I often wonder whether D&D has become so complex simply to leverage the massive CRPG audience. Of course I evolved from a simple D&D player in the 80′s to an OCD powergamer, so 3.5 and 4e have been right up my alley. But for many of the folks I game with, it is simply overkill.
Pretty cool idea. I’ve always been bouncing around the idea of character generation using monster design instead of PC design, but I’d make it slightly more complicated than pulling critters out of the monster manual. It’s just in my nature.