Tell me about you 4th ed campaigns..

[bagger245]

So, I was thinking about running 4th ed again after a disastrous Kobold Hall experience.
My players still think negatively of the game but I am trying my best to make them
like it. I was thinking up what type of campaign to run and thought of running FRCS
with the new books and all.
Would love to here any campaign suggestions on FRCS or your own campaigns and their nature.
I want to know how you guys make 4th ed work for you, and I realize it might lie in the
heart of the campaign you're running..

 

[Jhaelen]

My players still think negatively of the game but I am trying my best to make them
like it. I was thinking up what type of campaign to run and thought of running FRCS
with the new books and all.
Would love to here any campaign suggestions on FRCS or your own campaigns and their nature.
I want to know how you guys make 4th ed work for you, and I realize it might lie in the
heart of the campaign you're running..

I hate to disappoint you but I don't think the campaign setting you're using will make any difference. If they dislike 4E on principle, nothing will change their mind.

Did you ask them why they didn't like it? Maybe it was just the railroady, string-of-combats delve that is the Kobold Hall? If so, you may want to try a 'real' adventure, with more roleplaying opportunities, npcs to engage, skill changes, etc.

What I definitely wouldn't do is starting to invest in a new campaign setting.

 

[Engilbrand]

Make your own.
My game started out in an area known as Five Point. It's five villages set up like a pentagram. Due to the ridiculously high magic of the area, it takes 8 hours to get to any of them. They each have roads leading to the two next to them, plus one to a fountain in the very middle. The fountain is indestructible, and the forest around it is cut down yearly for a festival. After 3 days, the woods grow back. The festival is a celebration of the holding off of the Orc attacks. These happen every year at the same time.
When my campaign started, the festival was 3 weeks away. The strange thing was that the Orcs hadn't attacked yet. Not only that, but there were refugees who had started streaming into the city. Apparently, the Orcs had switched from raiding to slaughtering. They were looking for something.
A few small groups were sent from the villages in different directions between West and North. They were scouting.

The main idea for the rest of it is that there are Changelings who are manipulating the Orcs into finding them some special artifacts. The Changelings are worships of Mordain. He's a Wizard in the Eberron setting. WotC had an article about Mordain's Forest of Flesh. For my world, Mordain was an ancient Wizard who was seen as too dangerous. He was a fan of mixing things together that shouldn't be mixed together. When they tried to kill him, they could never succeed. He was like Russia's Rasputin, only worse. He had transcended being human. In the end, numerous spellcasters got together and shunted him to a pocket dimension between the Shadowfell and the Far Realm. While most people know him as Mordain the Fleshweaver, the Changelings refer to him as Mordain the Maker or Mordain the Healer. As they find the artifacts, which have an elemental theme, they perform a ritual and change. I've had them changing into Genasi.
Where Five Point now is, there stood Mordain's Spire. When the Giant Myrdoon unleashed his fury upon it, he destroyed part of the area. It also created a number of artifacts and some crazy, uncontrolled magic. The magic was harnessed and used to create the fountain and magical woods between the towns. It also causes the area out to about a day and a half in every direction to be peaceful. There is a general calming effect on everyone in the area. All of the races get along great and nobody does anything wrong. Soldiers and guards are still trained because of the occasional wild animal, as well as the Orcs and their minions. The magic also limits the power of the people in the area. There is nobody above 6th level in all of Five Point. It means that there can never be another Mordain.
As the artifacts are brought together, the area around them changes. The enemies have a few of the artifacts, and they actually managed to resurrect the Forest of Flesh. These are the Spellscarred areas. (I really liked that stuff from the FRPG.) If the players get all of them, they will merge the artifacts with the fountain and perform a ritual to make the happy-magic of the last 1000 years permanent, and it will become a lot larger than it currently is. If the enemies succeed, though, the Forest of Flesh and the Spire returns, and Mordain will once again walk the land. This time, though, he's had a thousand years to absorb the darkness of the Shadowfell and the insanity of the Far Realm.

Most of the campaign has been made up as I go. I literally do not prepare. It's worked out really well. I've been able to add to the story as we've gone through. What's funny is that I only had 2 players for a while. One was an Elven Warlock with the Dark Pact and now a Spellscar. The other is a Dragonborn Paladin who now has a bit of Barbarian. I have made ample use of the idea of using interesting things and doing what I want.
At one point, in the Spellscarred Forest, the Warlock was fighting with a massive snake. He was in a tree, and it was part of the tree. When he left, it merged with the tree and sprang out at him. It was wrapped around him when he killed it. I had stuck with the idea that it merged with things, so it's death caused part of it to merge with his Leather Armor and gave him Serpentscale Armor. He loved that.

Make up your own stuff and just remember that you can do just about anything. Roleplay a lot so that they don't just think that the game is about combat. The system is combat focused, but roleplaying doesn't require rules.

 

[FriarRosing]

My campaign is a really simple, for the most part: mysterious plague has hit the area, local Baron doesn't really care about the infirm, evil wizard locked in a deep dungeon beneath the earth has caused it and has also had the king of a rival country kidnapped to help start a war.

So far the game's been a lot of combat encounters, which have been great but, as many have noticed and as I am beginning to notice, monsters have too many HPs. I was going to start the campaign out somewhat sandbox like, but the nature of encounter design throws off that kind of play, for me at least, so we've been playing a more linear type of game. Though I've been by no means railroading. We do a lot of RPing, though admittedly I've yet to really do any skill challenges.

We actually liked the Kobold Hall. My players wiped that place clean and took all the loot. It might have helped that it was the first time I'd possibly ever ran a combat with Kobolds--I'm more of a goblin type of guy.


While I'm not convinced 4e is my personal favorite addition, I would recommend giving it at least one more try. I think what's less important is the system, and what's more important are the ideas in your game. If you have a cool idea, you can probably use any system to run it, for the most part. Or at least with minor tweaks. This is assuming your idea is within the bounds of your average D+D type of thing, of course. For better or for worse, my games are less about encounter design and the like, and more about characters, plots and locations I find interesting. If the players can find ways to succeed at killing said characters, ruining said plots or looting said locations, then that's even better!

I wouldn't go with FRCS if you don't know if you like the system yet or not. If you find out it's not for you, then that'd be a terrible waste of precious cash. I doubt Forgotten Realms is going to somehow make or break the system for you.


EDIT
This thread exists twice!

 

[Mallus]

I hate to disappoint you but I don't think the campaign setting you're using will make any difference.

I think a good campaign setting can go a long way to overcome a dislike of mechanics, and I say this as someone who DM'ed a long successful 2e homebrew. It wasn't the rules that kept players coming back for more.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

My Campaign is set in a homebrew setting. It essentially is a 18th century messed up version of Louisiana, with plenty of fantastical and supernatural elements too it.

Some changes in rules that we use for the campaign:

-I use the Swashbuckling PDF for my firearms.
-We changed Per Encounter to Per Scene and Daily to Per Chapter because of the decrease in combat.
-We allow separation of the different elements of a Power, ie; you could just use the healing part of a power or just the attack part of a power.

In the campaign, the PCs are slowly beginning to unravel a long-held secret that for many generations the Loa they worshipped too have been outcast or turned too a foreign legion of Devils. This turning is what initially led to the separation of Vodoun faith into various cults (though each in turn worship unknowingly a Devil).

The PCs have to decide when all is investigated and all mysteries unravelled how to procide. They know the Devil's are lying about who they are, they know the real Loa still exist in the deepest corners of the lagoons. But, they also know that life here isn't ungodly hard, and they do not know what the Loa are like either.

The Campaign is fairly combat light, with most of it being oriented towards RPing, diplomacy, simple chit-chat, lots and lots of Skill Challenges and plenty of investigative work. There is some combat usually when nearing the end of a investigation, but even this sometimes doesn't happen.

Edit: Didn't see the larger one, shall post this over there instead.