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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5597071" data-attributes="member: 54877">If you are having trouble with improv, prepare to improv the things that are causing the trouble.  This may be preparing monsters as several have mentioned. But what if you do that, and you find that the fights are boring? Well, this is probably because you also had to improv the location, the terrain, the situation, etc. And maybe those are the things, or at least some of them are, that needed more work. You might find, for example, that having a prepared interesting location--a rickety rope bridge over a 30 feet drop into a narrow stream, with rocky ground and heavy vegatation haning over the edges, is what you need. Given that, I can grab some orcs or kobolds or whatever out of the MM, reskin in 5 seconds, and run a very interesting fight. Put your same prepared monster list in an empty, featureless room, and you can't save it. I actually learned this well prior to 4E, which is why I haven't had trouble adapting to 4E on those terms. I'd already come to terms with improv of the location as being the critical skill for me, in Fantasy Hero and earlier versions of D&D. But like anything else, the more you work with it, the better it gets.  So I can improv those in 4E fairly well.  Now, the thing I have to prep more ahead of time is the situation--what are the goals of the participants and why are they here right now? If I improv that too much, it will be boring. But with a little practice, you can build those more generically, as easily as you can build encounters or terrain or locations. But Jester nailed it: "Here's my advice for running the type of campaign you want: Do what you did to run that type of game in earlier editions."  My addition to that is that if his advice seems not to work for some reason, then probably the things that you did to run that type of game in the earlier edition weren't fully working then, either. It is just that something compensated and made it not so noticable. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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