Recent content by cavesalamander

(emphasis added) This idea of important decision points occuring during the encounter is, I think, key to 4e. Earlier editions put all of the deciding moments between the encounters (and also had a narrower view of what constituted an encounter to begin with). I'm going to go back and have...

So I've been thinking about what makes for a good pre-published adventure for 4th Edition. Keep on the Shadowfell is generally regarded as one of the worst (which was unfortunate, since it was also the first adventure for many, many people), and Reavers of Harkenwold is usually mentioned as...

The choice the players made was to make an uninformed choice. Investigating the desert and discovering that they could find a wizard's tower there locks that wizard tower into the desert. They should not find that wizard tower anywhere else. If you disallow this encounter because it wasn't...

If the players make an uninformed choice, then I see no difference as to whether the DM placed the tower there before the game began, during game play because they thought it was cool, or rolled it randomly on a wildnerness encounter table. If the players make their choice because they...

Let's say that happens. What are your options as DM? 1) Use the heavy-handed approach: "That doesn't work. You can't do that." Not a good idea. Nobody's happy with that approach. 2) Throw out the rest of the path. "Well, there goes $20 out the window!" If the DM is good at winging things, this...

If the party finishes exploring dungeon A in the AP, and the path clearly continues to dungeon B, they will either want to follow the thread or they won't. If they follow the thread, it's most likely because the players recognize that there is a larger story at play here, and they want to see...

My group and I are still playing 4e. I ran a campaign that went from 1st to20-something level, and another DM in our group is ending the first chapter of his 4e game. When my turn to DM comes round again, 4e is being given serious consideration (ironically, the other choices I strongly favor are...

From the perspective of a potential adventure-writer, this sort of node is all but impossible to plan for ahead of time. Each encounter might have a 'win, lose or draw' outcome assigned to it, but there will still be too many variables to account for. Adjudicating encounter outcomes at the table...

This provides motivation for exploration and treasure hunting. If the party's fighter needs that +2 sword, all the DM has to do is drop hints as to where they can find one.

Eight to ten encounters is virtually a megadungeon in 4e.

I wonder that too. Say the party has a short decisive fight, where they curb-stomp a couple of goblins. If the goblins got off a lucky hit and cost the fighter a healing surge worth of hit points, the fighter will shrug that off if they have 8 or 9 surges. If they had 3 or 4? That'd be a...

So I'm picturing a 4e sandbox as the world map from the Baldur's Gate games. The PCs are in a place, a town perhaps, and surrounding that town are encounter 'hot spots' they can travel to. If they go north, they find encounter X, if they go west, encounter Y. Travel between these encounters are...

I've thought about making recovering treasure a type of quest, whereby carrying a parcel's worth of treasure back to town is worth XP equal to an encounter of the same level. You could cut 'defeat monster XP' to 1/10 normal, so that killing monsters isn't all that rewarding in comparison to...

(Branching from the 'Is the OSR Dead?" thread) I'd like to go a little deeper into this and ask for further thoughts on this. What is it about 5th edition (and 1st/2nd for that matter) that makes it so amenable to the "adventurous treasure hunters" style of play, and what is it about 4th that...

I'd like to follow up with this thought here, but that's a subject for another thread.