Hi There,
I am new to this forum so I hope I am not posting this in the wrong place but I do need a bit of help. I am new to e4 and havent been a DM since AD&D except for a few ''systemless advetures'' with my son and a a couple of sessions powered by Fudge with him and couple of his friends. I got a red box for my son a while ago but only managed to experiment with the rules a little so I am prety clueless as to what to do in my current case.
So after theunnesesarily long background story here is the situation: I will be in charge of a table of 4 or possibly 5 players in a couple of weeks. They may become a regular group but as it is they have never played Tabletop RPGs. I decided I will be using The first encounters from Dungeon Delve (adjusted for number of players) and if successfull I might thread some more into an adventure, but for the moment I do want to have pre-Generated characters so that we can just get in on the action. So... What party of 4 pre-generated level 1 characters is best to takle Dungeon Delve's Coppernight hold? also What of a party of 5?
I stumbled upon this link of prebuilt characters and looks alright but starts at party of 6 and I dont want to just give a choice from a bunch of these but instead have the right amount of Classes and Roles. Thank you guys 
(Link Removed)
1. Hello, and welcome to the forums! This is the 5e forums; for edition-neutral advice you might want to check out What's a DM to do? or more 4e-specific there's 4e General. They're not as well trafficked though.
2. I noticed you're directly linking to pirated material. That's kinda frowned-upon here.
3. For a 4e party, I'd recommend a defender of any stripe, any leader, a melee striker, and either a ranged striker or controller. For scaling up to 5, replace the or with an and. Classic Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, and Ranger works well. Though pretty much any combination will work, though preferably one leader. The only real limitations, especially choosing from that pool of pregens, is picking the right level of complicated-ness of character to the player. Some new players might like feeling rewarded for recognizing power combos that work well together, while others might feel overwhelmed and just want "press B button to attack".
Keep in mind each set of pregens is designed to show off some of the material in the books that were released around the time they were made. If you're not using some or most of the books for character creation, you may want to just stick with the books you have available, and make characters yourself. The free adventure Keep On The Shadowfell has some pregenerated characters using only the first Player's Handbook, if you want to keep it as vanilla as possible.
Can I ask what you think was pirated?
FrogReaver wrote:
ThorgritAnvilforge wrote:
Oops sorry about that I saw Dungeon Delve on a list of free content released by Wizards and although the links didn't work I thought they had just taken it down to focus on the new edition and found the PDF elsewhere. Anyway I edited the post and got rid of it.
Thanks a lot for your input I had forgotten about the pre-gen characters in the Keep on the Shadowfell I got the books and will use a Defender a Leader a Melee Striker and a Controller and add the ranged Striker if I get 5 players as per Thorgrit's suggestion. I think the controller might work best due to the amount of minions in the encounters. After the first session will decide if the characters fit the players and maybe get them to try different ones in the next meeting. Unfortunately character generation often puts people off (specially young people) in their first play but once they are hooked will be easier to go through that before an actual campaign. Thanks again!
I got another question and maybe there is no point starting a new thread. the encounters are designed for 5 players and suggests to get rid of a monster per missing player but in the case of the first three encounters what monsters should be better to get rid of?
Encounter 1:
8 Kobold Minions
3 Kobold Slingers
Surely getting rid of one minion wont make a difference so I am thinking leave it at just 2 Slingers
Encounter 2:
Kobold Skirmisher
3 Kobold Dragonshields
Kobold Wyrmpriest
Leave it at 2 Dragonshields seems quite obvious?
Encounter 3:
White Dragon Wyrmling
2 Kobold Slyblades
8 Kobold Cleavers
Should get rid of one of the slyblades or maybe 2 of the minions?
TomasDV wrote:
Oh God sorry missed the bit about this being the 5th edition forum thanks
TomasDV wrote:
How long/far are you using these characters?
If it is just for a level 1 delve, then basically Eclasses + Warlord. Defender optional. If you wanted to get fancy you could do a couple defender tricks, but typically not worth it. Are there going to be skills involved? What about magic items?
If you are going with 100% base class, all combat monkeying and not much else, You probably want an Elementalist, 2 Scouts/Theives and a warlord. If you want a defender replace a scout with a Knight.
If you want a defender and/or you don't like Eclasses (which will really excell at this), the party I would make would be like so:
Ranger|Cleric/Fighter (Guardian gives you 3 interrupts at level 1)
Straladin (Half-Orc for silly autodamage mark punishment)
Warlord (Dragonborn Bravelord with Inspiring Breath)
With that as the core, input pretty much whatever else. Grab a sorc or wizard for minion popping and then a good striker of your choice (again this is assuming you are avoiding the obvious choice of Eclasses + Warlord).
Thank you everyone you have been really helpful. I was able to do a test run with 2 of the players and both disliked the 4e combat mechanics I ended up improvising combat resolution in a way that resembled earlier D&D just to salvage the end of the little adventure. After that I decided that I will not bother to try and teach them (and me) how to play 4e and instead start out with the fifth edition. I got me the players and DM manuals and been reading through them. I am liking what I see so will probably let them build their characters from scratch and just build a few encounters as per DM manual instructions for next week weekend sessions. I am thinking the fact that they have created the characters themselves they will probably feel more inclined to see them succeed in their quest as opposed to sitting around a board game and get their pieces from A to B through a maze of complicated rules. If it all ends well I will leave the little adventure open ended enough for the chance of having the players back and excited about taking their characters through a proper campaign.
TomasDV wrote:
Hi There,
I am new to this forum so I hope I am not posting this in the wrong place but I do need a bit of help. I am new to e4 and havent been a DM since AD&D except for a few ''systemless advetures'' with my son and a a couple of sessions powered by Fudge with him and couple of his friends. I got a red box for my son a while ago but only managed to experiment with the rules a little so I am prety clueless as to what to do in my current case.
So after theunnesesarily long background story here is the situation: I will be in charge of a table of 4 or possibly 5 players in a couple of weeks. They may become a regular group but as it is they have never played Tabletop RPGs. I decided I will be using The first encounters from Dungeon Delve (adjusted for number of players) and if successfull I might thread some more into an adventure, but for the moment I do want to have pre-Generated characters so that we can just get in on the action. So... What party of 4 pre-generated level 1 characters is best to takle Dungeon Delve's Coppernight hold? also What of a party of 5?
I stumbled upon this link of prebuilt characters and looks alright but starts at party of 6 and I dont want to just give a choice from a bunch of these but instead have the right amount of Classes and Roles. Thank you guys
(Link Removed)
1. Hello, and welcome to the forums! This is the 5e forums; for edition-neutral advice you might want to check out What's a DM to do? or more 4e-specific there's 4e General. They're not as well trafficked though.
2. I noticed you're directly linking to pirated material. That's kinda frowned-upon here.
3. For a 4e party, I'd recommend a defender of any stripe, any leader, a melee striker, and either a ranged striker or controller. For scaling up to 5, replace the or with an and. Classic Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, and Ranger works well. Though pretty much any combination will work, though preferably one leader. The only real limitations, especially choosing from that pool of pregens, is picking the right level of complicated-ness of character to the player. Some new players might like feeling rewarded for recognizing power combos that work well together, while others might feel overwhelmed and just want "press B button to attack".
Keep in mind each set of pregens is designed to show off some of the material in the books that were released around the time they were made. If you're not using some or most of the books for character creation, you may want to just stick with the books you have available, and make characters yourself. The free adventure Keep On The Shadowfell has some pregenerated characters using only the first Player's Handbook, if you want to keep it as vanilla as possible.
Can I ask what you think was pirated?
FrogReaver wrote:
ThorgritAnvilforge wrote:
Oops sorry about that I saw Dungeon Delve on a list of free content released by Wizards and although the links didn't work I thought they had just taken it down to focus on the new edition and found the PDF elsewhere. Anyway I edited the post and got rid of it.
Thanks a lot for your input I had forgotten about the pre-gen characters in the Keep on the Shadowfell I got the books and will use a Defender a Leader a Melee Striker and a Controller and add the ranged Striker if I get 5 players as per Thorgrit's suggestion. I think the controller might work best due to the amount of minions in the encounters. After the first session will decide if the characters fit the players and maybe get them to try different ones in the next meeting. Unfortunately character generation often puts people off (specially young people) in their first play but once they are hooked will be easier to go through that before an actual campaign. Thanks again!
I got another question and maybe there is no point starting a new thread. the encounters are designed for 5 players and suggests to get rid of a monster per missing player but in the case of the first three encounters what monsters should be better to get rid of?
Encounter 1:
8 Kobold Minions
3 Kobold Slingers
Surely getting rid of one minion wont make a difference so I am thinking leave it at just 2 Slingers
Encounter 2:
Kobold Skirmisher
3 Kobold Dragonshields
Kobold Wyrmpriest
Leave it at 2 Dragonshields seems quite obvious?
Encounter 3:
White Dragon Wyrmling
2 Kobold Slyblades
8 Kobold Cleavers
Should get rid of one of the slyblades or maybe 2 of the minions?
TomasDV wrote:
Oh God sorry missed the bit about this being the 5th edition forum thanks
TomasDV wrote:
How long/far are you using these characters?
If it is just for a level 1 delve, then basically Eclasses + Warlord. Defender optional. If you wanted to get fancy you could do a couple defender tricks, but typically not worth it. Are there going to be skills involved? What about magic items?
If you are going with 100% base class, all combat monkeying and not much else, You probably want an Elementalist, 2 Scouts/Theives and a warlord. If you want a defender replace a scout with a Knight.
If you want a defender and/or you don't like Eclasses (which will really excell at this), the party I would make would be like so:
Ranger|Cleric/Fighter (Guardian gives you 3 interrupts at level 1)
Straladin (Half-Orc for silly autodamage mark punishment)
Warlord (Dragonborn Bravelord with Inspiring Breath)
With that as the core, input pretty much whatever else. Grab a sorc or wizard for minion popping and then a good striker of your choice (again this is assuming you are avoiding the obvious choice of Eclasses + Warlord).
Thank you everyone you have been really helpful. I was able to do a test run with 2 of the players and both disliked the 4e combat mechanics I ended up improvising combat resolution in a way that resembled earlier D&D just to salvage the end of the little adventure. After that I decided that I will not bother to try and teach them (and me) how to play 4e and instead start out with the fifth edition. I got me the players and DM manuals and been reading through them. I am liking what I see so will probably let them build their characters from scratch and just build a few encounters as per DM manual instructions for next week weekend sessions. I am thinking the fact that they have created the characters themselves they will probably feel more inclined to see them succeed in their quest as opposed to sitting around a board game and get their pieces from A to B through a maze of complicated rules. If it all ends well I will leave the little adventure open ended enough for the chance of having the players back and excited about taking their characters through a proper campaign.
TomasDV wrote: