NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 5039343" data-attributes="member: 9053">I want to thank the OP for making this thread, because it's something I've been thinking about for a long time. As someone who absolutely loves 4E, I agree with this assessment 100%.The official D&D modules for 4E, with a couple of notable exceptions, have just been dreadful. When 4E first came out, I decided I was going to run the Heroic series to get everyone up to speed on the new rules and we just stopped midway through Thunderspire. I actually think that's one of the better adventures, since it has SOME backstory and over-arching plot, but my players just didn't agree.Fortunately ENWorld stepped up with Burning Sky, or I honestly don't know what I'd be doing with my game at the moment, since I really don't have the time to create something of that detail with job + life. When we finally finish Burning Sky I may just move on to another game system unless something has changed.Now Burning Sky is not perfect...it does have some rules issues, but the quality of the adventure is leaps and bounds better than anything I've seen from WotC to this point. I can fix the minor rules issues, but the fact that there is a plot and characters that my players care about and can meaningfully interact with is the win.When we finished up with Scouring of Gate Pass, I sat down and talked to my players about what they thought about how things were going. They told me that the adventure was kind of strange, since it didn't feel like a typical 4E adventure. When I asked what they meant, they said it felt like something for another system where you had to think about what you were doing and pay attention to the details, since it seemed like the choices they were making were changing the outcome. The previous game had been moving from encounter to encounter, managing the combats, and that's about it.I have actually been running two games of Burning Sky, and the approach from the different parties has been radically different. In one case they largely allied with the Eladrin and turned a big portion of the adventure into a roleplaying/skill challenge. In the other case, they worked out an arrangement with the Black Horse bandits and helped them change leaders. The adventure did a great job of supporting multiple angles of play.From my experience, the vast majority of 4E adventures out there are simply combat scenes interspersed with skill challenges and the occasional short roleplay scene. No matter what you do, the adventures basically take the same format and path. Sometimes, as in the case of Thunderspire, you can approach the different parts in different order, but you're basically going to see each encounter in the end. What you do in each scene, and the choices you make have little or no impact on the adventure as a whole.When I look at adventures like Shackled City and Red Hand of Doom (which was written by Paizo folks for WotC) I see that same sort of attention to options and detail that WotC doesn't seem to care about. In seeing a "mega adventure" like Revenge of the Giants, I just have to shake my head.Maybe that sort of thing doesn't matter to you (and if it doesn't that's cool, REALLY!), but it is important to me. I would definitely say "your mileage may vary." I don't know what there really is to do about it at this point, other than opening things up to freelancers and taking a chance with something different.--Steve</blockquote>

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