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Message: <blockquote data-quote="firesnakearies" data-source="post: 5186732" data-attributes="member: 71334">Yeah...These adventures do sound very cool.  Based just on the blurbs, they should be awesome.I haven't found that to be quite the case, personally.  We just finished E1, and are starting E2.  Death's Reach was a long, railroady combat-fest, and didn't feel much more epic or intriguing than Keep on the Shadowfell or the average LFR adventure.It was also super easy.How easy, you ask?Well, we played through it with two PCs.  (We had a third for a couple of sessions, but we definitely didn't need him.)  Two PCs, and the DM didn't scale down the adventure.  In fact, about halfway through, he started adding stuff.  No joke.  He was scaling it up, because the two of us were stomping all over everything, and never feeling any real risk or threat.  Also, we had no leader.  It was just a defender (my Warden) and a striker.  (Sometimes a Monk, sometimes a Sorcerer.  Both, for a couple of the sessions, which felt like insane overkill.)The hardest fight of the entire adventure for me, personally, was [sblock] the very first encounter when you get to Svomarana, because the priestess lady there, Hertrud, had an at-will ranged attack versus Will that stunned until end of her next turn with no save.  So my Warden was stun-locked for the first five rounds of the battle, leaving the Monk to solo the encounter for five rounds until she finally stopped stunning me. [/sblock]But even that one wasn't particularly hard.  I never dropped to 0 hit points in the whole adventure (remember, I had no healer besides myself).  I had a whole bunch of daily abilities that I literally never used a single time in the whole adventure.  Like the ones that gave me regeneration, or let me get back up when dropping to 0.We started at level 21, built by the book, and hit level 24 after the last encounter of E1 (which the DM had scaled up to a level 29 encounter, and we still trounced it with no tension at all).Epic characters are insanely, stupidly powerful, and this adventure does not begin to take that into consideration.As for the story of the module, well, I didn't find it nearly as cool, immersive, or interesting as the blurb makes it sound.  It felt like a pretty typical, flat 4E WotC adventure to me.  Lots of railroad, little explanation or depth to what's going on, tons of forced combats with whatever high-level monsters they pulled out of the books.  None of the villains seemed very interesting or cool, and they all went down like we were beating up kids.This isn't to say that I didn't have fun.  I had a good time, and look forward to continuing the campaign through the end of E3.  But it just didn't seem like a particularly special or amazing adventure.  It wasn't horrible or anything, it just wasn't "Wow!"I own the adventure, and have looked through and read some of it, now that we're done playing it.  It reads better than it played, in my opinion.  But it looks like it could have been more fun and cool than it was for us.  I suspect that a lot of the blandness of our experience could be attributed to our DM, who isn't terrible, but isn't really all that great either.I think that an exceptional DM could make the adventure shine, that the basic concept and framework could be used to run a very cool epic adventure.  But as written, I don't know that it really equips a mediocre or poor DM to run anything but a typical two-dimensional 4E WotC slugfest with simply bigger numbers and a nice-sounding idea as the backdrop.In any case, you'd probably have to do some work personalizing it, adjusting the encounters, filling in the story and the details about NPCs and such.  Which to my mind means that it's nothing to write home about.Also, if you're going to try to DM for epic characters, be prepared for how ludicrous they can be.  The designers of this module's encounters obviously had no idea, which is actually exactly how I've found every published 4E WotC adventure, including the laughable LFR snoozefests, to be thus far.  And my friends and I are NOT the total CharOp absurd powergamers, either.  We built strong, but not "cheesy" or super min-maxed characters.  It could have been much worse.Mostly, I guess I'd probably say it was our DM's fault that the adventure wasn't all that exciting.  And our own, for making too powerful of characters, and not really insisting on delving deep into the roleplay enough.  A different DM, and more effort to engage with the story and make more casual characters on the part of the players could make Death's Reach a lot more fun.  But then, it might not.</blockquote>

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