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="Shemeska" data-source="post: 5108513" data-attributes="member: 11697">Based on my opinion of 4e in general, my advice here may be discounted, but it's constructive criticism, so hear me out. And it's a good sign that you guys are recognizing complaints by customers and potential customers. Hopefully something good comes out of this.WotC 4e adventures tend to be exceedingly formulaic and rapidly devolve into grinding fight after grinding fight. Make the story and the locations the focus of the adventure, not the 'you must be X level at each stage of the adventure and therefore you must have Y number of combat encounters' design shtick that has often felt to me to be at the center of 4e adventure design. Don't allow your system mechanics to dictate plot, setting, and story elements of an adventure. It's boring, jarring, and artificial.Drop the delve format. Please, drop the delve format. You guys fell in love with it in late 3.x, but it seriously disrupts the flow and story of an adventure. It makes things feel like disjointed combat encounters linked together, and that has only gotten worse in your adventures as time has gone by.Dungeon's adventures have felt far too often like what the guys on staff at WotC manage to write when they can squeeze in time to do so. It seems like it doesn't get the attention of printed work, and that's a problem. There's a perception that Dungeon and DDI articles in general are somewhere between afterthoughts and at the level of the web articles that were released for free during the 3.x period, but now they're behind a paywall. What's my point? Either provide your staff with more time to work on stuff in Dungeon, more time in development, more editing, more playtesting before release, or take them off of it and hire more outside freelancers.With slim (but often well written) exception (Shwalb, Kulp, etc), a lot of stuff is just in-house guys, and Dungeon lacks the sense of community contribution that it had when it was a printed magazine. There's no longer lots of discussion by people pitching ideas to the magazine, and I think that you're at risk of having the creative well running dry if you don't bring in new writers and -advertise- that you want people to contribute adventures. Now 4e isn't my thing, so it isn't me looking for work, but when I talk to multiple freelancers at last GenCon and all of them sigh and shake their head regarding hearing anything back from the e-zines regarding pitches, you have a problem in reality or in perception. And in this instance, they hurt you just the same.Get new people involved. Get new ideas.Don't force every adventure to be PoL. This cannot be said enough. You've taken a bruising over forcing core 4e and PoL quasi-setting into other settings, and you're doing the same to supposedly generic adventures.  Honestly if you're going to make generic adventures, make generic adventures, because if people don't like the tropes and themes of the PoL quasi-setting, they're going to be seriously turned off by the trend of having literally everything in that setting, even if it's generic or even if it's nominally part of another supposedly unique setting. Please please allow material that isn't PoL. Allow things to exclude parts of the core or go beyond the core themes and tropes. Diversity in adventure content and design is key, and you're not providing that right now.</blockquote>

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