John Zeitler

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been doing some pretty intensive reading and writing for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that’ll be starting up in a week or so. The first mission is about halfway finished, but what’s got me thinking is just how much easier getting everything together is under 4th Edition than it was in 3rd.

One of the things that I balked at initially was the concept of character and monster roles; it seemed like an arbitrary and silly way to enforce an intention on the DM and the players. The more I read through and pick out creatures– to say nothing of defining them– I realize it makes things easier in terms of strategizing creature placement and encounter size. In the planning phase, having the roles ensures that you don’t create encounters that are easily dominated by one particular style. For example, a cluster of identical kobolds (Brutes) can be boring to fight through, but give half of them crossbows and have them hang back behind cover (Artillery) and the encounter changes dramatically.

What’s also worth noting is that I’m not being as rigid in defining my encounters and rooms. I have a general idea of what I want to do when the PCs arrive in each new room, but it’s been a point here to stress that the environment is sometimes as much of a danger to the party as the monsters. Dungeons aren’t designed with OSHA compliance– they’re old, decrepit ruins which could collapse entirely at any given moment if a particularly foolhardy halfling were to, say, lunge at a handful of gems tucked away in an innocuous corner. When they’re not, they’re fortresses specifically designed to be hostile to the folks who come barging in. I learned a lot from watching other campaigns, where elaborate set-pieces make sweeping changes to the flow of a battle.

Finally, one of my goals with the campaign is to prove that a good encounter is one that can be solved in different ways. Violence is not always the most successful option, or even the one with the largest chance of survival. Players should be encouraged to hunt out ways to get out of fighting, because constant fighting can get tedious. And trust me, I have ways of making sure my players know the better part of valor.

We’ll know in a couple of days if my studies bear fruit or not– I’m doing a playtesting session this coming weekend. Till then, I want to leave you with this thought: I had to scale back my damage estimates less often than I had to increase them.