I will second a call for Shards of Selûne - the setting is (the book) is excellent, and it's a very good "tour of the horizon" adventure.
It's great at presenting the place and that alone may be enough to encourage your players into foraging into a region or situation on their own - which is usually a prelude to excellent, excellent games. (snip)
That's what happened during our version of it: a small sentence in the adventure became the prelude to the next, fairly extensive campaign arc that concluded with a battle with the lich Valindra and a SC/battle with the awakening claw of the tarrasque which was both a hazard and a monster. (This was under Morgur's Mound and the awakening claw caused tremors, rockfalls, and opened chasms across the battlemap. Lots of fun!
) And this was all because the player of an Uthgardt barbarian noted that the Bones of the Thunderbeast had been turned into totems of Thayan necromancy and determined that he should recover them and return them to Morgur's Mound.
Which would you say is the other ?
Chris Perkins. Logan Bonner was also very good but he wasn't on staff, IIRC. But Chris's DM Experience column really showed how well he got 4E; arguably his AI games did the same.
By contrast, I watched a YouTube video of Chris with Mike Mearls discussing adventure design at GenCon or similar convention. When Mike was asked about his current campaign he said he didn't have one. I suppose that was reflected in the fact that the only 4E adventures with his name on are absolute garbage (and turned into two of the great ads for Pathfinder!), and he was the only 4E designer whose latter work - at a time when 4E products were fairly well-liked - was largely panned (
Heroes of Shadow).
But the biggest disappointment for me as an adventure writer for WotC during the 4E period was Bruce Cordell. Up until
The Sunless Citadel, I was a big fan of his adventures but that marked the high point before a major decline over the course of 3.xE and then the near-nadir of
Keep on the Shadowfell as co-author and then the absolute nadir of those horrible Epic monstrosities whose names I will not even look up. Fortunately, like Mike, he did some good non-adventure design work for 4E but his name on an adventure for 4E is the kiss of death, IMO.
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As for the immediate and triggered action problem, yeah, that's huge. Because my players are fundamentally lazy, I have prepared cheat sheets for these actions written in stat block format with
triggers and
effects. Of course,
good players would prepare them for themselves... but at least this gives me a chance to really get across what the PCs can do between turns. And as I have a reasonable memory for this sort of stuff, I can often help with a hint when I see a player paralysed with the great burden of responsibility that comes from turning up to enjoy himself for four hours and having to remember to bring dice.
Anyway, I find the cheat sheets to be vital.
Also, getting the players to have some basic tactics pre-prepared - as MoutonRustique has already mentioned - is also really important. Fortunately my most addled player has a barbarian with
howling strike, a
vanguard weapon, and
badge of berserker (ignore OAs on a charge) so that boils down to "How about you just open with a charge attack that, if it hits, will deal d12+d8+d6+11 damage?" I find that, once that opening attack is out of the way, he then starts to focus.
Even though players and 4E detractors often complain about the difficulty of managing 4E's fairly complicated characters, in reality it's not that much different to earlier editions when 1. a lot of campaigns involved PCs with a lot of magic items and 2. you had to look up your spells (or feats) in the PHB or UA or an issue of
Dragon or a splat book or a spreadsheet where you toggle your buffs on or off (as my players in 3.5E used to do). The only real differences in 4E are 1. that all the information is there on your character sheet and 2. that magic items don't typically make as much difference.
