D&D 4E Is anyone running Murder in Baldur's Gate with 4E? (and other 4E adventure design issues)

[TheRustyOne]

Howdy, I'm the DM from the other thread. I guess what I meant, and actually, what my players meant, was a challenging encounter that would engage the party of six, in what for 4E has become a traditional set piece battle.
They did ambush the Tax Collectors bodyguards (a 4 on two battle that lasteed maybe three rounds.) They did do battle with some rat swarms (there were two out of them out looking for rats.) But half of the group was enjoying the greater roleplaying, splitting the party, etc, and the other half was getting anxious waiting for that big battle. Could I add one? Certainly. The other DM at our building (The Game Keep, in Hermitage TN) had a shark attack for the players to overcome. But if I have to build the encounters for my players every week to give them that 4E fight, why in the heck should I bother with Murder? It might be a good investigation adventure, I dunno, in the end, it feels a lot like the old 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms modules to me. But saying this can be run in 4th edition is like telling me I can run Savage Worlds "Necessary Evil" in 4th edition. Yes, I can. But there is nothing in it that supports 4th edition specifically.
This is also the third game I run every week. One of the things I liked about previous encounters seasons is the lack of prep work I had to do. Here I've got more prep work necessary than I do for my other two games combined (Next and Icons).
We were running it, but it definitely was not giving my players the battles they were expecting to come to every week. 14 previous seasons of encounters had led them to certain expectations, and one was that pretty much every week they could have a fight that challenged the whole party. As written, MIBG does not provide that. I can add them, but why should I have to? Our group paid 35$ for a pretty picture book of Baldur's Gate, a plot that, in the end, they can have a middling effect on, no support for their edition of choice, and then, in a further smack in the face, Icewind Dale is yet again new characters going back to 1st level? To me, what this is billed as and what it is are two different things. I'm also not the biggest fan of the realms, though, which may cover it. I have one player at encounters that plans to keep on buying the books just because he wants to see the story. He was also one that didn't mind we had been doing mostly conversation and investigation.

 

[D'karr]

Howdy, I'm the DM from the other thread. I guess what I meant, and actually, what my players meant, was a challenging encounter that would engage the party of six, in what for 4E has become a traditional set piece battle.
They did ambush the Tax Collectors bodyguards (a 4 on two battle that lasteed maybe three rounds.) They did do battle with some rat swarms (there were two out of them out looking for rats.) But half of the group was enjoying the greater roleplaying, splitting the party, etc, and the other half was getting anxious waiting for that big battle. Could I add one? Certainly. The other DM at our building (The Game Keep, in Hermitage TN) had a shark attack for the players to overcome. But if I have to build the encounters for my players every week to give them that 4E fight, why in the heck should I bother with Murder? It might be a good investigation adventure, I dunno, in the end, it feels a lot like the old 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms modules to me. But saying this can be run in 4th edition is like telling me I can run Savage Worlds "Necessary Evil" in 4th edition. Yes, I can. But there is nothing in it that supports 4th edition specifically.
This is also the third game I run every week. One of the things I liked about previous encounters seasons is the lack of prep work I had to do. Here I've got more prep work necessary than I do for my other two games combined (Next and Icons).
We were running it, but it definitely was not giving my players the battles they were expecting to come to every week. 14 previous seasons of encounters had led them to certain expectations, and one was that pretty much every week they could have a fight that challenged the whole party. As written, MIBG does not provide that. I can add them, but why should I have to? Our group paid 35$ for a pretty picture book of Baldur's Gate, a plot that, in the end, they can have a middling effect on, no support for their edition of choice, and then, in a further smack in the face, Icewind Dale is yet again new characters going back to 1st level? To me, what this is billed as and what it is are two different things. I'm also not the biggest fan of the realms, though, which may cover it. I have one player at encounters that plans to keep on buying the books just because he wants to see the story. He was also one that didn't mind we had been doing mostly conversation and investigation.

These are all very valid concerns, and I agree with all of them. The amount of work required to make it interesting is a lot. If you are not totally winging it, it will require work. I'm simply winging it with some framed things planned. For example I know that next week we'll be doing a Flaming Fist smackdown. So I plan to work to make that one interesting.

For D&D Encounters this is a bad fit. The "beauty" of encounters was that you could come to the store mostly unprepared, and run the session for that night - everything was provided. With MiBG I found myself having to jump from book (events) to book (campaign) to find information to give the players when they asked a question I couldn't easily make up an answer for. For next week I want to actually prepare so that the combat is interesting. All the "monsters" they've encountered up to now have been boring. The only reason the combats were interesting is that I improvised terrain, more monsters, other situations. So for the purpose of the adventure, the adventure has not really provided me anything except a situation, and most of that I've embellished myself.

 

[TheRustyOne]

And I totally agree that one can riff off of MIBG and come up with good things, I just found myself increasingly wondering "why should I"? And more than half my player base felt the same way.

 

[keterys]

I ran it for a while, then about halfway through they'd intimidated someone into surrendering and giving them information, and they convinced him to leave town and he goes "Okay, no problem, I know this town in the dalelands has some work." and someone in the party goes "Really? Can we come with you?" and thus ended our MiBG campaign as they headed off to new adventures, leaving the city to wash in its own fairly tepid waves of mildly murderous evil.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

What does he mean by a traditional 4E encounter? The two-page encounter spread?

Maybe he means the encounter has something even remotely resembling a map?

 

[keterys]

Just for clarity, the intro adventure - the single session spotlight on Baldur's Gate event - was awesome. In whatever system you ran it in. True gem.

 

[TheRustyOne]

I will agree with that completely. I ran that twice, once with 10+ people (in 4E) and we had a blast.

 

[MerricB]

I ran it for a while, then about halfway through they'd intimidated someone into surrendering and giving them information, and they convinced him to leave town and he goes "Okay, no problem, I know this town in the dalelands has some work." and someone in the party goes "Really? Can we come with you?" and thus ended our MiBG campaign as they headed off to new adventures, leaving the city to wash in its own fairly tepid waves of mildly murderous evil.

Heh. Can't blame them.

If the players don't find the material interesting (including the DM), it's definitely a better idea to go do something more fun. (We rather felt that about the Storm over Neverwinter encounters season). I've been lucky enough to have a number of players who are really engaging with MiBG. It was helped a lot with the encounter with Nant Thangol - he enraged them enough so they joined the side of the revolution without a second thought.

 

[keterys]

Yep, my guys were all for the revolution at first. The druid had randomly decided to play a communist as they came into the city, I think based on how we pronounced a name, and that momentum kept for a bit, but the defacing of the statues and some of the increasingly petty nature of things was irking them, while at the same time they were like "I am _so_ interested in the Bhaal angle, where the hell did it go?"

I was mid rewriting it to make things work for them when we decided that the Dragonspear adventures sounded like more fun.

 

[Phototoxin]

We're playing it. Main issues are times between rests, so we won't count as extended rest until the GM says so, which is fine.

We're also not going for any one particular group (guild, watch or fist) at the moment as we're not sure who we trust. In addition it all just seems a bit random and disjointed to be perfectly honest and very very slow moving.