What i've learned from Living Forgotten Realms

this last weekend i got to run a game of living forgotten realms for the first time with my group. And i highly recommend this experience to everyone. You can read the rules all you want but until you experience the game itself you don't realize how much fun you can have with the.

Point Buy
Most of my group is pretty old school, we've always rolled our character. The illusion that we posses a magical bond with the fates or our dice to roll good is the reason. My current 4e campaign started within 4e came out, we all rolled characters and everyone was fairly tough.
Point buy brought out two kinds of players, those that focused on two high abilities, and those that wanted to go more well rounded, fearing that a low ability score would cause their demise.

Once the game begins the stats take a back seat to what the party can do as a group, two healers and two strikers is a solid four person party.

Going forward i will force the 22 point buy on my characters for future campaigns, they are exprienced enough roleplayers that they can make up for low stats.

The Party
It seems with LFR there seems to be more of a focuse on rewarding players who start their own adventuring party with an official name. I feel this promotes roleplaying and should be added to each game. A adventuring party in LFR gets a party action point, it follows all the same rules as action points, however it can be spent by anyone in the party pending everyone agrees that the player can spend it.

This is such an obvious reward, and lets the players focuse more as a team than ever before

Encounters
The encounters were short but sweet, the players felt challenged, had to speend healing surges but it did not take forever. For my normal campaign we play for three to four hours, and get off two sometimes three combat encounters plus roleplaying and catching up on the last week. In the LFR game, we finished up everything in four hours and this included 4 combat encounters, extra roleplaying and introductions at the bigging, clarifcation of how rules worked, picked bundles, and even reported the event and browsed around our DCI logins to get used to the screens a bit. Combat felt fast, and yet was very satisifying for the players.

as a DM, i plan on looking deeply at how WotC designed these adventures in hopes that i can replicate this.

Challenge
For most of us we played one shot delves, but our main campaign has been ongoing since the release of 4e, and they are 11th level now. The one thing the players remarked about was that the encounters were still challening, everyone had to spend at least one healing surge per combat encounter and sometimes one after. Everyone relized that it seemed to be equaly as challging from 1st level and 11th level and it was not something that they noticed until going back.

Rewards
LFR offers three core sets of rewars to its players and DMs, Story rewards, Treasure Bundles, and Reward Cards

Story
Basicaly after each adventure if completed successfully the players get up to two story rewards that they track. For the most part they just state that the player completed the adventure and did something else (ie was nice to an old man instead of ignoring him) I like the idea behind this as a way to track and plan how your adventures and campaigns are being strung together.

Also you can add this to your game by offering the DM's best friend, a +2, the story reward could reward the players with a +2 to a skill while in the town, perhaps they get 25% of magic item value in this town. The possibilities are up to the DM and how you want it to fit in your campaign.

Bundles
If your not sure how bundles work is kind of simple, basicaly players are limited to how many magic items they are allowed to find (not buy) so at the end of the adventure the party has roughly 5 diffrent choices, instead of offering the exact item, ie Flaming Longsword +1, they are offered the choice of flaming weapon +1, anyone in the party can chose this reward and the reward can be chosen by muiltiple people. Then each player customizes the weapon for themsleves. The party also usualy has two other options, potion+gold, and gold

This is a trickey rule and you should get feedback from your party on how they feel about this. This still offers the old school randomness of found magic items, but allows players a choice still. I know my group does not like the wish list for magic items, and want the magic items to be a suprise.

Reward Cards
These are a neat idea, and are awarded to the player not the character. Basicaly if you play a certian amount of LFR games within a certian timespan WOTC will mail you out these chards. The reward cards are simple enough they let players make new races, and unlock classes. They also affect in the game, the most basic of wich is rerolls with +1 to +2 bonuses, or additional HP when spending a healing surge. Players are limited to how often they can spend one but get to chose which ones work for them.

House rules for any Campaign
- Party gets 1 AP
- Make combat encounters quicker, less is more
- Give players reward cards (one for every other game night)
- Make treasure bundles
- Create story rewards that act as notiroity with the simple +2 bonus

I have to say my overall expeirence with LFR so far has been great, i can't wait until i get the opporunity to run one again. As a DM ive learned some new ways of dealing with in game things, and some new rules to try out and test with my players.

I highly recomend for all DMs to login and take the hearald DM test and try it for yourself.

Until next time keep your dice on the table.