Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Talae May 12, 2009 11:39:35	Alright, so my party just hit level 9 and finished an adventure. They just have to finish up some quick loose ends and collect some rewards. I have decided that the next thing they will be doing is the Eyes of the Lich Queen adventure. It is actually proving to be easier than I thought to convert. I am finding that due to the level it was meant for I am having to ramp things up a little. A rough outline of the encounters in Part 1 is as follows (I will need to flesh out with some minions or something, as many are short on xp for a proper encounter): Show A1: 3 Greenscale Hunter (Level 4 Skirmisher – 175xp) 3 Greenscale Darter (Level 5 Lurker – 200xp) [1125xp] A2: 3 Marrowmaw Impaler (Level 9 Artillery – 400xp) 2 Blightborn Troglodyte (Level 10 Controller (Leader) – 500xp) [2200xp] 1 Blackscale Bruiser (Level 9 Brute – 400xp) [2600xp] A3: 4 Marrowmaw Mauler (Level 8 Soldier – 350xp) 1 Blightborn Troglodyte (Level 10 Controller (Leader) – 500xp) [1900xp] *2 Blackscale Bruiser (Level 9 Brute – 400xp) [2300xp] A4: *4 Blackscale Bruiser (Level 9 Brute – 400xp) 1 Girallon (Level 12 Brute – 700xp) [2300xp] A5: *3 Blackscale Bruiser (Level 9 Brute – 400 xp) Dragonborn Gladiator (Level 10 Soldier – 500xp) [1700xp] 2 Caustrex, Young Grey Dragon (Level 5 Solo Soldier – 1,000xp) A7-A8: 2 Troglodyte Impaler (Level 9 Artillery – 400xp) Bloodspike Behemoth (Level 9 Brute – 400xp) [1200xp] 2 Caustrex, Young Grey Dragon (Level 5 Solo Soldier – 1,000xp) A9-A10:1 Troglodyte Curse Chanter (Level 10 Controller (Leader) – 500xp) 3 Troglodyte Impaler (Level 9 Artillery – 400xp) [1,700xp] 2 Caustrex, Young Grey Dragon (Level 5 Solo Soldier – 1,000xp) A11: 2 Caustrex, Young Grey Dragon (Level 5 Solo Soldier – 1,000xp) [2,000xp] A12: 1 Crushing Walls Room (Level 11 Blaster Trap – 600xp) 1 Electrified Floor (Level 10 Obstacle Trap – 500xp) [1,100xp] A13: 3 Canoloth Warbrute (Level 11 Soldier – 600xp) [1,800xp] A14: 12 Whirling Blades Trap (Level 5 Obstacle – 200xp) 2 Stone Harrier (Level 4 Controller – 175xp) [2,750xp] A15: 1 Dragonborn Mummy (See below) A16: 6 Human Lackey (Level 10 Minion – 750xp) 6 Human Bowman Lackey (Level 10 Minion – 750xp) 1 Althanis, High Priest of Dragon’s Cult (Level 9 Elite Controller (Leader) – 800xp) [2300xp]
#2 Talae May 13, 2009 15:57:13	This is starting to come together nicely. I have started it on my Wiki. Let me know what you think. Note: Many of those pages have about half the info in the DM only spots, so you won't be able to see things like monster stats and tactics. Feel free to ask and I'll repost what I did.
#3 nthdegree256 May 13, 2009 16:37:36	I'm intrigued by this to the point where I believe I may be doing the same thing. I've had EotLQ sitting around unused for a while now, and I don't have a clear direction at the moment to take the campaign in... but thus far, the campaign has primarily revolved around one or two Age of Demons artifacts, (secretly) the Chamber, and the Emerald Claw, so in some ways EotLQ is shockingly perfect to slot in. (warning: the following might not actually be that helpful to you, since it's mostly about my own campaign) My main concern for my own campaign is that I've pushed this idea that the artifacts the PCs have encountered so far are part of a group of 13, all tied to one of the planes and used as weapons by the various empires throughout history (with some difficulty, since they're very finicky and require Prophecy knowledge or powerful divination to use to their full potential.) It would be quite handy if I could make the Dragon's Eye have some sort of planar connection, too, but nothing obviously springs to mind... I've directly used Mabar and Fernia so far. Maybe Kythri for the warping effect it has on the PCs? Or on the flip side, Daanvi for the control it is supposed to exert? Another interesting snag is that the PCs have already been to a temple in Q'barra, the remnants of a hobgoblin monastic sect. It was smashed up and laid to ruin as they left, and it might be a nice tie-in to have the PCs return to the remains of this dungeon and discover that the Altar is buried deep beneath it. I might have it take the place of the temple of Kha'Shazul. (self-aggrandizement over) My PCs are directly in control of an airship (on loan by House Lyrandar; the party paladin is a foundling manifesting the Mark of Storm and one of the higher-ups in the house has taken a shine to him), which gives them a lot of self-directed mobility. I see from your campaign page that your PCs are aboard a friendly airship; any idea how that's going to affect travel during the campaign? Will it let them shortcircuit some obstacles? I haven't looked through EotLQ in enough detail to get this one sorted out yet, but it seems worth thinking about. I like the swap of troglodytes for some of the lizardfolk. Encounter A13 as you have it written might be pretty tough - soldiers a level or two above the party are hard to hit, and you might want to swap out one or two of those canoloths for some other type of demon. Also, I noticed that the suggestion in the book for aberrant marks is to have them all grant something like resist energy. Do you think you'll be sticking with that? Only one (maybe two, if we go through with the character rebuild we've been discussing) PC in my group would be getting a non-aberrant mark, and I'm not sure I want to grant an ability that negates the careful planning our cleric has been showing by buying various resist potions, so I might be looking at other possible dragonmark abilities.
#4 Talae May 14, 2009 1:52:37	* The friendly Airship my party had access to is not currently in direct contact with them. Due to the ship and crew having it's own agenda, I can have it help the party when I decide. * By A13, the party will be nearing a level-up to level 10 (hopefully, I haven't counted experience out yet). I will see how things go when it gets closer. Thanks for the suggestion. * My party makeup will be entirely Abberrant marks and I haven't decided what to do yet. I really am open to anything at this point. I am honestly hoping that the EPG or a preview will be out in time for me to use. Thanks for the post and keep those ideas coming. P.S. It seems as though you have some interesting ways to tie it to your current campaign. The ideas you mentioned are great and I think you should employ them. I am actually personally thinking about changing the initial concept to a supposed villain that is one step ahead of the party and has been for the last few adventures. She could have been leading them along a series of tests and watching their actions.
#5 nthdegree256 May 14, 2009 2:58:33	Kick-started the adventure today! In the past, the party has been "working for" an agent of the Aurum that they've come to a strong disliking of (he kidnapped one of their other patrons in an attempt to force them to do his bidding), unaware that he's actually a dragon and member of the Chamber. They managed to trick him in the past into not believing that the artifacts they now have are real. I've set Sur'kil up as a fellow Chamber agent who is disdainful of how this first dragon has botched working with the PCs, and who believes that the current artifacts, while somewhat dangerous, are at least fairly safe in the PCs' hands, since they'll guard them jealously and are unlikely to hit the criteria necessary for any world-shattering events. (Heh heh, we'll see how that plays out.) In any event, he managed to more or less win over the trust and grudging respect of the party during their initial meeting, so I think we're on the right start. I'm also going ahead with replacing the initial temple with the ruins of the old one - I think it gives the campaign a nice strong sense of continuity, even if it does mean I have to do a little extra work to fit in the initial encounters. Not sure yet if I'm going to have them face a dragon or two, as the adventure suggests; they fought one the last time they were here and it might be redundant. If I do have one, maybe I'll make it a Gray like you're doing. Encounter A1 was replaced with them meeting up with the obligatory kobold-that-survived-the-party-slaughtering-his-people-and-somehow-befriended-the-party (don't laugh, you know it happens to every gaming group.) A2 was then a batch of Poison Dusk Lizardfolk I whipped up by slightly leveling up and tweaking the Greenscale Darters and Hunters (made them both level 6, added a bonus poison attack that recharges on a 5 or 6 to the hunters' spears.) It was an easy first fight, even as an ambush, but it got the party to take the antitoxins Sur'kil gave them a little more seriously, and the lizardfolk used their whistles so the rest of lizardfolk and troglodytes in the compound are alert... I'm probably planning on replacing Dura with an eladrin vampire (the Vampire Muse block from Open Grave) the party has faced in the past, to add that extra kick of recurring villainy. I'll have to give some thought to how it plays out, though, especially since they beat her when they were lower level so she's probably not so likely to underestimate them as the module suggests.
#6 Talae May 14, 2009 9:53:57	I didn't even think about using Dura as a way to pull in my recurring villain. I wll be doing that instead of as a replacement for Sur'kil. I did change around some of the above encounters a little and will try and post about it soon, when I get Part 1 all finished being planned out. One thing of note is that I plan on using something someone here came up with. Basically, for combat A16 I will be using 6 Human Lackey and 6 Human Bowman Lackey, but for the melee guys I will be using the Goon house rules. What this means is that they are like two-hit minions that are bloodied with one hit and killed with a second. They also die on a crit. I think it should prove to be rather fitting for that fight. They will count as 2 minions for xp. Thanks for the update and please keep the comments coming. They are helpful and I appreciate it.
#7 Talae May 14, 2009 12:22:42	I updated A1-A12 and got the wiki done that far. I think most links for the encounters are in DM only sections, but you can see half or so of each my navigating from this page: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/all-around-the-five-nations/wikis
#8 Talae May 15, 2009 16:27:43	I have kept plugging away at writing up these encounters. More thoughts?
#9 nthdegree256 May 16, 2009 2:21:29	Just glancing around a bit... I personally won't be using any blackscale lizardfolk in my encounters, mostly because the party already encountered several in Xen'drik and while they certainly live in both locales, I'd rather stat up something new so that the Xen'drik blackscales at least feel different from the Q'barra ones. I'm expecting to rely on just troglodytes and my leveled-up "poison dusk" greenscales. The gray dragons make me a little wary. I'm not sure using 2 level 5 gray dragons as written would be particularly challenging - they're given XP values equivalent to level 10 elite monsters, but don't have nearly as much in the way of defenses or attack bonus. They'll miss level 9 PCs frequently and be hit by many of their attacks. The alternatives I would go with are to have a single higher-level dragon instead of the two the adventure module calls for, or to re-stat the lower level dragons as higher-level elites - the justification for that would be "to an appropriate-level party, these are solos, but a higher-level party is tough enough that they're only elites in comparison", but that might be hard to swallow for some people. It's also possible I might be underestimating them. Their larger amounts of HP will help offset how often they get hit, and they are Soldiers which helps keep their defenses and attack bonuses closer to usable. I think they'll be much more effective if they work to actively target the "softer" PCs (wizards, sorcs, rogues, etc.), since their attack bonuses will match up better against those characters' defenses. If I end up crafting any new and interesting monster statblocks for this campaign, I'll be sure to post 'em here.
#10 Talae May 16, 2009 11:34:15	For the Dragons, I was planning on adjusting hitpoints and attack bonuses on the fly. The party has fought a dragon before and I wanted these to feel much less climactic individually, but interesting as an encounter when together. With only a +10 to hit, I will probably bump it more in line with the other monsters prior (+17 to +19) and hit points to about 3/4 (or like ~240). I might adjust damage on them as well, as it does seem a little low. Maybe I'll just add another die to each attack ([2w] instead of [1w]). I liked the gray dragons due to still having acid like the blacks and fitting the experience total I wanted. I will be flavoring them like black dragons still.
#11 nthdegree256 May 16, 2009 12:41:58	I have plenty of time on my hands today! Here's a gray dragon taken from the Caustrex statblock and re-numbered to be a level 9 elite soldier: (bumping them up to level 10 puts them at the same XP total you wanted, I'm just inordinately concerned about fights with nothing but high-level elite soldiers :P ) Young Gray Dragon, Level 9 Elite Soldier
#12 Talae May 17, 2009 11:42:30	I will be using the last one you posted. Thanks.
#13 nthdegree256 May 17, 2009 12:12:59	Whoops, I said that they had their new powers instead of Slicing Fury, and then I go and leave Slicing Fury in there anyway! Silly me. I'll edit the post to fix that up. I don't believe I'll be using either of them myself, actually, since I've already invoked the "scaly people in the jungle serving/venerating a dragon ruler" idea twice in this campaign and I don't want to wear out its welcome. In my version now, the troglodytes took up residence in the temple after it was smashed up by the events of several months ago, and discovered that A. there was a cracked-open passageway down to an underground chamber with Kha'shazul's skeleton, and B. the dracolich's skeleton has regained some vestige of animation and sentience after all these years, and is now demanding regular tributes from them. I'll be using a Bone Mongrel from the Draconomicon and a few other appropriate monsters to model the skeleton reanimating itself in bits and pieces. My decision to use my old dungeon has ended up forcing me to redo most of the initial encounters (A2 through A11), which is not exactly what I'd hoped for when I started using this adventure, but I've made my choice and I'm gonna see it through. :P
#14 nthdegree256 May 17, 2009 12:56:08	Also, I'm looking at treasure parcels for the area now... holy crap, there's a lot of treasure in this area as-written. All told, by the time the PCs have gotten the dragon's hoard, assuming they search the lizardfolk, they'll have acquired 3,140 gold (counting Sur'kil's initial 200), nearly a dozen magic items adding up to 15,330 gold (assuming they sell each for half price, as was standard for 3.5), and if they're motivated and can transport heavy stuff, 4,500 more for the 50 pounds of stuff in the vestry and a good 1,500 or so for selling off all of the masterwork armor and weapons. After the hoard, there's 5,000 gp for giving Sur'kil the two relics present in the temple, and 250-350 per PC (minus the initial 200) for the job, for roughly 1,400 gp. The Emerald Claw soldiers forgot to bring any loot with them. D: All told, the adventure has about 12 encounters, 13ish if they get the spear from A10 and return it to the Cold Sun lizardfolk (I forgot to drop a hook for that! Whoops!), which is more or less a full level for 3.5. My build of the temple has, hmm, one less encounter than the as-written temple, I believe, for about 5 encounters once the hoard has been cleaned up and another 5ish for all of the traps and Claw soldiers and stuff. That comes out to a full level, so there should be a full set of 10 parcels distributed in similar fashion throughout the area. Maybe an extra parcel or two. That totals to 4 high-level magic items (44,000 gp value but only a 8800 gp sell price, by 4th Edition standards, but they may be worth more to the party since they're all higher level items), and a total of 8,400 gp in miscellaneous loot. Hmm... I think I'm going to call the initial down payment I gave the PCs (which was higher than the recommended 200) a chunk out of the level 8 treasure parcels, since I'm not sure I filled that out fully, drop Sur'kil's payment for the relics down to 2000 (for the both of them), subtract the relic payment and the job-well-done payment from the 8,400 gp, and put most of the rest in the dragon's hoard - maybe a little bit will be scattered amongst the troglodytes. I'll also drop two of the magic items there, and distribute the other two among the troglodytes (the Curse Chanter is getting some lovely Healer's Gloves, for starters :D .) Alternatively, if I can't find a decent magic item for one of the item parcels, I might just convert it to straight cash and use it to beef up the hoard and miscellaneous troglodyte loot. I'm probably overanalyzing this, especially since the final conclusion was pretty straightforward, but oh well!
#15 Talae May 17, 2009 14:32:14	I haven't run numbers yet for treasure, but did get a sense that the module was packed with loot. I figured that I would just distribute a level's worth of parcels over each part (well at least Part 1 as I haven't gone through parts2-4).
#16 nthdegree256 May 17, 2009 16:28:15	If part 1 is any indication (being comprised of a full level's worth of encounters on its own), that sounds about right.
#17 Talae Jun 05, 2009 10:58:58	Do you think it would be wise to give the players the choice of a house mark of an abberrant mark, despite not being a member of the proper race?
#18 nthdegree256 Jun 05, 2009 11:43:03	I've been wondering about that myself. I luckily have some time to think about it - my group is on-track to finish up Part 1 just before I go on vacation for two weeks (out of state), which means I can end with the "you've started manifesting a dragonmark!" line and put off deciding the specifics for a little while. :P On the one hand, with 4E's stance on d'marks it's perfectly sensible to allow house marks for unmarked races (since my understanding is that people generally accept that you can pick up cross-race marks via the Altar.) Then again, this is essentially a free feat (and a really good one, at that - all of the mark powers we've seen so far are amazing!), so some arbitrary restrictions probably wouldn't hurt. At the moment, I'm thinking I'll allow any mark on any character, but I'll mull it over some.
#19 Talae Jun 05, 2009 12:12:51	As of now I am also thinking that I will allow each character to choose which mark they manifest (whether it be abberant or house specific), but also make them aware that if they have a mark of a house that it will bring some implications. I am hoping that the books start us on the right path to know how each house would deal with such a thing. I mean I can guess, like all of us, but it would be nice to the author's take.
#20 Rhoan01 Jun 09, 2009 10:45:00	I gotta say, this thread caught my eye at exactly the right time. I'm starting a new adventure for my group in Eberron, and I'd forgotten Eyes of the Lich Queen had been sitting on my shelf (also unused), ready to be updated. Here's a few things different in my conversion; my players are starting at level 5, and I've already told them I want to put their starting locale in Graywall. We meet once every two weeks, so I've been doubling the amount of XP they get to keep them leveling at a decent rate instead of going a month or longer without a level. I think transplanting the entire Q'Barra portion of the adventure to Droaam is an easy fix; I might replace the lizardfolk with something else, or just keep them since much of the group is still new to Eberron and won't immediately associate lizardfolk with Q'Barra. Also, several members in my group will have true dragonmarks, and I've been thinking about how the changes will affect them; I think I'll be giving at least one player an honest-to-goodness aberrant mark, but for those with true marks I'll probably increase their effectiveness by 1 (i.e. Orien mark lets them transport 2 extra instead of 1 extra, or Jorasco provides max healing +1). I need more info on 4E 'marks before making it final, though. One question: skill challenges are a big thing with me, and I'm wondering how you're incorporating them into your campaigns. I'd love to see any challenges you brewed up, and where you put them in the adventure.
#21 Talae Jun 09, 2009 11:21:21	In regard to skill challenges, honestly I haven't planned any. I haven't really used any, except in the very beginnings of us playing 4e. Things just seemed awkward and unbalanced. I really should try out the suggestions in the online articles and run some actual skill challenges. Let me know what you do. As for your marked PCs, maybe give them their current mark as a bonus feat and then they have an extrea slot. I say this because the Dragonmarks don't seem to have tiered feats/effects anymore.
#22 nthdegree256 Jun 09, 2009 12:00:23	I haven't used skill challenges in it yet, but there's a portion of the adventure where the PCs are supposed to get some information from one of the Princes in Lhazaar, and the brief glance I took at it just screamed "SKILL CHALLENGE" to me. The PCs in my game are just about to delve into the series of traps in the second half of the first dungeon. I have them statted up as pure traps, but I'll let you know if that goes catastrophically wrong - if that's the case, since you've had success with skill challenges before, you may end up wanting to run the traps that way.
#23 davethebrave371 Jun 10, 2009 18:39:58	Oh man, I am liking this thread. :D
#24 Talae Jun 10, 2009 19:10:21	Any critique?
#25 davethebrave371 Jun 10, 2009 20:12:42	Thus far, it looks a-ok to me. I think some bits (like the Dragonmark bit) can be pretty easily workshopped once the EPG is out. I'm sort of waiting for the EPG before I start to jump in and make suggestions, as some elements may be covered in the EPG that we can drop in here.
#26 nthdegree256 Jun 11, 2009 1:34:35	I thought I'd share what I put together for the Grinder room in part 1. I felt compelled to reorganize the trap to bring it more in line with 4th Edition "physics" (namely, how bursts and diagonals are treated, largely because I know that the discrepancy would have been inordinately distracting for at least one of my players...) I ended up treating the mass of whirling blades as a single Elite trap, the columns as two regular traps, and I hacked together some statblocks for the Persistent Harriers. All in all, I think that it went... all right. The PCs were certainly impressed by the configuration, but there wasn't a lot of reason for them to try to maneuver through the blades if they had ranged attacks, and the room as a whole was a level 9 encounter and honestly not that difficult. (My PCs were level 9 at the time.) As it stood, the only people the persistent harriers were picking on in the room were the paladin and the swordmage, both of whom had plenty of AC to deflect the blows. The harriers should probably be leveled up a bit, and their slow power switch to something that pushes, slides, or prones so they're at least very hard on whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the midst of the blades. :D Oh, or better yet, put the key to unlocking the door on one of the harriers. That'll at least force the PCs to deal with them and go diving into the trap, even if it's after they've blasted the harriers to bits. The Grinder Very similar to the encounter in the book. The harriers wait until at least one character is past the first column. Level 9 encounter, 2000 XP • 1 elite whirling blades trap • 2 spinning bladed column traps • 2 persistent harriers
#27 Phobos Jun 11, 2009 9:20:36	I've been reading this as folks have been posting. I like much of it, but this last post made me chuckle a bit, maybe its me and I'm cynical today. DC 16: Prone characters can avoid the horizontal blades. and DC 13: Standing within 5 feet of the columns would be quite painful. To me, my opinion, these DCs seem not only too high, but generally unnecessary. It falls into the category as 'duh' information. Things similar to this might be. 1. if I jump off my 2 story house, I might get hurt. 2. if I put my hand into that fire, it will burn me. 3. the news Rolling Stone released about Adam Lambert. All generally things I might tell my players without a check, assuming they simply look at the item. The other DCs seem appropriate. This one also strikes me as a bit off: DC 13: The blades are rapidly moving in and out, but at predefined locations. I'm not sure I'd need to roll for this, if the players took a second or two to watch the blades. Again, not knocking, just hit me as unnecessary.
#28 nthdegree256 Jun 11, 2009 10:32:43	I should probably strip those out of the statblocks - when I actually ran the adventure, I didn't even bother with the checks and just told all the players the obvious dangers and countermeasures, so I think as it turns out I agree with you. That said, I think there's some justification for the check. The room is jam-packed with blades flitting in and out all over the place, and there's nothing that says they're obviously in sync with one another. It'd be a visual nightmare to try to keep track of it all, and verifying that all of the horizontal blades are safely above crawlspace-level would take some effort, especially given that all but the closest two areas are hidden behind gnashing vertical blades. If nothing else, lowering the DCs for the obvious details might make sense - putting all of the reasonably-obvious material within reach of a "Take 10" Perception/Dungeoneering check - and given the manner in which the PCs encounter the trap, they have time to study it and figure out a plan of approach before the combat starts, so they could certainly take a few moments to look for gaps.
#29 Phobos Jun 11, 2009 15:30:20	That said, I think there's some justification for the check. The room is jam-packed with blades flitting in and out all over the place, and there's nothing that says they're obviously in sync with one another. It'd be a visual nightmare to try to keep track of it all, and verifying that all of the horizontal blades are safely above crawlspace-level would take some effort, especially given that all but the closest two areas are hidden behind gnashing vertical blades. I agree 100% on this one. I wasn't imply a fast look told ya how the blades worked, only that a moment of looking would make it clear the blades are fixed in spots. However, if you want to learn their pattern of projection, so you can say they move int he following pattern: top left, bottom right, left middle, etc... that would definitely require a check.
#30 Rhoan01 Jun 12, 2009 23:59:03	I like the idea of putting the key on the harriers; a PC with the highest passive Perception score notices a glint on one of them, which turns out to be the key. The group sighs, and trudges deeper into the whirling death-room after the little buggers. :D Are you finding yourself having to make serious XP changes to compensate for 4E's lower leveling totals (like adding / removing several encounters), or are things just falling into place naturally? I only ask because as I mentioned earlier, I'll be running players through this at double XP.
#31 nthdegree256 Jun 13, 2009 2:08:04	I haven't been worrying about it too much; truth be told, I dropped a couple of encounters from Part 1 more so I could keep things moving at a faster pace, rather than out of any plans to meet level quotas. I'll keep this in mind when I prep Part 2, though, and I'll try to remember to post back in this thread with my thoughts. Given that Part 1 has about 13 encounters (3.5 standard for a level), I'd definitely recommend dropping a couple in your case to keep things paced a little better - gaining 3 levels before you've even finished the first part of the adventure would seem a little wacky to me. Then again, given that you've made the call to go for double XP, I suppose you know you and your players' preferred rate of advancement better than I do.
#32 Talae Jul 08, 2009 10:21:38	Any updates from the others doing this conversion? My players just finished the encounter guarding the tempe entrance (so only like 3 or 4 encounters in).
#33 hastur_nz Jul 08, 2009 23:02:19	I'm running a different conversion to 4E (Savage Tide in Eberron, but that's another story), and have only had a cursory look at what you've done so far. But one thing I can say, based on my experience with converting from 3.x to 4E, is that to get the most out of it for everyone, you really do need to work hard on "optimising" your 4e encounters. By that, I mean really work hard on making most of your encounters fit the 4e conventions, because as written they follow the 3.x conventions, which are quite different and won't work. So for example, a few of your encounters seem a bit low on number of enemies - a group of 4-5 PC's against anything less than five foes is, more often than not, going to be a bit dull. Most solos are boring fights - compare the solos in MM2 to most of those in MM and you'll see how the designers realised that a bit late too. Elites are great for important NPC types, but don't overdo it. Rather than take your 3.x encounter, and up the levels, add elite templates etc, strongly consider adding more "mooks" to what's there, combine adjacent encounters, and so on. Make sure your encounter mas a mix of creature types - rather than all brutes and/or soldiers, make sure you've got a controller or a couple of artillery / skirmishers in there too. To fill an encounter's XP budget, err on the side of more creatures of lower level, and you'll set up a fun fight. Be prepared to learn and adjust as you go along - use the adventure as a guide, keeping the "fluff", but don't feel you have to use too much of the "crunch" - you need to make sure that you embrace the new world of 4e encounter design, in order to make sure that everyone gets the most out of it (otherwise why play 4e?) One thing I do a lot is actually steal bits of "crunch" from published 4e adventures - sometimes creatures, sometimes an encounter, sometimes a whole mini-dungeon! For example I'm about to use a whole dungeon from the latest (4e) adventure path, re-skinning a few creatures and swapping a couple of others, to make it appear like the one in Savage Tide; doing this actually saves me a lot of time, and creates a much more interesting dungeon under 4e than that one that was published under 3.5 (especially if I'd converted it to 4e rules). Oh, and lastly, remember that in 4e an "easy" encounter is pretty much a waste of everyone's time - it can still take half an hour or more to play out, and typically you find a healing surge or two was used but no dailies, so it's not even useful in terms of draining the PC's resources. Under 3.x, these kinds of easy-beat encounters were OK because often one or more PC's could end them really fast (well under half an hour was not uncommon), but it was still likely you'd drain some resource(s), typically spells that were only refreshed daily. So when converting to 4e, I find it's important to look at every encounter and ask yourself, "is this important, and how tough should it be?" If it's not important, I delete it (e.g. same creatures as already fought), or wrap it into a skill challenge (e.g. wilderness travel), or combine it with another encounter (e.g. multiple rooms in a dungeon). If it is important, I make sure it's of a significant challenge, say at least +1 over the PC's level. That meshes well with what my players like too - they enjoy tough fights, even more so under 4e - fights where it's obvious right away that the PC's are going to win are usually a grind for players and DM alike - once in a blue moon, to show ho powerful the PC's really are, is fine, but really, it's best in 4E to make sure you give the players PC's a decent work-out on a regular basis. Hope that's useful, despite being quite vague!
#34 nthdegree256 Jul 09, 2009 2:05:46	Hastur_nz makes some excellent points. I made plans to have a couple of patrolling troglodytes around the temple but scrapped them largely for the reasons above - they wouldn't have been much of an impact on party resources, but would have taken an unfortunate amount of time to deal with. I actually just ran the first segment of Part 2 last night. It was... interesting. I deliberately made the second and third encounters in the mansion "easy" because I expected the PCs to have to go from the second one to the third one without a short rest in between. I did not expect what actually happened, which was that the PCs charged on ahead from encounter to encounter without "finishing" each fight, turning the entire thing into one long running battle as they tied up the badguys from one encounter in chokepoints while they burned down Dura and charged into the library (including a fantastic use of Arcane Gate to shunt most of the party deep into the mansion, then shutting the gate so the enemies would have to take the long route.) I was caught off-guard at first but managed to play along, keeping the fire raging and the enemies coming as they dropped the Divinity Seeker (a refluffed chain devil), grabbed the book, summoned their hippogriffs (which they had used the Summon Steed ritual on just earlier that day, having learned about the ritual while getting their new dragonmarks!), and flew out of the window as the building burned behind them with half their enemies still alive but caught inside. It was glorious. :D I need to see about prepping the next two segments, though, especially the skill challenge(s) for the Prince Ryger part.
#35 davethebrave371 Jul 09, 2009 8:31:06	Oh, and lastly, remember that in 4e an "easy" encounter is pretty much a waste of everyone's time - it can still take half an hour or more to play out, and typically you find a healing surge or two was used but no dailies, so it's not even useful in terms of draining the PC's resources. Under 3.x, these kinds of easy-beat encounters were OK because often one or more PC's could end them really fast (well under half an hour was not uncommon), but it was still likely you'd drain some resource(s), typically spells that were only refreshed daily. ...woah, really? I found that easy encounters that lasted like five rounds in 3.x took hours and hours, and the hardest, most enemies on the board, crazynuts 10+ round difficult fight in 4e takes like 45 minutes at most. And one round encounters in both systems take like two minutes (maybe slightly more in 3.x if you've got optimized casters in the group).
#36 hastur_nz Jul 09, 2009 20:33:05	Well, I didn't want to turn this thread into a conversation about 3.x vs 4E, especially as I enjoyed 3.x but am enjoying 4e even more. But suffice to say I DM'd a lot of different groups under 3.x and, towards the end, one group in particular went through a lot of dungeon-crawl style adventures where virtually all the fights were quite quick, quicker than anything we've managed under 4e to date (although we do still need to speed up our play under 4e). The "problem" that I've heard people, including the 4e designers, talk of with 3.x combats taking too long? I never saw it, because I knew the rules well, as did most of my players, and we learned a lot of tricks to help speed things up, whether we were playing level 1, or level 23 (yes, we ran a campaign from 1st to 23rd level once, and combat never became a slow grind, we learned ways to ensure everyone's turn was pretty fast). For my 3.5 groups, an easy encounter usually took 2-3 rounds and was done and dusted in 10-15 minutes max, often less; a tough one could take any number of rounds (say 3-20) and take any length of time (say 10-120 minutes) - it all depended on what the spell caster(s) had that could short-cut the encounter (the PC's were, mostly, all fairly well optimised, and the players were pretty smart). 4E doesn't have those short-cuts, so it's a lot more predictable - if you total up the XP in the encounter, you can correlate that to an expected length (in number of rounds) pretty accurately, with variation mostly coming about due to things like high defenses (soldiers can slow it down, especially too many), terrain, a run of poor dice rolls, etc. Short of speeding up your players' time to take each of their turns (and making sure your DM turns are snappy), the biggest thing you can do as DM is to make sure that your combats are well designed for 4e. Ideally, this means they should be appropriately tough, with enough foes to make the PC's work hard on their synergies or really struggle. Most 3.x adventures just don't have encounters like that - some of the ones that came out towards the end were getting close, but overall, mostly 3.x adventures don't have enough foes, and/or their levels are not high enough to be a real threat. So just bear that in mind when converting, or you really can find your combats become too easy and hence a bore, or bogged down slogs where it takes forever to kill the monster(s) and still the PC's are not significantly stretched. After all, it's no fun for anyone to have fights where monsters die with half their powers unused, or PC's have only used one encounter power out of four. Similarly, it's really boring when everyone is down to their dailies and your only half-way through the fight. That's all I wanted to say really - converting from 3.x to 4e is an art that takes a while to master (part of the reason I enjoy it!) The good new is, that the 4e rules make it so much easier (and more predictable) to create encounters, tweak monsters, create completely new monsters, etc, so converting from 3.x to 4e much is less grind working through the rules, leaving more time to finesse the encounters into ones that will be exciting and challenging for everyone. I guess that's my last piece of advice - don't be afraid to re-work your plans a few times before you unleash them. The worst thing you can do as a 4e DM is to prepare too far ahead - because converting or tweaking an encounter really is so easy now, you should focus most of your time on preparing only the encounters you need for the next couple of sessions (at most). Have an outline of the future, but don't do the detailed work until the last minute, because by the time you get there, you'll have learned a lot more and had a lot more ideas on how to make it memorable.