Well, we've finished Storm over Neverwinter, and I've never been so glad to see the end of an adventure. I just hope that the Game Day adventure is better, because Storm over Neverwinter was FUCKING AWFUL!

The last session we ran, as we've run the rest of the series, using D&D Next. This session was probably a lot better in 4E, but whoever was doing the Next conversion didn't pay that much attention. As the battle started, the players rolled really low and lost initiative. Then Karis cast her Storm Burst spell and dealt about 25 damage to everyone who failed a save. Not surprisingly, most characters failed it and took a bunch of damage and were knocked prone. Her husband folled up with a Fireball spell for about a further 20 damage. And then the dragon flew in and breathed poison gas on the group for a yet another 20 damage or so.

How many hit points do 4th level pregens have? It's in the range 25-50. Now, this is meant to be against a party of five 6th level characters, but even in that case, you're not talking about all that many extra hit points. Even making all three saving throws you take half damage…

Now, because I'm an experienced DM, that's not how it ran. I held off on the dragon arriving, I stopped casting area effect spells once the party started falling over, and I was generally nice to the party. (Josh wasn't so nice, and may have had a TPK. It was going that way, but I didn't see the end). But the insane thing about this rash of area effect spells? They could cast them again… and again… and again. Well, Karis couldn't cast more than two Storm Bursts, but then she would move to lightning bolt, so not much damage lost. And the design of the encounter put everyone close together and made it very difficult to spread out.

Yuck!

When the monsters were hit, they tended to go down quickly – real glass cannons, especally as by Level 6 (which most of the PCs were), their Deadly Strike made for some impressive damage, especially as a few criticals were rolled.

At the end of it all, the players looked at each other and asked me what had just happened – not just the encounter, but the entire season. The plot was opaque to them. Why was the wizard being attacked by the cultists and then aiding them? While there are answers, they didn't come up in-game, which is where they needed to be.

The next challenge will be D&D Game Day, assuming that Wizards are able to get the adventure to us in time. We haven't got it yet, so there's four days left for it to arrive…