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#1 dungeonmastergaz Oct 17, 2008 9:09:31

Hi all I was wondering how all you DMs go about building an adventure, so I created this thread hoping we could pass on some wisdom to each other. The way I currently craft my adventures for 4E is as follows: I break up the campaign into sizeable chunks, with each adventure I write spanning a few character levels. Much like the H-series of adventures (KotS, TL, & PoS) I’ve broken up the Heroic Tier of the campaign I’m working on at the moment into 3 adventures. Adventure one spans levels 1-4, adventure two 4-7, and adventure three covers levels 7-10. My players are just approaching 4th-level, and the climax of the first adventure, so I’m designing adventure two at the moment and will use that as my example. It’s easy to see how much XP a character needs to advance for each level, so I break that down into encounters of varying levels. My breakdown for the first part of the adventure, covering the party’s advancement from level 4 to level 5 is like this: Level 3 encounters = 1 Level 4 encounters = 2 Level 5 encounters = 2 Level 6 encounters = 2 Level 7 encounters = 1 This should give the party 1700XP each (50XP short of 5th-level). I work out the same encounter breakdown for level 5-6 and 6-7 and end up with a total number of 25 encounters over 3 levels. To these I add 5 5th-level minor quests (1 for each of my players and equal in XP to 1 encounter), 1 major quest (the whole purpose of the adventure with the same XP as 1 encounter) and 6 off-the-cuff encounters (2 each of level 5, 6, and 7). I throw in these extra encounters because I know my players will follow their own path through the adventure, and perhaps miss some of the planned encounters (I don’t railroad my PCs). The extra random encounters can also be used to steer the PCs back on course if they lose the main track of a quest, or the adventure itself. In total, if the PCs did play through every single encounter, and complete every quest, they would earn 8375XP (2125XP more than what they need to reach 7th-level by the end of the adventure, but like I said – I don’t expect them to play through every encounter, and the 6 random encounters I throw in can be taken out to balance the XP if needs be). Any encounters they don't play through can easily be recycled, so their not wasted time. Once I’ve planned the encounter progression (and not all these are combat encounters. Some are Skill Challenges.) I start to develop the story. I determine the Major quest as the main story plot first, then the minor quests, and assign encounters from all three levels to them. It happens that I determined the major quest to include 9 encounters, and the remaining 14 encounters are split between the 5 minor quests. I found that doing it like this gives the PCs a good choice of directions to choose, and they are free to do the quests in any order, and even do a bit of one, do some of another, then go back to the first later. If there is a time constraint (the PCs must do something before its too late scenario) then I make them aware they need to pursue that quest as a matter of urgency by making it clear in the game using my NPCs, but other than that – it’s totally free-form. I hope all that doesn’t come across as too confusing. In practise the method works well for my game design, and gives my players a lot of freedom. They always feel that it was they who drove the story along because of it, and feel like it’s actually them that shape the world. Of course, not everything can go as planned sometimes, but 4E makes it really easy to adapt and change things as a DM, so tweaking is a breeze. So, how do you guys go about building your adventures? I’d love to know. There are some really great ideas going around the forums here so I’m looking forward to learning something new from your responses to this post. Thanks in advance.