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="MoutonRustique" data-source="post: 6924577" data-attributes="member: 22362">The bold text bears repeating.Someone also used the phrase: "This isn't Dungeons & Dragons, it's Dragons and Dungeons" as a rather pithy turn of phrase.To counter my friend above:You can use very large dungeons (in that the map is very large), but it requires a little bit of an adjustment:1 - you'll want to group areas of the dungeon as encounters as opposed to [rooms]2 - a good deal of the dungeon should not have creatures - this works as a double bonus: one, less low-value combats; two, the players now have access to more terrain, hazards and traps to use against the enemies by maneuvers and falling back and such; extra bonus(!): it often makes more sense in the fiction to have a bit of breathing room (ha!) between creatures...[/pedantic counter] <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> [MENTION=51843]Eilathen[/MENTION]As to the adventures - yes, many are built on the: [room 1 -fight!], [room 2 - fight!], [corridor 1 - fight!], [...] structure that is so very poor.On the flip side, it's not much work at all to cut those combats out of the adventure, and to group a couple into more significant events. On the whole, I've found 4e adventures to nurture some very cool stories and ideas - they're just not well served by the implementation...Lastly - xp in 4e is a great gage of power when building encounters. 90% of the time (19 times out of 20 - hehe, poll stat humour) the encounter guidelines will deliver what was indicated. Other than that, I strongly urge you to set-up a different leveling system for your players. There are mountains(!) of very good, different options.My preferred one: remove "kill xp" completely. Make major quests worth ~1/4 of a level's xp, and minor quests 1/12 (a third of the big ones). This makes the outcomes of the adventure and the choices of the PCs matter more. And it removes the very, very bad incentive to kill everything in sight. Another good aspect of this approach is that you can set the pacing quite easily by changing the number of major quests required to gain a level (For instance: You want every adventure to have a major quest and characters to gain a level after a successful adventure? - bam! Done.)</blockquote>

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