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="Jonathan Walton" data-source="post: 5157731" data-attributes="member: 43574">So I'm not a regular 4E player anymore but I think I'm right in the target market for what you're trying to do with 4E, at least among the older generation, not the kids.  I grew up playing Robotech, have been playing mostly indie games for the past few years, but was really excited about the possibilities of 4E (having never played D&D before), bought the core books and ran it for a while before getting really frustrated creating adventures that were not very fun and not having any good examples to help me know how to make better ones.  Here are some bullet points from my frustrating experiences:1. All adventures need to include all the maps needed to play at full size, so I can photocopy them, or at least include a link where I can download them and print them out. Otherwise they are useless to me. Why have your map artists create beautiful maps if I can't use them in play?2. Likewise, I want tokens for all monsters and interactive objects on the map. You should make it really, really easy for me to run this, not force me to use chess pawns or whatever else I have lying around.3. You need to make the players and the characters care about the adventure. If the bad guys have kidnapped somebody I've never heard of, I don't care. If we're descending into a mysterious dungeon that we know nothing about, we don't care.  It's hard to tell writers how to make something interesting if they don't know how, but clearly a lot of the adventure writers don't really know how to do this, or they're trying to make the stories so general -- so they can fit into any campaign -- that there's nothing gripping to sink your teeth into.  We have to both know about what's going on (mysteries are not interesting in and of themselves) and have some immediate, personal connection to it. The example early in this thread of adding a burning house to the beginning of Keep on the Shadowfell is a great example. Boom, we're saving people from being burned alive or at least taking revenge. Suddenly it's more personal. Or set up situations right off the bat.  Have you seen John Harper's free indie scenario, "Lady Blackbird"? It starts with the characters in the brig of a ship, having been captured for flying a false flag.  And the first question the GM asks is "How do you escape?"  Boom, everything's off to a flying start. Starting in media res is one great way to do this, but not the only one.4. The encounters themselves seemed really repetitive in all the published adventures I played. We'd go to a room, fight a bit, never really be in danger, heal some hitpoints, and then move on and do it again.  If the characters are never really in danger in 4E, they don't really get to make interesting questions.  PC death is not really that scary; making new characters in 4E is fun! Or at least there need to be more dynamic choices to make, choices that actually matter.  Like, you can do A or B but not both! Or you can do two of A, B, and C (or maybe only one of those if you mess it up)!5. The NPCs need to want something from the players.  Not something concrete necessary, but they need to have a clear agenda and guidelines for how they are going to pursue it, both if the PCs intervene and if they don't (or if they assist them!).  They shouldn't simply be standing around waiting for the PCs get there, so the encounter can finally start.  The world should feel like it's alive, not static.  Like, if the PCs delay and decide to rest, the NPCs keep pursuing their agenda.  Forget earning Action Points; that's where the true consequences of spending time healing should come from.6. Published adventures should do more than be solid adventures, of the kind I could make myself given time and experience.  They should be SUPER INSPIRATIONAL THINGS that push forward the boundaries of what D&D can do.  You should have players saying to each other in game stores: "Dude, have you played 'Curse of the Midnight Marauder,' yet? Holy Crap, there's this amazing part where you fight vampire bats on this magical moving staircase that wraps around the outside of an ancient tower that's falling apart as you climb it."  Published adventures have the freedom to prep more than any reasonable GM will have time to do in their week. They should be the equivalent of the coolest video game you can imagine, not just the standard stuff.7. In general, things need to be both super accessible / easy to run and utterly fearless and mindblowing.  Right now, they're both opaque and weaksauce, which is what I found so disappointing.  I want to run a fight inside the stomach of a dragon and I want everything I need to run it, right at my fingertips. Seems like D&D should be able to do that.</blockquote>

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