D&D 4E Which 4E adventures did you play?

[D'karr]

I think the difference between 3e and 4e adventures was that 3e had a boatload or three 3rd party adventures. 4e seemed much more limited, so bad to average adventures stood out a lot more. It's a lot easier to ignore poor work from a 3rd party.

I think another great thing that 3e had was Paizo really busting their hump to put out good adventures in Dungeon. I remember spending many commutes to work reading over the material. A lot of it did not play out as well as it read (Savage Tide I'm looking at you). But they still put a lot of worthwhile effort into the material.

In addition, Paizo also provided amazing service for their subscription service customers. IMO, nothing guarantees customer loyalty as well as good/awesome service. I might not be a subscriber to the APs anymore, but that is because I have no need for them any longer. I would recommend Paizo's subscriptions just on customer service alone.

I can see why Paizo adventures, and the Pathfinder game have kept such a loyal following, even if I'm not a fan of the game system. They do things right. Kudos to them.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I think another great thing that 3e had was Paizo really busting their hump to put out good adventures in Dungeon. I remember spending many commutes to work reading over the material. A lot of it did not play out as well as it read (Savage Tide I'm looking at you). But they still put a lot of worthwhile effort into the material.

In addition, Paizo also provided amazing service for their subscription service customers. IMO, nothing guarantees customer loyalty as well as good/awesome service. I might not be a subscriber to the APs anymore, but that is because I have no need for them any longer. I would recommend Paizo's subscriptions just on customer service alone.

I can see why Paizo adventures, and the Pathfinder game have kept such a loyal following, even if I'm not a fan of the game system. They do things right. Kudos to them.

Agreed on Paizo - good customer service and doing things the right way has really helped them out. WotC - deserved or not - got a lot of bad publicity with the start of 4E. (I got burned out on 3.5E towards the end, and didn't see that PF had changed 3.5E enough to make it "fun" for the DM again.)

 

[D'karr]

@D'karr Great post and when I read that interview I thought, word for word, what you thought above.

Thanks for the compliment. Great minds think alike and all that. LOL

As time has worn on, and they've showed their hand more and more, the more I'm convinced that Mearls and Cordell utterly, completely, and in all other ways absolutely had zero idea of (a) what the 4e ruleset was capable of, (b) how to properly run an evocative, thematic 4e game, (c) how to write a proper 4e adventure.

I get that vibe too, but I'm not so sure if some of their comments are more a "devils' advocate" type comment, or not. I've argued against Mearls's "clueless" comments in the past. I think the comments sometimes come off as purposely ignorant. If he was not the Lead Dude(tm) at R&D it would really not even register on the "radar", but coming from the Lead Dude(tm) it is almost disturbing.

To blame the ruleset itself for the terrible format of "adventure as ridiculously detailed, dubiously-connected, uber-page-eater delve format" is an extraordinary bit of logic. How about correlation does not equal causation...in fact, how about the inverse; a great portion of the misunderstanding of the capabilities (both genre and non-combat depth) of the ruleset by sections of the community is directly correlated to the abysmally formatted adventures written exactly by the people blaming the ruleset...and such misunderstanding gained momentum and proliferated from there.

I've been running with this ruleset for a long time, and I can say that it is very robust and extremely tweakable. But you have to understand the underlying logic for why things work the way they do. When you understand that, the system and underlying subsystems are very "self-contained". With that understanding, you can rather easily see what knock-on effects would happen if you implement a specific house-rule. That is golden for hyper-tinkerers like myself.

So when I see the game designers say that the ruleset is inflexible I have to wonder if they really understand the underlying framework at all. I can understand if you don't want to make changes because the cost benefit is too high, but using the proper tools within the tool set is not really making sweeping changes. I can understand if you are mandated to use a crappy format for putting ALL encounters in, but then don't blame the tool. Put the blame where it belongs, the crappy adventure writing policy.

Chris Perkins and Steve Townshend quickly became my favorite go-to guys for adventure design. They seemed to really understand that the underlying story is what makes adventures exciting, then they used the ruleset to great effect to provide that. They made the game sing through their adventures. Perkins' DM advice on his column should have been mandatory reading for all 4e designers. Rich Baker also did some very awesome work. The rules tweaks for Gamma World, and 4e Dark Sun, which incidentally Schwalb co-wrote, were simply inspired. The idea of themes, brilliant.

Then we have another "gem" from Cordell with Marauders of the Dune Sea. I don't know why that adventure was even written for Dark Sun. I honestly believe that it must have been sitting somewhere as an adventure for use in Anauroch in the Forgotten Realms and they decided to do a straight up conversion to Dark Sun because Anauroch is a desert, and Athas is a desert planet so "it must fit". The fit to the campaign setting was simply that horrible.

Now don't think that I'm being overly critical of Cordell. I know that sometimes these things are just corporate decisions that the designer has no control over. But then when they spend time saying that the ruleset is inflexible it makes me wonder if they really understood the game at all.

I would have loved to have seen a 4e that embarked on its intrepid journey backed by current adventure design and the current content in Dungeon magazine.

Me too.

 

[D'karr]

Agreed on Paizo - good customer service and doing things the right way has really helped them out. WotC - deserved or not - got a lot of bad publicity with the start of 4E. (I got burned out on 3.5E towards the end, and didn't see that PF had changed 3.5E enough to make it "fun" for the DM again.)

Yep, I heartily agree. Pathfinder might not be my cup of tea for very similar reasons to yours. However Paizo deserves every bit of praise for the work they do, even if I'm not a fan of their game system.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) So when I see the game designers say that the ruleset is inflexible I have to wonder if they really understand the underlying framework at all. (snip)

It still astonishes me to this day that you had three fairly influential WotC employees - Mike Mearls, Rob Schwalb and Bruce Cordell - who basically didn't like and/or didn't get 4E...

Yep, I heartily agree. Pathfinder might not be my cup of tea for very similar reasons to yours. However Paizo deserves every bit of praise for the work they do, even if I'm not a fan of their game system.

... unlike Paizo where it is clear that all of the employees are actually fans of the game they produce, despite its faults.

In relation to the second quote, I also think back to the period of Bill Slavicsek's "leadership" during the 4E period when the 4E tools weren't working etc... and he completely failed to ever address the complaints in any meaningful and public way. Compare and contrast this with Paizo where they really do display leadership at practically every level of the company in terms of engaging with their customer base.

 

[MerricB]

This IMO is quite true, and very telling. I think the Delve format for the presentation of encounters had quite a lot to do with that. However it was almost as if the writers forgot that there is more to D&D than combat, and you can't blame the edition, or the long format for that. The latter adventures bear this out, and if you look at adventures in Dungeon Magazine you also find some gems that don't forget it.

It wasn't the writers. I've heard from some of the adventure writers from Wizards and they were quite clear: it was editorial mandate to do simple, combat-heavy adventures (especially in HPE).

The other part of it, of course, is just that 4E changes the D&D adventure paradigm just too much so that it's something new. You can run a 1E adventure in 2E or 3E (or one of the other ways around) and have no problem because, structurally, adventures all work the same way. 4E requires a different structure. And that's a real problem when the things 4E is actually best at (exploration and role-playing) are ignored in place of lots and lots of combat (which it's bad at, except for the set-piece boss combats).

Cheers!

 

[delericho]

I ran "Kobold Hall", I think it was called - the adventure from the DMG.

I also ran one session (and one encounter) of "Tomb of Horrors", which sadly was the thing that finally convinced me 4e was not a game I'd enjoy running.

Also, I played "Sceptre Tower of Spellgard". And, as with the other two, it failed really badly. This one killed what had been, until then, a very promising campaign.

Fortunately, 4e was pretty good for homebrewing adventures, because my experience of the published adventures (those I played, plus the others I merely read) was unimpressive.

 

[pemerton]

Cordell also wrote Bastion of Broken Souls and Heart of Nightfang Spire - IMO, two of the worse adventures I saw during the 3e era.

I have HoNS but have never run it - it looks like a slog to me.

I ran BoBS (using Rolemaster as my system) and I found it to have a lot of good ideas, from its initial premise to its banished god to its gate in the form of a living angel. But I had to basically ignore all the GMing advice (eg that the banished god would always attack; that the angel-gate could never be persuaded to sacrifice herself; etc). And I never ran the dungeon that is the second half. That looked like a slog too.

I think the Delve format for the presentation of encounters had quite a lot to do with that.

<snip>

I really think that the Delve format is also the significant cause of this. When your format for every encounter is two pages long you are basically designing set-piece combats for everything, and that eats up a lot of space that could be used for expanding NPCs, background events, etc.

I want to make one qualification to this: a lot of the encounters in the 4e modules I'm familiar with aren't even set-pieces!

For instance, E1 has room after room with n blackstar baddies and one or two other random hangers-on, nothing of any narrative significance at stake, and no goal other than hacking through those baddies to get to the door to go through it to find the next room full of baddies. I've taken some bits and pieces from that module to populate a couple of adventures sites of my own - I like the idea of the angel encounter, for instance; I've used the cache encounter to build a room within the Dark Lake Ziggurat (from Underdark); I've used some traps to build another room in the same location; and I've used ideas from the reliquary to design the Reliquary of the Ebon Stone in Mal Arundak (from The Plane Below) - but I can't imagine running it as written. What a pointless slog!

With P2, I cut out quite a bit of the filler, and in other places combined encounters to create genuine set-pieces (eg the whole of the temple, plus Maarth the assassin sneaking in from the rear, I ran as one big encounter).

And here are the changes I made to H2, taking advantage of nice features of the maps that the module authors appeared to have ignored, and generally trying to make things more tactically dynamic with more dramatic narrative stakes:

For the Chamber of Eyes I did two things. First, I joined the introductory encounter (with the hobgoblins torturing the prisoner) onto the Chamber of Eyes: (i) run the corridor in the introductory encounter onto the entryway into the foyer of the Chamber of Eyes; (ii) add a secret passage exiting the NE corner of the hobgoblin chamber via a secret door and running diagonally, with staircases, up to the balcony in the Chamber of Eyes foyer; (iii) add a spyhole/arrowslit on the E wall of the hobgoblin chamber (near the barrels) looking onto the Chamber of Eyes foyer; (iv) add a portcullis that the hobgoblins can drop in the entryway to their chamber, making the secret passage the only easy path between their chamber and the Chamber of Eyes.

Second, I was prepared to run the introductory encounter, C1, C2 and C4 as a single encounter with waves. The PCs first heard the prisoner being tortured (I made it someone they had already met earlier in the campaign who they knew had been captured by goblins/hobgoblins and were hoping to rescue) and entered that chamber. The portcullis (iv above) was dropped, trapping them in that room. As they made fairly short work of the hobgoblin soldiers the warcaster opened the secret door and fled up the passage (ii above) with half the PCs chasing him while the others finished off the soldiers. The PCs correctly feared that he was going to get reinforcements. The PCs narrowly failed to stop him on the balcony, and he went through the other door and alerted the goblins in C2. I had the bugbear engage the PCs on the upper level, while the skull cleavers came out through the main doors to make missile attacks - some of the PCs jumped down to engage them, while others fought the bugbear and one who had been left behind in the first room attacked through the spyhole (iii above). The warcaster meanwhile went on and alerted the chief, who came forward to join the skullcleavers with his wolf while the archers controlled the long-ish corridor with cover from the shrine doorway (I eliminated the second warcaster as unnecessary).

This was a very dynamic encounter, with PCs moving around through the various corridors in the entry way, going back and forth into the original room to take advantage of the arrowslit, and in the end causing the hobgoblin archers to retreat after defeating the rest of the goblins. (They then took on the archers with the rest of C3 - roused from their drunken revelling - as a separate encounter.)

I also decided that the duergar would wait and see what happened rather than joining in on the potentially losing side of a fight - the PCs discovered the duergar in their rooms as they were looking for somewhere to take their short rest and ended up negotiating a contract with them, paying 300 gp to be delivered in a months time to pay for the release of the slaves (the players preferred this to the thought of having to assault a duergar stronghold).

In the Well of Demons I also ran the gnoll encounters together as a single more dynamic encounter (again leaving the tieflings out of the equation, figuring that they would make a more interesting encounter after the gnolls had been dealt with). The interesting aspects here were (i) the players thought the first chamber with the motely crew of monsters was the more challenging encounter, and so blew quite a few resources on it and therefore were really pushed to the limits with the gnolls, (ii) the use of the connecting tunnel from the boar room to the entry chamber as a way of making the PCs fight on two fronts (and yes, enemies were pushed into the well) and (iii) replacing the barlgura demon with a naldrezu (sp?) from MM2, which is a lurker that captures a PC and teleports it away to munch on it - combined with the two-fronts aspect this introduced extra mobility and tension into the fight.

 

[Steve Jung]

I've run my Living Forgotten Realms group through the first part of Tomb of Horrors. When they reach the appropriate level, I'll run them through the rest.

 

[keterys]

4E had a lot of awful adventures written for it. So, too, honestly, did every edition of dnd, but folks had a much better idea how to write adventures by the time 3rd rolled around. I didn't run Pathfinder at all, but I still merrily subscribed to PF adventures for years to use in 4e.

Even though I now write for LFR, with an audience that near mandates heavy combat convention-capable (railroadish) adventures, I'm still baffled at the lack of narrative anything in most of the official 4e adventures. Which is a real shame, however that decision got handed down.