Please welcome guest contributor Zack Walters and the first part of his multi-post look at introducing D&D 4E to his gaming group:

I recently found myself back in a too-familiar situation: a game I was playing in was wrapping up. We all wanted to keep playing something, but no one wanted to step up to run the game. I sighed, martyr that I am, and offered to run one of the several dozen games that lay percolating in my brain at any given time—in this case a 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons game.

Our group has been getting together on Wednesday nights for the last three months or so. We’ve been playing a band of mercenaries trying desperately to maintain order in one of the many tiny kingdoms of the Forgotten Realms setting. And we’ve been doing it all with the 2nd Edition rules set.

At first I thought my buddy Jeff, who was DMing, had chosen 2nd Edition for a particular reason; maybe he really wanted to run this particular adventure module, or he liked the simplicity of the edition’s skill rolls, I thought. But when I asked why he didn’t want to use the (in my opinion) superior 3rd Edition of the game, he told me he didn’t own it. Turned out no one in the group had picked up any 3.x book. They didn’t know anything about it, except that it existed.

Feeling like a technology junkie suddenly dropped into the middle of the Amazon, I tried to talk up the virtues of recent editions of D&D in the hopes of civilizing the savages around me. I especially promoted the at-the-time nascent 4e, diligently comparing its mechanics to the tribe’s favorite social gathering, World of Warcraft.

Everyone thought the changes to the game looked interesting, most especially the promise of completely rebalanced classes, and agreed to play a 4th Edition campaign just as soon as we returned our corner of 2nd Edition Faerun to the status quo.

So fast-forward a few weeks, and the group gets together for the first 4th Edition session: character creation and a simple adventure driving invading goblins off a plantation.

I started the night by outlining my take on the basic Points of Light setting, explaining that the story would be unfolding on the southern end of a supercontinent amidst the Romanesque ruins of an ancient magical civilization, and then moved on to easing everyone into character creation. To my surprise, the conversation went like this:

Zack: “Okay, so now we’re going to go over character creation. Who wants to toss out a concept first?”
Jeff: “I bought a set of core books—“
Zach (not me, note the spelling): “Me too.”
Asa: “Me too.”
Jeff: “—and I’m pretty much done with my character.”
Everyone: “Me too.”
Zack: “Oh, okay. Do you have any questions about how your powers work?”
Everyone: “Lots.”

Since everyone in the group was already familiar with the basics of RPG character generation, they breezed right through all the initial steps, even going to so far as to pick out their powers and feats, two parts of their characters they weren’t entirely familiar with. In this way, I found 4th Edition to be amazingly easy to pick up and use at a basic level; however, when it came to understanding their characters’ powers and abilities, the players still needed some help with the nuances.

The exclusion-based power structure and functional layout of the Player’s Handbook made it easy for everyone to accurately estimate the usefulness of a power, both thematically and tactically, but the wording was so self-referential it was difficult for them to understand the full usefulness of a given power without first seeing it in action. While similar critiques can be applied to just about any game of this complexity level, I think a significant portion of the trouble in this particular case was caused by the group’s unfamiliarity with the foundation of the game’s mechanics; that is to say, 3rd Edition.

Unlike groups that had experience with 3.x, ours continually ran into the issue of player expectations vs. 4e’s true functionality. Jumping from the still-decidedly Gygaxian 2nd Edition directly to the tactical strategy game that is 4th provided us a constant stream of minor misunderstandings, and this was most evident to me in the players’ approach to their hit points.

Hit points in 4e are constantly depleted and replenished throughout each encounter, unlike 2nd Edition, where each fight was a strict endurance match, with little in the way of last-minute healing. While even I had to adjust the strategy of my monsters after seeing 4e healing surges in action during the first combat, it took my players well into the second session to fully appreciate how much even their paladin relied upon constant healing in order to tank.

And so it’s been with nearly every aspect of our 4th Edition game. The players’ experience with 2nd Edition has given them an understanding of the basics of play (kill, loot, be heroic), but when it comes to the rules, they’re essentially relearning the game.

I’m not sure what this means about the various editions, if anything. I had originally assumed my friends’ lack of experience with the previous edition would afford me some insight into 4e’s design, but their general acquaintance with both paper and computer RPGs prepared them for it just as much as my familiarity with 3.x did.

I’m walking away from this experience with the understanding that 4e doesn’t have much in common with its predecessors. I’m curious to hear your thoughts, though. Have you had a similar experience bringing people to the game from the old editions? Post your thoughts and we’ll compare notes.

Zack Walters is a part-time game writer and full-time web marketeer. He has written several quickstarts for White Wolf Publishing, including the ENnie-nominated Changeling: The Lost demo: “Dwelling in Darkness.” The next time you’re in Atlanta he will take you home and cook for you.