4E Campaign - Session 4 - Stepping Stones

I had some time to prepare encounters, finally, and I was very pleasantly surprised with the results. I have six players instead of five, so I went through about 10 encounters making adjustments from the standard "5 PC" encounters, and there's a very nice table on p57 of the DMG. FOr example, the EL3 encounter should go from 750 to 900xp. A glance at the encounter tells me that I can either bump the minions by 6, or one 150xp creature. Whatever I think would fit. Total time spent for me to adjust all the encounters was under an hour. This included a pretty significant re-working of the Lady of Shadows encounter from the FRCG.

I was pleased that the party moved quickly to complete the "traitor" skill challenge encounter from the previous adventure. I decided to make the traitors both Ninaran, whom they encountered briefly at the tavern, and Curuvar. Curuvar, an elite, attempted to escape from the encounter through a dwarven stepping stone portal. I ruled this would require a succesful DC20 Know Arcana check. The party went through the portal one by one over about a dozen rounds. This moved the party into B2, under the Barrow of the Ogre King. They made quick work of the fleeing Curuvar, however, the battle with the goblins therin was dicey.

I was really pleased with how this evening flowed, and ranged from skill challenge to trap to big combat to big combat. It was extremely challenging to the players. I can't believe this was only a second level adventure, it felt like a much more challenging set of encounters which thoroughly taxed the parties resources.

At this point, I'm prepared to say that as far as first and second level encounters go, these have been some of the best I've ever run for an rpg.