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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7081164" data-attributes="member: 996">Nod, not so much simulate a similar experience as a similar narrative:&nbsp; You spend days poking carefully through a dangerous underground complex, a surfeit of tedium &amp; anxiety punctuated by moments of violence &amp; horror.&nbsp; The classic/5e approach is to faithfully go through all the tedium in detail and whisk through the brief moments of violence, which must be great for immersions.&nbsp; The obvious 4e approach would be to abstract the many hours of exploration into a not-too-complex Skill Challenge highlighting the more significant bits, with failures triggering minor encounters, and then linger over a big set-piece battle or few for hours.&nbsp;Of course, nothing forces you to abstract the fascinatingly intense tedium of dungeon crawling into a skill challenge:&nbsp; you can still explore, map, and clear a devious/improbable tunnel complex in detail, making checks all the while to search each innocuous square foot of crudely-worked stone for fiendish traps and so forth, punctuating that systematic process with a series of 'minion-stomps' and wandering-damage encounters with lone level-appropriate standard lurkers and the like, each quickly resolved in a round or two - AND, still have a climactic set-piece battle or few if you want.That's not entirely hypothetical, either, I've done it.&nbsp; I left the option of dropping the map and going abstract skill challenge open, and after a bit, the players went for it, but if you have players who can endure the classic dungeon crawl, you can certainly run one.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7081164, member: 996"] Nod, not so much simulate a similar experience as a similar narrative: You spend days poking carefully through a dangerous underground complex, a surfeit of tedium & anxiety punctuated by moments of violence & horror. The classic/5e approach is to faithfully go through all the tedium in detail and whisk through the brief moments of violence, which must be great for immersions. The obvious 4e approach would be to abstract the many hours of exploration into a not-too-complex Skill Challenge highlighting the more significant bits, with failures triggering minor encounters, and then linger over a big set-piece battle or few for hours. Of course, nothing forces you to abstract the fascinatingly intense tedium of dungeon crawling into a skill challenge: you can still explore, map, and clear a devious/improbable tunnel complex in detail, making checks all the while to search each innocuous square foot of crudely-worked stone for fiendish traps and so forth, punctuating that systematic process with a series of 'minion-stomps' and wandering-damage encounters with lone level-appropriate standard lurkers and the like, each quickly resolved in a round or two - AND, still have a climactic set-piece battle or few if you want. That's not entirely hypothetical, either, I've done it. I left the option of dropping the map and going abstract skill challenge open, and after a bit, the players went for it, but if you have players who can endure the classic dungeon crawl, you can certainly run one. [/QUOTE]

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