Second Son: A 1st Level 4th Edition Adventure

[SlyFlourish]

Balance

I tried to balance it based on what I saw at D&D Experience. Overall it has less monsters than there are PCs so the monsters can be a little more powerful.

It seems that 4e's power curve is a lot more shallow so a level 5 monster isn't THAT much more powerful than a level 1. The hitpoints are higher but not by a whole lot and the attack power and damage are higher but not that much higher than a ranger's bowshot for example.

I'll let you know what we experience on Thursday!

 

[Iron Sky]

My comments after reading through it:

My take is that Insight= the social version of perception. I'd replace the first and last Perception checks against Jantzen with Insight(even if it isn't what I think it is, it gives the players that have it a chance to shine).

How does that Wisdom check let PCs without goblin speech know what they are saying on page 3? I'd expect it to be "A DC 15 Perceptioncheck and goblin speech..." rather than "A DC 15 Wisdom check or goblin speech..."

"...Three skeletons rise up on either side of the pool. Two draw longswords screaming across the stone ground while the third explodes in purple flames." Are the longswords screaming or the skeletons? What's going across the ground? This stopped me cold trying to figure out what's going on.

Aside from that, it has a great layout, clean formatting and looks like a good, tough adventure. Dunno if I can pull it off with my 4 PC group (especially since they'll murder me if I ask them to play 4E again rather than run my 3.5 campaign), but I'd love to give it a run through.

 

[vagabundo]

I like the format of the adventure, seems easy to run. Nice clean story too.

I would like if the Hobgoblins where level 1 so I could run four of them. Anyone know how we can downgrade them?

 

[SlyFlourish]

Thank you for the feedback, Iron. I updated it appropriately.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Finished

I ran the adventure last night for our regular gaming group. Everyone loved it except for one fellow who seems to be pretty down on 4e already (he's a huge 3.5 player and loves to dig into the rules - not really having any hurts that).

The adventure ran fine - lots of big battles with a lot of damage going back and forth. A couple of characters went down but no one died. I never had to balance encounters on the fly except for adding another hobgoblin in the first encounter.

The big boss encounter with the chainwielder went well - I made him sort of epicy by giving him an action point. His dance of blades or whatever it's called managed to do a lot of damage to a lot of players before they shoved him into the electrified water and killed him. It was a nice big battle.

The game ran just under four hours with six encounters. We didn't do a lot of roleplaying or non-combat encounters so it was pretty much straight battles. Six battles in one night isn't too bad though.

The one fellow in our group who seemed sort of down on it started off by not really liking the Paladin. A couple of times he got stuck behind other members and couldn't get up to the fray. He also felt the paladin did a lot less damage than the other classes and, with the cleric out there, didn't feel he was really needed for healing.

Later it came out that he's just not into fourth. He brought up the whole "It's an MMO! If I want to play it we should all just play World of Warcraft" which is an easy way to complain without really having any merit or fact. Digging into it a little more he picked apart the very thin rules and hated "marking" and all the changes we had to put in place for it based on the changes at DDXP.

Really it came down to him still liking 3.5 and knowing it really really well while I do not. There's no way I'm going back to old grapple and turn undead rules now. There's no way I'm going to try to balance encounters the old way. Even in my current 3.5 game I'm turning the monsters into 4e monsters. Epic monsters get more attacks, higher hps, and special bloodied effects.

Anyway, as far as the rest of it went, people liked the adventure and everyone else at the game table had a good time.

Thanks again for the feedback!

 

[Xorn]

Loved your blog!

I was afraid I wasn't going to find this adventure! I saw it last week and forgot to save it, and after running Raiders of Oakhurst for the party, they don't want to play v3.5 anymore! So it looks like I'll be running 4E one-shots till June. *ugh* (I'm sure they'll finish the 3.5 campaign eventually, but right now everyone just wants to do more 4E!)

Can't wait to run this one. I think I'm doing this one on Saturday, and Burning Plague the weekend after!

 

[ianleblanc]

Many thanks!

Very cool adventure!

One question: is there a way to print out the tiles in 1inch*1inch format? I would like to use the tiles as map tools for my players.

Thanks

 

[pukunui]

I was short two players this evening, so I decided to try running 4th edition for the remaining three. I printed out all three adventures from these boards and chose to go with this one. The players each chose two characters, had a quick read-through of the rules and powers and stuff and away we went. We managed to get through the first two fights.

In retrospect, I think I probably should have used one of the other ones because this one, while good, doesn't showcase the whole "fighting mobs of low-level baddies" thing.

The biggest problem we had was simply uncooperative dice. The players kept on rolling abysmally while I, the DM, kept rolling very well, getting several natural 20s and so on.

Overall, though, the guys seemed to enjoy it. One said he thought it was awesome, if a bit "boardgamey". There others were a bit more reserved in their opinions. I don't think they found it to be a whole lot different to my 3.5 campaign (lots of really tough combats). No one died although several characters dropped into the negatives during the second fight.

The highlight of the night was when the guy playing the wizard decided to use maged hand to pick up a rock and drop it on the hobgoblins. I let him pick up a 20lbs rock and then I had him make a d20+Dex mod vs Ref attack to hit (this was to account for him having to get the spectral hand into just the right place above the hob so that it wouldn't be able to avoid the falling rock). I also guessed and said that the 20lbs rock would do 1d8 dmg.

A couple of things came up to which I didn't know the answers:
1) What kind of action is standing up from prone? A move action?
2) What kind of action is drawing a weapon?
3) Are there weapon sizes? That is to say, could a halfling use a hobgoblin longbow?


Anyway, thanks for the adventure! (And thanks for the convention blog!)

 

[Revinor]

1) What kind of action is standing up from prone? A move action?

And does it provoke AoO? No idea.

2) What kind of action is drawing a weapon?

Minor action. "minor actions are little things like drawing a weapon or opening a door" from the rules from DDXP.

 

[pukunui]

And does it provoke AoO? No idea.

Hmm. That's a good question too.

Minor action. "minor actions are little things like drawing a weapon or opening a door" from the rules from DDXP.

Missed that. Thanks.