Easilly assembled encounters, more character driven adventures?

[Cirex]

I DM'ed a very long campaign some years ago (two years and a half real life time, they went from level 5 to 19) and after it was done I said "Not again over level 10". It was just too painful overall, especially for me.

So, you can keep stories simple (having in mind that they have more resources, for both the good and the bad), but NPCs were a nightmare.
I ran the Spider Queen module(the only non-made by me module I ran), set in the Underdark, and had to reedit all NPCs because they were stupidily weak compared to the characters. That took a very annoying amount of time.

Then, while playing, a few minutes for each turn, be it because they had tons of attacks, too many spells from choosing from, etc.

When they were level 16-19 (+EL and stuff), they faced one of the BBEG most important allies, and the fight lasted *eight* hours. We're talking about 5 PCs against 5 NPCs. This was with good and experienced players. Shortly after that, the campaign was over.

So yes, high level PCs and NPCs, especially casters, are a pain to create and play at high level.


There's another story...about how a friend bought me, as present for DMing, the epic character book. So we spent a few evenings (4-6 hours each) preparing characters with all books available. They were level 25 characters. Then I prepared a super short game to test their characters, and the NPC creating was just...
Needless to say that we never got past that. Maybe it was the lack of practice on such high level, but not again.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Fights in 4e seem like MORE work to me, because everything has to be the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny with exploding terrain, hordes of minions, and giant whirlygigs of doom. You can't just run into an ettin thug who's the mind controlled pawn of a bloodsucking tree anymore.

Huh? Have you run any 4E sessions? I'm only asking 'cause I've ran 8, and unless there's something incredibly combersome that's in the full rules that we've all missed in our efforts to play it early, I don't see how this could possibly be so.

Encounter design is SO simple. Your example is so easy I could stat that up in 2 minutes in the middle of the game without my players noticing. (Okay, they'd notice I was up to SOMETHING - but I wouldn't have to stop the game to do it.) Less if I had an Ettin stat block available. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's at least THREE in the monsters manual.

For the OP: Have no fear! At least from my perspective, this is exactly true. I have a wife and 2 kids and run my own business and I've got no time to plan, and with my limited understanding of the 4E rules (I've never seen the books) I can run games on the fly, making up stats for monsters just 'cause I like the first figure I pulled out of the box...

Fitz

 

[hong]

Guess what my favorite toy was as a child?

Hint:It wasn't a bear.

Now, it might be that when we actually see the mechanics, there'll be enough crunch to keep me enterained -- a system as meticulously fine-tuned as 4e cannot have a 'pull numbers out your ass' system. A large part of the 'fun' of monster building is working within limits, of saying 'given these boundaries, how can I get what I want?'. It will be interesting to see what the 4e limits are and how much they challenge creativity.

Are you sure you're up to designing for this "4th edition" thingy, Lizard?

 

[Lizard]

Are you sure you're up to designing for this "4th edition" thingy, Lizard?

My answer hasn't changed.

The wya I figure it, few games are more rules-lite than Pelgrane's Dying Earth, and if I could design for that, I could design for 4e.

 

[hong]

My answer hasn't changed.

The wya I figure it, few games are more rules-lite than Pelgrane's Dying Earth, and if I could design for that, I could design for 4e.

Guardians of Order did this better than you.

 

[Lizard]

Huh? Have you run any 4E sessions? I'm only asking 'cause I've ran 8, and unless there's something incredibly combersome that's in the full rules that we've all missed in our efforts to play it early, I don't see how this could possibly be so.

Encounter design is SO simple. Your example is so easy I could stat that up in 2 minutes in the middle of the game without my players noticing. (Okay, they'd notice I was up to SOMETHING - but I wouldn't have to stop the game to do it.) Less if I had an Ettin stat block available. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's at least THREE in the monsters manual.

To be clearer -- obviously, you can plonk monsters on the table in 4e like you can in any other game. But is that in keeping with the 4e paradigm? I mean, 4e disdains even a simple pit trap -- if you can't have every PC working to deactivate it, it's Not Fun.

Perhaps it's just perception, but everything I've seen about 4e seems like it promotes a much more formal, much more ritualized game style than I'm used to. The rules promote, or seem to promote, a much more abstract world, a world where everything just moves from encounter to encounter and nothing exists outside that conveyer belt of combat set pieces. Perhaps this is because all we've seen are demo modules which must be designed that way, and also because a lot of comments from players indicate that's how they ran their 3x games, and 4e makes that easier, so they're happy. My campaign sessions are a paragraph or two of scrawled notes and a vague hope that the PCs follow the plot; I usually fudge things madly to include any particularly important or challenging combats I want to occur. Last game, I basically filled the middle with "You are in town for a week; tell me what you're up to" and ran with it. When fights break out, I tend to draw the map on the spot.

My next game, I am going to have a bunch of NPCs statted up and a vague sense of Lurking Menace; whether it will have any fights or not, I don't know.

 

[Lizard]

Guardians of Order did this better than you.

They did Dying Earth supplements?

 

[hong]

To be clearer -- obviously, you can plonk monsters on the table in 4e like you can in any other game. But is that in keeping with the 4e paradigm? I mean, 4e disdains even a simple pit trap -- if you can't have every PC working to deactivate it, it's Not Fun.

Why do you care about the 4E paradigm? If you want to do it, just do it. You can trust Nike, they do their market research.

 

[Lizard]

Why do you care about the 4E paradigm? If you want to do it, just do it. You can trust Nike, they do their market research.

Uhm...because I want to take full advantage of every rule set I use? If I run a 4e game, it's going to be full of pits over lava, hordes of minions, and rolling boulders.

 

[hong]

Uhm...because I want to take full advantage of every rule set I use?

The trick is to run the game the way you want to run it, and the devil take the zeitgeist. Why, I'll bet you've never even banned wizards and paladins.