WotBS "Tweaking" WotBS for 4E.

[MorbidCharlie]

I'm picking up DM'ing after a long hiatus from PnP gaming. We got a group together and we're going to give 4E a try.

I don't have a lot of time to put together adventures, so I wanted to find a campaign that would take characters from 1 to 30 and I keep hearing how fantastic WotBS is.

The flip side of that coin, though, is that I hear it's a conversion from 3.5 and that there are some issues because of this.

Being completely new to 4E and only understanding the mechanics of the game as they are on paper and not having seen them in action, what should I do to "tweak" WotBS, if at all? Are there any DM's out there that have a blog/post that tells what they did to make the game more smooth?

Have any DM's out there run this "as is" for 4E without any problems?

 

[OnlineDM]

I'm running it for 4e (just started the 5th adventure, with PCs at 13th level). The "seams" from the transition get less visible as you go along in the adventure path.

To keep it simple, there are really only two tweaks I would recommend.

First, you should update the amount of damage that monsters deal. WotBS was written with "pre-MM3 damage expressions" which means that the monsters deal too little damage. The books published since Monster Manual 3 (including Monster Vault, Dark Sun Creature Catalog and Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale) have updated the amount of damage that monsters deal. Definitely do that, or else there's no threat in the battles.

Second, I recommend ditching experience points and the number of battles needed to get the "right amount" of XP. The first couple adventures have a lot of this, but I see it even in adventures 3 and 4: Little combats that don't really need to happen for story purposes, but that seem to be included in order to give the PCs "enough" XP to level up at the right time. If a combat isn't important to the story or otherwise really interesting, skip it. Combat takes too long in 4e to have random throwaway fights. I just level the PCs whenever it seems appropriate, and I'm much happier that way.

That's about all I'd recommend tweaking. The campaign is a fun one, and I think your players will like it. If you have any specific questions, let me know! I'm happy to share my experiences.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

I concur with ditching XP. In my game I level up once a module and have the players do off-camera stories of the adventures in between the major events of the campaign. The story is spread out to the point where you could feasiably make a campaign of a smaller set of modules.

For instance, The Mad Kings Banquet has enough depth and backstory to turn it into a full campaign in and of itself!

Up through module #6, I would recommend cutting out 'filler' encounters' and update to MM3 damage. If you have time, rewrite the major encounters from scratch.

After module #6 the writers had a much better grasp on the flow and you can run them pretty much as is, depending on your group make-up and play styles that is!

 

[john112364]

What would you recommend as the updated math? I've heard a couple of conflicting formulas.

 

[OnlineDM]

I personally use my own damage expressions, but those only work if you're using something like MapTool (otherwise, I do not recommend trying to roll d7s and d23s). That table does contain the official WotC damage expressions, though.

The official updated damage expressions are on page 39 of the compiled rules update document that you can find at this link on the WotC site.

 

[EugeneZ]

I'm running the 4e version as well. The PCs are about to hit 22nd level, so I'm pretty far in. The quality of the conversion increases dramatically with #7, Trial of Echoed Souls, when NPCs get less "generic 3e monster" and feel much more 4e-ish, with correct damage expressions and more interesting powers.

Like the other replies in this thread, I think one change you need to make is to update the damage expressions and in some cases powers of the NPCs in #1-#6. That said, if you get lax here or do a poor job, one of the things that makes Burning Sky special is that encounters usually do not just involve the PCs bashing the enemies heads in. Many encounters have alternate elements (often they are interactions you don't even foresee when initially reading the adventure). I enjoy the AP the most when the players focus more on these game-system-agnostic elements rather than on the numbers. That said, when the game does fall back on numbers, it tends to flounder. This has been far less noticable starting with adventure #7.

More importantly, skill challenges are horribly underused in 4E. Not just in Burning Sky, even a lot of WotC stuff has this problem. Some of the WotBS ones are really bad, however. I suggest reading the SCs ahead of time and either scrapping the SC system altogether and RP your way through the situation, rebuilding it under some alternate homebrewed system, or (the hardest but also the most rewarding) spend some time rewriting it properly after reading Mike Mearls series of articles on Skill Challenges. I've taken each of these paths at least a few times. Every once in a while I accidentally underprepare and forget to replace a SC, and in those cases the game ends up being weird and akward, because that's how the SCs are typically designed. I'd recommend being careful to avoid that.

 

[MorbidCharlie]

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

I'm real fresh to the 4E system, but I am a D&D Insider subscriber. Will the Encounter Builder help me redesign the enemies for a better fit? I'd like to think that it uses the updated damage expressions.

Thanks for the heads up on the Skill Checks. I'll look into it, and hope I can make some sense out of it.

 

[liggetar]

I entirely agree with the skill challenges!

My group will probably finish adventure #10 this weekend. I haven't used the encounter builder, but I have used the downloadable Monster Builder in the the Adventure Tools - I've been making the monsters in there, and then exporting to Mortaneus's DnD4e Combat Manager (which I can't recommend highly enough!) My group is a little on the large side (6 instead of the 5 that 4e is built around), and is VERY good at tactical combat, so I needed to tweak things to make them a little harder. I would look at how the numbers worked out in the Monster Builder after entering all of the relevant info, and take the higher number for defenses, damage, etc, and it seemed to work pretty decently.

One thing I am finding rather quickly - tweaking 3e was always tricky and intimidating for me. I'm finding 4e much more approachable and forgivable in terms of tweaking.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I have only DM-ed the first module - which was a lot of fun.

Reading the whole adventure 2-3 times is a must. There are loads of information easily missed on the first read-through. This really applies to the skill challenges. They are actually quite fun, but don't run them straight up, role-play them. It takes longer, but makes a lot more sense. The one with the dwarves towards the end of the first module was memorable.

Changing to-hit and damage expressions according to the new guidelines will probably make combat better, but for the first module, things are ok.

I haven't gotten to DM module 2+ because I can't seem to have the necessary time and will to deal with the loads of information absoruption need to run the module. I am currently looking for something lighter and more straight forward.

 

[EugeneZ]

I agree that reading the whole adventure is a must, and pay careful attention to little details. For some reason, the authors of each module treat the DM like he's the audience to the story that is Burning Sky and often conceal details within other details and other such mechanisms which makes it hard to see the significance of certain events or actions until later adventures.

I don't think the Skill Challanges are fun, however. I think they are poorly designed with little thought as to how to actually run them. I suspect that [MENTION=63962]Blackbrrd[/MENTION] enjoyed the SCs when RPing through them because the focus was on the RPing, not on the mechanics... indeed one of my suggestions above was to replace the skill challenges with RP encounters. But if you want actual Skill Challenges, you will need to do some work.

The first adventure, in terms of difficulty, was exceptional because it had several "too hard" encounters and some "too easy" encounters. The issue with the damage expressions becomes more and more obvious the farther the adventures deviate from the damage errata WotC produced. IT's less evident in adventure #1 because the damage expressions are much closer (if not identical) in the errata. However, you've got encounters like that one in the crypt (Dead Rising?) that pretty much guarantee a TPK if the DM plays the NPCs properly and doesn'y fudge.