D&D General Learning from LFR: Encounter and Monster Examples to Steal for Your Game

[Joshua Randall]

Learning from LFR: Encounter and Monster Examples to Steal for Your Game​

There is much to learn from the Living Forgotten Realms (LFR) Organized Play adventures which were published over the lifespan of 4e D&D (2008-2014).

My goal is to crack open some LFR adventures and to scrutinize encounters and individual monsters to see what made those adventures work. We can use this knowledge to inform our current encounter and monster design.

My anti-goal is to review the LFR adventures. Reviews at this late date would be pointless, and I'm honestly not interested in whether the adventures' plots hang together coherently. (Some do, some don’t.)

To reiterate: I plan to peel apart an adventure, pick out an encounter and/or monster, and see what lessons we can apply to our games today. It doesn’t matter if our games use the newest version of the D&D rules, an older version of those rules, or some other ruleset -- I hope this project is useful to everyone.

I want current day gamers who did not play 4e and/or LFR to reap the rewards from those of us who did: those rewards being the lessons learned from years of (sometimes bitter) experience about how to make cool, awesome, fun encounters and adventures.

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Deep Background

In 2024 on another message board with the abbreviation RPG in its name, in the context of a discussion about 4e D&D’s monster design, I drifted that topic to adventure design in general and suggested to myself that I create a thread to answer the prompt: "Do you want to lean into 4e's game-i-est game design? This is how.”

I recently alluded to that statement here on EN World.

The purpose of this thread is to make good on that promise. Whatever you may think of 4e, LFR, or Organized Play -- and we are not here to debate their merits -- the LFR adventures are a tremendous resource you can mine.

I strongly believe that one of the great strengths of 4e in general, and LFR in particular, was its ability to create compelling encounters. Let's see what we can learn!

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Where Should I Start This Crazy Project?

I debated with myself for a long time over where to start this project. I knew I was never going to examine every one of the literally hundreds of LFR adventures, all of which are still freely and legally available from LivingForgottenRealms.com . So if I’m going to pick and choose LFR adventures, which ones?

Year 1 of LFR was pretty rough. Many Year 1 adventures lack any good encounter or monster examples to use. So I thought about skipping to Year 3, specifically to the Epic tier adventures of Year 3, which are fantastic. But then I thought that would be confusing to people. Starting with Epic tier examples also might turn away any readers who don't care about the highest levels of play.

In the end, I decided I will start with Year 1 after all. I’ll be highly selective in what I focus on in Year 1 (and Year 2) because I don't want to burn myself out before I get to the cool stuff in Years 3+.

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Who Am I?

Who am I and why should anyone listen to me? While I don't want to indulge in an Appeal To Authority fallacy, my bona fides are quite bona for this topic.

I was the benevolent dictator for life of my FLGS's Organized Play during the LFR years. According to my records (you knew I had records, right?), we ran 416 LFR games from the very first Weekend in the Realms in October 2008 until we shut ourselves down in April 2024. Out of those 416 games, I participated in about 300 as either player or DM.

That does not count dozens of additional LFR games I played or DM’d at conventions.

That also does not count hundreds of weekly(ish) home group 4e games since 2014, continuing until the present day.

I have played a lot, and I mean a lot, of 4e.

Back to LFR -- later in its lifespan, I contributed in my own small way to various LFR adventures as a playtester, editor, and in a few cases as an author. I mention this not to puff up my own importance but to clarify where I come from: a place of deep familiarity with and love for all things 4e and LFR. A love that also allows me to criticize where appropriate.

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LFR Adventure Codes

A word about LFR adventure codes:

• each adventure begins with a 4-letter region abbreviation (for example, LURU for Luruar or WATE for Waterdeep),
• followed by a digit to indicate the year of LFR's existence (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6),
• followed by one or two digits counting up the number of adventures in that region/year combination.

For example: LURU1-2 or WATE2-4.

The named regions in LFR (such as Luruar or Waterdeep) effectively didn't mean anything. They were a vestige from earlier organized play programs in which the real world was mapped onto various parts of Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms.

There was also the CORE "region" which was a catchall for LFR adventures intended to be broadly applicable.

There were also other codes for special adventures of various types (ADAP, SPEC, etc.) which I'll explain when they come up.

Bottom line -- don't worry about it. The codes are arbitrary, like an old DOS filename.

 

[Joshua Randall]

The very first Living Forgotten Realms adventure was the Weekend in the Realms kickoff WEEK1-1, run at our store in October 2008. (Along with WEEK1-2 and WEEK1-3 because it was a triple-length adventure!)

And… I don't have access to that file. It's not on the LFR adventures website and even if it were, I wouldn't have much to say about it. My recollection is that Weekend in the Realms, year 1, was a decent introduction to the game -- remember, we were all learning as we went and fumbling around to grab on to the at-the-time new edition. But there weren't any amazingly cool encounters nor monsters to learn from.

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After WEEK1-1/2/3, the first normal adventure for LFR was CORE 1-1 Inheritance. So let's make that our first example, too.

As a reminder, I'm not going to dissect the plot, so if you want to know what was actually happening in any given adventure, please grab the file from the LFR adventures website and take a look.

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CORE 1-1 Inheritance
by Pieter Sleijpen
reviewed by Sean Molley and Shawn Merwin

https://livingforgottenrealms.com/adventures/CORE0101LFR.zip

The premise here is that in Urmlaspyr, a city in "free" Sembia near Suzail in Cormyr, there is some MacGuffin that the PCs are hired to retrieve for a down-on-its-luck noble family. Literally a fetch quest. That's not an interesting premise at all.

What is interesting is the approach laid down by this adventure, an approach that would be mimicked in many, many other adventures for the next six years.

• Encounter 1: PCs meet the quest giver at the start location (Suzail) and can make some skill checks during the conversation. PCs must accept the quest if they want to play this adventure.
• Encounter 2: PCs journey to the target location (Urmlaspyr) and can make open-ended skill checks to investigate.
• Encounter 3: PCs traverse the target location via a skill challenge.
• Encounter 4: PCs locate the specific building that holds the MacGuffin via another skill challenge.
• Encounter 5: PCs dig through the rubble of the specific building via yet another skill challenge.

(In summary: that is two open ended skill-check-centric encounters followed by three skill challenges in a row.)

Much has been written about 4e skill checks and skill challenges (in my opinion, the less said about them the better). Regardless of what you think about skill challenges, here's the first lesson we can learn from LFR:

Do not start your adventure with multiple instances of investigation and skill-checking (unless your game is built around investigation and skill-checking as core activities).

So yes, we're starting with an anti-lesson, with a "don't do this". The reason not to do this is because in games like 4e D&D that are built around heroic action, you want to lead with the strengths of the game system, not the weaknesses. Grab everyone's attention so they put down their smartphones and can’t wait to play.

In F20 games like D&D (particularly in 4e), you should start the adventure with a combat encounter. "Roll for initiative" is a longstanding cliché about the best way to start a new D&D campaign. And clichés exist for a reason: because they contain an element of truth.

If this were GUMSHOE or some other game with a strong investigation premise backed up by rich rules around skills? Then yes, absolutely, start with a bunch of skill checks.

But for most versions of D&D or F20 games in general? Action!

Immediate action or, if you must have some setup, very quickly get to the action.

A better start for CORE1-1 would be to drop the PCs into the adventure as they're digging through the rubble, with a brief flashback to establish why they're here. This one short skill-checking encounter would lead directly into a combat encounter, which in my opinion is a better start than five skill-checking encounters in a row.

Tomorrow, we'll look at CORE1-1's first combat encounter and dissect it to see what we learn.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Encounter 6 of CORE 1-1 is the first combat encounter. This encounter is worth unpacking in detail because it's super ambitious and impressive for one of the earliest fan-written 4e adventures.

The combat takes place as the PCs traverse a trapped corridor within the ruined location en route to the MacGuffin they need to acquire.

The opposition consists of

2 clay scouts (S)
2 iron cobras (C)
2 magic crossbow turrets (T)

From the encounter writeup we learn the following:

The clay scouts and iron cobras are initially hidden or out of line-of-sight. The magic crossbow turret traps only trigger when the PCs get about two-thirds of the way down the corridor. There's a pit at the beginning of the corridor. There are some long-dead bodies visible that may offer clues to observant PCs. There's rubble that counts as difficult terrain. There are statues to hide behind for cover from ranged attacks. There may be a cloud of dust that creates the lightly obscured condition, depending upon the outcome of the immediately preceding skill challenge.

This encounter has so much going on! The plethora of details and naturalistic approach give this encounter a delightfully old-school gloss. To quote the adventure,

• The corridor to the vault was once heavily trapped, but the ravages of time have caused a lot of damage.
• The alcove, directly to the left of the entrance, has partially collapsed, filling the area with debris. The corridor itself remains relatively uncluttered, since most of the debris fell into the pit.
• The statues on that side [of] the wall are life-sized humans, depicting various richly dressed lords and ladies, possibly ancestors of the Thanterim family.
• Directly across from the trigger plates, the PCs can see the skeletal remains of a human slammed against a statue. The glitter of jewels can also be seen.

(Note that I have picked out the relevant info that was scattered various places and presented it to you in a short list.)

See, everything here makes sense -- this is Gygaxian naturalism done right.

• There are traps in the corridor to protect access to the MacGuffin (though the doors at the opposite end), but the ravages of time have caused things to break down, which is why there's so much debris (difficult terrain) here.
• There are statues because this was the abode of a noble family, and noble families always have statues of themselves.
• There is a skeleton here because some prior thief tried and failed to navigate the corridor. Although the thief did manage to recover some glittery jewels, which is a fine lure for the current PCs.

All of that detail is extremely cool and evocative, but what we have learned since the old school days is that humans need time to process information. When you throw so many details at the players and DM all at once none of those items land effectively.

In other words, what we have here is sensory overload for both the DM and the players.

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Many readers will be familiar with the seminal article "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" by George Miller (1956).

Although the number has since been partially debunked (see for example Broadbent, D.E., 1975; or Mastin, L, 2010) -- the key finding, that entered our collective understanding, is that human working memory can only hold a small number of items at once.

The newest thinking is that the number isn't 7±2 (5 to 9), it's more like 4±1 (3 to 5). See for example Jeff Johnson's book Designing with the Mind in Mind.

I have found in my own experience, backed up by observing other DMs, that a good rule of thumb is no more than 3 types of monsters per encounter, alongside no more than 2 other things in that encounter (terrain features, and so forth). This is close to the "four, plus or minus one" recommendation given by Jeff Johnson, so at least my extremely large sample of anecdotal experience matches current-day working-memory theory!

You can adjust these numbers up or down situationally.

Simple-to-run monsters might count less towards the total. For example, a simple Skirmisher with just one ranged attack it will spam doesn't take up as much mental processing power as a complex Skirmisher that alternates between melee and ranged attacks and also has an immediate reaction. (However, even the very simple Skirmisher is still an item in the encounter, so be careful not to grossly exceed the "no more than 3 types of monsters" recommendation.)

Easy-to-understand non-monster things might also count less towards the total. In 4e, Difficult Terrain is an example: it's easy to understand (costs one extra square of movement) and it is typically well indicated on the map. Thus, Difficult Terrain maybe "doesn't count" as one of your 2 other things in that encounter, or counts as ½ alongside some other easy-to-understand feature.

Conversely, a big climactic encounter warrants higher complexity with a higher than usual number of items. When the DM knows it's the climactic encounter, and when that information is properly signalled to the players, we can expect everyone to sit forward in their chairs and to bring their maximum concentration -- which allows everyone to ratchet up their working memory to hold more than the usual number of items.

Climactic encounters can have more than 3 types of monsters: maybe a boss (Solo), a couple lieutenants (Elites), and two different types of normal monsters -- 4 types of monsters. Climactic encounters could also have more than 2 other things: maybe a lava flow that damages anyone who enters, and some crumbly pillars that can be knocked over, and a mystical control panel the PCs can interact with to weaken the boss monster's defenses -- 3 types of other things. Of course, you don't want to overdo it, even in a climactic set-piece encounter.

All of the above is more art than science. Much like the Pirate Code, the lessons and recommendations we develop here are not hard and fast rules -- they're guidelines.

So let's make this guideline our second lesson:

Limit the number of items in an encounter to about 3 monster types and about 2 other things so that the DM and the players can process the information.

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The problem with Encounter 6 of CORE1-1 is that is has 3 monsters types and also at least 4 other things going on (and that's after I extracted the "other things" info from where it was scattered). And keep in mind this is meant to be one of, if not THE, first ever LFR adventures for a DM and players with a new game system. Particularly for the DMs, this was not easy to run.

My hat is off to whomever ran this for me at the FLGS back in 2008 (sadly, my records were not that detailed... yet).

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I still haven't said a word about the monsters. Yet there is still so much to say about things other than monsters, here. More to come!

 

[Joshua Randall]

I wrote earlier that this encounter is "super ambitious and impressive". While it might be overly ambitious in terms of the sheer volume of information, its heart is in the right place. What do I mean by that? I mean that CORE1-1 understands that while "fight monsters" is already a fine 4e combat encounter paradigm, the encounter becomes much more interesting when you add some wrinkles to the fight.

I'll unpack my own statement:

"Fight monsters" is already a fine 4e combat encounter paradigm -- For a game like 4e with strong monster design, combat can be plenty enjoyable on its own merits. Stick a good mix of monsters on a hypothetical featureless plane and it just works.

One could argue that these early 4e monsters weren't all that well designed. They certainly didn't reach the peaks of monster excellence that 4e would later achieve with Monster Vault and beyond. But even the Monster Manual 1 monsters being used here are not terrible. (And yes, I promise eventually to crack open some statblocks.)

The encounter becomes much more interesting when you add some wrinkles to the fight -- Combat becomes far more enjoyable when in addition to monsters, the map is meaningful. And combat becomes far more enjoyable again when there is an objective other than "kill 'em all!"

In this encounter, the map is meaningful because it contains terrain features that both impede the PCs and can be exploited by the PCs. More on this below.

Also in this encounter, the PCs' objective is to traverse the corridor to the end so they can unlock the doors that lead to the MacGuffin. The PCs don't need to kill clay scouts and iron cobras and they don’t need to disable crossbow turrets. Those monsters and traps are impediments in the way of their objective.

(That said, because of how much fun the combat gameplay loop is, the players likely want to kill the monsters anyway.)

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The map in this encounter is meaningful because it forces the PCs to engage with the impediments (the monsters and traps) en route to the doors.

If we go back to our hypothetical featureless plane, that vast empty expanse of squares would allow the PCs easily to bypass any impediments (especially stationary impediments like traps) and to beeline for the doors. The reason we don’t use featureless planes in practice is because we want the map to matter. We want terrain features that restrict PC movement, up to and including impassable walls that channel the PCs where we want them to go.

At higher levels, the PCs might be able to fly, burrow, long-distance teleport, phase through solid rock, or otherwise quickly traverse the corridor regardless of any terrain features or even regardless of walls.

But here at 1st level? The PCs have to put one foot in front of the other. They have to respect the map. (Low-level Encounter teleport powers, such as the Eladrin's racial feature, can bypass some of this map but not all of it.)

Lessons:

Add an objective (other than “kill ‘em all!”) to a combat encounter to increase the interest of that encounter.

Use the map to restrict PC movement and to guide PCs towards their objective.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I do have some issues with this map. Let's look at it again:

One of the biggest complaints about LFR is that it far too frequently starts the PCs in "the penalty box" where they are tightly bunched. Not only crushed into fireball formation, but also stuck in an unfavorable position that no rational PCs would willingly put themselves into.

CORE1-1 doesn’t literally show dashed lines outlining its penalty box (that "innovation" would come a bit later in LFR’s development), but the encounter tells us that the PCs enter from the stairs near the broken door (on the far left).

And… they’re behind a pit. It’s an open pit, so it's not going to take anyone by surprise, but it’s still something that immediately slows down the game because the players and DM need to operate the rules for jumping over pits and/or the rules for falling into pits.

Once past the pit, the PCs will immediately gain LOS (line of sight) to one of the Clay Scouts, which according to the encounter intro for the DM, is Hiding.

Hidden is one of the worst RAW (rules as written) elements of 4e, a morass so sticky that we needed a lengthy thread on the Wizards forums (archived here) to sort it out.

Back in 2008, we didn't have Rules of Hidden Club sorted out, so you'd see LFR encounters with a phrase like this one:

The homunculi stay hidden until the PCs see them, trigger the trap[,] or move beyond the trigger plates.

Thus there is immediately a branch in the flowchart for what happens in this encounter: do the PCs detect the Clay Scout in the pit? By RAW, as soon as each PC moves into LOS (line of sight) to a Hidden monster, that monster loses Hidden; and the PCs basically start with LOS to the pit! The monster would need Cover or Concealment to retain Hidden, which the Clay Scout doesn't have in this situation.

But it was 2008 and nobody knew better, so what happened was that each PC made a separate, individual Perception check to detect the Clay Scout. It's hypothetically possible that all PCs failed to detect the monster! In which case, the Clay Scout stays "Hidden" until the PCs "trigger the trap" some distance down the corridor.

So before anything happens in this combat encounter that involves combat, the players have already needed to consult the rules twice (jumping / falling and Rules of Hidden Club) and needed to roll dice a bunch: Athletics to jump over the pit, falling damage if falling into the pit, PCs’ Perceptions vs. Clay Scout’s Hide (arguably not needed, but probably was rolled in practice).

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At some point someone will detect the Clay Scout and it will enter the initiative. It has an initiative modifier of +7, which is higher than most 1st-level 4e PCs: from around +4 to +5 at best (the DEX 18 or 20 rogue or ranger) to as low as +0 or -1 for anyone who tanked their DEX (“cleric speed!” is the operative cliché).

Given the wide variance of the d20, we can’t really determine where that +7 Initiative will land the Clay Scout that is hiding in the pit, but mathematically it does have an edge.

Initiative is another set of dice rolls that have to be processed and their results tracked for the remainder of the encounter. I have a deep and abiding hatred towards rolled initiative in any game system, and I have utterly excised rolled initiative from all my games since about 2010… but I will save that rant-slash-house-rule for another day and assume we’re running LFR by the book here.

This encounter immediately confronts the fledgling DM with the question: when should I call for initiative? On the one hand, as soon as the DM lays out the dungeon tiles, everyone knows this is a combat encounter, so we may as well roll initiative and acknowledge that reality. On the other hand, until one of two triggers happens in the encounter (PCs spot Clay Scout or PCs pass a certain point on the map), there is no opposition in place that would make turn order matter. On the gripping hand, if the DM gets the PCs’ initiatives then he can impose some order on the chaos of exploration of this complex space. On the… four-armed white Barsoomian ape’s hand… a call for initiative disrupts the pure exploration old-school vibe we have going on here.

I suspect in historical practice most DMs called for initiative as soon as this encounter started; i.e., as soon as the map tiles got set out.

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We can thus add another set of rolls to the beginning of this encounter. Roughly in the order that I suspect they would have happened historically:

1. Initiative
2. Perception vs. Stealth (arguably not needed, but likely rolled anyway)
3. Athletics checks vs. pit
4. falling damage (possibly mitigated by Acrobatics, a 5th roll!)

Nobody has made an attack roll yet and that is already a ton of dice clattering across the table.

Here is where Learning from LFR depends upon what game you want to play at your table.

It's a completely legitimate mode of play to say all of those rolls are great: they force us to slow the game down, to consider the details of what is happening, and to take pleasure in that moment-to-moment detail.

At my table, all those rolls force us to slow the game down and argh it hurts we just want an exciting combat when can we roll attacks/damage go go go! I'm exaggerating my own position. But this is my thread, so I get to make these my next lessons:

Do not front load your encounters with multiple dice rolls (other than initiative, if you use it).

Do not front load your encounters with multiple complex rules cases.

I worded these specifically: the terms "front" and "multiple" are doing some work here. We will eventually see examples where extra dice rolls and complex rules get added to an encounter later in the encounter (not at the front) and in small doses (not multiples). Which turns them into ingredients that can make a normal, OK encounter into a special, exciting encounter.

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So far, this thread proceeds down a painful path, wherein I must force myself to dissect examples that contain "don't do this" rather than "here's an awesome example to steal!" I will continue despite the pain, because this groundwork will make later examples that much stronger. We'll be able to compare later examples to CORE1-1 Encounter 6, and we will see how those later examples improved upon the baseline.