New Realms = Old School

[Piratecat]

Hooookay, time to stop. We're getting off on a ranty tangent that no one wants to see, your friendly neighborhood moderators in particular. The moment you start using charged language or insulting a person instead of discussing an idea, you know it's time to walk away from the keyboard for a bit.

Many people love the Forgotten Realms. Not everyone loves when change (whether good or bad) occurs. Don't mistakenly turn your strong feelings about the setting into an attack on someone else, or on their opinion.

Back on track, please.

 

[S'mon]

I happen to think that the 4E enthusiasts' claims of oldschooldom are a desperate clambering for legitimacy, which speaks for itself in terms of lack of confidence in standing on it's own feet and hypocrisy in terms of trying to have your cake and eat it.

If I'm not running 4e I'm mostly running Old School Renaissance games like Labyrinth Lord (BX D&D clone) & OSRIC (1e AD&D clone); before that I was running C&C D&D. 4e does an old school exploratory sandbox very well IME; much better than 3e did. I don't find long combats a problem; when converting an eg 1e adventure to 4e the best approach is to treat 4-6 of the original adventure's rooms/encouters as a single extended emcounter in 4e. This might be a small dungeon, a level of a medium sized dungeon, or a section of a large dungeon level. The time taken to play through works out similar, and it's much more dynamic.

 

[Windjammer]

Hi everyone, an appeal from me.

The thing we need most to make the sandbox workable are random encounter tables geared to four terrain types: mountains, forests, hill lands, and marshes.

On the assumption that the sandbox is initially geared at heroic tier play, we'd be looking at entries in the range of mostly EL 1-13 (perhaps 1-15).

To keep the format simple, I'd like to compile all suitable entries in the MM 1 on "encounter groups" and sort them into terrain type. I'm short on time and so can't do all of that myself, so if some of you could create posts with entries like these

Forest EL 4 - Orcs (MM, page 205)

that would be a great way to pool our resources. The page numbers are there to speed up time at the game table (for those of us running combats off the books). Now, what's more, if you've created a memorable encounter out of MM1 creatures that fits the above strictures (roughly EL 1-13, fits a terrain type well) please share it here! In that case, kindly reference your encounter thus (I'm using the same encounter group as example):

Forest EL 4 - 2 orc raiders (MM, 203), 2 orc berserkers (MM, 203), 1 dire boar (MM, 35)

Now, there are plenty of dungeon type encounters on the hex and plenty of creatures in the MM 1 that are primarily suited for underground encounters. But I think the random encounter tables oughta focus on overland travel and the dangers thereof.

As I said, I'm happy to compile it all (sort it by terrain and EL, using Excel) once we've amassed a dozen of posts or so. I'll then do neatly layouted PDF thereof to be linked to in my OP for all of us, so that we can roll our d100s and cause player mayhem.

Finally, if the type of resource described in this post already exists for 4E, please link it and save us all a lot of work. Thank you.

 

[Barastrondo]

I don't find long combats a problem; when converting an eg 1e adventure to 4e the best approach is to treat 4-6 of the original adventure's rooms/encouters as a single extended emcounter in 4e. This might be a small dungeon, a level of a medium sized dungeon, or a section of a large dungeon level. The time taken to play through works out similar, and it's much more dynamic.

That was an approach I was considering; I was musing over how much I enjoyed the old "beat up an entire stockade" adventure of A2, and the thought of engaging several room's worth of guards at once in a given battle, the fight spreading from room to room, was kind of appealing. It's neat (and encouraging) to hear that you make it work.

 

[S'mon]

That was an approach I was considering; I was musing over how much I enjoyed the old "beat up an entire stockade" adventure of A2, and the thought of engaging several room's worth of guards at once in a given battle, the fight spreading from room to room, was kind of appealing. It's neat (and encouraging) to hear that you make it work.

Yes, it works especially well where the dungeon features hordes of mooks with an occasional leader. I ran eg the Hobgoblin Fort from 3e Vault of Larin Karr this way, with the whole upper level of the fort as the encounter area. The PCs came up into the dining hall and the initial fight broke out there. Then more hobgoblins kept arriving; the PCs tried to bar the door. As the tide turned the hobs fell back and the PCs chased them into the courtyard, where they accidentally released the gelatinous cube in the stables.

I recommend lots of minions, with regular monsters as sub-leaders/champions, and maybe an elite monster for the enemy commander. To keep duration reasonable, a good rule of thumb is to have no more regular monsters than the number of PCs, plus any number of minions. Eg: 20 minions, 4 regulars, and 1 elite works well and doesn't take noticeably longer than 4 regulars + 1 elite without minions.

 

[S'mon]

Hi everyone, an appeal from me.

The thing we need most to make the sandbox workable are random encounter tables geared to four terrain types: mountains, forests, hill lands, and marshes.

Well, my experience with 4e so far is that rather than use a huge d% table, the GM is best off preparing only a small number of possible random combat encounters per terrain type. Say 3 for "hills"; then if you roll that a random combat encounter occurs you can take the first one, roll to see which one occurs, or pick the most appropriate one. You're not likely to see more than 3 random combat encounters in a session, and by allowing for proper preparation this approach plays to 4e's strengths. Once an encounter has been used you simply prepare another one for next session.

For a generic approach, I'd suggest splitting each tier into low, mid and high, say 1-4, 4-7, 7-10 for Heroic Tier; or 1-5, 4-8, 6-10 would work too; decide which level range that area is, and prepare encounters accordingly; 3 per area, each with appropriate encounter levels.

So for a low-Heroic area (1-5) you might prepare 1 EL 1, 1 EL 3 and 1 EL 5 encounter. If you roll an encounter you can either roll a d3 or choose a suitable encounter taking into account the strength of the party, whether it's night or day, etc. If you use the EL 1 encounter, then for next session prepare an EL 2. If you used the EL 5, then next time prepare an EL 4, and so on.

 

[Windjammer]

S'mon, that's excellent and entirely reasonable advice. However, I'm not the reasonable sort of guy, as my players can tell you.

So here's my take. First of all, here's a free online tool to create 4E random encounters:

4e Random Encounter Generator - Asmor.com

Thanks to Coldwyn - one of my players - for alerting me to the tool, and thanks for Ian, the site owner, for letting me link it here!

Ian's tool, however, doesn't let you generate encounters by terrain (recall, I wanted to sort them roughly into: mountains, forests, marshlands, and plains/hills). So here's what you do: either consult the 3.5 DMG, page 96-97, Table 3-25, for a pretty authoritative listing of D&D core monsters by terrain type. Or use a similar resource (for free) here:

Monsters by Terrain (Pathfinder_OGC)

Once you got a basic grasp of those entries (it's quite a bit, but interesting to master), you can re-roll the results of Ian's tool as you see fit until you get a monster group that suits the terrain type.

Cheers,

W.

 

[Herschel]

I think it may be a relative term. That is, old school is "the products that came out just before I started playing".

So, "old school" = electricity? (for those of us who some times feel a few years aged)

 

[Kurtomatic]

Bumping this thread with my base-layer, player-friendly hex map for a Loudwater-based campaign area.



Since my personal talents run more towards pixel-pushing than brush stroking, I eventually decided to photoshop the 3E map into 4E shape. This map forms the vanilla background layer; other layers will contain enhanced content (adventure sites, etc.) and meta data (such as hex grid and numbers). I like 40-mile hexes at this scale; I'm not trying to replicate the classic 5-mile hexcrawl. I went with vertical hex grain and 4-digit hex numbers. Mkhexgrid is a wonderful utility that saved me the trouble of rolling my own hexgen code.

Sorry I haven't contributed to any random encounter tables! I'm only now approaching the point of thinking about this. Despite buying the grey box when it was brand new, I have never actually spent any time playing in the Realms before now, outside of Bioware games, heh. I was always more of a Greyhawk-type. So I'm still a newb after all these years, and I'm just starting to get a handle on the source material for The North.

Thanks again, and hopefully someone finds this useful. /bump!

 

[Hussar]

Just as a question.

40 mile hexes are HUGE. My math isn't so strong, but, that means a single hex is about 950 square miles. Or, put it another way, according to Wikipedia, the UK is about 95 000 square miles, or about 100 hexes. Think about that for a second, you can fit all of the UK in a 10x10 section of that map. Or, about the size of the High Forest.

40 miles is not 2 days travel. Well, it is over a road. Over just about any other terrain, you're looking at easily double or triple that time. This is a MASSIVE area.

Why are fantasy settings for D&D so bloody huge?