TuesD&D Recap II: Heavy Hands

Continuing my bashing of New DM (He's still doing quite well, I'm just going to focus on the less-good things so far): Things felt rather heavy handed last night.

First, there was another party in play. I wasn't expecting another adventuring party to be in the same location as we were. That was kinda good, but how did they avoid the first trap which was a Zombie pushing rubble on top of us. Did they somehow sneak past the zombies? I really do like this idea though that there are others interested in the same goals as the players, but its kinda odd for the GM to portray whole parties at once, and a party of two dudes seemed very small to encounter. 

Second, New DM doesn't really roleplay charactersBut he had one of them killed so he just did one character, and didn't even say the words the NPC was saying: he just said things like "He basically tells you X". All of this while one of the other players was trying out voices for his character. It was also funny, because after we slaughtered the guy in the cave, he mentioned how it was sad cause he wanted to roleplay that guy... So... I'm confused.

Third, I'm not sure how much information we're supposed to be getting or how quickly, but he was doing a lot of reveals. This other adventuring party gave us quite a bit of info, all but saying there were four evil cults we needed to deal with. [Its very tempting to look through the module to see how the location was described and if he's adding new stuff or what.] He also loves the idea of the factions in these new D&D modules, and I've found them all rather lackluster and generic. But now the factions are actively trying to recruit PCs and also spilling information hither and yon. I was kinda expecting something a bit slower, like how I ran Against the Cult of the Reptile God. It all seems rather fast.

Fourth, dude has just raced us up to third level: that was the second session and now we're 3rd level. This might not be a mistake, but it did seem quite swift. Obviously characters don't really come into their own till 3rd though, so its probably fine. I still have a few spells/powers that I haven't even used yet though.