Why 4e is a bridge

[viktor_haag]

After starting to fiddle with the translation that will be needed to move the Monday Night Group over to 4e, I'm becoming swiftly convinced that 4e is a bridge for two big reasons: (a) it's fun to play, and (b) they've finally offered a set of rules that make things easy to piece together balanced sets of scenes in a clear and swift manner. I still haven't really figured out how exactly 3.5e constructs scenes; by contrast, building scenes with the new rules is easy, adjusting and tailoring foes appears to be easy. The proof will be, of course, when these notes get put into play in a month or so, but from my point of view, point (b) goes a heck of a long way and helps explain why everyone seems to be taking to the new edition like ducks to water.

Comments

[maliszew.livejournal.com]

What are these "scenes" of which you speak?

In all seriousness, D&D adventures don't have scenes, so I'm a bit baffled by what you mean here.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Oh; I tend to have a filmic approach to these games, and think in terms of scenes and acts. I believe the common parlance is "encounters". But what I like about the new edition is the extension of "encounters" past just tactical exercises: skill challenges and quests represent interesting sorts of narrative constructions as well. I'm already using skill challenges in my 3.5e sessions, and I like 'em.

As I was translating Pathfinder #2's first part on the weekend, I found it fairly easy to deconstruct it and kit-bash it back together with the 4e guidelines: "OK, the players should advance about this much during this part, which means I need about this many 'encounters', so how does the material here map onto that? Well, let's see: here's a quest, here's a skill challenge or two, here's the encounters they've provided that I should translate over... hmmm... still missing something? Aha! OK, here's another scene that would make sense, now to build it, snip, snap, all done!"

What I really like is the new "minion/standard/elite/solo" type templating for foes. It's quite easy to scale foes up and down with a minimum amount of effort: especially once you realize that you can use the MM as a pratique and start lifting powers and abilities from here and there to good effect: the role definitions for foes give reasonably good guidance on what kinds of powers can be copied over without much worry about balance (at least it seems that way: we'll have to see if it turns out that way in a month or so).

[thebitterguy]

I knew you meant Encounters. Don't worry, he's cranky all the time too.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Cranky too?! Who else are you referring to?! Bah!

[thebitterguy]

Why, pyat, of course.