[4E] Keep on the Shadowfell - pregen chars

Played our first game of 4E at home. We only had a few hours, so we
really only got through the first encounter.

The audience was 4 males (ages 10, 12 , 14 and 16) and a female (age
17), and one old fart DM. All of these people have experience with
D&D through 3.0 and 3.5.

We used the pre-gen chars. Mistake!

To put it bluntly, they hated the characters. They did not like the
character sheets, and had a difficult time finding simple stuff like
what their attack bonus for their weapons were.

My son, who was playing the wizard, commented that he didn't have any
good spells, and he hated the new magic missle. He said "I would
rather have one magic missle that I know will hit than unlimited ones
that will miss."

When I explained healing surges, my cousin said "I heal myself? How
do I do that? Is it magic?".

The 10 year old complained that his guy did not have any gear. I
pointed out the armor and weapons on the paladin, and he said "What
about a rope? or chalk? or iron rations? Do I have a backpack?"

They did like only counting one space for diagonal moves. They also
liked that movement and ranges were in squares, instead of feet,
because we use a battle mat.

I got some funny looks when they dropped a kobold minion with 2 points
of damage. They were likewise surprised when some of the other
kobolds hung on as long as they did.

The fighter critted a kobold, but it did not die (since it had around
36 HP left), and he was very disappointed.

We quit after that first fight. They wanted to go back and play "the
other game". So we went back to 3.5, rolled up some chars, and picked
up the story line. They like the story so far, but they hated those
characters. We lifted the diagonal movement rule from 4E and are
using it (and it seems to work OK).

I am going to try 4E again sometime, but with my gamer group, and with
their own chars. I think the char sheets funny layout and the fact
that they did not make their own characters confused the kids quite a
bit. I need to find one online that is laid out better than the one
from the books because I've been struggling with that one...

.