D&D 4E Which 4E adventures did you play?

NewJeffCT · Sep 7, 2013

Starfox said:
This is not how 1E was to us either. We just had a lot of 15 minute adventuring days back then. That's what I meant by retreating often. "Old School" is different to different people, I never played "ing fantasy Vietnam", nor did I ever want to.

agreed - 1e and 2e was full of the 15 minute adventuring day, as was 3e. Cleric uses up his or her Cure Lt Wounds, and you're done. Don't want to risk getting caught outside of town if that happens.

I don't love 4E, but a 15 minute adventuring day was very rare in the 2 year long campaign that I ran using 4E. The players kept on going as long as they had at least one healing surge left... encounter powers would recharge, and you had your action points recharging after milestones as well. And, the system allowed a DM to provide boons (like a recharged daily) if the PCs did something especially heroic (defeating a main bad guy, rescuing somebody considered not able to be saved, etc)

(My problem with 4e was that I had trouble coming up with challenging & interesting solo encounters for those big boss encounters...I'd be bored after 2-3 rounds just repeating the same attacks over & over again.)

Henry · Sep 7, 2013

For me, just Keep on the Shadowfell. Everything else i ran for 4e when i was running it, i created personally for the group. We just didnt play it long enough to get into lots of prefabs.

RichGreen · Sep 9, 2013

Hi,

I've played Keep on the Shadowfell, Thunderspire Labyrinth, Slaying Stone and several decent Dungeon adventures, all of which were enjoyable. We are currently playing the 4e conversion of G1 which is also fun, but is basically a lot of combat, taking a long time to play through.

I've DM'ed P1, the first part of the new Tomb of Horrors book, and the first two Punjar adventures but my favourite published scenarios are three from Open Design/Kobold Press: Wrath of the River King, Halls of the Mountain King and Courts of the Shadow Fey. These adventures were much more creative then anything WotC published in the early years of 4e. I have since bought Madness at Gardmore Abbey and it looks great, but haven't had time to run it yet.

Cheers

Rich

Quickleaf · Sep 10, 2013

RichGreen said:
I've DM'ed P1, the first part of the new Tomb of Horrors book, and the first two Punjar adventures but my favourite published scenarios are three from Open Design/Kobold Press: Wrath of the River King, Halls of the Mountain King and Courts of the Shadow Fey. These adventures were much more creative then anything WotC published in the early years of 4e. I have since bought Madness at Gardmore Abbey and it looks great, but haven't had time to run it yet.

Cheers

Rich

Hey Rich, of the three Open Design / Kobold Press adventures you played, which did you like the best? I have a 13th level party and have been considering picking one of the adventures up.

MerricB · Sep 10, 2013

I played through The Lost City (Logan Bonner, Open Design), which had great concepts and terrible maps. It made for a good adventure, but you needed to do a lot of work to make sense of some of it.

MerricB · Sep 10, 2013

D'karr said:
Okay, so if the adventure writers were "pressured" to do simple, combat-heavy adventures then it should follow that it is not the system that forces that inflexibility, but editorial/publisher mandates. Then how come the game system is being blamed for inflexibility?

Because the game system does have problems when trying to run D&D adventures of previous editions. 4E can do really good adventures, but it requires a different style of writing to what was seen in 1E-3E. That it can't run some adventures that are key to the D&D feel is an actual problem.

I've written more about this elsewhere, but 4E has some real problems with pacing. When a combat takes about an hour to resolve, and many sessions run about the 3-4 hour mark, a very few combats gain huge prominence over the rest of the game. (To be fair, higher-level 3E games have the same problem).

The mistake of the HPE adventures is not to leverage the strengths of 4E and instead give us combat-fests with little exploration or role-playing. But that doesn't mean that the underlying system doesn't have problems.

Cheers!

RichGreen · Sep 10, 2013

Quickleaf said:
Hey Rich, of the three Open Design / Kobold Press adventures you played, which did you like the best? I have a 13th level party and have been considering picking one of the adventures up.

My favourite was Courts of the Shadow Fey – lots of courtly intrigue, mystery and duelling in the Shadow Realm. Luckily this one is also the right level for your PCs and the only one of the three that was released publicly – Wrath and Halls were patron-only projects.

Cheers

Rich

RichGreen · Sep 10, 2013

MerricB said:
I played through The Lost City (Logan Bonner, Open Design), which had great concepts and terrible maps. It made for a good adventure, but you needed to do a lot of work to make sense of some of it.

I have Lost City but haven't run it. The collaborative nature of the early Open Design projects meant that there is a real need for a strong editor to make sure the various sections are tied together clearly for the DM to run the adventure. Certainly in Halls this could have been done better – it needed some work to figure out the timeline of events and really needed an overview map. Having said that, the effort I put in was well worth it when we played and we had a great time.

RichGreen · Sep 10, 2013

MerricB said:
I've written more about this elsewhere, but 4E has some real problems with pacing. When a combat takes about an hour to resolve, and many sessions run about the 3-4 hour mark, a very few combats gain huge prominence over the rest of the game. (To be fair, higher-level 3E games have the same problem).

Wise words indeed

NewJeffCT · Sep 10, 2013

MerricB said:
Because the game system does have problems when trying to run D&D adventures of previous editions. 4E can do really good adventures, but it requires a different style of writing to what was seen in 1E-3E. That it can't run some adventures that are key to the D&D feel is an actual problem.

I've written more about this elsewhere, but 4E has some real problems with pacing. When a combat takes about an hour to resolve, and many sessions run about the 3-4 hour mark, a very few combats gain huge prominence over the rest of the game. (To be fair, higher-level 3E games have the same problem).

The mistake of the HPE adventures is not to leverage the strengths of 4E and instead give us combat-fests with little exploration or role-playing. But that doesn't mean that the underlying system doesn't have problems.

Cheers!

I actually thought 4E combats tended to run quicker than 3.5E combats - especially at higher levels where 3.5E had parties spending so much time buffing before combat and then debuffing the bad guys to start the combat. Of course, in 4E, you had conditions you needed to track, but that seemed a bit easier than multiple layered buffs. But, both too far too long when compared to 1e/2e.

My problem with 4e adventures from Wizards was that the ones I saw in my local gaming store didn't seem to have much connection to one another. I like Paizo's Adventure Paths that take a party of adventurers from level 1 all the way to level 18 or so at the end. Sure, some of the APs are not as good, and even the stronger APs have a mediocre module or two in them, but they encompass an entire campaign and run together logically.

D&D 4E Which 4E adventures did you play?

Which of these 4E adventures have you played or DMed?

H1: Keep on the Shadowfell

H2: Thunderspire Labrinth

H3: Pyramid of Shadows

P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens

P2: Demon Queen's Enclave

P3: Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress

E1: Death's Reach

E2: Kingdom of the Ghouls

E3: Prince of Undeath

FR1: Scepter Tower of Spellguard

Seekers of the Ashen Crown

HS1: The Slaying Stone

HS2: Orcs of Stonefang Pass

Marauders of the Dune Sea

Madness at Gardmore Abbey

Tomb of Horrors

Revenge of the Giants

Halls of Undermountain

Reavers of Harkenwold (DM's Kit)

Cairn of the Winter King (Monster Vault)

Murder in Baldur's Gate

Other

None

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