D&D 5E playtest impressions: session 2 - Clerical Errors

Since we had another session of the D&D 5E playtest adventure, I'll be posting another recap of the session along with any additional discoveries or impressions that I got.  This session was a bit shorter than the previous one, and there were fewer initial discoveries.  However, there was one small detail about the rules that we discovered and had a major effect on how we were playing the game.  I will go into detail on this discovery during the session recap, and yes, this post's subtitle is, in fact, a pun that relates to this discovery.

Recap and In-game discoveries.

Having cleared out the Kobolds from their cave, the Adventurers set off at about midmorning to slaughter the  residents of one of the other caves.  They were intimidated by the general aura of death and decay emanating from the second cave they approached, and opted to try another one first.  The Dwarf Cleric noticed that one of the other caves had seemed to be dug out by goblins fairly recently, so they decided to try see what was behind cave number three.

Rounding the first corner, they managed to get the jump on a goblin hallway patrol, killing most of them before they could react.  The remaining one gave a shout of alarm, and ran around another corner.  The Rogue and Wizard immediately gave chase, and found themselves in a room similarly that was, similarly to the kobold common room, filled to the brim with 22 goblins.  The goblins had also managed to take advantage of the alarm to hire a mercenary Ogre from an adjacent cave.  The wizard cast sleep on the goblins in the room.  However, unlike the room with the Kobolds, a few more of them were able to resist, and the Ogre was merely slowed.  The remaining goblins were also a lot more clever than the kobolds were in the first session, and while some of them charged into combat, others stood back and attacked with shortbows, while yet a few others, went about waking their enchanted buddies.  Under normal circumstances, the situation would have been bad enough to have required the party to flee the cave, and develop an alternate strategy, however, we were following an improper understanding of the rules, which I will now go into detail on.

As is foreshadowed in the title of today's recap and impressions, we made a bit of a mistake with how we interpreted the Dwarf Cleric's Defender Feat.  The way the feat is described in the text is as follows:

While you are using a shield, when a creature within 5 feet of you is attacked, as a reaction you can give the attacker disadvantage on the attack.

The way this we interpreted this for the first session-and-a-half was that as long as the other party members were adjacent to him, incoming attacks would be at a disadvantage (roll twice, take the lower result).  We realized that there must be something wrong with either the rules or how we understood them when we were over halfway through the combat with the 22 goblins and their Ogre pal, and the party was able to hold their own.  When I asked the Cleric to read out the exact wording of the feat, the word "reaction" rang a bell in my mind.  In a previous 4th Edition campaign, we had a moment where we had to look up exactly what was meant by reactions and opportunity attacks, and I recall that before that there was some confusion in some of the players minds in terms of how exactly those worked.  Sure enough, when I looked up "reactions" in the How to Play document, I found this little revelation:

When you take a reaction, you can't take another one until the start of your next turn.

So unless stated otherwise, the cleric can only grant disadvantage on one incoming attack to an ally per turn. After that, the rest of the fight became a bit more dangerous for the players, as they were actually taking hits from time to time.

While we didn't retcon the entire fight, I did retcon the last round of goblin attacks, and resumed the combat from there with a better understanding of the game mechanics.  Now that the goblins were reduced to 13, the fight was still manageable, but now the players were actually taking some hits.  The Wizard and Rogue were actually forced to fall back a bit after having taken a few hits.  In the end, the heroes emerged bloodied, yet victorious.

They opted to return to town to restock supplies and spend some of their hard-earned treasure.  There was a small bit of rp, involving a surly innkeeper who gave them the stink-eye for paying their 1 gold each for room and board in 100 coppers each, as well as a drinking contest between the two Dwarves and the Elf (The fighter won, of course).  The next morning they bought a healing kit, a handful of health potions, and some armor before setting out for day three of their adventure.

They returned to the goblin cave to find that the goblins inside had moved out in the party's absence, so they decided to try yet another cave.

Entering the fourth cave, they came across a row of severed heads, of various races, placed in little niches along the wall.  The elf spotted that one of the heads was not, in fact, a severed head at all, but the head of an orc lookout that was watching the entrance through a tiny hole in the wall.  The retreated back to just outside the entrance to the cave, and within a few moments, were charged by a band of eight orcs.  The wizard did some serious damage to the entire group of them with his Burning Hands spell, and the group was able to handle them with minimal difficulty.

Summary Impressions
The fact that we did not understand the rules may have had an impact on our impressions of the first session. So on that note, remember that unless you have an ability that states otherwise, you can only make one reaction per turn.

We still hate how many different denominations in currency there are.  Having to nickel and dime how much money the party is getting as loot is a real hassle, and wastes time that could be spent doing actual adventuring.

Also, due to the fact that we are playing with pregenerated characters and do not have access to any character creation rules yet, we don't have a clear idea yet of how the mechanics handle the "Ivory Tower" design philosophy (one of the major things that I dislike about D&D).  However, given that starting combat feats are tied to themes that help show how the feats are intended to be used, it seems like they are trying to make the game easier for less combat mechanics oriented players to build decent characters from the get-go rather than having feats and skills that are pretty much newb traps.

Edit:
I forgot to restate my fascination with how fast the combat seems to be flowing compared to previous iterations of the system.  I'm going to try running the next session with a battle map to see how fast things are when you are actually moving units around in a physical space.