D&D 4E Invading the castle:Small rooms, small fights, and 4e

So I'm running the "scourge of the Sword Coast" for a 4e group, and several of the scenes involve clearing out castles or towns or whatever in a series of what I would call "Small rooms, small fights" where your have about 14 smallish rooms connected by long halls, and you probably might have 3-4 monsters in about half the rooms, with reinforcements or traps or some other hook. This is very traditional for D&D in general, but in general not how 4e does its best work. I've never included it in my DMing of 4e. I'd like to try it though. I know 4e catches bad press for its long fights, and for being BAD at exactly this sort of thing, so I'm eager to adapt it to making it work. I estimate it would take 4e at least four times as long (probably more) to run this sort of adventure using standard rules and monsters, and it wouldn't be very interesting.

I'd like any input people have regarding using 4e in this way, both advice and ideas, but also if you've gotten it work for your table OR how it all went wrong. I'll be sticking with 4e no matter what, but I'm VERY open to alternative rules, winging it, trying something that doesn't work well at first, etc. I make all monsters on the fly using math, so adjusting hitpoints, etc is certainly an option. That being said, I will NOT simply be doing it as a skill challenge, that holds no appeal to me, and likely none at my table. It should be a combat system.


HERE ARE MY THOUGHTS SO FAR:
My experience with other systems (3.5, 5e, pathfinder, as a player only) in this sort of environment is that each room is ~2 rounds of fighting. The PCs get worn down a little, hit a few big fights, and then have a nice showdown with the boss at the end. I like the flow of this.

Why this works for other systems, but not 4e:
--Since these systems have essentially no encounter recharges, there is not an obvious advantage/disadvantage to having many short fights versus one longer one
--resting between fights only needs to be as long as it takes to chug a potion or cast a spell. Less need to worry about patrols finding you.
--monsters die faster: having hp=(1d8+con per level) means that if PCs are doing 1d8+str dmg, monster level is more or less equal to the number hits to kill them, but even a level 3 can go down on one good hit.
--movement and positioning are less of an assumption, so small rooms are fine.
--4e cares greatly about number of encounters, 5 minute rests, monsters that take ~4 hits to kill at any level (for non-strikers using at wills), and people moving all over the place. Great for the final battle scene, not great for this.

My goal is for the process to (in order of importance):
1) make them feel like they are exploring a castle room by room, not just zipping through a castle and stopping in two really big rooms for two traditional 4e encounters.
2) not waste the players time with needless fights or needlessly long fights. (this is of course in direct competition with #1).
3) make them feel as though they are "under-the-gun" and can't spend too much time resting
4) let them feel like they are still getting to use character abilities (encounter powers) regularly.
5) Keep rule changes mostly on my side of the screen. They shouldn't need to change how powers work.

Thanks for any input y'all might have.

One route 4e GMs have discussed (I'm not one) is to combine several of the rooms into a single encounter with waves of minion/low end creatures that trigger when the fight is detected.

That way the 14-room castle has say 3 "combat encounters": two leading up to the climatic battle and the final assault on the leaders.

The one time I did something similar, I gave the PCs a lot of intel based on how they researched the dungeon. They had about 2/3 of the complex mapped out before we started. I drew the whole complex out on a couple of easel pad pages of 1" square graph paper, so the dungeon took up the whole table. Then they moved along the map to where they wanted to explore/clear. I think we ended up with 8 fights in total, and including the set up/intel and the breakdown afterwards was 2 full sessions.

PS

We combine area into single encounters.

For example Julkoun would be Lower Village, Upper Village, and then maybe 2 minor areas, plus a finale.

I'd be flexible on whether the Goblin shaman or Shorg are the finale.

If the encounters are staggered then usually we up the total combat XP budget since it waters down the enemy action economy.

Larrin said:

My goal is for the process to (in order of importance):
1) make them feel like they are exploring a castle room by room, not just zipping through a castle and stopping in two really big rooms for two traditional 4e encounters.
2) not waste the players time with needless fights or needlessly long fights. (this is of course in direct competition with #1).
3) make them feel as though they are "under-the-gun" and can't spend too much time resting
4) let them feel like they are still getting to use character abilities (encounter powers) regularly.
5) Keep rule changes mostly on my side of the screen. They shouldn't need to change how powers work.

Thanks for any input y'all might have.

Click to expand...

A good friend of mine, [MENTION=38140]Frylock[/MENTION], wrote an article in which he developed a system for dealing directly with these issues. We playtested the system with the entire Against the Giants adventure series. I think the site with the original article went kaput but, from the link above, check the link for the Dungeon Crawl System. The system addresses all these issues and would probably be very beneficial to what you are attempting to do.

Good luck.

I would also follow the recommendation of combining multiple rooms into one encounter.

Ensure that there are multiple ways to get into every room, so the party can't just block one single choke point, nor ends up being suddenly trapped.

If you have a larger encounter with multiple enemies, your party is likely to handle a much higher encounter budget. That is because the enemy cannot attack all at once - some will only enter the fight later (simply because they aren't alerted yet), others will have no direct way to the party and need to move around them with no line of sight.

The challenge is designing the groups and rooms in such a way that it will make logical sense that there is some delay between fights, that there is a reason for a short rest in between.

Though if you want, you could also give more leeway with rests - define certain "milestones" (not in the mechanical sense) in the building where even just 10 rounds or so can act as a short rest.

Larrin said:

My goal is for the process to (in order of importance):
1) make them feel like they are exploring a castle room by room, not just zipping through a castle and stopping in two really big rooms for two traditional 4e encounters.
2) not waste the players time with needless fights or needlessly long fights. (this is of course in direct competition with #1).
3) make them feel as though they are "under-the-gun" and can't spend too much time resting
4) let them feel like they are still getting to use character abilities (encounter powers) regularly.
5) Keep rule changes mostly on my side of the screen. They shouldn't need to change how powers work.

Click to expand...

I did this with my 4e conversion of Dragon Mountain and Ghost Tower of Inverness, using different approaches. You'll need to figure out which works for you, since I don't know the source material (Scourge of the Sword Coast).

In Ghost Tower I stressed their healing surges. I did an almost close conversion of the dungeon, with an emphasis on creatures, hazards, and puzzles that would stress their healing surges (and could re-spawn if they left, similar to [MENTION=38140]Frylock[/MENTION]'s Dungeon Crawl System). The tower itself I re-designed as several encounters in an alternate plane no-rest zone. So the question became: "How hard do we want to push in this dungeon before going into the tower? Do we have enough healing surges left? Is this encounter in the dungeon worth the potential healing surge loss that could be dangerous in the tower?"

In Dragon Mountain I did a painstaking conversion, grouping areas much as [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] describes. I used kobold minions almost exclusively, lots and lots of traps, and there were almost no resting places. I did have a complex exploration/wandering encounter skill challenge operating in the background that worked very very well, but only because it was a megadungeon which spanned 13 sessions.

When you say "castle" I assume it's actively defended? How does raising the alarm work? If creatures can readily move to another area or hear another area, I would incorporate them as one "encounter" in 4e, just staggering when the enemies come out to fight in waves.

Seems like it'd be pretty hard to get a 5-minute rest in such an environment, so it would be a string of short encounters, larger encounter(s) or multi-wave encounters depending on how they did. Should be totally doable in 4e.

For example, you could roll initiative as soon as the PCs are discovered (assuming they're sneaking at all) and stay in initiative time the entire time they're there, with guards shouting for assistance, runners heading for doors to get reinforcements, etc. Could be pretty exciting.

Keep on the Shadowfell had this problem. It's not a 4e problem, though.

I would rather have a few rooms in an area, each with an understrength encounter. Act quickly or stealthily and you're never overwhelmed. Be slow and noisy and you fight a single high-power encounter instead.

For dungeons, I like to separate each themed area considerably from each other with long empty corridors. The orc area might be far from the gnoll area. You could wipe out the orc area and be fairly safe from the gnolls.

I'm going to give you advice that may seem counter-intuitive and that is to dump those trash fights altogether.

First of all, step back and ask yourself what is the real purpose of these fights in prior editions, or Pathfinder? And do you need them at all? My answer would be no. They serve only two real purposes, neither of which you need in 4e.

The first purpose is to drain sufficient resources such that other encounters, especially the story focused ones, are actually a threat. The second purpose is to provide XP and gold fodder to ensure PC's advance on par with the adventure, and that they remain appropriately geared up as they advance.

As you pointed out, 4e isn't a game that's suited to grinding through umpteen dungeon rooms of pointless trash fights. That's a feature, not a flaw. I recently converted the entire Carrion Crown Pathfinder AP to 4e and ran my party through from start to finish. I would say I ended up cutting out 80-90% of the encounters because they served no story purpose whatsover. They existed solely to force PC's to grind through them.

So here is my advice: First, if an encounter doesn't matter to the story, get rid of it. Random room full of giant spiders? Dump it. Intercepting a party of assassins on their way to the King's Ball? Keep it.

Second, always assume PC's are at full strength when designing encounters and that this will be their only encounter of the day, so expect them not to hold back. You don't need a trash fight to drain resources so that later encounters are tougher. Just make the encounters that matter that much tougher right off the bat since there will be fewer of them, and then get rid of the trash fights. Then who cares how rested the PCs are? It ceases to even be an issue.

As far as compensating for XP and treasure accumulation with trash fights to pad those numbers, just don't give XP. The players level when its narratively appropriate. Likewise, use Inherent bonuses, and bigger chunks of gold and treasure in the encounters that matter.