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I love the monster variety and encounter balance. I love being able to make my own unique monsters easily and with confidence. I love being able to choose an XP budget for an encounter and know exactly how hard the fight's going to push the players. This weekend, I'm running a huge paragon tier...

So... yeah. I took Rechan's advice. I took it real good. Then I took it again. Final tally: eight deaths, world drowned, -365 points scored. Spoileriffic details follow. First, you have to know that my group is a fairly casual group. We've been playing WotBS for over a year, and we played the...

I'm going to run Sersa V's Crucible of the Gods this Tuesday. My group has years of experience with 4e (except one player) but is completely new to Fourthcore and old-school playstyles in general. Any suggestions for me?

I think I have the first half of the opposing forces figured out. Again, my goal is to create the feeling of a big battle, with the players at the forefront, without bogging down or getting too abstract. I'm going to conduct two waves. I want each wave to feel very different. For the first...

It works fine in practice. Are you really looking for help, or do you just want to complain?

The balance is fine. 4e (pre- and post-Essentials) is the most balanced D&D ever. You don't have to worry about it. If one of your players seems overpowered, check the errata (available free on the WotC site). Or ask here. But other than that, stop worrying about it. You're stressing over...

Thanks for the suggestions! I kept the squads and swarms because I want the "big battle" feel that they give me, but I leveled them up to level 14 to reinforce that the PCs (who are level 12) aren't yet as powerful as a whole squad. (At this point, they know that they can generally take out a...

SPOILERS ahoy, cap'n! I'm about to run my players through The Battle for Gallo's Fend (Act IV of The Mad King's Banquet) and I love the Paragon-tier feel of the battle. The actual encounters as written... not so much. So here's an attempt at improving things. Please critique! Goals: I want to...

4e adventures are super-easy to scale in general. Just remove monsters until the XP value of the encounter is about the same as 3 monsters of the encounter's level. Usually this involves taking two monsters out. That said, the monster design in the early adventures isn't great (and it's...

I killed off two characters in the awesome closing encounter of Siege of Bordrin's Watch. I had the grateful NPCs "pass the hat" and raise most of the funds to cast Raise Dead. The players still had to chip in their own gold, but not all of it. As for penalties, the players found the penalty...

I really like the new random generation technique for treasure parcels. I like not having to plan out a whole level's worth of treasure at once, and I like the way it scales to larger and smaller parties. What I don't like is the amount of dice I have to roll and the need to look up the...

Wizards (and Mearls in particular) has commented on the option bloat in the game. They've talked about the value of having a few meaningful choices rather than a bazillion trivial choices. That's the reason they've given for feat categories and it's also at the heart of the Essentials class...

I'm wrapping up #3 and I think rebuilding the encounters with post-MM3 monsters is essential. A flaw in an otherwise excellent series. It's a pain, but ever since I started rebuilding in earnest (mostly in #3), my players have enjoyed the fights so much more. And the rest of the adventure path...

My group went through the dragon's mouth (just walked through), triggered the lava trap, and couldn't get through the doorway. I think they found it more frustrating than enjoyable. They were also a little stumped about what to do next--they knew they had to find Lee but didn't know where to go.

My group is about to start WotBS #4 and I've prepared an episode cheat sheet as usual. I've attached a PDF if anyone's interested. Massive spoilers, of course.

Wow, you've really knocked this one out of the park. Can't wait!

We did exactly this for over a year in my campaign. The problem we had was that the value of the fate points as action points was so much higher than the value of the fate points as fate points, they were only rarely used in the fate point way. We ended up changing them to be gained for any...

"You must spread XP around..." Thanks! I'll be running this soon-ish (currently wrapping up adventure 3) and I've been looking for a way to make this battle more memorable.

Teleporting is movement, so yes.

Here's how I think about it. First, let's look at what it means to be hidden. 1. There's a condition called "Hidden" which means that you can't be seen or heard. In game terms, you're Invisible *and* enemies don't know what square you're in. Because you're Invisible, you have combat advantage...