D&D 4E Is it me or are 4E modules just not...exciting?

[S'mon]

It surely needs some work, but I like that the adventure gives advice on how to handle a party that tries to enter the tower from the top, instead of sneaking in from the catacombs. I like the ruins encounters and the customisable tower map. I think I like the pieces of the adventure more than the finished thing.

This was my impression. It looks like it could be very boring as a slog-through-the-tower adventure, but there's also a fun 32 page sandbox environment in there that with a bit of development looks like it could work well.

I think the trick may be to do something I saw my Monday night DM do running Sellswords of Punjar; have many rooms empty, and use their inhabitants as wandering monsters who can be encountered before or after the PCs reach their chamber.

 

[vagabundo]

The entire back of the Chamber was one big encounter, encompassing several rooms that could be navigated or circumvented, encouraging the PCs to maneuver the enemies into locales that put them at a disadvantage.

I agree, I found that dungeon quite dynamic. My guys found a secret passage from the kitchen into the main room*.

I also put a beholder in there in a secret tube under the main alter. It is the chamber of eyes after all.

This was one of the best dungeons. in the adventure when I ran it. It is such a pity the main plot is so terrible. I wish they would do a revised H1&H2. Both suffered from a lack of minions. Oh and get a proper map of the Labyrinth, it doesn't have to be complete, but it has to be better than the line drawing they provide.

*I cannot remember if I put that there or it was always there.

 

[Klaus]

I agree, I found that dungeon quite dynamic. My guys found a secret passage from the kitchen into the main room*.

I also put a beholder in there in a secret tube under the main alter. It is the chamber of eyes after all.

This was one of the best dungeons. in the adventure when I ran it. It is such a pity the main plot is so terrible. I wish they would do a revised H1&H2. Both suffered from a lack of minions. Oh and get a proper map of the Labyrinth, it doesn't have to be complete, but it has to be better than the line drawing they provide.

*I cannot remember if I put that there or it was always there.

The secret passa ge was there already.

Good call in putting in a beholder. With MM3, you could even put in multiple beholderkin.

Another part of H2 I liked was thr Horned Hold. Not the encounters themselves, but the map for the Hold was very good, and a good example of an underground dwarven fortress.

Me, I wish WotC would do a conversion of the Forge of Fury.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'm curious about this point. So there's something about 4e's mechanics that lends it more readily to a sandbox style than previous editions? Can you elaborate?

It's indirect, but when I run sandbox I generally want:

• Easy prep monsters
• Know the system well enough to reskin on the fly
• A power curve that lets the characters get in over their heads and then out again
• Elements that won't throw balance out of whack if found out of order (magic items and rituals in 4E)
• An adventuring party that covers all the bases (see 4E skills)

And so forth. I think 4E stacks up pretty well on those points.

OTOH, if I'm running a prepared story line, I generally want:

• Lots of pertinent but off-beat mechanical details without having to make them up myself
• Multiple character-realization paths in the character mechanics
• Customized encounters that push a particular party right to the brink

And so forth. 4E isn't impossible here, but it is not its strength. Those are extremes for illustratin by the way. I'm always running at least a little bit sandbox.

Loosely, you could say that the main thrust of a sandbox is that the party is defined by the challenges they picked, and when they picked them, and what they did when things got hairy. Whereas, the main thrust of a prepared story line is how the characters changed and grew over the course of overcoming the challenges (or failed trying).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd have thought 4e would be great for customizing encounters, it certainly is 100x easier than in 3.x at least. Probably about on a par with 1e/2e, but you have a few extra options like terrain powers and such.

I think it does pretty well on the 'multiple character realization paths' count too.

There are a couple issues that I see with 4e and sandbox though. It has a MUCH narrower tolerance for off-level encounters. I recall in a 2e game a few years back throwing a Hill Giant at a level 3 party. It was fun and challenging for them. One character IIRC ended up squished flat, but the players loved it. I don't think you could run that encounter in 4e out-of-the-box. I'm sure you COULD do it, but you'd have to specifically design the whole encounter to work with low level PCs. In 2e it was just a regular encounter in my sandbox that the party happened to blunder into even after they saw the warnings about not going there.

Sandbox games also tend not to have a lot of plot driven encounter action. I find that in 4e that makes it hard to determine what a good setup for an encounter is. You will tend to end up with a lot of fighting and not enough exploration, IMHO.

So it will depend on your concept of sandboxes. I think it can work and I've certainly designed my 4e campaign as something of a sandbox, but it probably wouldn't qualify as such by the standards of a lot of sandbox advocates (IE I rebuild encounters to work with the PCs and I have a lot of the action be plot driven, though the plots are rather loose and the players decide where to go and what to do).

 

[KidSnide]

There are a couple issues that I see with 4e and sandbox though. It has a MUCH narrower tolerance for off-level encounters. I recall in a 2e game a few years back throwing a Hill Giant at a level 3 party. It was fun and challenging for them. One character IIRC ended up squished flat, but the players loved it. I don't think you could run that encounter in 4e out-of-the-box. I'm sure you COULD do it, but you'd have to specifically design the whole encounter to work with low level PCs. In 2e it was just a regular encounter in my sandbox that the party happened to blunder into even after they saw the warnings about not going there.

I think the key for this sort of encounter is that you need a solo version of a hill giant. It's a little weird to have multiple stat blocks for the same creature, but 4e focuses more on the way that the PCs interact with an in-game construct (whether a monster or a social or wilderness challenge) than it does on the in-game construct itself. The strength of this is that the rules focus on what the GM needs at the moment, but the corresponding weakness is that it is harder for a GM to create a monster or NPC without knowing how the PCs will interact with it.

Personally, I WotC produced more on how to solo-ize creatures. It takes quite a bit of art to do it well, so true BBEGs deserve custom crafting. That said, it would be nice to have a quick and dirty template for those 3rd level parties that wander into a hill giant. Something like:
* Adjust hp, defenses, attack/damage
* Give two initiative actions
* Add an anti-group power
* Add an interrupt power
* Add an anti-condition power
* Add a "bloodied" effect

...where the real key to the template is providing a dozen or so examples of each of those powers/effects.

-KS

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the key for this sort of encounter is that you need a solo version of a hill giant. It's a little weird to have multiple stat blocks for the same creature, but 4e focuses more on the way that the PCs interact with an in-game construct (whether a monster or a social or wilderness challenge) than it does on the in-game construct itself. The strength of this is that the rules focus on what the GM needs at the moment, but the corresponding weakness is that it is harder for a GM to create a monster or NPC without knowing how the PCs will interact with it.

Personally, I WotC produced more on how to solo-ize creatures. It takes quite a bit of art to do it well, so true BBEGs deserve custom crafting. That said, it would be nice to have a quick and dirty template for those 3rd level parties that wander into a hill giant. Something like:
* Adjust hp, defenses, attack/damage
* Give two initiative actions
* Add an anti-group power
* Add an interrupt power
* Add an anti-condition power
* Add a "bloodied" effect

...where the real key to the template is providing a dozen or so examples of each of those powers/effects.

-KS

Oh, yeah, I agree, a low level solo Hill Giant would work fine in 4e. In fact I am pretty much OK with that as a general concept. It just doesn't fit will well a true sandbox type setup. Even assuming you're not a purist insisting that the DM never takes party level into account at all you still have that point where you'd have to do the solo version of the giant, which the DM might not have a lot of warning on. If there were templates and guidelines that would probably be helpful.

 

[catsclaw227]

It's indirect, but when I run sandbox I generally want:

• Easy prep monsters
• Know the system well enough to reskin on the fly
• A power curve that lets the characters get in over their heads and then out again
• Elements that won't throw balance out of whack if found out of order (magic items and rituals in 4E)
• An adventuring party that covers all the bases (see 4E skills)

And so forth. I think 4E stacks up pretty well on those points.

Thus sums up my experience with recent conversions of a 3.x/Pathfinder sandbox mini-campaign.

There are a couple issues that I see with 4e and sandbox though. It has a MUCH narrower tolerance for off-level encounters. I recall in a 2e game a few years back throwing a Hill Giant at a level 3 party. It was fun and challenging for them. One character IIRC ended up squished flat, but the players loved it. I don't think you could run that encounter in 4e out-of-the-box. I'm sure you COULD do it, but you'd have to specifically design the whole encounter to work with low level PCs. In 2e it was just a regular encounter in my sandbox that the party happened to blunder into even after they saw the warnings about not going there.

In my experience, the the narrow tolerance for off-level encounters is based upon a fallacious paradigm perpetrated from the beginning. I am not saying AbdulAlhazred's statement is fallacious, I am speaking more to the mentality in general.

It is as "appropriate" to have the PCs blunder into an off-level encounter in 4e as it is in 1e or 2e. The problem is that since the beginning of 4e, and to some extent the bulk of the 3e life-cycle, DMs were told that they needed to make encounters level appropriate because that was "more fun". It was almost as if they were so focused on mechanical balance that they decided that players couldn't make intelligent decisions like "run away!" or "holy-crud that was tough, we're gonna get pounded if we stick around. Let's regroup." This was almost a staple of 1e.

For the most part, it was all mindset, not mechanics or system. In 3.x/4e, the game world existed FOR the PCs. In 1e, the world existed DESPITE the PCs. And, as far as I am concerned that is all about DMing style and the implied gaming contract that is agreed upon by the group.

This is becoming more and more apparent as I more fully sandbox my 4e game. Initially, a dude whose experience was almost all 3e/4e just charged into every encounter assuming that he likely won't die, and if he did it was luck of the dice, not because it was just plain stupid.

Fortunately in 4e, there is some room for error. In 1e, if you guessed wrong, one shot can kill you, but in 4e you can get clobbered in one hit and still survive to run away.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree that 4e allows a bit of leeway in terms of running away or regrouping that AD&D generally didn't. That is a feature that caters well to less controlled sandbox type environments.

I'm not sure that AD&D (and 1e specifically) really TRIED to cater to off-level encounters. In fact the early days of the game were pretty heavily dominated by a dungeon crawling convention where you had a very good idea of what sort of threats you would face. Even the random dungeon encounter tables/wandering monster tables were keyed to dungeon level (albeit you could run into some fairly nasty encounters and some very easy ones).

Wilderness play was a bit different, but it was also adapted more for mid to high level adventuring. Once the PCs were approaching name level they concept seemed to be that then they would start pushing out into the unclaimed wilds, generally bringing along a significant entourage of henchmen, porters, etc. You would run into all manner of stuff out there, but a clever group would rarely be completely outclassed by what tended to be beasts, large bands of humanoids, and certain types of beastial monsters. My experience was that typically the worry was attrition in a situation where you might wander far enough from a base if you were imprudent that you would get in trouble with the 2nd or 3rd nasty wandering monster of the trip.

I think later versions of the game, 2e to a large extent and definitely 3e/4e simply moved away from the 'hexcrawl' type mode of play and focused more and more on module based story driven adventures. Certainly the purveyors of RPGs seem to have found that to be the direction that was most lucrative (you can sell adventures and in any case most people are more interested in stories than in playing out highly wargamey land conquest games).

Notice how Paizo has a whole adventure path now that pulls in a lot of hexcrawl style elements. It is pretty good, but it also has a fairly strong plot as well. Kind of the best of both worlds in a way. I think that might be a rather good model for a 4e game. I'm thinking I may do something similar for my next 4e campaign, place the PCs in a PoL type area with large areas of dangerous wilderness and a few small but established communities which are starting to push out to reclaim it. There can be ancient titles, warlords, all sorts of other complications, but the general thrust will be the PCs eventually claiming territory, clearing it, and moving on into a higher level game of rivalry with other would-be petty kings. Could make a good dynastic game too if it goes long enough.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Yeah, it is not as if we are discussing absolutes here--rather merely tendencies. In addition to being able to absorb the first few nasty blows and decide to run away, 4E is a bit more forgiving in how it handles the chase, too, by both RAW and impression it gives. A early D&D DM can very easily intrepret the rules to be more forgiving than 4E, but then he could easily intrepret them to be a lot harsher, too. This is partly where those "clever plans" were so important. With 4E, it's clearly a skill challenge, and if that doesn't totally favor the players, it is at least a structure that you can explain with some consistency.

Besides, I'm not surprised that they have done adventure paths and the like. A lot of people like them. I'm just surprised they haven't done something more obviously sandbox, too. Sandbox may be a bit harder to learn. And you certainly won't be doing that "playing in 30 minutes" bit mentioned earlier (at least, the DM won't). But if we learned Keep on the Borderlands with an early version, somehow I think the beginners today could manage it with 4E--especially with a bit of guidance. Some of them would find that they preferred it.