D&D 4E What is today the best way to start D&D 4E (paid and free)?

[Joshua Randall]

I can’t speak to 4e Encounters, never having played any of them, but another option that I somewhat waffle about recommending in the ‘free’ category is Living Forgotten Realms

Living Forgotten Realms

Official campaign resources for Living Forgotten Realms, including rules, adventures, pre-generated characters, and more. This site is maintained by the LFR Global Admins under license from Wizards of the Coast.

www.livingforgottenrealms.com

I like(d) LFR a lot but the problem is the wheat to chaff ratio is pretty low. I’d avoid anything from years 1 or 2 (there are a few gems but not many) and look at years 3+.

Free is free….

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Does anyone recommend the 4e encounters PDFs? I have never used them but they are cheap and provide a decent number of short sessions most with one focus combat starting at 1st level that look like they could be good intros to the system.

They look like they were mid-4e, post the initial HPE series of modules and before the later acclaimed things like Gardmore and Slaying Stone.

Also if you are thinking about getting 4e PDFs take advantage of the current GM's Day Sale to get them at 40% off.

They were good for their intended purpose. You got together with random people to play one encounter every week. You had all the maps ready. Pregens printed on durable stockcard mini-sheets. And there was fun to be had. I ran it for several seasons and played in a few.

That said, it's hard to see value in them simply as pdfs and without organized play to make use of them, unless you have people willing to participate at your local gathering places and gameholes. The plots aren't great, and the format is terribly linear, more so than even the most railroady adventure you can think of.

But, yes. You could mine them for the encounters, which most are designed for starting characters. I believe there was only 1 or 2 that started higher than level 1.

Keep on the Borderlands (season 3) is my personal favorite. It has an old school feel to it (for obvious reasons). It was the first released after Essentials came out, thus using the new monster designs and game philosophies. It's also longer than most, and actually decent. The keep itself also gets fleshed out later in Dungeon 196 as a potential home base, and becomes the center of the Chaos Scar adventure series.

The quality generally improves in the later seasons, but they also experiment with different approaches and themes. There was a run of all-drow players stories, for example. One Season let players level up after every encounter. And the last few were hybrids with multiple edition stats, and test beds for D&D Next (i.e. 5e).

 

[cavalier973]

The Keep on the Shadowfell would be a good free product with which to start, because you get the pregen characters, a bunch of monster stat blocks, encounter maps, and DM advice.

You don’t have to run the adventure as is. When Chris Perkins ran “Acquisitions, Inc.” through KotS, he hand waved all the beginning part and started them at the dungeon entrance.

It allows people to see if they like the rules before paying any money for it.

I agree that the DMG1 is an exceedingly excellent book.

The first Monster Manual isn’t quite as bad as advertised, especially for heroic tier monsters. It includes “encounter groups” for each monster type, so that the DM can quickly work up a combat encounter. The Monster Vault, though very good, doesn’t provide the encounter groups.

Addendum: the adventure has goblins, kobolds, cultists, drakes, a dragon, zombies, skeletons, and more!

If you are playing in person, and need “miniatures”, a quick and cheap way to make some is to cut 4x6 cards into one inch squares. Label the PC markers with letters, and the monster markers with numbers.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I’m going to say it again and with emphasis:

Keep on the Shadowfell is terrible. It completely misunderstands everything great about 4e. It will make new players either hate 4e, or question why they bothered learning it.

DO NOT use KOTS for anything other than its poster maps.

 

[cavalier973]

Looks like the PDFs of the three core books are on sale right now at drivethrurpg. $6 each.

 

[DEFCON 1]

If you wish to use Keep On The Shadowfell because it was free, but also were afraid that you'd find it to not be a very good adventure... the web blog The Alexandrian went into a very detailed "remix" of this adventure, fixing and changing a whole bunch of things across the entire module to make it better and more comprehensible (at least in Justin Alexander's view.)

Remmixing Keep on the Shadowfell - The Complete Collection

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I remember I remixed KotS as well. I think I cut down the monsters and made it so that the background story was told in visions people visiting the Keep experienced. I also altered some of the story. But the details are fuzzy.

 

[Joshua Randall]

It’s not worth putting so much work into such a bad adventure. Your time is surely worth more than the… (checks eBay)… twenty bucks it would cost to buy a print copy of Cairn of the Winter King, or the $28 for Reavers of Harkenwold, or from DriveThru the $7.19 for the PDF of Madness at Gardmore Abbey.

 

[GreyLord]

Interestingly enough, I'm not sure why everyone says Keep on the Shadowfell is a bad adventure.

I ran it (admittedly, long ago when it came out) and we had a blast with the module.

I've had quite a few 5e adventures that were a LOT worse than it (the original Rise of Tiamat and Hoard of the Dragon Queen come to mind for starters).

It's not the greatest adventure I've ever run by far, but I think people criticize it far more than it deserves.

It's an easy module to run (far easier than some, such as some of the Ruins series where a DM has to start creating their own portions of the Ruins to run the game), and for a beginner DM, probably one of the easier ones to start with in 4e.

I can't seem to pull up DMsguild this instant, but one item I'd probably say was a better starter than the module was the Quickstart set (which I think was also free on DMsguild). It had more introductory stuff, written for beginners, and also had a short adventure.

Ah, here we go...

D&D 4e Quickstart

It is also free

Well, I was wrong, it appears. The quickstart that's free on DMsguild only offers the same quickstart rules found in Keep on the Shadowfell and nothing else (so no starter adventure, etc.). Which is a shame.

 

[overgeeked]

Interestingly enough, I'm not sure why everyone says Keep on the Shadowfell is a bad adventure.

Mostly that it’s a dungeon crawl designed before the rules for 4E were finalized. 4E is absolutely terrible for constant little resource-draining fights, which is what Keep is, which is what most dungeon crawls are. 4E does fewer, bigger set piece fights really well.