Can you help a bored DM?

[bloodflowers]

Hi all, I'm an old DM, having played every edition since 1E, and my group and I switched to 4E when it came out. We haven't played much, only Keep On The Shadowfell, but for the first time in a long time we are getting bored. Is it because of 4E? Is it because of Shadowfell? Is it playing 1st level again? Are we getting too old (I hope not!)? I don't know.
Let's say it's just Keep On The Shadowfell, do you have any good Module, or better yet, campaign to suggest? My players are mostly 'hack and slashers, the best times they had in 3E was in Rappan Athuk.

Thanks!

 

[Infiniti2000]

IMO, it's not 4E it's KotS. One of my players 'got bored' too in KotS and now that I'm DMing my homebrew he's having a blast. If system specific doesn't matter to you, then you can try RttToEE in 3.X. That's a great module for hack n' slashers (and I daresay RPers if handled by a good DM). Banewarrens is another good one.

 

[Amaroq]

We had a similar experience: 20+ years gaming together, and our first 4e experience the DM figured "I'll use published material so I don't mess things up" but it turned out that the published materials didn't have great plot, didn't have those "memorable" scenes that make a campaign, and we had ten times more fun with everything he altered, etc. He wound up getting to a point where he could recognize the 50% of the encounters that were simply no fun at all, and just ditched them entirely, and finally figured out that what we were really enjoying was the material he came up with, and what we were hating were the as-published material ...

.. as soon as he ditched the published crud and got back to the kind of creativity he'd shown in 1e, 2e, and 3e, we all had a blast again.

 

[Fkewl]

It's KotS.. it's a dungeon crawl with a little dressing

Get the DDI subscription and use the Scales of War, i like it.
.. Or get a published adventures from Goodman Games

 

[Iron Sky]

I've played the first few adventures of Scales of War and it's still pretty much a dungeon crawl. It's kinda hit-and-miss on how good each adventure is.

I've heard good things about War of the Burning Sky, but I''ve never played it...

I think there's a fan-made adventure designed before 4e even came out (Raiders of Oakhurst I think) that, IIRC, won an ENNIE. Might be a place to start.

4e is so easy to DM though, it's never been easier to homebrew.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

KotS is pretty mediocre. Its not a bad introductory module overall and there are a couple parts that have some moderately good stuff in them but its pretty bland overall.

I'd say just make up something wacky. I mean you can toss 30 minions and a couple normal monsters at a party if you want. Or use some crazy terrain and hazards and whatnot. 4e's strength is hack-n-slash. It'll handle it fine.

 

[Truename]

It's KotS.. it's a dungeon crawl with a little dressing

Get the DDI subscription and use the Scales of War, i like it.
.. Or get a published adventures from Goodman Games

Agreed that the boredom comes from KotS. Also, combat takes a while in 4e, so even a hack-and-slash group needs some interesting downtime between combats.

Scales of War has some great set-piece battles. It's also wall-to-wall combat with minimal exploration or RP elements. My group played it for a year, and liked it, but as a DM I got pretty tired of it. Like you, the things they liked most were the pieces I customized.

If you use SoW, my suggestion would be to extract the set-pieces (or at least cut some of the fights) and build your own campaign around it.

 

[Nytmare]

We had a similar experience: 20+ years gaming together, and our first 4e experience the DM figured "I'll use published material so I don't mess things up"

Yeah I did this exact thing myself. Figured that it would be best if I just ran the published adventures by the books and I eventually hit a point where I realized that none of us were really enjoying it.

I don't think that it's necessarily a fault of the published material. More that it's just me getting past the learning curve and getting back to the basics.

 

[Truename]

I've played the first few adventures of Scales of War and it's still pretty much a dungeon crawl. It's kinda hit-and-miss on how good each adventure is.

I've heard good things about War of the Burning Sky, but I''ve never played it...

My group switched from SoW to WotBS last week. We've only had one session so far.

I really like WotBS a lot, but it may not be the best campaign for a hack-n-slash group. It has a lot of role-play elements and takes some effort on the part of the DM to understand and bring to life.

The nice thing about SoW is that, after my initial read-through, I could literally sit down each week and DM straight from the book, with no more prep than drawing out the battlemats. It's a very easy campaign to run and with some more effort (like cutting the boring encounters) it provides a lot of varied and interesting combats. Just don't go into it expecting anything but combat to be great.

 

[the Jester]

Yeah, KotS doesn't really have much plot. The excavation encounter is the best example- kill these guys who are digging up something Kalarel needs, but we're not going to bother deciding what he needs it for or what happens if he doesn't get it.

If you don't mind the work of converting it, and you can find it, I'd recommend running something like either The Secret of Bone Hill from 1e (L1) or Of Sound Mind (from Fiery Dragon Press and written by Piratecat).

A good trick when converting older editions to 4e, imho, is remembering to put multiple rooms together as one encounter.