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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 4707693" data-attributes="member: 9789">Quick update after running one series of encounters and looking at the book more:I have to say, I'm a bit more impressed than when I first looked through it.  As I suspected, some of the numbers are wrong, but many of the ideas in this book are just downright good.  The designers have done a great job of pushing crappy map tiles as FAR as they are able to go:  I only wonder what we could have gotten without this marketing constraint.  But there are some really original and interesting ideas tucked away at least once pretty much every mini-adventure.Also, I mentioned this before but it's worth saying again:  I probably reduced my prep time by 80-90% and my actual run time of the game by maybe 25-35%.  The former was expected (and why I bought the book) but the latter was a pleasant surprise.  Having all the details you need on two facing pages really IS amazing, and I would highly recommend even for your own encounters to mimic this design idea.  Copy stat blocks, make notes, but just put everything together in one simple place - hard copy or electronic - and it will seriously speed up your playtime.  And that's awesome.Overall, even though I've been creating and running encounters for years I think I picked up some good tips for how to make a good 4.0 encounter from this book (probably not as useful for other games), and there are still lots of good ideas to mine/steal/reskin for other encounters.  I'd have to say that after some playtime, I would go back and change my original recommendation up to "maybe."  I'm still not convinced it's worth $30 and you can still technically do it all yourself, but if you're short on time or trying to learn how to make good encounters, I think it can help.</blockquote>

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