I used to hang about Dragonsfoot a lot. I've seen a lot of the complaints I refer to.
Interesting point.
I don't quite agree with it, though. For one thing, I can't think of a published adventure module that
wasn't tailored towards adventurers of a certain level. You don't enter the Keep on the Borderlands and find a Colossal Red Dragon in the first cave, for instance.
Certainly there are tailored difficulty levels in 4e (the varying DCs of slime, for instance), but I don't know if you can extend that to the system as a whole.
Cheers!
I think you misunderstand me. It's one thing to simply go overboard and put a colossal Red Dragon in the first cave in an adventure, it's quite another to rigidly tailor a game built around a group that's got five people in it fulfilling specific roles that belong more to an MMO than to an RPG. If you were to take a published 4E adventure, say, Keep on the Shadowfell, and you were to tailor it for just two players, it would be ridiculous. All this dungeon space for very few monsters and very little treasure; you'd think the poor folks at Winterhaven would've taken Lord Podraig's troops and cleared it out themselves.
Sometimes, you want to put a monster somewhere that is going to completely outmatch the PCs, especially if you run a dynamic campaign that doesn't necessarily revolve around the PCs. One thing that 4E DMG "asks" that you do is tell your PCs the general level of the quest they're undertaking. I would never, ever do that.
One of the ways you build up tension and excitement at the table is by breaking the habit of leading players to where you want them to go. Tell them you're not leading them by the hand, that they can go wherever they want and you simply adjust. Throw out a few hooks, one for an easy adventure, one for a moderately hard adventure, one for a hard adventure, and a few for something that's just impossible on paper. Give the players a hook that involves a lot of treasure for a return of high risk, not bothering to specifically tailor the game to them, and you will develop a lot of tension. If they get in over their heads, if they do not escape, kill them or capture them and then kill them. That will let them know that you do not care about their well-being at all, that you're not leading them by the nose to where you want them to go, and that they truly live or die by their decisions.
When you get your players to ask, "Gee, I wonder if we can really handle this?," you've got them.
4E isn't really designed for this kind of game for a whole host of reasons, primarily the premise as described on pg. 28 DMG. This is a game that tells you that when your PCs are down do not have your monster NPCs keep hitting on them. This is a game in which the condition Immobilized has replaced Paralysis or Petrification; Immobilized basically means that you can defend yourself and you can hit targets, but you can't move, which makes no sense. Petrification was deadly; which is why Medusas and Basilisks were highly feared creatures. They don't do that anymore. Indeed, nothing is really, instantly deadly anymore in 4E. Oh, sure, you could put instantly deadly stuff in the game, but if you wanted to write an adventure for Dungeon Magazine the editors there will tell you, as they've told me, to take out that instant death trap you put in there.
4E wants you to be forgiving to your PCs if they do foolish things. If they go to the land of the giants and they're only 2nd Level, this game doesn't want you to put giants in your encounter tables. Sometimes, the players may decide they need to get somewhere, but they may have to cross an expanse that's known as a feeding ground for a mighty colossal Red Dragon (which, incidently, in 4E, aren't as mighty as they used to be). Yes, if the dragon appears, and attacks, the only recourse for the PCs is to flee or die, but that's part of High Adventure. High Adventure comes at High Risk.
When I submitted an adventure for 4E, it was rejected eight times for reasons that, had the game been written for 3.x, 2E, or 1E, would've been approved. One consideration I put in the adventure was what would happen if the PCs had managed to make too much noise or something that alerted the entire castle they were in. The place was filled with gnolls, and that if there were intruders anywhere in the castle they would ALL descend on the PCs. WotC editors didn't like that.
"Say only a couple encounter groups hit the PCs." They told me.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because if you throw forty-two gnolls at the PC's they're sure to be killed or captured."
"And? Your point being?" I said.
"Just rewrite this."
I don't handicapp or adjust my monsters on the condition or composition of the PCs. I stopped doing that back when I was first starting out, because there's no telling just what conditions may exist for the party.
That's the point I'm trying to make. I put monsters where I think they should be, and give them just what I want that would make sense to me under the circumstances, and respond to common sense directives based on those circumstances. If I want to put a colossal Red Dragon on the first cave in the Keep at the Borderlands, I will (maybe it's just acting like a sphinx or something, or maybe it's really an elaborate illusion).
