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#1 Authw8 Sep 15, 2009 23:23:48

The current business model WotC seems to have settled on for their adventures is to essentially package together a bunch of combat encounters into a rough story. The designers have said in several locations that they want to provide generic adventures that DMs can customize into something more interesting. I can see the idea behind this, but I don't really understand why they're doing it. Encounters are really easy to come up with in 4e, I can do that in my sleep practically. I would much prefer the exact opposite of their current approach: Give me a deep, interesting story with lots of setting details, and leave the encounters out. I can create encounters very easily, especially now that I have the monster builder to play with. A major advantage of this system would be that a story could be written for a general level range, and the DM could simply design encounters based on his party's level. Every adventure would be much easier to sit down and play, because you wouldn't need to make sure you picked one of the right level. A DM can of course tweak the adventures as they are right now, but most of the current adventures offer little more than a bag of themed encounters. Most of the adventure is thus wasted. Some adventures seem better than others, though. The adventure in the back of the ECG was fun, and had a lot of material that came to life at the table. The same is true for Seekers of the Ashen Crown, which I'm running right now and seems good. Last Breaths of Ashenport was cool, and offered lots of setting information that I could use to deal with player creativeness. Most of the other adventures I've seen have been more towards the uninspiring end of things, and I think its because they're trying so hard to be useful in any campaign, they end up being useful in none.