Encounter Design

[kaisel]

This is a rather random post, but I've realized I kind of suck at making interesting encounters in D&D. I have one rather trivial puzzle, and one where the players are going to be fighting over rotatable bridges, while trying to get to the other side (kind of like a "why did the chicken cross the road" joke :P). The thing is, while I have this

Comments

[kaisel]

Luckily most of the premade 4th edition ones I've seen make it where there aren't a bunch of cooler people around. In fact, nearly everyone around either sucks, or seems kinda cool then dies.

The encounter actually turned out a bit more interesting than I thought, ended with one of the characters lasso-ing a mechanical flying monkey after being knocked down a floor...

[kaisel]

Yeah it went pretty well, which was good. Still not entirely sure how I feel about the whackiness though, since I'm not exactly the most comic of people :P.

[koyetay]

With the campaign I'm in, our party actually lives in a city built specifically to cater to adventurers. This is really nice whenever we need some extra help, very easy to find entertaining people to hire.

In terms of why OUR party seems to be the ones solving everything: it seems that other adventurers in the city are frequently caught up in their own, usually unrelated quests. Our party in particular has been taken under the wing of the City leaders, so we get to take part in the crazy world-shaking events going on.

I think why it works really well with ours is that the world still has a reason to exist sans the party. This setting has been host to multiple campaigns and has some very involved history and machinations going on.

[kaisel]

Most of the premade stuff that 4th edition has is pretty much "find a reason for why the heroes are there, here's an adventure" for the most part. I think they wanted to do that so there's less of a DM playing against himself with hirelings and monsters.

The current campaign I'm actually playing in is going through one of the Wizards of the Coast adventure paths, where there are multiple groups doing stuff, ours just happens to be doing most of the world saving bits. It's not exactly high art or a very engrossing overarching plot, but we've gotten some really good RP out of it at any rate.