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

A Battle Most Bazaar by Nem Z

The PCs (all fairly low in level) confront a former hero with a questionable moral outlook in a crowded marketplace street - a situation ripe for chaos.

This is good writing but a large setup. I don’t see it as an encounter. Seems like a bunch of them put togehter and kinda random at that. I think it kind of leads the PCs too, as it assumes they have to follow this guy. I can’t drop it into my game without setting up a bunch of backstory. A lot of the other entries you can just pick up and use (like that orc farmhouse I just read which is more of a single encounter, although it has a lot of people like this one does).

I think my group might do some things that aren’t covered in the if/then assumptions part, and then I’d have to scrap the entire setup and just play it as they did. Not sure how that would go, although I do have all the areas mapped out for me. I really think my group might just walk away and go to a tavern or somehting. Seems like a bunch of NPCs all fighting, so they likely wouldn’t even get involved. Wait for the NPCs to kill one another, then get the treasure. It didn’t even seem like the PCs had to be here for all this stuff to happen and that they were important to it happening. I think it would work pretty good if it could be developed in a longer campaign, but it doesn’t feel like an encounter as I read in the contest rules.

I like the maps. Looks like some professional work.

True, it isn’t a “run this tonight!” off the shelf sort of set-up.  The BBEG comment in the rules thread convinced me it should be a pivotal encounter, and for that it needs to be then end of a series of adventures such as you might find in a longer adventure path.  I worked from that assumption onward, trying to balance all the details necessary to understand what’s happening and not getting too much over the 3-page suggestion.  If you take out the maps it should just fit in under the limit.

Glad you liked them by the way… it took a lot of work to do all that dot-by-dot in MSpaint!

As far as your group not getting involved, if they actually played through the implied previous adventures I hope that would be motivation enough.  I would love to have been able to actually write the whole thing up but that wasn’t what the contest asked for. 

Taking any of the identified loot in Chez’s complex would lead to some interesting further plot hooks.  The two ‘treasure rooms’ are essentially safety deposit boxes, the property within belonging to people who aren’t actually in the encounter.  Likely some of them might not take kindly to their items disappearing.

You’re right in that things would happen whether the PCs are around or not (though being present should have an affect of some sort).  That’s my DMing style coming through; the world in my games is much bigger and more complex than what the players see at first glance, but their actions cause ripples around them and they can get involved in the goings-on if they dig around a little.

I was trying to set up a single encounter with several different ways it could get hectic quickly depending on the actions of the players.  I do respect your opinion as to what constitutes an encounter, though.  If nothing else the wide interpretations of that term represented in the contest entries hints at the fact that using encounters as discrete units of time will be an important section of the 4e rules.

Thank you for the comments, BindleBee.  Win or lose I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from this experience.