D&D 4E Invading the castle:Small rooms, small fights, and 4e

[Quickleaf]

Seems like it'd be pretty hard to get a 5-minute rest in such an environment, so it would be a string of short encounters, larger encounter(s) or multi-wave encounters depending on how they did. Should be totally doable in 4e.

For example, you could roll initiative as soon as the PCs are discovered (assuming they're sneaking at all) and stay in initiative time the entire time they're there, with guards shouting for assistance, runners heading for doors to get reinforcements, etc. Could be pretty exciting.

Yes, this worked well for my group in Dragon Mountain. This happened a lot, nearly forgot about it. Party would wipe floors with kobolds, maybe even a second wave of reinforcements, then I'd keep them in initiative as they explored a bit, then...ambush! Or, trap! Or, something unexpected! And then an even harder combat. Sometimes that would happen two or three times in a row. Not all the time, but enough. It was great fun.

I'm going to give you advice that may seem counter-intuitive and that is to dump those trash fights altogether.

First of all, step back and ask yourself what is the real purpose of these fights in prior editions, or Pathfinder? And do you need them at all? My answer would be no. They serve only two real purposes, neither of which you need in 4e.

The first purpose is to drain sufficient resources such that other encounters, especially the story focused ones, are actually a threat. The second purpose is to provide XP and gold fodder to ensure PC's advance on par with the adventure, and that they remain appropriately geared up as they advance.

As you pointed out, 4e isn't a game that's suited to grinding through umpteen dungeon rooms of pointless trash fights. That's a feature, not a flaw. I recently converted the entire Carrion Crown Pathfinder AP to 4e and ran my party through from start to finish. I would say I ended up cutting out 80-90% of the encounters because they served no story purpose whatsover. They existed solely to force PC's to grind through them.

So here is my advice: First, if an encounter doesn't matter to the story, get rid of it. Random room full of giant spiders? Dump it. Intercepting a party of assassins on their way to the King's Ball? Keep it.

Second, always assume PC's are at full strength when designing encounters and that this will be their only encounter of the day, so expect them not to hold back. You don't need a trash fight to drain resources so that later encounters are tougher. Just make the encounters that matter that much tougher right off the bat since there will be fewer of them, and then get rid of the trash fights. Then who cares how rested the PCs are? It ceases to even be an issue.

As far as compensating for XP and treasure accumulation with trash fights to pad those numbers, just don't give XP. The players level when its narratively appropriate. Likewise, use Inherent bonuses, and bigger chunks of gold and treasure in the encounters that matter.

This is also a great approach, and the one I use for a lot of my 4e gaming.

However, if you want an "old school" vibe dungeon crawl (and sometimes your players do! ), and from the sound of the OP that's what it seems like, you won't be doing this. Instead you'll be getting very familiar with how wonderful minions are, coming up with interesting encounter complications with goals besides just killing the monsters, and provide ample exploration opportunities that are tangential to the main plot.

 

[Dragonblade]

Yes, this worked well for my group in Dragon Mountain. This happened a lot, nearly forgot about it. Party would wipe floors with kobolds, maybe even a second wave of reinforcements, then I'd keep them in initiative as they explored a bit, then...ambush! Or, trap! Or, something unexpected! And then an even harder combat. Sometimes that would happen two or three times in a row. Not all the time, but enough. It was great fun.


This is also a great approach, and the one I use for a lot of my 4e gaming.

However, if you want an "old school" vibe dungeon crawl (and sometimes your players do! ), and from the sound of the OP that's what it seems like, you won't be doing this. Instead you'll be getting very familiar with how wonderful minions are, coming up with interesting encounter complications with goals besides just killing the monsters, and provide ample exploration opportunities that are tangential to the main plot.

If you want to run an old school "clear the dungeon" style game, I wouldn't pick 4e, and I love 4e, but its just the wrong tool for the job. BUT, if you really want to use 4e for this style of play, here are my recommendations and it involves borrowing several things from 13th Age.

First, the Escalation Die. You should use this in any 4e game you run, whether its a dungeon crawl or not. No tweaks needed, just drop it in. Second, the core essence of the dungeon crawl is about strategy and logistics. The PCs pit limited magical and health resources against the unknown of the dungeon. The reason 4e isn't ideal for this type of play is that 4e is more focused on in-combat tactics and less on long term resource management. But you can change that.

After adding the escalation die, get rid of extended rests. Players can take a short rest whenever, but only recover 1 daily, and 1 surge per hour. Anytime a player goes into negative HP and fails a death save, they take an Injury. What the injury is can vary based on context, but essentially its a cumulative -1 to all d20 rolls the player might make. Injuries can only be removed with a week of bedrest. If you are familiar with 13th Age, its basically a negative Background.

Next, use 13th Age mook rules instead of the 4e minion rules. Mook monsters have one quarter to one half the HP of a standard monster, and damage is never wasted. What this means is that a PC crits a mook doing 40 damage. But the mook only has 20 HP left. The remaining 20 HP get applied to the next mook in line. Now all those trash fight monsters become mooks. Players still encounter them, but the fights should be short and ugly in the player's favor. Just like they would be in an OSR dungeon crawl. Oh and mooks are always considered Bloodied for purposes of triggering powers against them.

Next is gear and resources. In an old school dungeon crawl, gear matters, and so does using spells to solve problems. I wouldn't use the Inherent bonus rules and make the PCs have to buy or create magical gear. I'd also encourage the use of Rituals, but instead of GP, they cost a surge to cast. Anyone can pay the surge cost. You can charge more surges for higher level rituals if you want, like two surges for paragon, and three for epic. Be sure to track supplies, torches, etc.

I'm probably missing a bunch of stuff, but for a message board post, it should get you thinking in the right direction.

 

[Larrin]

Thanks for the replies!

I agree that this is not a necessary thing to try for 4e, from a mechanics/xp/treasure standpoint, and other systems can certainly do it more easily, but if its possible to do, I'd like to be able to do it in a fun way. Basically the adventure has all these maps and descriptions of the little rooms/areas and if I can make a quick moving combat way to explore (only) the interesting rooms, including the ambushes and such, then I think my players would have fun with it.

I'll be trying it on a castle filled with orcs first, which looks like it will probably be a standard encounter when they enter the courtyard, but then entering the castle and getting to the final boss would be much more interesting if they feel like they are fighting/exploring their way through castle room by room (I'll definitely try to keep the number of rooms and fights to an enjoyable level), with one final standard encounter with the final boss. If I can make this sort of thing work, I think it will be useful at other points in the campaign, and a useful tool to have in my 4e box.

 

[jodyjohnson]

Additional notes:

SotSC is not really a series of Dungeon crawls in the traditional sense - I'd treat them more like commando raids. Once the party pokes the hornets' nest it won't really be an exploration mission.
Save the exploration for after the fighting stops.

The maps are all in 10' squares. That's actually bigger than the maps feel. Some of the rooms are large enough. I'd also pull a page from the earliest editions and sometimes use 3 1/3 foot squares to allow more physical tactical room.

Regarding Short Rests there are times when I get more strict about having them be laid back full rests (not something you can do quick while monsters pound on the door, or while the adrenaline is still pumping) and other times you need to just say the party can have a short rest or even a long rest as a gimme to get through the day.

I treat it more as pacing, because I really want to avoid the 'do 2 rooms, leave, do 1 room, leave, do 4 rooms, leave' pacing that we fell into for editions 1 through 3.5. Simply because we wanted fights to be challenging but at the same time it was really hard to gauge how many resources a party will use in a given encounter due to the dice.

At the same time, taking a short rest between every encounter enables play where the party focuses on dropping 2-3 encounter powers first round every fight and that can get just as monotonous as only having basic attacks.

We also used Mook rules because when we felt that creatures had too many hit points, we just gave them less. Minions felt like they had too few.

 

[Quickleaf]

If you want to run an old school "clear the dungeon" style game, I wouldn't pick 4e, and I love 4e, but its just the wrong tool for the job. BUT, if you really want to use 4e for this style of play, here are my recommendations and it involves borrowing several things from 13th Age.

Whether its the wrong tool or not, I used 4e for a megadungeon crawl of Dragon Mountain and it worked great. All changes I made were on the DM's side, not core rules. YMMV.

Thanks for the replies!

I agree that this is not a necessary thing to try for 4e, from a mechanics/xp/treasure standpoint, and other systems can certainly do it more easily, but if its possible to do, I'd like to be able to do it in a fun way. Basically the adventure has all these maps and descriptions of the little rooms/areas and if I can make a quick moving combat way to explore (only) the interesting rooms, including the ambushes and such, then I think my players would have fun with it.

I'll be trying it on a castle filled with orcs first, which looks like it will probably be a standard encounter when they enter the courtyard, but then entering the castle and getting to the final boss would be much more interesting if they feel like they are fighting/exploring their way through castle room by room (I'll definitely try to keep the number of rooms and fights to an enjoyable level), with one final standard encounter with the final boss. If I can make this sort of thing work, I think it will be useful at other points in the campaign, and a useful tool to have in my 4e box.

Ok, I've got a better feel for the adventure from what you and [MENTION=5590]jodyjohnson[/MENTION] have said, and I think "castle raid" is a better description. I would not do *room-by-room* exploration, in this case, and instead think of group of rooms as *combat zones*. Some other tips:

• Stop thinking of the castle as a collection rooms with orcs. Start thinking of it from the Player's perspective: what interesting areas are there? Think of it from the orc's perspective: how defensible are different parts of the castle? The map says "4 orcs in room X", but those orcs might be patrolling the nearby hall or banquet room, or one might be reporting to the chief, and so on. Total the orcs forces before the PCs invade - that's what they're really up against (unless, perhaps killing the leader breaks their morale completely), and it's up to you to pace it in a way that is convincing and fun, and it's up to the players to think how they can divide and conquer.
• Consider either using mostly minions or as [MENTION=2804]Dragonblade[/MENTION] recommends house-ruling "mooks." Another option is what I call "Humanoids": 1/3-1/2 standard HP, old MM1 damage expression (as an average, they don't roll damage just like a minion), half XP, simple monster design with no encounter powers or reactions. Any of these options is easier to handle at the table, makes for faster combat, and lets you use lots of enemies without totally overwhelming the PCs. Remember to make frequent use of waves.
• After they first roll initiative, stay in initiative count while raiding the castle. It will save time and emphasize that the threat is far from over.
• Come up with a list of "escalate options" in advance that explain why PCs cannot normally rest in the castle. How do the orcs use their resources to repel invaders? For example: pound gong to alert other orcs, threaten the hostages, close the portcullis, position orcish archers at ramparts (if not there already), unleash a strong monster (e.g. Ogre or krenshars) in courtyard, break down a wall PCs are brhind or smoke them out, etc.
• If PCs do manage to take a short rest in the castle thru clever thinking or magic, have the orcs make use of those 5 minutes as well...barricade door/gate X and Y, pour boiling tar down passage Z, gather reinforcements who were patrolling outside the castle, stage an ambush outside of where PCs are resting, etc.
• 4e's milestone mechanic is easy to forget. It can be "every 2 encounters" or you can define mission appropriate objectives that count as milestones. Also, in a series of back-to-back encounters like this castle raid sounds like it will become, you can also let each PC recharge an encounter power at a milestone (or whatever dramatic point you think is appropriate), since they probably won't be resting.
• You can still keep a bit of exploration, just do so in the context of imminent threat and urgency. If the players dawdle, hit them with an escalate option. The orcs worked hard to sack this castle, so they'll work hard to defend it from the PCs!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I am suddenly reminded of some of the genius that is still in Torg...

For an "ebb and flow" of combat, the initiative system was pretty interesting. Each turn, something special could happen, like a Flurry (one side can act twice), an Up (one side gets to roll an extra d20), a Fatigue (one side takes some shock points) or an Inspiration (One side recovers all shock points).

Maybe one could use something like that in D&D as well. In the spirit of D&D, it might not be on cards, but a special table you roll at the start of each round. Maybe it can interplay with the 13th Age escalation die. (Say, roll 1d20 and add the escalation die value).

The advantage of such a system is that you can create mechanics that will replace short rests, allowing some recovery of abilities without needing actual pauses.

 

[Argyle King]

I'm going to give you advice that may seem counter-intuitive and that is to dump those trash fights altogether.

First of all, step back and ask yourself what is the real purpose of these fights in prior editions, or Pathfinder? And do you need them at all? My answer would be no. They serve only two real purposes, neither of which you need in 4e.

The first purpose is to drain sufficient resources such that other encounters, especially the story focused ones, are actually a threat. The second purpose is to provide XP and gold fodder to ensure PC's advance on par with the adventure, and that they remain appropriately geared up as they advance.

As you pointed out, 4e isn't a game that's suited to grinding through umpteen dungeon rooms of pointless trash fights. That's a feature, not a flaw. I recently converted the entire Carrion Crown Pathfinder AP to 4e and ran my party through from start to finish. I would say I ended up cutting out 80-90% of the encounters because they served no story purpose whatsover. They existed solely to force PC's to grind through them.

So here is my advice: First, if an encounter doesn't matter to the story, get rid of it. Random room full of giant spiders? Dump it. Intercepting a party of assassins on their way to the King's Ball? Keep it.

Second, always assume PC's are at full strength when designing encounters and that this will be their only encounter of the day, so expect them not to hold back. You don't need a trash fight to drain resources so that later encounters are tougher. Just make the encounters that matter that much tougher right off the bat since there will be fewer of them, and then get rid of the trash fights. Then who cares how rested the PCs are? It ceases to even be an issue.

As far as compensating for XP and treasure accumulation with trash fights to pad those numbers, just don't give XP. The players level when its narratively appropriate. Likewise, use Inherent bonuses, and bigger chunks of gold and treasure in the encounters that matter.

What if the reason for those fights is to create a world which feels like it is alive? It seems strange that an entire castle would be so empty.

 

[Dragonblade]

What if the reason for those fights is to create a world which feels like it is alive? It seems strange that an entire castle would be so empty.

Sure. If that's part of the feel you want to convey, then keep some of those encounters and rework them as appropriate.

But when we played D&D back in the 80's and 90's we used to joke that the dungeon modules we ran were so full of monsters that realistically would never be living one or two rooms away from each other, that it was all a vast conspiracy ala The Truman Show movie.

That one of these days the adventurers would burst into a room just as dungeon catering was bringing the snack cart around. And that the orcs and ghouls and various monsters would be scrambling to drop their donuts and grab their weapons.

 

[pemerton]

A few people upthread have mentioned that the room on a map needn't coincide with the encounter for 4e purposes.

I agree with that.

Another suggestion is to look at your map for ways of increasing the connections between rooms. Add in a secret door and passage. Or, if there is a secret door, have the NPCs use it. That should help increase the degree of combat movement and flow. (Which is what you want in 4e.)

 

[Storminator]

A few people upthread have mentioned that the room on a map needn't coincide with the encounter for 4e purposes.

I agree with that.

Another suggestion is to look at your map for ways of increasing the connections between rooms. Add in a secret door and passage. Or, if there is a secret door, have the NPCs use it. That should help increase the degree of combat movement and flow. (Which is what you want in 4e.)

I did this in my dungeon crawl mentioned above. I made sure there were a variety of paths for encounters to flow thru.

PS