Skipping some encounters in pre-made adventures.

[davethegame]

I've done it for every published 4e adventure I've run. If they avoid a fight through active play, I just give them the XP for what they avoided, and sprinkle in more skill challenge/quest XP. I also don't mind if the PCs are a level behind when they reach the final boss, but then again, I usually have a pretty effective party.

 

[surfarcher]

If they avoid it, they avoid it. No biggie. I just move stuff around or introduce something new (and relevant) if they are looking a bit low level wise.

 

[Stuntman]

If you don't want to punish PC's for skipping encounters that are specifically designed to bump the PC's up a level, just tone down the encounters. Take out a monster or two or replace a standard monster with a minion. Aventures shouldn't force PC's to go through everything.

 

[Chimera]

We're running through the War of the Burning Sky. We play once a month, for 4-5 hours tops. Usually around 3.5.

Our regular GM is out of town for a couple of months, so I took over for the Trial of Echoed Souls module.

If I ran AS IS, I estimate that it would take our group at least a year, and possible closer to 18 months, depending on which paths were taken and what people wanted to do. Given our pace, it was my duty to cut it down to, at most, 6 months. That means no more than two months for each of the three acts in the module.

I sat down with Primitive Screwhead (our regular GM) and went over the module. We streamlined the first act down to four total encounters, or two per session. Where other things were planned or necessary, it became necessary to roll those 'information bits' off into other encounters or gloss them over. There tends to be more "railroading", but only in the sense that we don't have the time for people to spend 3-4 hours running down red herrings before getting back on the path.

Some things just get completely glossed over - such as the whole flavor of the forest. My joke was that, in a D&D world, the "unnatural" elements of the forest are completely natural. So much so that I nicknamed it "Generic Evil Forest 3-B", then used that as a basis to set expectations of what they would find and encounter so that we didn't need to bother with endless minor encounters and flavor blocks. Now, some groups or people might be bothered by that, but not our group. It meant that they know "evil **** happens here, don't be surprised" and we take it for given that the characters deal with it appropriately.

Hey, more time, more flavor. Less time, more handwaving.


Experience point wise, I haven't found it to be an issue. We don't track XPs normally. We just level up every couple of months as needed.

 

[Jhaelen]

Experience point wise, I haven't found it to be an issue. We don't track XPs normally. We just level up every couple of months as needed.

Yep, that's my favored approach in 4e, too. Currently, I still tell them what xp they would have gained from encounters, etc. since some players are interested in it, but I no longer use it to determine when they level up.

I'm a big proponent of skipping routine encounters and have started pruning my 3e adventures, as well. Instead I offer more 'quests' and award xp for achieving goals.

That's another thing that tends to happen more and more often in my 4e games:
The players come up with a clever idea to combine their 'regular' adventure duties with 'side-quests' by asking around who'd like to gets things done in the surrounding area. It's a neat way to grant the pcs some extra rewards.

 

[fba827]

I don't see any problem with doing so as long as you recognize a few things (most of which already mentioned in this thread), like ...
- your level will be lower than assumed for subsequent encounters
- you might miss out on treasure parcels that they assume you earned
- you might miss out on healing potions or important items that might help you (i.e. the cultist holy symbol that lets you bypass the wards/traps if you wear them, etc)
- you might miss a step in the dynamics (this one is hard to explain with out example. But if you go from hard encounter to hard encounter to hard encounter, skipping the easy encounters inbetween, you change the "average" for the players making the hard encounters have much less emotional impact. so some sort of build up is a good thing with some encounters that are easy for the PCs will keep them from feeling frustrated (or overly confident, depending on whether you take out high or low encounters)
- you might miss out on flavor of the story (as silly as this one sounds, if you skip the encounter with the kobold sorcerer, the players may never realize how the town guard was doing those magical things, or realize that the town guard was really inleague with the kobolds all this time)

i'm sure there are others but that's all i can think of at the moment.

Any one encounter skipped here or there probably won't break things. But if you do it often enough, the above points start to become more and more apperent.

Luckily, any of those are easy to overcome as long as you recognize them in advance. So if you don't like some encounter setup for some reason, but all means, no need to bore your players if it would fall flat for the group.

(perhaps even just talk it out and say "you fought X,Y, Z in a tense fight / easy fight" etc.)

 

[Baumi]

My Group started to use Skill Challenges for the "boring" encounters. Which are much faster, more cinematic and still give you XP.

Here are my Rules for it, if you are interested: Flanfs RPG Page | Regeln / DnD4E-Houserules

Skipping Encounters might work too, but you really should play either without XP (just level up when necessary), give out XP like they have fought these encounters or just let them level slower and decrease the difficulty of the later encounters. Also you have to be careful that you don't skip some important clues or locations/treasure/etc.

 

[DSlash]

When I did KotS with my group, I looked at the maps and took a black sharpie and X'd off certain areas. Any important loot I put into different encounters. If the party was under level for later encounters, I adjusted things accordingly. It worked out pretty well and the module didn't drag on.