Frustration with KotSF and pacing

[Herobizkit]

This could be a muddled post, so please bear with.

I'm a DnD vet of some 20+ years. I'm currently playing with a group of younger guys and a DM who has just started his foray into running the game.
As far as 4e goes, we're all in the same boat experience-wise, a year or less.

We are currently trying out the legendary Keep on the Shadowfell.
Our party (we are each playing two characters):
Dragonborn Paladin and Eladrin Assassin
Thri-Kreen Monk and Goliath Cleric
Dwarven Runepriest and Warforged Starlock

We breezed to level three, going up a level every two sessions, and that was fantastic. Now that we're level 3, however, it seems like the "standard" advancement of 8-10 combats per level has kicked in, and the players are quite frustrated.

We only play once a week, and the month of December is going to be written off. If we are to believe what the DM guide is saying about advancement, we may not finish the keep before April.

We also play Serenity once a week as well with a different DM.

We've discovered an optional rule that allows for quicker advancement, but the DM does not want to venture outside of "the rules", ie. the adventure as written.

As it is, each encounter takes about an hour or two to resolve (which seems to eat up most of our time), which means that we get at most 1 or 2 encounters completed in a game session.

So, as far as I can tell, we're left with the following options:
1) suck it up
a) drop the Serenity game and play DnD twice a week
b) somehow convince the DM to start granting double XP
c) drop the campaign altogether and start a new one
d) drop the DM altogether

Am I missing anything? I guess this is more of a vent than a request for help, but any comments are welcome.

 

[Will Doyle]

If your DM wants to speed up advancement whilst playing a published adventure, he should either cut chunks out of the adventure, or scale it up as you play. He shouldn't speed up advancement for the first chunk, and then flatline for the rest.

In 4E, every level should take 8-10 encounters, using standard advancement.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Is the campaign fun? Aside from not skyrocketing through the levels as fast as you would like, are the sessions actually fun to play?

 

[Herobizkit]

[MENTION=66434]ExploderWizard[/MENTION] - the game is fun to play, and this is going to sound contrary, but I'm getting really annoyed with "everywhere you go, there's a fight". We've been resting in the dungeon all the time, and we want to do stuff with our new found wealth, but when we get back to town, we're in yet another fight.

Also, anytime we do something really heroic or awesome, or succeed at a difficult task, the DM almost immediately follows it up with something bad that happens and puts us right back in jeopardy. It's got me feeling like "even when we succeed, we fail."

 

[Alan Shutko]

Well, if you're talking about Keep on the Shadowfell, the reason is that it's a bad adventure which had bad pacing. It was the first 4e adventure WOTC released, and it had lots of problems. Based on my experience, you either should not be playing it, or the DM needs to do some fairly substantial surgery on it. (Obryn, I think, had some ideas in that line.)

More recent WOTC adventures, and third parties, are better in this regard.

 

[Nebten]

I would look into why its taking an HOUR or 2 per encounter at such a low level. There are some boss encounters that may last that long, but the rest shouldn't. Also the fact that you've all played at least at year and using classes that are more advanced then what KotSF was prepared for, some of the encounters should be pushovers. Being at level 3 now, you should be almost completed with the adventure. It only goes to level 3, so I don't see how this is going to last until April.

It sounds like there is a misunderstanding somewhere.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

How much time is each player taking per turn?

 

[mudlock]

KotSF is a terrible adventure, especially as an introductory adventure. There are far to many irrelevant combats, and with 8 PCs none of them will be even slightly challenging (except maybe the normally-TPKfull Ironfang encounter) although at least the slog-fest at the end will be less sloggyl. Also, the treasure awarded is laughably below the levels recommended in the DMG, so you'll be behind the curve when your DM starts crafting their own encounters.

I wish WotC would promote something else as their free introduction to the game. Even if they use the same story, and either filled it out (so three levels worth of interesting stuff happens) or cut out the filler (cut 8-10 encounters so it's only a level 1-2 adventure.)

 

[S'mon]

I think WOTC adventures really need about half the encounters taken out.

 

[Gryph]

Adventures written to cover three full levels of 4e play are going to have trouble keeping the pacing at an interesting level.

The Slaying Stone is a much better example of an introductory adventure than KotSF.

When I ran the module right after it came out, I cut a bunch of encounters on the first dungeon level of the keep and gave a few extra quest xp bonuses to make up for them. That helped, but it still took a couple months of sessions to ge through. The players were all new to D&D and 4e so we had the same issue you are with encounter lengths of an hour or more.