Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7452648" data-attributes="member: 996">4e was very easy to run, in general, not just in the sense of creating combats, which was quite simple.  I was struck both by the ease of creating a combat (4 combat, in fact, in a matter of minutes), and the ease of 're-skinning' monsters the first time I had occassion to run an impromptu pickup game at a convention.  I didn't have a DMG on me, but I did happen to have a MM, I vaguely remembered the gist of the encounter building guidelines - an equal number of standard monsters of the same level is a basic combat.  Solos are equivalent to 5 monsters, Elites to 2, minions 1/4.   I flipped through the MM for elementals (that was the theme of the mini-adventure I had in mind, a 2-bit ToEE), didn't find anything around the level I needed (4th - the level of a few characters one of the players had on hand).  I did quickly find firebats, a young black dragon, and spectres. I re-skinned the spectres as air elementals, simply dropping the necrotic keyword from their attacks, and the black dragon as a water elemental (can't, almost 10 years later remember what I used for the earth elemental, pretty sure it was Elite + minions).  Monsters were easy to run, too, they had everything they could do spelled out in a stat-block, typically a quarter-page, so there was rarely any need to look anything up - they got easier when the stat block format changed, grouping like actions under headings.  And, PCs were easier to deal with, too, because you could just look at the power they were using and fairly easily tell what it did, relatively little interpretation needed, and what they did was rarely out of line (and, until Essentials, swiftly errata'd when it was), so there wasn't this need to completely understand everything every PC might be able to do when throwing together an encounter.The pitfall was that it was also easy to just fall into a rut.</blockquote>

Verification