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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7170446" data-attributes="member: 29398">Based both on the ones I've run and the ones I've read but not run, I'll grant they have some decent features...but awesome?  Not so much, for the most part. (with one notable exception that I'm aware of: Madness at Gardmore Abbey - which I own and have read through - looks quite interesting and well-designed, though I've yet to run it)I'll give them this one.  Good variance here.To me this is a bug rather than a feature, as I prefer there be some exploration between the encounters - sometimes a completely empty room generates as much tension as a room full of foes.  I'm also not a fan of linear adventure design with no junctions or choice points - i.e. to get to the 5th encounter you have absolutely no choice but to slog through encounters 1 2 3 and 4 whether you want to or not - and some 4e modules are very bad for this.Sometimes too much so - I'd rather see a fairly wide range of CR/EL equivalents within a module, from near-pushover to edge-of-the-seat best-to-run-away levels.  Some of the 4e modules tend to have a rather narrow range of encounter levels.The one thing that 4e modules generally do accomplish very well indeed - which I'm surprised you don't note - is the dramatic set-piece memorable battle using varied terrain, a spread of opponents, and giving lots of tactical options for both PCs and their foes.  Every 4e module I've seen has at least 2 or 3 of these, interspersed between lesser encounters and battles.However - and quite germaine to the thread topic - the one thing that stood out to me when I started converting and running 4e modules (KotS in particular) is their seeming expectation that the party will probably blast through the whole adventure - or certainly great big chunks of it - in one run, without resting at all.  Part of that, I think, is because 4e allows much faster resource recovery than earlier editions and (particularly the early) modules were written so as to highlight this.  But it's a bloody nuisance when trying to convert for a non-4e game. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Lan-"Marauders of the Dune Sea, converted for 1e and with a little tweaking to add some choice points and extra passages in the dungeon part, actually played out really well"-efan</blockquote>

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