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Jan 28, 2010 -- 3:15PM, Keith53 wrote:

No mention of anything called Lair Assaults.  See my posts under the RPGA General forum.

Keith

As far as I know, lair assaults are replaced with the D&D Encounters. The first one (Undermountain) is LFR related and those characters can be exported into the LFR campaign.

I, too, recall there being TWO programs mentioned - Encounters and Lair Assaults.

I haven't heard anything new/recent about Lair Assaults, which usually means there's nothing to say, but I can always ask Chris when he's back in the office next week.  

I was wondering about both of those things myself.  I'm betting that the encounters will be bigger than your standard encounter, to make it worth going out to the game store for one fight and so you don't have to wait 9 weeks to go up a level.  But too much XP in one fight could make it really deadly.  Since it's Undermountain, there could be a lot of traps and hazards incorporated in, making for interesting combats and potentially more XP.  Stances, Rages, and Guardian Forms FTW?  Also wizards will be scary- all their dailies in one encounter.

From what I remember, Chris told us that you would start with a first level and end at 2nd. Each encounter is really 1 encounter. The extended rest is somewhere after the xth sesion (halfway). How the rules deal with some of the issues of attendence and how to determine daily used I don't know, although at 1st level that is not a particular big problem. Remember, the program aims at getting new players into the game and they are supposed to last only 1 to 2 hours. I know that at my local shop the fact that you have to sit down for 4 hours is a serious draw back to the casual gamer and the customers who want to give it a try. I do know there are some special rewards for players who attend everything, but Chris did not go into the details of what that reward would be.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 10:24AM, bgibbons wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 6:15AM, Madfox11 wrote:

The first one (Undermountain) is LFR related and those characters can be exported into the LFR campaign.

I am curious to see how this will work.

Since the characters can be exported into LFR, I would expect that everyone will start with 1st level PCs and only advance based on experience they earned.  At one encounter per session, that's 8-10 sessions before you hit 2nd level, which would likely feel a bit repetitious to me.

I am also interested in seeing how they deal with the obvious problems of single encounter sessions.  Either they will only be doing extended rests every four sessions or so (with attendant issues of bookkeeping and dealing with players dropping in and out) or everyone starts fresh each session (which skews things in favor of daily powers with encounter-long effects and benefits those with few healing surges).  Each seems problematic.

I was figuring, using LFR as my example, that since each LFR adventure has roughly four encounters that the D&D excursions might be broken up into three "acts" that make up a story arc. Each act being analogous to an LFR adventure. An extended rest is assumed to take place between each of these "acts".

I'm curious if for the undermountain excursion, if you have to use the pregen characters, or if you will be allowed to generate one using the LFR rules?