TheNewGuy's page

We've been playing 4e since a few months after it came out, and our group very much enjoys the gaming system. The encounters are a lot of fun, but we've found one thing about them:

they take too long

In our most recent campaign, our encounters regularly took 2+ hours with 5-7 players. We're looking at a paragon-tier campaign next, and I suspect that the encounter time is only going to increase as PC options increase and monster HPs increase. It got to the point where we'd only have 1 encounter per gaming night and they took so long that we regularly forgot why we were fighting by the end.

Has anyone come up with ways to speed up 4e encounters?

KYUSS!!!

Thanks. I thought I'd read Wotc had tweaked it so that there was a chance a low hp PC could survive a crit instead of having it be a set amount. Guess I was wrong :)

You might be thinking of 3rd edition, then :)

Max damage on a crit is rarely fatal unless you are using monsters of much higher level than the PCs. Remember, a PC has to go down to his bloodied value into negative hp before he dies automatically. I've DMed our 4th edition campaign up to 6th level so far and there's only been one fatality and it was from a PC that fell 100 feet out of a tree after being knocked to zero hp. Basically, the PC was killed by the DM and not by the monsters.

The only time I've come close to killing a PC this way using monsters was when the PC was taking ongoing damage when he went below zero hp.

Even across the vast distances of Editions, I hear the siren call of Mystara...

;^)

I'm DMing our group's first 4e campaign, and it's set in Mystara. I couldn't think of a setting that better caught the feel of what 4e was going for.

I use human/demihuman "monsters" from the MM and slap a template on them. It takes 2 minutes of work and the fact that they're now elite monsters virtually guarantees a memorable encounter and gives the NPC a very good chance to escape if I want them to.

Yeah, they don't have 900 powers, but they don't need them. They wind up with enough powers to do 2 or 3 things per round and their powers are strong and diverse enough to mix it up. If you have powers that recharge, the flexibility of the "monster" increases.

While I realize I might be in the minority here, I don't like spending lots of time statting up monsters and NPCs. The 4e templates are sweet for DMs like me.

That's my two cents.

We're doing a 4e Mystara campaign. I had a stripped down version of Burnt Offerings. A stripped down version of Palace of the Silver Princess. And now the PCs are in Specularum and I'm running some of the adventures from the Grand Duchy of Karameikos gazetteer (such as Davinos's Complaint).

To the OP, the answer is simple. If you don't like DMing 4E, then DM something else or have someone else DM. I tried 4E, and I did't like it, so I don't play it. I play Pathfinder or 3.5 instead. If you are waiting for WotC or Goodman Games to put out adventures good enough to make you want to run 4E, you are probably in for a very long wait. If WotC made 20 4E adventures, one of them might close to the quality and depth of a Paizo adventure. Goodman Games has made almost nothing but straight hack and slash dungeon crawls so I wouldn't expect much in the way of quality adventures from them either.

I realized it's not 4e that I am tired of, it's D&D. I was very burned out and 4e was the only reason I continued with the hobby.

I'll say that the only person in my group who has lost interest in 4th edition is me, the DM. And it's really that I've lost interest in D&D altogether.

I've noticed similar things. Our players, who normally only buy the PHB and maybe one other book that fits the kind of characters they like, all have the PHB, AV, and some of them bought Complete Martial the day it came out. Our group is latching onto the books and really enjoying them.

There's no mumbling about 3rd edition being better. Not in any way. In fact, over the past 3 months a number of players have noted during and after the game that they're having much more fun with 4th edition than 3rd, mainly because of the increased flexibility during character creation and less frequent rules lookups/disagreements.

Our FLGS has all the 4th edition books prominently displayed and the bulk of the 3rd edition books are shelved in a corner (except Pathfinder).

It appears that the state of 4e is very strong in NYC, and it looks like it's even stronger when compared to 3rd edition. If you compare it to Pathfinder, I think they are both doing well. It makes sense, since both WotC and Paizo are turning out best-of-breed products.

TS,

Let us know how this rule works out for you. I think the 4e rules system is pretty sleek and I'm looking forward to hearing what happens when you tweak it. I'm sure my group will find something that doesn't really work for our style and it will be good to have some idea of what you can change with these rules.

Racial stats certainly do support traditional tropes, which is fine for most folks I guess. I myself like to encourage players to come up with the occasional oddball character. Recently I got an idea for a doppleganger paladin character for a pbp game, but ended up trashing it because the doppleganger racial mods just don't synergize well with the paladin class. I realize that a couple +1 bonuses don't matter much even in 4e, but I just couldn't follow through with the character because of those two little bonuses.

TS

Our group has "that guy" that makes an oddball character no matter what. The rest of the group doesn't see a problem with it being difficult for dopplegangers to be paladins, for example. Or for dwarves to be wizards. There are other races that are better at magic, and it's reflected in their ability bonuses, just like there are races that are naturally stealthy or strong.

It's an interesting idea, making every race exactly the same in terms of ability bonuses, but I just don't see any advantage to it other than to build min/maxed oddball characters. If that's what you're looking for, 3rd edition might be your game.

So far, and we've only been playing 4th edition for 2 months, we've found no reason to tinker with the rules. Even our players who like to tinker with the rules haven't found any reason to do so.

I'm prone to agree with you.

TS

I think you're basically taking a major human advantage and giving it double to everyone else. I would very strongly oppose this kind of thing in my group.

However, we play a pretty traditional fantasy-type game. Elves make good archers and the mechanics support that. Tieflings make good warlocks and the mechanics support that. Humans are the most adaptable and the mechanics support that.

TheNewGuy wrote:

WotC's ability to develop an innovative and fun rule system far outstrips Paizo's.

With respect to Paizo (a gang of creative geniuses, IMO) I agree. 4e is a fantastic ruleset.

That's why playing 4e is, in my opinion, getting the best of both worlds. It's the sleek, streamlined rules of 4e with the inspired creativity of Paizo's stories.

TheNewGuy wrote:

It's a deliberate omission because WotC said they would be omitting that going forward. They're basically taking D&D back to basics and making the decision to write something once and make it useful to everyone rather than write something and have it only be useful to Dragonlance fans, for example. It's very much like the "good old days" of D&D except with a more streamlined rule system.

Actually, they didn't say that until an increasingly-vocal element criticized KotS and SoW for it's omissions. At that point WotC explained, for the first time, that such a move was deliberate.

It's my understanding that WotC has been saying this since before they announced 4e. A quick look back over the history of TSR shows that partitioning your market in this industry leads to financial disaster. A look back over the editorials on Wizards.com over the past two years shows instances when they said this. It's been the plan all along and, as people catch up, they get upset because it IS a redirection from past strategies that defines a new strategy that avoids the business pitfalls that both WotC and TSR ran into.

Yeah, the gaming community loses a little something, but at its heart WotC is letting the gaming community do what they do best ... take material and customize it to their game. It's what we've all been doing for 30 years and what we'll hopefully all be doing for the next 30!

I see it as WotC providing the sandbox (the 4e rules system), and the shovels and buckets (monsters, encounters, new rules). They can't come to our houses and play our game for us.

I'm with you in that the inspiration is what drives the game for me. I use Paizo material for that. Paizo is head-and-shoulders above WotC in that respect and always will be. WotC's ability to develop an innovative and fun rule system far outstrips Paizo's. I take the best from both of them.

I think we are starting to see the germs of power-creep in the books released so far. I think that's inevitable. It probably won't get as bad as 3rd edition did and WotC is doing it in such a way that it evens itself out over time.

If Martial Power makes fighters/rogues/warlords/rangers a little more effective, you can bet that the Arcane Power and Divine Power and PHB2 are going to compensate. In the end, though, I think the differences are slight and they're doing a good job of keeping a lid on the power creep.

I hate to say it, but the GSL looks like it's going to be a good thing. A lot of the most blasphemously broken rules were written by 3rd parties (the Psionic rules by WotC being the NOTABLE exception). The GSL should clamp down on people publishing garbage just to publish something. Hopefully we should see a much higher quality of 3pp material.

Sorry for the ramble.

This is definitely very indicative of a shift in philosophy for WotC. It's a good one, too, since the tight coupling of products to campaign settings was one of the main reasons TSR sank. This campaign setting/game material integration killed D&D once.

There's a reason why Paizo can get away with it. Two, actually. One is that they're really, really, really good at it. Better than probably anyone before them. The second is that they're an order of magnitude smaller than WotC and have no incentive to grow any faster than they want. They're a private company and accountable only to themselves, and this is what they want to do.

Tatterdemalion wrote:

And I find it passing strange that WotC's new products deliberately omit the elements that best define and distinguish the campaigns gamers have most admired and loved -- for 30 years.

TheNewGuy wrote:

I expect that verse 9,234,543 of this song will be the same as verse 1.

Until someone can explain this deliberate omission -- yes, it will be.

WotC has evidently decided that encounter design philosophy is the preeminent focus of the game -- in the rules, and in the campaigns released. This is not the lesson that the game's history has taught, important though it may be.

I won't accuse you of disregarding the question if you don't accuse me of caring about the question :)

Let me explain the deliberate omission. Here's the explanation:

"WotC has evidently decided that encounter design philosophy is the preeminent focus of the game -- in the rules, and in the campaigns released." I don't remember exactly who said that, but they were wise beyond their own knowledge.

It's a deliberate omission because WotC said they would be omitting that going forward. They're basically taking D&D back to basics and making the decision to write something once and make it useful to everyone rather than write something and have it only be useful to Dragonlance fans, for example. It's very much like the "good old days" of D&D except with a more streamlined rule system.

Maybe this makes DDI material useless to you and your group. That's fine. It sounds like you decided a while ago that it was going to be, which is also fine.

WotC's position seems a bit self-contradictory -- it assumes people want to do a lot of the work themselves, but producing a campaign presupposes that they need and/or want someone else to do the work.

I think you might be creating contradictions because you want there to be some.

WotC has been pretty consistent. They came out and said several times before 4e was released that their plan was to produce as much material as possible that could be usable in any standard campaign. They're doing exactly that. The SoW adventure path can, with little modification, be dropped into most campaigns. It's basically a matter of changing some names. Maybe you'll have to change something else, like move a desert adventure to a frostfell adventure because of the geography of your setting, but you're still looking at changing "fire damage" to "cold damage" and being done in 5 minutes. The same goes for the bulk of the printed material released so far.

Also, I'll take a few contradictions if they lead to a better, more fun game. At the end of the day, that's all I'm looking for ... a fun way to spend Thursday afternoons with 7 other really cool guys. Strict, nerdular adherence to internal consistency comes WAAAAY down the priority list in things I'm looking for in my once-a-week hobby.

And I find it passing strange that WotC's new products deliberately omit the elements that best define and distinguish the campaigns gamers have most admired and loved -- for 30 years.

I expect that verse 9,234,543 of this song will be the same as verse 1.

I got both yesterday. Martial Power got a cursory overview by me (I'm DMing, and this is a book that's targeted squarely at players) but it looks like it upped the flexibility of martial characters slightly. Look at all the powers that are minor actions. I think a couple of the PCs are going to be more productive in combat and I like that.

Draconomicon is great. It's a DM-only type of book, so there's no reason for players to need it. It's got all the "physiology of dragons" fluffy stuff that we've come to know and love/hate, but the crunch is solid through-and-through. Running dragon encounters in 4e is way simpler than the same thing in 3rd edition without sacrificing much in the way of tactical options. There are new dragon types, new dragon-related monsters, planar dragons, elemental dragons, shadow dragons. The list goes on. They also include probably a dozen sample lairs, completely mapped, stocked, and statted up in the delve format (which REALLY helps me run 4e games). There are some of the "heavy hitters" of the dragon world statted up in the back ... Tiamat, Cyan Bloodbane, and, of course, Dragotha.

If you're looking to run more dragon-related encounters, this book is a must. Even if you just want to have a couple per campaign and keep the rest of the game more "swords & sorcery", this book is still solid for background material on dragons, their lairs, their hordes, and how to make those scarce dragon encounters truly memorable.

I loved it. It was exactly what I was hoping for.

I think I am good at creating encounters. I was DMing 4th it would be easy to whip up a monster, set the scene and voila!

The thing is, it's not that easy. First of all, one monster does not a 4e encounter make. That's 3rd edition thinking and we only did it in 3rd edition because it was too much math homework to create interesting, balanced encounters.

Secondly, setting the scene is a HUGE part of planning good 4e encounters. I probably spend 5 minutes on monster selection and an hour on "set design" for a good encounter. You need to come up with the effects of interacting with the environment that you create.

I suspect that you've got some talent for creating interesting encounters. In a way, 4e handicaps you because it's easy for everyone to create a basic encounter that's interesting. On the other hand, if you're willing to put in the time I'm sure you could come up with a couple of knockout encounters per week. I envy you.

hopeless wrote:

Wish I had enough money to buy dungeon tiles or whatever they're called...

Those were Dwarven Forge's Master Maze product line. That stuff is cool.

I'm still not convinced about the DDI as well - mainly due to the fact I'm going down the 3.X route. A good chunk of the stuff will be of no use to me.

I subscribed to DDI, and if you're still playing 3rd edition then DDI is of no real use to you. DDI is a great resource for 4e DMs.

TheNewGuy wrote:

At first, I was disappointed that Scales of War had such a weak storyline but now I get it. They're basically giving you the tools to create whatever storyline you want. I'm planning on using about 50%-60% of the encounters from the SoW adventure path in an entirely different setting (Mystara) and with an entirely different storyline ...

This is me, too. Initially, I despised Scales of War because it was not Age of Worms or Savage Tide. It took me a while to figure out that Scales of War was mine to do what I want with it. We've taken Scales of War and used it to play a very compelling game in Middle-earth. I've used about 90% of the encounters and about 60% of the story line.

In the end, it has turned out to be a blessing that Scales of War is short on story and long on action. The D&D Insider has helped me develop the campaign in ways not possible before 4th Edition - I'm mostly talking about the D&D Compendium and the magazines.

How did the compendium help?

My PCs are just getting close to 4th level, so I think I might drop them into Scales of War soon and follow that track but use my own story.

I flipped through both at Books-A-Million and bought the Martial Power book on the strength of what I saw. The Rogue stuff really appealed to me. Dragonomicon is a great book to flip through, but I just could not justify paying the cover price for that amount of in game use that I think I would get from it.

Both books seem to have been printed on cheaper paper than I am used to seeing in Wizards D&D products, and some of the graphic elements seem to be pixelated or blurry.

I did the opposite. I'm sure my players will all be picking up copies of Martial Power, but as the DM ... gimme more 4e dragons! I ran a dragon encounter and it was the most fun I had as a DM since I ran Kyuss.

TigerDave wrote:

...So, yeah, I *did* buy a subscription... I'm neither reading the materials nor using the tools.

Are you playing 4e?

My opinion is that the stuff WotC is putting out is pretty high quality -- if only we were playing 4e.

Interestingly, I don't think any of the new material generates useable ideas for previous versions -- no cool plots, setting, or characters to steal, and certainly adapting monsters and mechanics is difficult, at best. This is (IMO) a new and annoying phenomenon.

Is anyone else noticing this to be true... or untrue?

I think that's 100% true. I'm actually doing the reverse from you. I'm playing 4e and I subscribed to DDI in order to get access to 4e mechanics (basically ... prepped, statted, mapped encounters. This cuts down my DM prep time by about 80%). When I need some awesome NPCs, cool setting ideas, or insidious plots, I stop by the game store and pick up any Pathfinder materials I can grab.

If you're not playing 4e, the 4e materials have little to offer. I like that, though, because I can take interesting ideas that I come up with or that I steal from Paizo's books and drop in 4e encounters. It's really a way to "outsource" a lot of the DM prepwork that I don't like to do. At first, I was disappointed that Scales of War had such a weak storyline but now I get it. They're basically giving you the tools to create whatever storyline you want. I'm planning on using about 50%-60% of the encounters from the SoW adventure path in an entirely different setting (Mystara) and with an entirely different storyline (they don't really have one yet, and I doubt they're going to any time soon).

How did we not see this thread degenerating like this.

New Guy, pull out your 1st edition AD&D PH, and you'll find the druid, bard, half-orc and gnome. My prior post made reference to 1st edition d&d, not basic d&d or anything else.

I was just pointing out that the definition of "D&D" changes over the years. It's changing again now.

I'm not saying that the changes don't matter, and I don't even really disagree with you. But WotC made a really fun game, and it very much feels like D&D to play if you let it.

Matthew Koelbl wrote:

I really consider this a false claim. Classes and races you prefer are not more important to the game than those someone else prefers. 3.5 was missing Dragonborn, Warlocks, Warlords, Skull Lords and so forth in the core rules - this did not mean it was an incomplete game.

You do not need a druid to play D&D, no more than you needed a warlord to play it. You can certainly prefer what they should have included or not included, but claiming it is incomplete because of it is really misleading.

Dude, they are not false claims. Those classes & races have been in the PH since D&D began. 4.0 is the first edition of the game to omit those classes & races. What is false about that? Where is the historical presidence for Dragonborn and Warlords? There is NONE.

D&D began with the following classes:

wizard
cleric
fighting man

and the following races:

human
dwarf
elf
hobbit

Dragonborn and warlords have exactly the same stature, relative to "since D&D began" as such uppity newcomers as:

Thief
druid
bard
paladin
gnome
half-elf
half-orc

It's also notable that gnomes are, in fact, a playable 4e race. Half-orcs don't exist in 4e as of yet, but it's not unreasonable to use the orc mechanics to make a crappy PC race and call it a half-orc.

If you take the ratio of playable races to core books, 4e probably crushes any other rule system. If playable races are your thing, 4e core offers to best value for your dollar.

The delve format is great for the busy DM and busy players. I've got a lot of projects going on that aren't D&D related, a full-time job, a girlfriend, and investments to manage. Our games last three-to-four hours after work on Thursdays, so really no one is interested in angsty-vampire roleplaying or intricate puzzle solving. We all have to deal with that in real life, so game time is for smashing monsters and getting cool powers.

For our group, the delve format is great. We just want to get together with our friends, get trashed, and play some D&D. For most of us, this is one night away from the women and children and it's just pure action. When I'm planning encounters, I try to make them as much like the action scenes in Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, or Star Wars as possible. 4e is the unqualified best rule system for our group's style, and the delve format makes running those encounters more streamlined.

Fair enough.

Thanks for the insight! I appreciate the fact that we can ask these kinds of questions and get great answers.

Map Packs present a series of independent locations, so the tiles only connect up when a single location is spread across multiple cards. In those cases, arrows on the cards show you how they line up.

So, how are people using these during games? That's really the question. What was in Paizo's mind when they made these?

TheNewGuy wrote:

For us, 4e has been great because combat is more tactically interesting and that's where we spend our time.

That's such a great way of putting it -- tactically interesting.

Unfortunately, my group no longer has any interest in switching; what 4e offers us doesn't make up for what it lacks. Personally, I'd kill to find a way to effectively integrate 4e's magic system into 3.5.

We haven't found it to be lacking in anything. In fact, the skill challenge mechanism has allowed our heavily action-oriented (read: they only consider themselves to be playing D&D when there are dice and XP involved) group to roleplay more. I turned "a night at the tavern" into a skill challenge, let them explain what they want their characters to do then roll some dice, and when they (or I) start getting tired of it I tell them that the skill challenge is over and I give them some XP. It's exactly the same as my old, heavily roleplaying-oriented group, except 4e lets these guys roll dice while they're doing it.

Same with "negotiating with the duke", "investigating the murder scene", and "trekking across the wilderness."

If your group is made of people who truly love roleplaying, maybe 3rd edition might be a little better for you. On the other hand, the flow of 4e combat may help make the action scenes more interesting as the mechanics of a fight with, say, a lich and his minions feels and runs much different than a fight with a dragon, or an orc tribe, or crocodiles and lizardmen. If you're an action-oriented group, 4e definitely helps you with your bread-and-butter plus it makes roleplaying mechanically meaningful.

I'm not trying to convert you, I'm just telling you that 4e isn't lacking in as many areas as people think. It's all in how you use the mechanics. They're really very flexible, and a group creative enough to run a good 3rd edition campaign can probably run a good 4th edition campaign. If you stopped playing 4e with "Keep on the Shadowfell", you missed out on a lot of the best features of the game. And you certainly can't hold a candle to Paizo's adventure paths. No one can. That's just a fact of life like angry ex-girlfriends or taxes.

I think the one area where it might be equivalent to 3rd edition is in a pure roleplaying/storytelling game. But D&D has never excelled at that the way other systems do. It started off as a tactical miniatures game and 4e again closes the gap back to those Gygaxian roots.

4e even has gnomes as a playable race, although in 25 years of playing D&D I still have yet to see someone play one.

I envy you guys. My current group spends about 90% of our evening on combat once the game starts. That's the way they like it. That's the way they've played for 30 years now. Nights when I introduce more roleplaying some of the guys like it but most of them wander off and start doing other things. We have an average turnout of 7 players + 1 DM since we adopted 4e about two months ago. It was closer to 5 players + 1 DM towards the end of our 3e campaigns.

For us, 4e has been great because combat is more tactically interesting and that's where we spend our time.

Dragon's Hoard.

Neat, but looks limited to Alea Publishing's products only.

It also suffers from the same problem that the bulk of 4e 3pp materials suffers from: it's all for the players, who play 1-2 characters per campaign. Meanwhile, the DM, the guy most likely to pay for new material, the guy who plays 4-10 different types of monsters per night, is left with nothing.

WotC is the only company who figured this out. WotC is the only company that gets my money (Paizo gets some, too. I buy their stuff in the stores because it's awesome despite the fact that I play 4e).

Am I missing something? I bought the "Slums" one but I don't see how or even if it's supposed to fit together. Is there any suave way to connect these tiles?

Drawing interesting maps is a weakness of mine that really kills me when planning 4e encounters and I'm always looking for help. These seem like they might be able to help, but maybe not exactly what i'm looking for.

Advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm looking forward to the Draconomicon. I ran an encounter for my PCs against a young green dragon (level 5 solo monster, 7-8 PCs of 2nd level) and it was basically a tie. The PCs were tapped out by the end and the dragon was down to about 80 hp from 260 and it took off and flew away.

The players really enjoyed the encounter despite the fact that it took all of 5 minutes of prepwork for me so my assessment is that dragons are just plain fun. I'd love to see some more dragon-based material for DMs and I'm definitely picking this book up the weekend it hits the shelves.

I'll confess to paying for DDI. I'm a busy DM and there's really not that much material out there for people like me. The bulk of the fan created material, even the good stuff, has been new classes, new feats, new paragon paths, and new items. In short, all PC material. Yeah, there have been a few new monsters created but so far in 8 weeks of DMing I've probably used 20 out of 400 monsters. I'm not in danger of running out.

What a busy DM really needs is statted, planned encounters. I've been saying that since 3rd edition, but the 4e encounter building process is so much more flexible that it can be a little overwhelming at times. I can come up with maybe 4 or 5 good encounters per month, but we typically run about 9. I'll happily pay $8 a month or whatever it works out to be in order to get some solid encounters from WotC's writers. And whatever you think of their adventure design skills (I don't love them), they really come up with some solid, fun encounters.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

Good Dragons are the biggest trouble spot for me. Good anything is kind of hard to come by. Certainly players need things to kill but monsters make good allies, better then NPCs much of the time as they are less complex and therefore spend less time stealing the spotlight.

I'm still sticking by the belief that 4e was designed for combat -- not roleplaying. Good dragons are about roleplaying opportunities, and are thus superfluous.

Well, the COMBAT stats for good dragons are kind of superfluous. That doesn't mean you can't have good dragons in your 4e game.

As someone DMing a 4e campaign, I'd really like to get my hands on their Dungeon adventures.

As someone who has a credit card, I really don't trust WotC's tech staff enough to turn my CC number over to them.

I play the D&D Miniatures skirmish game, so I have a fair number of the skirmish battlemaps laying around,

Where did you get them? I don't mind spending a couple of bucks if it's going to cut out the part of DMing that I enjoy the least. I'm not an artist and my maps suck.

(We have a dry-erase battlemap but the pre-drawn battlemaps have a lot more detail)

I'm finding that running 4e games takes a different kind of prepwork than running 3rd edition games. Specifically, the terrain and map for the encounter are, in my opinion, a lot more important than before. I tried using a battlemap from Keep on the Shadowfell and it worked out very nicely.

I saw at my FLGS that there were tiles for sale but they were pretty small. Ideally I'd like to find some full-size battlemaps that I can quickly lay out between encounters.

What have other people found to be useful for handling the terrain for 4e encounters?

DMed again last night. We only got through 1 skill challenge and 1 combat. The combat lasted for 2 hours because I planned out the map in advance which gave me the chance to spend a few minutes thinking about monster placement and tactics while the players were arriving and getting settled.

One awesome thing about 4e encounter prep ... I forgot to bring the page that listed out how many of each kind of monster would be in the encounters and I was able to come up with the amount of XP that I wanted the battle to be worth and build the encounter at game time rather than at design time. I think I might do that more in the future. Our group, at full capacity, has 8 players + 1 DM, but the reality is that it varies between 4 and 7 PCs most of the time and we don't usually know until game time how many people will be there. This was difficult to account for in 3rd edition but much, much easier to do in 4e.

It's growing on me as I start to redevelop my bag of DM tricks. I think it's going to take a while to prep up for the next month or so, but I'll get the hang of it and be able to bang out 4 hours of gameplay in less than 4 hours of prep time.

True. I am running or have run mostly WotC mods and have not written anything from scratch. I am hoping that a revised GSL leads to much better published adventures.

That being said the prep time I was referring to was the time it takes me to go over the encounters, understand the critters, and set up the flow of gameplay.

When I was running adventures out of Dungeon in 3.5, it was a breeze. I could read through the whole thing in a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon, and then the night before the game I reviewed what I expected to run and made note of any rules I thought we'd need.

These 4e adventures from Dungeon magazine are all for much higher level characters. There are a couple of paragon-tier adventures and most of the rest seem to be high heroic tier. I'm left with "Keep on the Shadowfell," which half the players have a copy of already.

Yeah. It would be nice if they were willing to do 4e adventures, since it's such a fun, streamlined rules system and Paizo makes such interesting, tight adventures. The 4e ruleset really does make 3.0/3.5/PRPG look like a Pinto next to a Corvette and Paizo's adventures do the same thing to WotC's adventures.

But I live in Manhattan, have a high-stress tech job, there's a retirement to plan, I'm taking a Brazilian portuguese class (to retire to Brazil), and a girlfriend who is much more fascinating than any solo or elite monster. I'm spending 2-3 hours prepping for a 4 hour weekly game that I now no longer enjoy. That's an extra day of work that I do.

Once I got a good grasp of the game it ran so smoothly and required so little prep that I can never go back to GM 3e.

I'm finding it to be more work than 3e to prep. At least with 3rd edition there were good adventures from Paizo. I just can't get into the published 4e adventures or the ones in DDI Dungeon. I try to read through them and get excited, but I can't.

I've been very much looking forward to 4th edition and I was excited to finally play. Our group wound down its 3.5 campaign and I pretty much got drafted into DMing 4e. The two guys who wanted to DM both backed out once they realized the the DM rules were totally different from the player rules and they really wanted to play characters.

I prepped up for our first game and ran it last week.

It was my least favorite gaming experience, ever. I didn't enjoy being in the DMs chair (I DMed two 3.5 campaigns and LOVED DMing). The new monsters all started to run together in my mind, the confusion at the table was painful (I realize this will go away, but it sucked so much that I don't want to DM again), and it's so much work to prep encounters that it's just not worth it.

I might enjoy playing, but at this point my first time out of the gate playing 4th edition was so painful that I don't want to play again. The players ALL had a great time and said it was one of the best games they'd played in a long time.

I'll give them that. They had a great time. I did not. The thing is, the rules are 10 times better than 3rd edition (IMO) so I don't want to go back to playing that game, but the WotC adventures have been so uniformly uninteresting that I don't want to use them, either.

This is my rant about 4th edition. I have to DM again this week and I'm not looking forward to it. I'm going to need a break from D&D for a few months once I can finally end this campaign.

*EDIT: This is just my experience. Like I said, I've been very much looking forward to playing 4e, but DMing is more work than I want to put into a hobby.

If I'm president of the US dealing with the fallout from the financial crisis? I'm moving to Brazil.

Bear wrote:

In general, we as a society have lost the desire to partake in the art of the argument... the incorrect idea that everyone is anonymous on the internet, we've come to the point where it matters less what you say than how loudly you can say it...

I (perhaps foolishly) continue to hope that it can get better.

Unfortunately, many people don't remember the value of courtesy and respect, even when reminded. It makes me fear they were never taught the value of such things, and are too stupid and/or self-absorbed to figure it out on their own.

You have to put some of the fault for this on Paizo. They've taken a quietly anti-4e stance on these boards (and this is their right), and it might make more sense for them to just shut this section of the board down rather than fan the flames and continue to upset their (now former) customers. Paizo is a collection of top-notch adventure game designers, and they should focus on that instead of playing the messageboard police role.

I stopped buying Paizo products because of this. I still come here hoping to see bona fide discussion of 4e, but that's less likely than before.

Please provide a link to one of the threads you speak of.

Look at the threads Paizo locks.

crosswiredmind wrote:

Huh? How is saying that this playtest thing is such a small issue compared to some of the real problems with 4e a "lack of civility"?

Then why are you getting your panties in a bunch over my comments?

"Why does every 4e thread have to turn into this" would be a better question. Why can't an actual civil discussion take place ABOUT THE GAME? We've heard people say why they don't want to play 4th edition for a year now. I think it's time to move on.