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[Badwe]

The closest thing I could find was a link about skill challenges as a way to get demogorgon into level 1:

The Keep on the Gaming Lands: Skill Challenges as Tool for Putting Demogorgon on Dungeon Level 1

edit: found it, http://kotgl.blogspot.com/2008/08/in...-monsters.html


The wandering monster issue is a sticky one. My guess is that there exist several ways to manifest it in 4e that are all suboptimal in one form or the other, and no perfect form exists. That said, let me take a stab!

Skill Challenge: While navigating the dungeon, the players are attempting to evade drawing the attention of wandering packs using skills like stealth or dungeoneering, possibly bluff if the monsters are listening through a door. Failures indicate being pounced upon, success is either evasion or the opportunity to set up an ambush. XP is therefore given out as part of the skill challenge. Pros: creates a system by which the PCs can work to succeed or fail. Cons: doesn't address the issue of XP budgeting, PCs may feel like there is incentive to fail if they think it's worth XP.

Out of the frying pan: PCs rarely stumble into wandering monster packs. Instead, the clever monsters are made aware of the bumbling PCs and use their superior knowledge of the dungeon to stalk them. The next time the PCs enter a static encounter, the wandering monsters jump in to join the fray, significantly upping the difficulty! Alternatively, if enough wandering monster packs start following the PCs to be equal to approximately one normal encounter, they may just jump the PCs normally. Pros: the penalty for catching wandering monsters becomes larger encounters that, while worth more XP, are more likely to turn deadly and cost more resources. Cons: may be difficult to convey that these are due to wandering monsters, doesn't have an immediate impact when wandering through rooms.

It was all part of my plan: Simply assume that the party will run into a number of wandering monsters in the course of exploring and count that as part of the 8-10 encounters for a level. This goes back to an earlier point of broadening your idea of a "level". In the old days, you might create a floor with 12 encounters with the assumption the PCs will level up by the time they go downstairs to the harder floor. Instead, just go with it. As long as the PCs have the option to descend into harder fights, they can determine how difficult a challenge they take.



On to a broader issue: XP. It's been stated that some of you have a desire to reduce the XP reward for wandering monsters. I think that would work, but I would generally recommend instead cutting XP for all encounters, based on an average number of wandering monsters you expect the players to run into. Of course, since it's random it will vary from the average, but that will be ok. As long as you stick to the 10 parcels per level, the players would merely spend more time being at each level and would be using the 10 items for longer before finally replacing them. To me, this is easier than trying to figure out an acceptable conversion rate for the special case of wandering monsters.