The Slow Death of Epic Tier

[Upper_Krust]

I think rather than the WotC approx. 30 encounter approach a much better way of designing 4E adventures would be to have maybe simpler 12 encounter adventures:

Act One: 3 encounters
Act Two: 6 encounters (some encounters in Act Two optional/variable paths)
Act Three: 3 encounters (Encounters in Act Three of variable difficulty depending upon events in Act Two).

ie.

Act One - getting to the 'dungeon'
Act Two - in the 'dungeon'
Act Three - something bad happens ('dungeon' starts to collapse/flood - race to escape while fighting enemies/boss)

Every detailed encounter must feature an important elite or solo opponent/trap. Anything else is a potential random encounter.

In Act Two, the path might split between 2-3 options. Depending on which path you take (which might be a story path not necessarily a literal pathway) the encounters in act three might be easier or harder.

A potential random encounter between the (defensive position) detailed encounters could be avoided, but at the risk of having the enemies of the random encounter folded into the next main encounter (showing up after 3 rounds for instance).

You could probably boil E3 down to its 12 primary encounters without much of a problem.

 

[MerricB]

It took us one 4-5 hour session to finish the Forge of Four Worlds segment of E3, which comprised of 7 encounters. One of them, thankfully, was a skill challenge/negotiation (so took about 5-10 minutes). Only about 2 of them were really significant/long encounters. I think that I could have taken one or two encounters out without affecting the adventure too much.

I'm now pretty sure that the biggest problem with the 4E adventures isn't the number of encounters, it's the length of the encounters. At present, our group is able to race through the encounters, and it changes the feel of the adventure significantly. 30-40 minutes per encounter is very different to 1 hour per encounter.

Cheers!

 

[keterys]

Yeah, that's _very_ group dependent. In playtesting the level 23 adventure for LFR we had crazy disparities - the most egregious was one encounter that was 22 minutes for one group and 4.5 hours for another. My theory is to design encounters to take 60-90 minutes, and if some groups take 30-60 minutes - good for them - and nobody should ever take more than 2 hours. Some of which _has_ to be on the DM and PCs.

 

[Gort]

At present, our group is able to race through the encounters, and it changes the feel of the adventure significantly. 30-40 minutes per encounter is very different to 1 hour per encounter.

Why do you suppose this is?

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

My group takes 1.5 to 2 hours to get through a combat encounter.

This is due to a number of things:
Large group. {5 to 9}
Long spread between games {once a month}
Fast leveling {every 2 or 3 sessions}
- these last two result in players who take more time to figure out what they are going to do
'Casual' gamers..we often get sidetracked on other topics.

Its not bad, but I am working to shave as much time as possible while still feeling epic. {24th level}


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