Yeah 4e was great for DM Light and Big Challenge, bad for Big Empowered DM and Big Story.
Obviously, I tend towards the latter. I was fine with running 4e, both at encounters, which tended towards the former, because it was just very easy to pick up and run an Encounters module (prior to the crystal cave and MiBG, anyway), and in my own games, which were more 'Big Story.'
. Can you see why I see 5e as reactionary and not as The Game To Unite Us?
Well of course it's reactionary, but it's also the One Edition to unite them all (...and in the Darkness Bind Them) ;p
. In 5e, the rest problem, spotty accuracy of the CRs/ELs, and the sandboxy nature make it an utter wreck when looking for DM Light or Big Challenge.
5e is not innately sandboxy, the DM can take it either way...
The main thing I'd have a difficult time with, I think, would be keeping it playable with a much much much slower level advancement such that the campaign could go on long enough (at least several years) to be worthwhile without the PCs' levels getting too stratospheric.
Adjusting overall advancement in a campaign like that is as simple as applying a divisor to exp awards. NBD.
From what I understand, converting any module into 4e is trickier than converting a 4e module out to something else.
Converting via some sort of formula was problematic in either direction, because 'level' had a much more consistent mapping to challenge in 4e, so encounters were pretty close to a specific level of challenge.
However, because prep in 4e was so easy, you could 'convert' a module very simply, but not trying to do so precisely. For instance, when I converted Temple of the From from 0e to Essentials, I looked through the monsters in the module, and found a preponderance of them were around 9th-level appropriate in 4e, so I pegged the pregens at 8th level, and the monsters that were far below that range I minionized or aggregated into swarms. Then I tossed together and infiltration skill challenge to quickly get into the dungeon (TotF could be used as a centerpiece, virtually of a campaign, I was running it in one sessions at a convention) and an exploration skill challenge to navigate the dungeon if the party got bored with mapping (which, in both the playtest & at the convention, they did, quickly).
I've I'd tried to convert every creature by some sort of apply a formula to every stat conversion guideline, it'd've been not only tedious, the result would likely have been unusuable.
Going the other direction, I converted both the first part of HoS and the Twisting Halls to 5e, and, well, it didn't go so well. For one thing, this was shortly after 5e release, so I didn't have the full encounter guidelines, bunches of kobolds looked just fine by the encounter guidelines, but were overwhelming thanks to BA. I pulled all sorts of cheap DM tricks to avoid the TPKs I had running HotDQ in let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may 'playtest mode,' so the result was salvageable.
In contrast, converting B2 and H1 to 5e was barely even a conversion process - I'd invert ACs as I went, that was about it, it meant some monsters hps were a little low, but I could fudge those if they seemed too easy.
Well, AEDU is kinda still there if you look closely - A is still A, E is vaguely mirrored by short-rest, D is clearly mirrored by long-rest, and U is kinda maybe reflected by rituals.
Well, AEDU is kinda still there if you look closely - A is still A, E is vaguely mirrored by short-rest, D is clearly mirrored by long-rest, and U is kinda maybe reflected in rituals
Rituals reflect Rituals in 4e. AEDU was not just the presence of an intermediate recharge period in addition to D&D's traditional at will and n/day usages
(apropos of little, there were obscure n/hr, min, round, turn (10min), week, fortnight, month, and year recharges in AD&D, and I'd be surprised if, in all the published 3.x material there wasn't something that recharged more often than daily) - that'd've been AED, as the Utilities were, individually on one of those schedules, too.
Rather, AEDU refered to the resource advancement that all classes more or less used, rather like how all classes in 5e use the same proficiency progression.
AEDU meant that classes stayed roughly balanced regardless of day length. A campaign's pacing was thus freer to vary than it had been before or since. The Elephant was more of a mouse in 4e...
... But it was still a potential issue, iff you wanted a resource-attrition-based challenge reminiscent of a traditional dungeon.
I wonder if you'd very quickly get closer to what you're after if you dropped the short-rest mechanic and replaced it with per-encounter refreshment?
That could give you more consistent encounter balance, and I wouldn't consider making short-rest-recharges classes 'OP' too much of a risk, so it's a possibility, not to restore the benefits of AEDU (class balance &c), but as one step towards reducing the pacing issues this thread was originally about.
