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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6552129" data-attributes="member: 87792">Yup. There are far fewer people now who want dungeon crawls with a bit of framing story.Agreed. If made up on the fly is garbage then the problem exists round the table. On the other hand most of the RPGs I know that really facilitate improv also run to short (half a dozen session) campaigns because remembering more than that is ... challenging.Yup. I don't think any version of D&D has had this little in the way of published adventures since about 1977 (with five issues of The Strategic Review and a few of Dragon behind it).Definitely! There are a couple of gems in early 4e Dragon, but they are few and far between. HS1: The Slaying Stone has an excellent reputation among 4e fans not because it is good, but because it, unlike most adventures, reaches the level of adequate.On the other hand, 4e is probably the easiest version of D&D to improv with at the table, and a little preparation goes a long way. Ridiculous PC Plans? Play them through as a skill challenge - <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/18t-lWABpQoNnT_HbV97HjHYko-2MSxIXKBeAe9d5ADM/edit?usp=drive_web" target="_blank">used properly</a> (and yes the guidance is bad) they are an amazing improv tool. If the PCs start a fight you didn't expect? Pull something out of the MM. There won't be any cross-referencing needed (there's none of this "Casts like a third level sorcerer - check another book for the spells" nonsense, let alone them expecting you to remember subtypes or the trample rules and giving the monster six different feats for you to have to know). And the monsters themselves will take about half an hour to put down so the few seconds you spent finding the right pages in the MM are trivial by comparison.This works until you hit the adventure path - at which point you need to stay roughly in line with the story.Actually balance being more of a thing means that published encounters had less utility because it was so much easier to get right rather than being a cake walk or crushing the PCs. Where published encounters helped (but nothing like as much as they should have) is that with all the forced movement in (pre-Essentials) 4e terrain was a much bigger thing than it was in other editions. Pushing monsters into their own pit traps or back through their own portals was SOP - and flat featureless rooms were singularly boring areas to fight in. A pit trap wasn't a no go square on the battlefield so much as it was a focus for the combat.</blockquote>

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