I ran a game of D&D 4th on Sunday.

Great fun, ended with a TPK during the big fight at the end.

Interestingly, I had 5 players, one almost complete noob (Caroline, played Savage Worlds with us once and had fun playing the party wizard, so insisted on playing a wizard again. Other than that, never played before) one ex-gamer (Nick, who hasn't played at all for about 12 years), Claire, who's never played D&D before plus Mat and Stuart, both of whom have played 4th ed once or twice.

Things I learned:
* Using the edge of the battlemat to keep track of hitpoints worked really well. When I had more than one creature on in an encounter who had hitpoints, I made sure they were all on different coloured baseplates and used a corresponding colour pen to write down the damage they'd taken.
* We were playing in my kitchen, and there's a whiteboard on the wall which is usually used for shopping lists and stuff like that. It was wonderful for tracking initiative.
* Holy fuck, Rogues are badass!
* If in doubt, Flank. Kobold's "shifty" power makes them actually really damn tough. If you're fighting two of the buggers and they survive the first round, you're pretty much guaranteed to be flanked next turn.
* Fosters Twist is exactly as disgusting as it sounds.
* I mean it, Rogues are pretty much pure death.
* The book keeping isn't that bad, if you play smart and have lots of stuff to play with.
* Don't assume that the PCs will win. I mean, this is a newbie adventure and the first boss fight happened way before the players would have reached level 2. It ended in a TPK, with the boss at less than 10 hp (out of a hundred-and-odd). Had the players been luckier, or if I wasn't such a bastard in terms of tactics, or if they'd played differently or taken another extended rest, things would almost certainly have been different.
* At the end of the day, I was trying to run the game exactly as written and pretty much did so. We all had a great time: every single person has text or emailed me to ask when I'm running it again. So yeah, it's a kick ass game.

Anyway, here are the photos, I know that's the only reason anyone's reading this :^)

http://picasaweb.google.com/richks/DDKeepOnTheShadowfell