NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5108452" data-attributes="member: 58197">Wow. Okay. Way to put me on the spot, Rodney. Now I have to put my money where my mouth is and propose actual solutions instead of just snarking at WotC. <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=":)" />Let me see here.First of all, I don't think all WotC adventures are bad by any means. There have been some really stellar ones, in fact. "Red Hand of Doom" comes to mind as one of the all-time greats. On a much smaller scale, there was that tiny little solo adventure in Dungeon a few months back - "Dark Awakening," it was called. Barely long enough to merit the name, but it packed a really engaging adventure into that space.But there's also stuff like "Keep on the Shadowfell," which... yeah, kind of sucked.So, what's the difference?Mostly, I think it's a question of pacing. You have to keep the energy level high, keep the players engaged, keep the plot moving. This means:Don't string fight scenes together without a break. This is especially important in 4E where there is no such thing as a brief combat. When every single fight takes 45-60 minutes, you really have to put some breathing space between battles. Put in some exploration, some traps, a social encounter or two, a mysterious location with clues to discover."Dark Awakening" was one of the shortest adventures I've ever played, yet it had a lot of exploration scenes and even a social encounter (in a solitaire adventure!) interspersed with the battles. I really got into carefully, stealthily scouting out the dungeon. "Keep on the Shadowfell," on the other hand, felt like a horrendous slog because it was just... fight this, then fight that, then fight the other thing.Keep the focus. Keep reminding the PCs why they're doing what they're doing. They should be constantly reaching little milestones that advance the overall plot."Red Hand of Doom" was brilliant at this. Every few encounters had us defeating one of the evil overlord's lieutenants or winning allies for the big showdown to come. Despite the massive length of the adventure, we always felt we were pressing on toward an objective. In "Keep on the Shadowfell," there were long stretches where we felt like we were just whacking goblins to whack goblins. Our only reward for successfully whacking one group of goblins was to get another group of goblins to whack. 4E combat is engaging, but it's not that engaging.Change the scene. As a poster upthread mentioned, after a certain number of encounters any dungeon has overstayed its welcome. Wrap it up and move on. Players like to explore new things. To some degree this ties in with the previous point about reaching milestones; one of the ways you can create that feeling of focused advancement is to have the PCs reach literal milestones as they cross the game world."Red Hand of Doom" took us all over the place, with adventures in swamps, ruins, mountains, you name it. Most of "Keep on the Shadowfell" took place in, well, the Keep on the Shadowfell. It got old.More on this as I think of it.</blockquote>

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