The New Flesh

An unusual situation arose in a game last week. We discovered that the Intimidate skill allows you to make an Intimidate roll to force Bloodied opponents to surrender. This significantly shortened fights and actually made the game more interesting that just stomping over piles of corpses. I'm not sure if it is meant to be so powerful but I do think it works better than the old Red Box morale rules where the GM had to dice to see if the monsters wanted out. This way the morale collapse of the monsters is actually player initiated unless the GM things the encounter is hopeless for the monsters.

Billed as the D&D 4e starter pack this module comes in a card folder and doesn't skim on the components. There is a full colour map or two, the quickstart PCs booklet and the scenario and quickstart rules in a separate colour magazine style booklet. The only disappointment is that the covers of the scenario booklet are ordinary paper rather than heavier weight paper. Rips and tears in the cover seem inevitable. The PC's booklet has four archetypal characters in a pregen fashion which is a little less flexible than I had imagined. The rules are different again from Star Wars Saga and definitely make the game a lot less flexible in genre than 3/3.5e was. This is tricky because Star Wars has a defined genre convention whereas D&D has not really done that previously. Well of course it's had its inherent narrative but this edition seems to place the game with both feet in the action adventure genre.