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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retreater" data-source="post: 9418637" data-attributes="member: 42040">I ended up quick-levelling the party to get to Madness at Gardmore Abbey so I could run that as the send-off adventure. I was doubling the XP I was giving them at some points. I'm sure they had "legitimately" reached 5th level after 8 months of weekly play. Part of this was due to awarding XP for 5-6 characters, and all the encounters were "appropriately levelled" - so they weren't getting extra XP for more challenging fights.Yes, I did end up cutting encounters AND modifying most of the ones I kept. I used "MM3 on a Business Card" (<a href="https://www.blogofholding.com/?p=512" target="_blank">Monster Manual 3 on a business card</a>) to scale down most of the monsters so they NEVER fought a creature above their level (even if it were within the acceptable bounds of encounter design.) Even at the time, I thought the adventures were poorly written for their stated design goals. You can't put in the same number of combat encounters when they are supposed to be dynamic and exciting (and last over 1 hour) as you would for fights in the 1e era that lasted 20 minutes, tops. That's a conversation for Session 0; however, people are really bad at describing what they want. I saw a video (Food Theory) several years ago where people will describe what they like about coffee (bold, rich, dark roast, etc.) but in actuality they want it weak, diluted with cream and sugar, etc. This has been my experience with Session 0 as well. Players will describe what they want (deep story, mystery, rich world building, political intrigue, deep character customization, tactical depth, etc.) with the buzzwords they think make them sound like mature players. But they actually want hijinks, dungeon crawling, and fart jokes.</blockquote>

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