D&D 5th Edition Playtest! How did it go?

Last night we playtested 5^th edition D&D. If you are looking for an indepth analysis of how 4^th edition and 5^th edition differ, and which one is better… search the internet again. See, I am a 4^th edition virgin. All I have ever played is one game of D&D basic, and one game of D&D 1^st edition. Some of you might be stunned by this. After all, I play Dark Sun every week. We converted it to another system, the Warhammer 3^rd edition system. So even though I own 4 sets of polyhedral dice, I usually use them as countdown markers when we play Magic the Gathering.

Still, I broke them out, blew them off, and played a cleric last night. The play test module was Caves of Chaos. Most of you are nodding sagely, remembering your own adventures or misadventures there. Again, I’m a virgin. At 34, this was my first trip there. At the announcement others of our group were nodding sagely, and at least one person looked terrified. I pressed on.

We arrived at our first cave. We had two clerics, one wizard, a rogue, and a fighter with us. Eleanor, a longtime gamer has the wizard and kept shuttering that she only had 11 hit points. I had 15, but 15 wounds in Warhammer gets you pretty far, so I wasn’t that afraid. And I could heal, but the fact I could only use my spell twice before it went away was annoying. Still, we went on. The first cave we encountered has goblins and one ogre. At the sight of the ogre, there were more yips of terror than in a kobold camp. We beat it and killed most of the goblins. We racked up XP, and some loot. Life was good. Many of us were wounded and neither the clerics nor the wizard had any spells left. We ran. I would like to say we made a tactical retreat, and that is what we called it, but we ran.

The wound system was very different than I was used to. Fifteen points hit points goes very quick when you can’t soak it with toughness or armor. On the other hand, healing spells get you a lot more wounds back and after a single night of good rest you are completely healed. Really? Your knife wounds and mangled limbs just go away after a single night? I raised an eyebrow and went back to the caves. We had hidden in a small grove where we buried our loot.

When we went back, in the first cave we encountered, we had goblins and hobgoblins. I wondered how much worse hobgoblins could be? After all, they are goblins with an extra ‘hob’. Well, that hob means they have tons of extra hit points, nasty bows, and bad intentions. Partially because one of our dwarves (the paladin) was over anxious and broke down the door, they were alerted to our presence. They did not like the fact we had killed many of their friends the previous day, so they jacked our $hit up. Both our dwarves, a fighter and cleric died. It was tragic. We tried to save them, but we ran. We ran so far away. I am even reasonably sure we ran both night and day. We barely got away.

Running back to town, we picked up our health and two more dwarves (another fighter and cleric) that were cousins of the previous dwarves and looked a lot like them. Anxious for revenge, and armed with a few healing potions and extra armor, we headed back. We had extra healing potions, right? Right?

We came across a new cave, and this one was filled with cute little yipping kobolds. Remember I am new to D&D, so Jason told me they were little dog lizard creatures. They were yipping, afraid, because we had killed so many other creatures. They had so few hit points we could kill them by kicking them. I felt like a monster, especially when we found a chamber where they were all huddled inside, protecting their young. Both Eleanor and I felt like monsters, but the guys were insisting they were a huge threat. I thought, “We can kill them by kicking them, and there are babies in there! How big of a threat can they be?” I didn’t act. Eleanor cast sleep, which put all but 11 into a magical sleep. Now faced with 11 kobolds, I thought we should just leave. But, the dwarves charged in. Threatened with instant death, five kobolds surrounded each dwarf, and in a set of shankings that would make any Martin Scorsese film jealous, they killed both our dwarves. I dove onto my fellow cleric so I could heal him, and the rogue did the same for the fighter to give him a healing potion. Those cute little kobolds? They killed us both. The only one that got away was the wizard, who ran like hell and was able to out run kobolds and half movement.

What I learned was Warhammer Fantasy 3^rd edition is still my favorite system. I also don’t care for dungeon crawls. But most the biggest lesson I took from last night? Kobold’s are dicks.