D&D 4E Have you ever run 4e using just Essentials?

[Voadam]

If it helps, old school for me is lighter on combat, focused on exploration and emergent stories (sorry, hate using chic terms, but darn if it isn’t a good way to put it). Combat does occur, but it’s short until you get to the BBEG at the end of the dungeon (dungeon loosely used here).

Otherwise, this is very encouraging! I’ll see what I can find on Fourthcore.

A lot of stuff is the same for base 4e as for essentials here.

Minions are great for short sudden combat pacing (something 4e did not really push in their adventure designs), leaving the full on cinematic 4e full fight for the climactic BBEG is just a matter of DM pacing. The default is all cinematic combat full on long combat for the majority of encounters, but the tools are there for DMs to control the pacing to suit their desired feel.

I think essentials auras are easier to track in your head/TotM than a lot of individual conditional marking stuff from earlier 4e.

Essentials, like 4e, has its own internal pacing mechanic of healing surges per day and still has some dailies which works somewhat similar to Old school spell daily and hp limitation stuff. I personally like the more encounter essentials baseline for exploration than an x far per day due to daily resource management set up.

You can do a bit more exploration and interaction mechanically with skill challenges than you could with old style traps and one off mechanical challenge resolutions. Most old school tricks and traps are pretty unidimensional unless the DM has a Grimtooth's book. 4e skill challenges can allow a bit more mechanical focus on those challenges if you want.