D&D Encounters, Season Two, Encounter 1-1

So D&D Encounters Season Two is off to a pretty good start. The Lord Admiral and I headed down to our FLGS to roll some dice and kill some monsters on the desert planet of Athas. I am playing as Jarvix the Tiefling, and he's playing as Shikirr the Thri-Kreen. It is my opinion that he and I snatched up the best two characters out of the six.

This encounter was fairly straightforward. The caravan we were travelling with was hit hard by a sand storm. Sand storms are a pretty common occurrence on Athas, but this was no ordinary sandstorm. This was filled with shards of obsidian. A sand storm like this happens rare enough for it to be considered legendary. Anyway, the storm ripped through the caravan during the night, destroying most of the supplies and killing most of the caravaneers. The encounter started the following morning with the six survivors. Our main task was to gather supplies from the wrecked caravan tent, before continuing to travel toward out destination, Tyr.

However, we realized that there were hungry lizard-men around, and we looked tasty. So while gathering supplies, we also had to defend ourselves against these lizard-men (some of whom were armed with blowguns with immobilizing darts). It soon became clear that we couldn't really stick around for long, as the lizard-men had called for reinforcements, who were on their way. At some point, the objective changed from "kill lizard-men" to "get the hell out of there!" Which we did.

The encounter went pretty well, for the most part. Our DM is great; he provides very good descriptions of the action. Something I'd like to work on in my home game. The players were mostly good, too. Some of them were clearly less-experienced than the others, but that's okay. This is a good way to introduce them to D&D 4e, and they didn't slow things down _too_ much. ;)

There were several cool moments I'd like to mention:

• I got the first kill! Jarvix is a psion, and he totally rocks. Near the start of the encounter, our Mul, Yuka, had left the caravan tent and grabbed one of the lizard-men. However, this caused a couple other lizard-men to surround him and flank him. So on my turn, after casually grabbing a couple packs of supplies, I hit one of the lizard-men with my Mind Thrust, causing his head to basically explode. So that was cool. ;)
• Not too long after that, Yuka was holding one of the smaller lizard-men, and being attacked by the larger lizard-man. Then our human sorcerer, Barcan, hit the big lizard-man with Excise From Sight, causing him to not be able to see Yuka. Our DM was great at describing how the big lizard-man was seeing one of the smaller lizard-men just kind of suspended in the air, with blood dripping off him and just pausing, suspended in mid-air.
• Speaking of Barcan, poor guy. He really does not have very good defenses. I think he took the first damage of the fight, which was enough to nearly kill him in a single hit. All told, he was knocked unconscious twice, I think, maybe three times.
• Similarly, our poor elf, Castri, was also knocked unconscious two or three times. In fact, he was unconscious at the end of the encounter, when he was literally carried off the map by Yuka.
• Barcan did have a cool moment, earning his player Renown Points for "Moment of Greatness" (I think that's what they called it). Basically, near the end of the encounter, he was unconscious, again, and it was time for his player to roll her saving throw. She rolled a natural 20, reviving him. Then on Barcan's next turn, he attacked one of the lizard-men who had attacked him earlier, calling down the "Ray of the Moon", if I remember correctly. Once again, a natural 20, utterly frying the lizard-man. Rolling two natural 20s in a row, and going from being on death's door to crispifying the enemies was certainly good enough for some "Moment of Greatness" points!

All told, it went really well and I think everyone had a good time. My only complaints were that the materials WotC produced for this were obviously rushed. The art did not match the characters' descriptions at all, and I think every single character sheet had at least a few typos on it. I read on another blog that some of the skills and stuff were even calculated incorrectly, but I haven't looked into that myself. Still, nice job, WotC. I hope they release errata-ized character sheets at some point during this season, but honestly, I kind of doubt they will. I assume we'll get new character sheets when we hit Level 2, anyway, so it's probably mostly pointless to release errata-ized versions of the current character sheets.

I didn't quite get a chance to use all of my Encounter Powers, though. I used most of them, but I have one called Send Thoughts that I can use twice per encounter. It lets me telepathically send up to 25 words to someone, and allows them to respond in kind, as a free action. This is potentially useful, but the situation last night just didn't call for it. I actually thought abou tusing it a couple times to threaten the enemy or throw out a pithy one-liner before killing them, but decided against it. Mainly because I couldn't think of anything clever to say. ;) The other one I didn't use is called Infernal Wrath, and it allows me to have a bonus on my next attack roll against a given creature, and deal extra damage if the attack hits. However, it can only be used on someone who had hit me since my previous turn. I was not hit at all during this encounter, so I never got a chance to use that one. Not really complaining about that, though. ;) I felt a little bit bad about having not taken any damage at all, when two characters had both nearly died multiple times, and I think everyone else used at least 1 or 2 Healing Surges, but I didn't feel too bad about it. Not my fault if Jarvix kicks ass.

Looking forward to next week's encounter!