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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Primitive Screwhead" data-source="post: 5096294" data-attributes="member: 20805">Short sessions are very much a plot-line killer. My current WoBS campaign is a monthly game of 4 to 6 hours. We usually get 2 combat encounters in and some roleplay/explore in between. This meant that the adventure through Castle Kortsull took about 6 months of real world time to do 3 adventuring days and I had to regularly prompt the players as to why they were there, what thier goal was, and why it was important. However, I spend maybe 3 hours prepping between session, which includes converting the 3.5 module to 4e, trimming it down to fit the session, and sending out the pre/post-game emails. We often socialize for about half an hour before the game starts, but as a group we have chosen to focus more during play as a means to get more enjoyment out of the game. There have been growing pains to get us to this point, the campaign has been going on for over two years now. I would recommend looking at how your encounter builds are different from the earlier levels. One of the things 4e does pretty well is level out the encounter math, so an encounter should be able to scale pretty evenly with the player options.  In a recent 14th level encounter, I tossed the equivilent of an adventuring party against the group {1 elite leader/artillery, 1 elite controller, 7 lower level skirmishers} It was a nasty combat that lasted a bit longer than usual, but the group will remember Lord Gorquith and Findle the Bard for some time to come! Everyone ended the encounter bloodied, down to less than half healing surges, and out of daily powers.  The key to running that combat relatively quickly was that the skirmishers tactics were very simple, I only really had to pay attention to the options for the two elites.  I think the reason it was a good combat was that I avoided the static 'queensbury rules' fight, where everyone just lines up and hits with thier best weapon. The party was divided and challenged right off the bat by a Wall of Cold and Tasha's Hideous Laughter. And I am rambling.. but I noticed something in your post: "Minimal need to tweak monsters". I custom-make every monster that goes into my encounter mix, and generally it takes about 5 minutes per monster. My rules of thumb are to keep the monster level within 2 of the PCs and to build encounters with 1 or 2 more monsters than PCs.  I like including groups of skirmisher types in all my encounters as they are the easiest to run and I can adjust their numbers based on how many players show up.</blockquote>

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