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So... I played Lair Assault tonight with my usual group, and we won.  We had a great time.  I'm not going to spoil it for anyone, though if anyone has any questions I'm happy to answer some.

Here's a bit on the group.  We had the standard 5 players and a solid, smart, though not extremely experienced DM.  The players have been playing 4e since it first came out (and some before it came out - myself included).  I'm primarily a DM but I wanted to play this one.

I'd say the characters were 80-90 per cent optimized.  No one in my group is a munchkin or CharOp man, but we make solid characters (and followed the instructions to buff up what we would normally play by a degree.)

The party was
Human Executioner (Wizard's Apprentice theme) (my character)
Teifling TacLord (Guardian)
Dragonbord Sorcerer (Noble)
Goliath Warden (Noble)
Dwarf Hybrid Fighter Runepriest (some kind of devil theme? Can't remember)

Some of us (myself included) are very tatics-minded, and we won in six rounds (might have pulled off the five-round achievement, but I rolled a 2 two rounds in a row)  I got the kill.  The dwarf died, but it was the Sorcerer who took him out.

My first thought is that it was easier than advertised, but then, I've read the module (though I didn't really use any of that knowledge) and I talked to the DM and there was a few things that just plain worked out in our favour by sheer fluke.  Despite the fact that the DM crited us five times, we also rolled a few crits (three I think) and a few fortuitous saving throws, and we did all the right things at the right time.

I'm going to be running it a few times with other players in the coming month(s) and I look forward to seeing how different it can be.  I'll come back here and post some thoughts on those as they happen (Next one is on Saturday) and I will give more details once more of you have had a chance to play it (I don't want to ruin it for anyone).

Thanks for reading! 

Thanks for the report, I can't wait to play this. I'm surprised it took WotC so long to come up with this public play program. Better late than never

I want to ask a hundred questions but I also want to play it for the first time without any influence. This challenge is something that I know a lot of people are looking forward to. I'd like to remind everyone posting to please put in spoiler warnings if you're going to reveal details or strategy hints for this encounter. I know there's a lot of players who want to face this thing fresh and come up with their own ideas.

For those of you interested in more information about Lair Assault, Dungeons Masters at the link below is doing and will continue to do some write ups about the event. The latest preview talks a little about character generation, be forewarned however, that he drops some very minor hints about how to build your characters for the event.

dungeonsmaster.com/

Aug 31, 2011 -- 8:33AM, FLAvatar wrote:

Tell the grognards to look up the scoring rules for the original C2 or S1-4, GDQ (at least the GD part), A1-4, or really any tournament module from the 70s and 80s, but replace "points" with "glory."

If anything, Lair Assault is a return to the old "championship modules" of 1st/2nd editions. But of course, if you tell the grognards that their very own "old school games" were also "videogamey" back in their time, they'll get angry :P.