In order to create an effective, interesting, and challenging adventure; you had to make sure that every single encounter was challenging in and of itself.
I now had to make every single encounter some sort of challenge.
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I like 4e, but it's a different "genre" than 1st-3.x/PF/Next. Those games are more adventure style. They're Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, 4e was action.
A 1st/2nd/3.x/PF game to me is an adventure story, while 4e is an action story.
I agree that 4e only works if every encounter/event/episode of play is interesting. But I am inclined to generalise that over RPGs as a whole.
I certainly don't experience, in my 4e game, any dramatic "adventure vs action" contrast of the sort that you are describing here. The PCs go to places and exciting stuff happens to them. Sometimes they are the initiators. Sometimes they are the victims of others' initiations.
If players only have daily and at-will abilities and run across a scout or guard, they're not going to waste those daily abilities to not waste the resources. They may, however, lose other resources such as HP/healing or ammunition.
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If resources are shifted back to an encounter based design, that means that any encounter that isn't in and of itself a challenge becomes nothing more than a waste of time. They're not losing any resources with a short, easy encounter. Even if things go bad (which in a daily-based resource balance means they may have to use up spell slots for healing or attack), it's not going to matter because those encounter resources come right back.
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If that had been a previous edition or Next as-written, it still could have been an interesting combat. The
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his attack would've meant something more than "Oh no, I have to spend one healing surge."
Two responses. First, losing healing surges matters. This is the major long-term resource management of 4e, at least as it plays at my table.
Second, you answered your own question:
Then that's no longer a fight. That's a skill challenge with initiative.
In 4e taking out a guard or two is also a skill challenge (with or without initiative). Mechanically, the way I handle it is as a skill check to turn an NPC into a minion (and hence a one-shot kill on a successful attack). If the skill check fails, then the NPC isn't minionised, at which point it can be resolved quickly using the combat rules and the PC runs the risk of being heard, having the NPC escape, etc.
But you could run it even more abstractly if you wanted: skill challenge - success leads to minionisation, failure leads to the NPC escaping to sound the alarm.
Small encounters (e.g. a couple of guards at the entrance) often not worth the set up time, compared to how they progress the story. You could of course run such things as a skill challenge, but I found that this didn't sit well with the players, they expect fights of any kind to use the combat mechanics.
This han't been my own experience.
Encounter-based design forces me as DM to make sure that every encounter in and of itself is challenging, eliminates the usefulness of small encounters like a couple of guards or a single enemy, and creates an artificial feel to design that forces each "room" of a dungeon to act independently of all others.
Encounter-based design makes no logical sense for a story standpoint (because monsters or NPCs aren't going to stay huddled in encounter-level appropriate groups) or from a historical game standpoint (4e is the only edition of D&D and now that I think about it the only roleplaying game I can think of that had an encounter-based design).
Again, two things. First, this sounds to me like bad scenario design. If you're setting up situations that are non-verisimilitudinous, stop doing it. Design scenarios that are versimilitudinous instead, including where friends and allies come to one another's aid.
Second, encounter-based design is pretty much the standard for a whole swathe of contemporary RPGs: Maelstrom Storytelling is an early example (1997) but there is also HeroWars/Quest, Burning Wheel, and a lot of other indie or indie-inspired systems.
And most of these games aren't notorious for their weak stories. The main design purpose of encounter (or scene/situation) based design is to produce
strong stories without railroading - the GM frames a scene, the players engage it with their PCs, everyone gives it all they've got using the agreed-upon action resolution mechanics, and
because the scene was interesting, and had stuff in it to engage and challenge the players (and their PCs), when it comes to a resolution the shared fiction will be in an interesting state that wasn't known at the begining.
This sort of game doesn't work, of course, if the GM tries to frame all the scenes in advance. Because you can't frame scene B until you know the outcome of encounter/scene A - which, if encounter/scene A was worth playing through at all, can't be known in advance.
In my experience, players will hold onto their daily powers until the "last fight of the day" unless they're thoroughly in the weeds. If you follow the standard 5 encounter design that a lot of adventures had, the first 4 encounters are pretty much the same unless you take pains to vary the monsters and their abilities and the terrain.
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I want a system where I as DM have the freedom to decide what sort of adventure I design.
Whereas pre-4E allowed for more avenues of assault (including ones the DM didn't think of), 4E discouraged going any where your DM hadn't planned.
To me, these suggest bad adventure design. In particular, it suggests that the sequence of events is preordained. Which is the exact opposite of scene-based or encounter-based design - it looks to me like plot-based design with pretty heavy-handed railroading.
I mean, how can the players tell that an encounter is "the last of the day" unless the sequence of events in the fiction is already pre-determined?
In almost all situations, the kobold caves are a single encounter.
I haven't converted, or tried to convert, the Caves of Chaos. I didn't enjoy it when I first encountered it 30 years ago, and my view of it hasn't really changed.
But when I ran the Chamber of Eyes from the 4e module H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth, this was exactly how I ran it. Except for the drunken revellers, who didn't hear the fighting taking place in the rest of the stronghold, it was a single "encounter" with no short rest taken until the PCs had forced the archers to retreat to a defensible position.
No one knew in advance that it would play out this way. There was no need for this alleged "artificial cocooning" of NPCs one from the other.
I build encounters on-the-fly all the time.
Likewise. I often have pre-prepared elements to hand such as NPCs and monsters (either written up or in the rulebooks). But the way things actually play out depends on the players' choices.
In my second session of 4e (running my conversion of Night's Dark Terror) I had to abandon my plan for the goblins to attack the farmhouse, when the PCs were fooled by a goblin trick and instead went out into the forest. A quick sketch map later, and the we were able to resolve the battle between the PCs and 20-odd goblins.
I also rely very heavily on the standard DC and damage charts for this sort of thing (and that is the whole point of those GM tools, isn't it?).
Try to convert one of the old 1st edition modules to 4e, sticking as close to the source material as possible, and see how well it works. I've tried. It doesn't.
Going to have to disagree with you.
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It's all on how you approach the conversion.
I've also converted modules: a lot of the old Basic module Night's Dark Terror, bits of the 3E module Speaker in Dreams, and bits of the Eden Odyssey d20 module Wonders Out of Time. I didn't have any trouble. I did have to make choices about which monsters would work best as minions, which as elites, and the like. But making those decisions is part and parcel of 4e GMing.
If a party of 10th-level 3E adventurers faces five separate ECL 8 combats before facing an ECL 13 set piece, their effectiveness in the final encounter is almost certainly reduced more (compared to how they would fare skipping the easy encounters) than a party of 10th-level 4E adventurers would be facing a level-13 encounter after a string of five level-8 encounters.
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you could argue that the 4E DM should combine some for those level-8 encounters into a smaller number of "real" encounters, but that's exactly the point. The 3E DM doesn't need to change his design.
Well, neither does the 4e GM once s/he designs properly for that system. I don't see that there is any assymetry here, except that you're taking 3E/PF design norms as the default.
That makes sense in a conversion context - if you're converting from system A to system B you will have to correct for different design senibilities in the two systems - but I don't think there is anything default about 3E/PF as such. In my personal experience, it tends to encourage lazy design, in which encounters
aren't interesting and serve no purpose but to wear away hit points. (So-called filler encounters.)
That 4e makes it obvious that encounters are pointless unless they have a genuine point - actually matter within the fiction and to those playing at the table - is for me a strength, not a weakness.
If you want encounter-based play, you can get it from a daily-resource system with minimal fuss.
it's a lot easier to build an encounter-based adventure in an adventure-day based system than vice versa.
I don't agree with this either. Daily-based systems tend to introduce duration tracking, recovery-tracking, and other forms of resource management that drag attention out of the scene/encounter and into the more pedantic, exploratory aspects of play. And these features, whereby action resolution is not confined to the encounter, get in the way of closing finished scenes and opening new ones.
Good encounter-based play needs a good system in which action resolution is focused within the situation/encounter, rather than away from it. And 4e has many features that do this, from its short rest mechanics to its duration rules to its absence of long-lasting buffs.
If you have a daily-based design, you just have to make sure no particular encounter is going to TPK. Even weak encounters are going to chip away at resources and provide some level of challenge managing those resources.
As I said above, for me this reads along the lines of "boring encounters in a daily system can still deplete resources". True, but not describing a game I particularly care to play or GM.
