D&D 4E 4E DM's - what have you learned?

[Zuche]

Before this system, I thought I understood the importance of knowing the objectives or your NPCs and monsters. This system has taught me that there is still much to learn.

The skill challenge system pointed out that non-combat encounters shape paths, rather than dead ends. With that in mind, it was easy to determine when enough was enough for an encounter. Injury, cowardice, greed, hunger, and other elements could be used to dictate when a creature might break off an attack long before it was kill or be killed. That's nothing new, but the mechanics did make it easier to judge when such a thing could take place.

For example, a higher level lurker or skirmishing pack could stalk a party for hours, waiting for a moment to strike and run, until a target finally succumbed and got left behind. If the group wanted to pursue their stalker(s), they risked diverting attention from time sensitive objectives. (Those objectives wouldn't become impossible, but would instead present new challenges.) Figuring out how to deter further pursuit without coming close to killing the pursuer was still worth something to a group, and it became obvious how many ways there were to accomplish that. Injury, investment of resources (as bait or bribe or perhaps even outright sacrifice), misdirection (including the possibility of eventually turning your pursuer against opponents you're trying to reach)... all so much fun.

The more thought I gave to skill challenges, the more potential I saw in applying their principals to combat challenges and the circumstances in which they took place.

 

[Kannik]

This may not all be 4e specific, but I will try to keep it to what I have learned while DMing the current part of the campaign through 4e (and much has been facilitated by 4e):

Make interesting encounters interesting: While I am still lax on including fantastic terrain I have found 4e's monster design paradigm delicious. I can create the creatures/NPCs for an encounter in very little time, even on the fly, and still make them (usually) interesting and unique. I get to think of the desired effect and then easily create or steal or reskin the abilities that make it fit. The last fight with one of the major adversaries was a "shadowsassin" who essentially went 3 times per round, using living darkness/shadow for an attack, creating shadow copies of a Myrkul statue (minions), plus his own shadowdancemulitattack against multiple party members --- and he got taken out by a readied action and being dazed and thus unable to merge back into the shadows after his attack. Brilliant and exciting for the players.

Let the players' own imaginations/paranoia lead the way: There is one of you, and many players. Left to their own devices they will come up with the craziest ideas of what may be going on.... great! Let them, and steal bits of it to incorporate into the story or villain's plan. Not only does this make for better exciting plots, but it lets the players feel great as they 'figured it out'.

Let the players', the reverse: If you are running a campaign with a backstory to be found, discovered, investigated, stopped, and etc, overshare. Then overshare some more. Even when you think you've said plenty remember you know what's going on, so it seems obvious. The players may not. Check in if the players know what's going on, and if not, add more clues.

Give a sense of accomplishment: Allow for bits of the adventure to give a sense of progress. Or even bits of a combat -- I'm starting to realize that combats may seem grindy only when progress seems to be stalled for a time. For the adventure at large, if it seems like much random wanderings (unless that is the specific campaign type you're playing) then be sure to let the players know they are accomplishing something. I didn't do this in my current campaign and the player interest suffered (made worse the way I designed it that had them feel like they were going back to square one every new city they went to). It would have been easy, something even as simple as the PCs overhearing how conditions were improving for people, or rumors of great happenings in other cities, to let them know they were making a difference.

Find the right balance between sandbox and aquarium for your group: or put another way, how many guideposts or rails you have vs letting the party wander/figure things out/etc. It's a balance that will be different for everyone I think, and it's a skill I'm still learning to develop fully. I've let the party spin their wheels in one (logical, but fruitless) direction for a while leading to some boredom. I've put a heavy handed guidepost too early in others. Just be aware of it and play with it and be ready to loosen or tighten as you go along. Similarly, find the balance of pacing in everything in the game (fights, negotiations, tavern tales, etc).

Let the players be inventive: I've always played in inventive and tactically thinking groups. Let 'em be, I say. I even gave each player an at-will card called "Do something creative." I run skill challenges as a framework hidden in the background and let the PCs say what they want to do/try, and ask for skill rolls as required. Certain actions may create auto successes, creative uses of powers may add, all that. If they do something I didn't think of (and the NPCs wouldn't either), sweet! Something cool happens and away the PCs go into victory (for the moment.... muahahahahahaa... er... )

Build trust: Trust is such a nebulous thing to pin down and there's trust on many levels. As one of Chris Perkins' players put it: they trust him to lead the adventure to a cool and exciting place. Keep listening and have whatever conversations it takes to build that trust with your players (and vice versa), and the game will really start to sing.

Let the RP shine: Let the players find their "unique" voice in the game, be it through traditional role play or maybe just a character concept they like a lot. Let the players have some investment in the game and their character. Reskin as necessary to get what they want with some assurance that it won't break the game. (and do feel free to keep the game from being broken -- see trust above)

Use some unusual things unusually: a bit of a tortured title, apologies... every now and again do something nifty in the game be it a prop, music, special printed/laminated map, 3d terrain, whatever. Pull them out not all that often, so that when they come out it sets the tone that 'something big/unusual is going down here'. It will feed into the player's mood and thus into their play, RP and the epicness of the event.

There might be more... but I'll stop for now.

Thank you for starting this thread! This kind of DM sharing is glorious and has the capacity to really make all of our games shine just that much more.

Peace,

Kannik

 

[pemerton]

If you are running a campaign with a backstory to be found, discovered, investigated, stopped, and etc, overshare. Then overshare some more. Even when you think you've said plenty remember you know what's going on, so it seems obvious. The players may not. Check in if the players know what's going on, and if not, add more clues.

Agreed. Because I'm running (what I hope will be) a 30-level campaign (currently half way through), I don't give out all the backstory all at once. And I also reserve the right to change backstory that hasn't come out yet, in order to support the direction the campaign and the players/PCs are heading. But if you want it out there, put it out there! WotC modules seems to have this practice of hiding all the backstory in the GM's intro and never having it emerge in play (or, even worse, having it emerge from NPCs in irrelevant "plot downloads" that have no impact on the broader action). Hidden backstory is pointless backstory, in my view.

 

[Spatula]

To all of my fellow 4E DM's out there: what have you learned about making a good game of D&D in the years you've been running your campaign, if anything? What has 4E, specifically, added to your repertoire? What lessons has its design taught you, if any?

I haven't DM'd much 4e, so a lot these lessons were learned playing and DMing 3e. But 4e certainly confirmed a lot of the conclusions I had already come to, and taught me some new things as well.

1. Don't sweat the small stuff. Make rulings at the table and look them up after. Games ground to a halt a lot in 3e because I insisted on looking up how certain skills or spells worked (with spells, you couldn't really avoid that). 4e frees the DM from a lot of that, which leads to a better game, IME.

2. Don't get too hung up on creating a world that's interesting to you but not the players. Or don't overthink things. The players are only loosely aware of the game world and aren't half as concerned with it being a living, breathing entity as I was. This was a habit that 3e seemed to encourage in me that added nothing to the actual game experience. If the players don't care where these high-level opponents came from, I don't need to worry about it. And if they show interest, I can spin story ideas from that when it happens, not before.

3. Don't over-prepare.

4. Know your group and design for them. More of a rookie DM mistake, I think. Write and run adventures for the group you have, not the group you wish you had.

5. Know your system and play to its strengths. As far as 4e goes, what I learned was that it does really great set-piece encounters, but that combat is too involved to be used for trivial time-wasters. That's a big change from the past, where D&D dungeons were pretty much filled with trivial time-waster fights. If the fight doesn't have stakes or isn't important to the plot, skip it.

This was one of the big mistakes of the early 4e adventures, IMO. Pyramid of shadows is nothing but room after room of fight, fight, fight. It takes forever and it gets old, fast.

6. 5 PCs vs 1 monster requires some breaking of the rules. The attention to the action economy in 4e and the extra abilities granted to elites and solos pinpointed a problem I had been having for years and came pretty close to solving it. Why does this NPC get to act 4 times per round? It just does, and that's ok, because otherwise you get a poor game experience instead of the big blowout fight you thought you were going to get.

7. It's OK for monsters and PCs to have different rules. When 3e came out, I thought that having monsters built using PC rules was the best idea ever. 8 years later, I learned that I didn't want what I thought I wanted.

 

[GreyICE]

I've learned the following:

Throw whatever you want at the party, and see if they surprise you.

Boring combats are boring. You are allowed 1 per level to show your party what badasses they are, but after that, spice it up. Nothing is predictable.

Variety, variety, variety. If you want a whole bunch of sameness for an army, make em all minions. No one minds 12 identical minions. But even pure minion fights can be fun.

Give your players options. See what they do.

For the love of god, don't do 'sandbox.' You don't need a railroad, but the players should be able to find a track (this is something I learned as a player, but I've applied it to DMing). Your players should be thinking 'goddamn, there's so many things I want to do' not 'okay, what now?'

It's okay for the campaign to go off the rails. And off the track. And into a ditch. Your players can handle it.

This is a GAME. I have spell cards. I have tokens. I have counters and chits and accessories. They HELP roleplaying, not hurt it. Humans are visual creatures, don't give your players TEXT. More accessories help your fun.

 

[Quickleaf]

This is a GAME. I have spell cards. I have tokens. I have counters and chits and accessories. They HELP roleplaying, not hurt it. Humans are visual creatures, don't give your players TEXT. More accessories help your fun.

I'm not convinced that's true. Certainly it could work out that way for a group of excellent role-players, but I think all that stuff you mention, while certainly helpful, does come at the cost of role-playing. Least what I've observed is players shifting to more gamism and less immersion, more reliance on power cards and less creativity, more skill checks and less description.

I'd be interested to hear what other 4e DMs think about this point.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Lots of good stuff in this thread; best I've seen in the 4e section since the Apocalyp5e.

I aim to contribute, but most of what I would have said has been said already by others, so I will think on it before posting and try to contribute something unique.

 

[S'mon]

I'm not convinced that's true. Certainly it could work out that way for a group of excellent role-players, but I think all that stuff you mention, while certainly helpful, does come at the cost of role-playing. Least what I've observed is players shifting to more gamism and less immersion, more reliance on power cards and less creativity, more skill checks and less description.

I'd be interested to hear what other 4e DMs think about this point.

I agree - fun stuff is fun, but comes at the cost of immersion, not helping it.

 

[S'mon]

For the love of god, don't do 'sandbox.' You don't need a railroad, but the players should be able to find a track (this is something I learned as a player, but I've applied it to DMing). Your players should be thinking 'goddamn, there's so many things I want to do' not 'okay, what now?'

'goddamn, there's so many things I want to do' is pretty much the definition of a good sandbox.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I'm not convinced that's true. Certainly it could work out that way for a group of excellent role-players, but I think all that stuff you mention, while certainly helpful, does come at the cost of role-playing. Least what I've observed is players shifting to more gamism and less immersion, more reliance on power cards and less creativity, more skill checks and less description.

I'd be interested to hear what other 4e DMs think about this point.

That doesn't match my experience -- at least, I don't think that's the most important cause of a shift away from immersive story and RP and towards gamesmanship.

If there has been a shift (and I think there has been, although I don't think it's night and day, just moving on a continuum) I think the reason for the shift is a lot more intrinsic to the game design

If we're just talking about the way things have shifted from 3e to 4e, I think the change is largely the result of the heavy focus on the encounter as a set piece. AS a DM, the game encourages me to prepare in terms of encounters, rather than overarching story. As a player, because the overarching story tends to get less attention, and encounters are so much more complex and interesting, that's where my focus goes, and I pay a smaller amount of my attention to the story.

I should point out that I LOVE 4e and Love encounters in 4e. But I can see the shift. I don't think it's cards or props or other aids, although that's just based on personal experience -- I've made cards for spells for my characters across many editions, for example, and it didn't hurt my gaming or my roleplaying.

As a 4e DM, I keep this shift in mind and I try to pay more attention to RP and story as I prepare for my games. I try to invest time in thing like RP encounters, skill challenges, and so on.

-rg