4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

The map for the charnal pit encounter was a bit confusing at first, but when I paged to the back and saw the cross section, it kind of helped.

That said, they’re fun little encounters. I might have to try and use them at some point. The moving bridges seem like the exact kind of things my players would hate me for. Woo!

This is perfect for me.  I see myself using this around 930 at night when we’ve wrapped up most of what I wanted to cover, but have time for one more quick encounter.

I thought the mechanic of the hazard in the second one was really good. It has fun written all over it, with the minor inconvenience of moving bits of paper around. Not too bad, really, and it is fun. Ever since Sagegloom Hall at D&DXP;I’ve come to see that the long 4E combats can really benefit from these types of challenges. Movement for tactical sake is fine, but it isn’t interesting. When the environment dictates movement, that is interesting.

Long 4E combats?  I’m hope you’re not saying that the combat system takes longer now?  By way of comparison in 3.5 in a 4 hour game session we’d be lucky to finish 3 encounters, where as in 4E we’re going through 5-7 every time we play.

No, not long. Tremendously long. Sorry, but I don’t think they shortened combat. They did shorten the amount of time the player of a spellcasting class takes to make decisions, but they lengthened slightly the time spent by other players. And, more importantly, they increased hit points and removed a lot of cheese from damage. It can be totally fun, but it has been longer by far. We converted a Living Greyhawk mod to 4E, and it made us wonder how LFR will work. The mod ran longer. There is a real danger of the longer combat feeling like a grind under the wrong DM/author. With the right DM/author, the tactical feel is really cool and you are happy to fight longer - it just isn’t easy to picture how the average con mod will work. Bears more testing. We shall see.