After a long lapse of writing anything interesting on here (uni being on holiday i had nothing to procrastinate from) I thought i'd snag a quick post in regards to both keep on the shadowfell and my own dungeoncrawl adventure. Both of these are being run in 4th ed.
I had a bag of holding's worth of misgivings about 4th ed (type 3 if anyones interested) but this may have come largely from having been part of some form of 3rd ed DnD session for the last 10 years or so. Having now played it several times (including the opportunity to test it out at my local gaming store pre-release to the actual books) i can easily say that i thoroughly enjoy it.
Lets face it, they've got the combat right and i do mean RIGHT. A couple of examples to this would be (from my campaign) the players facing more than 10 goblins of varying levels on a bridge of ice over a gaping chasm as well as a warlock at lvl 4... with them only being lvl 1 and having just fought their way through the first part of the ransacked water temple (see earlier post for the teaser)
I'm not saying it was easy, hell it took 3 of the 5 party members down, but by god it was fun. Intense even.
Secondly the keep on the shadowfell. We had a poor turnout with only 3 player characters. D was kind enough to let us ding to 2 (for balance) and we soon found out why. after a close call on the king's road (no healers save for my fighter with the heal skill who managed to get the others back on their feet mid-combat with a well placed action point) we fought our way through a horde of kobolds at the entrance to their cavern. Literally, a goddamn horde. with a vast amount of luck and no small amount of skill we managed with 3 people to beat the encounter that most 5 man parties apparently TPK on. hooray for us! I believe the turnaround point was the ranger (after most of us telling him that if he didnt roll that 20 to stabilise, we'd all be dead) rolled that 20.
Naturally i still have some gripes about the system, like no craft skills, but to be honest all of these can be gotten around with some easy ad libbing and house ruling. Nothing us veteran players or DMs should balk at or fear.
4th ed ftw.