D-D-Dragon!

We finally got together for our Friday 4e D&D game again. Looking back it was the beginning of October the last time we played it. Generally that would be a death knell, and we spent about an hour bullshitting about movies and stuff before actually getting to the business of even updating our characters and trying to remember what happened all those months ago. Turns out my memory, while good on the broad strokes had painted them with Southwest desert colors instead of the Germanic forested ones of which they were actually comprised. Once we got back into it things rolled along pretty smooth and it turned out to be one of the better sessions of this game. There was a bit toward the end with a dragon that highlighted a strength and a weakness of 4e. The strength: we decided to try to talk the dragon down instead of fighting it. We jumped into a skill challenge and avoided what would have likely been a long-ish, possibly bogged down, fight. We got to roleplay convincing a powerful monster that we were a bigger threat than it was, and feel like badasses in a situation that wasn't combat. I love skill challenges for this aspect. The weakness: From an economic standpoint it would have, within the rules of 4e, made more sense for us to jump into combat. Or maybe to use the skill challenge to set ourselves up for advantage in the fight with the dragon. We would have gotten size-ably more XP for fighting, which does say something important about the game, "This is what we designed this game for. You can use skill challenges, but they're not as important." I don't really like that.