Underdark adventure with Demons, Beholders, Elementals and a Hydra

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] I'm amazed you have been playing a 4e campaign without miniatures or battle maps! Theoretically I see how it could be done, but haven't known any 4e DMs who've done it consistently.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Quickleaf

I don't play it that way either. I assumed that most people do not. Do a lot of people actually own a large set of miniatures and battlemaps? I figured that most people do not and they either use tokens + acetate grid + sharpie or a some sort of VR table and wifi and TotM for quick and dirty fights. Are miniatures and battlemaps mainstream?

 

[pemerton]

beholders are just too damn cool

I've never used them before, because of hesitation at the whole SoD thing. But in the encounters above I pushed the 4e equivalent hard - bodaks, nightwalkers' Finger of Death, beholder petrification and disintegrate - and they played pretty well, I think. Though not something that I'd do in every encounter.

 

[pemerton]

I'm amazed you have been playing a 4e campaign without miniatures or battle maps!

I'm always happy to amaze, but on this occasion I think I've only confused. As is shown in the map at the bottom of the post, I use a map and tokens - it's just that (generally) my maps are handdrawn onto photocopied gridded paper (I draw these up on my daily train commute to work), and the tokens are mostly old boardgame pieces. If a module has a good fold-out map, I will use that, either for its own purpose (eg the homestead in Night's Dark Terror, the Well of Demons in H2) or repurposed (as in the Orcus temple described above).

In the photo, the multi-tiered tokens are the PCs (black: drow; red: invoker-wizard; yellow: dwarf; white: paladin; blue: elf), the cardboard is the hydra, the white ones with green edges are salamanders, the slightly raised black and red ones are archons, and all the flat coloured counters stacked on top or underneath are conditions markers (red: bloodied; blue, white - quarried by elf ranger, marked by paladin; orange - marked by dwarf fighter; etc). The dice mark the two ends of the Arcane Gate.

I would find 4e very hard to run without some form of visual representation.

Also, whose cheat sheet did you think I am using? I generally do my own MM3 damage conversions, and typically stick to whatever dice were used in the original monster.

EDIT: Ah, looking at the photo again I've worked it out! I have a whole lot of resources (eg Blackleaf's business card, and some random internet guy's cheatsheet) combined onto a couple of A4 pages that I clip at the back of my GM rules notes (other stuff in there - some houserule notes, my skill challenge guidelines, and photocopies of all the ritual descriptions). Stuff like that comes in handy from time to time.