D&D 4E Any notable 4E adventures worth converting to 5E?

[Tony Vargas]

No, he's right. Because of 4E's absolute marriage to the encounters per day l/milestone system, a lot of the combat in its adventures really was unexciting filler.

5e expects 6-8 encounters/day, depends on resource attrition over that period to provide challenge, and class balance will fluctuate as you deviate from that guideline. 4e expected 4 or 5 encounter per day, presented challenge both via attrition and within each encounter, and class balance was not disrupted by varying it.

5e is a great game in a lot of ways, but having /fewer/ 'filler combats' is definitely not one of them. 5e expects more, easier, faster combats per day, not fewer.

Keep on the Shadowfell was written before the 4e core books were made, right? That's why KotS has conflicting rules with the 4e handbook.

Yep, just like HotDQ. The first & the worst.

The people discussing "Do Not Convert 4e Monsters & Combat" are accurate too. As much as I like 4e, the monsters started becoming Big-Bags-of-Hitpoints at a certain point.

To be fair, they stopped being that at a certain point. MM1 Solos & Elites feel short of design goals, they were too hard to hit, had too many hps, and didn't /do/ enough. MM2 and MM3 were big improvements, that way. I wish 5e had held onto more of the secondary-role, action-preservation, &c innovations than it did with just the Legendary rules.

Anyway, I'd rank the first 3 modules as Thunderspire Labyrinth > Pyramid of Shadow > Keep on the Shadowfell.

Agreed. Marginal, barely-salvageable, and terrible, respectively.

Actually, I quite like TL and fun could be wrung out of PoS if you didn't take it too seriously. KotS was pretty aweful, though, and it's too bad some opinions were formed on it. I'm glad there wasn't the same overreaction to HotDQ.

 

[pemerton]

No, he's right. Because of 4E's absolute marriage to the encounters per day l/milestone system, a lot of the combat in its adventures really was unexciting filler.

The solution to this, in my experience, is to cut the filler and just include stuff that matters.

 

[CapnZapp]

5e expects 6-8 encounters/day, depends on resource attrition over that period to provide challenge, and class balance will fluctuate as you deviate from that guideline.

Why reiterate this?

It doesn't make it right, or good, or fun.

I would never give off advice that leads to a lot of individually boring fights.

A fight where the stakes are "will you have to spend a healing potion, an action surge, a point of ki, or a spell - or will you persevere without spending that resource" is the definition of boring.

Not just because that question in itself isn't particularly exciting, but mainly because a fight where you don't use your kewl abilities is a boring fight where the fighter just whacks away and everyone else uses cantrips.

A fight where already in round one you realize you will probably win the fight (so that you can afford yourself the luxury of asking yourself the above questions; that you seriously contemplate winning the fight without any resource expenditure) must be a completely unchallenging fight by definition.

Even the basic expectation that a fight should take three rounds is something I don't understand. If the fight probably won't take more than three rounds, then the opposition must truly be pathetic.

I can't imagine why anyone would actually give advice that leads to a long series of combats that each take no more than three rounds to resolve, when it would be so very much more fun and exciting to take those monsters and bunch them together into perhaps two fights, that now mean something, that now challenge the players and their characters, where now there are actual risk on the table.

Also; the elephant in the middle of the room that nobody wants to discuss.

In the "recommended" play style, say the idea is for the party to have run out of nearly every resource by their eighth encounter for the day.

This encounter is still just three goblins or whatever; but since the party is all down to single-digit hit points and they only have a few special abilities (like spells) left, now there is actual nerve: will the goblins manage to actually kill off some PCs before the day ends?

But this will never happen in practice. The game is incredibly generous with allowing rests: not only does the game leave it entirely up to the players when to rest and when to retreat; it even supplies nigh-indefeatable spells to facilitate undisturbed rest.

Pressing on when you're incredibly vulnerable for no other reason than the game becomes tense if you do, is an incredibly frustrating thing to ask of your players. Unfun.

And forcing them through story is also incredibly frustrating and unfun - not perhaps once in a blue moon for the sake of variety, but as a regular means of adding challenge.

In the end, the analysis is clear:

I would love a module that's meant as a challenge (like DDO dungeons) where the adventure supplies the restrictions: you know that if you don't reach the end of the dungeon with the resources at hand, you will have failed and will have to try again (roll up new characters and "restart") - there are no rests to be had (or there are rests to be had, but the adventure assumes tight control over where and when you may rest, and sets a hard limit on the number of rests you may take).

Suddenly that three-goblin fight can have actual nerve!

But that doesn't work for general campaigns.

The general solution has to be: since the DM doesn't get to prevent rests, each set-piece encounter has to be challenging enough by its own. D&D is pretty frackin' far from empowering the DM to be able to count on "when they reach the Throne Room they WILL be at half strength, so the Boogie King doesn't have to be overwhelmingly lethal to still present a deadly challenge as appropriate for the adventure finale".

That this leads to fewer encounters between rests is an unfortunate consequence of how stubborn the rules are on "you WILL find rest each night". The DEFAULT is incredibly generous, meaning that the DM must actively harass and wreck the party's resting plans in order to prevent "free" resting.

And I don't like to play the evil stingy DM. I would MUCH rather have the rules tell the players they can't rest. Period. UNLESS the generous loving DM decides from the warmth of his heart to allow it maybe just this once as a personal favor to the players... (Okay maybe overdoing it just a little - but you get my point)

That this favors long-rest classes (like wizard) over short-rest classes (like fighter) is much less of a concern (to me) since 5th edition has shifted the balance of powers rather drastically away from the once-quadratic wizard towards the still-pretty-linear fighter.

What I mean is: with the dearth of save-or-die spells, with the multiple drawbacks of concentration (little to no buffing; only one Big Spell at a time; vulnerability to taking damage etc), and with generally low amounts of spell slots to begin with; no it's not necessarily a problem if adventure days seldom offer as many as six encounters.

 

[jayoungr]

My favorite example is an LFR adventure that begins with a worker dropping a crate of fire beetles, all of which you then have to fight. The adventure then proceeds with the worker getting scolded, which is the actual plot-relevant part, and fire beetles are never mentioned again.

I dunno, that sounds kind of fun to me. While it may not be plot-relevant, it does start the adventure off with some action, and fire beetles are out of the ordinary for a party's first encounter.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Why reiterate this?

To make a point that you snipped when you replied, that had nothing to do with whether attrition-based challenges were legitimate.

Why did you reiterate your anti-5e-attrition-based-challenges rant?

 

[the Jester]

While that's fair, don't forget that Keep on the Shadowfell and Pyramid of Shadows are widely considered two of the worst modules ever made for 4e.

As a fan of 4e, I totally agree. Both share similar problems. For instance, there's an encounter in KotS where there are a group of bad guys trying to excavate a key artifact to the BBEG's plot, but whether the pcs completely skip the encounter or trounce the bad guys makes absolutely no difference to the rest of the adventure or to the BBEG's plot. Yeah.

Likewise, PoS has an interesting setup- you're basically trapped in this pyramid that hops in and out of reality- but there is no way to fail. The end of the adventure basically says, "Oh, if your pcs totally screw up every step of the way, let them out at the end." In other words, in both cases, the pcs' actions don't actually matter to the way it plays out.

On the subject of good 4e modules, though, I've already run Thunderspire Labyrinth (or at least a chunk of it- the pcs explored the bits they were interested in, found the Well of Demons and had an awesome set piece battle climax). It's a great sandboxy adventure. Demon Queen's Enclave, likewise, is a great one IMHO; it's full of politics and intrigue if the DM only runs it that way, which is suggested very strongly in the module. King of the Trollhaunt Warrens, other than the filler encounters, is pretty strong, too.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

A fight where the stakes are "will you have to spend a healing potion, an action surge, a point of ki, or a spell - or will you persevere without spending that resource" is the definition of boring.

A definition, not the definition.

That it bores you doesn't mean it bores others, or that others won't find what you find exciting to be boring, it's subjective - not objective.

I can't imagine why anyone would actually give advice that leads to a long series of combats that each take no more than three rounds to resolve, when it would be so very much more fun and exciting to take those monsters and bunch them together into perhaps two fights, that now mean something, that now challenge the players and their characters, where now there are actual risk on the table.

And I "can't imagine" why anyone would actually give advice that leads to each battle being individually more than 30 minutes of play time, and always include such significant risk of failure by way of unconscious or killed characters.

My way (the way 5th edition suggests playing) bores you. Your way (sounds like 3.5 or 4th edition's suggested play) bores me. It's subjective.

Also; the elephant in the middle of the room that nobody wants to discuss.

In the "recommended" play style, say the idea is for the party to have run out of nearly every resource by their eighth encounter for the day.

No, don't say that. That's not actually an idea the recommended play style of 5th edition suggests you should ever have.

The only idea the recommended style has is that a party can probably take on 6-8 encounters before needing a long rest. That's it. You're not supposed to bank on the idea that the party doesn't get a rest before some encounter in particular, at least not unless your scenario makes it impossible for that to not be the case.

Pressing on when you're incredibly vulnerable for no other reason than the game becomes tense if you do, is an incredibly frustrating thing to ask of your players. Unfun.

The solution to that, in my experience, is to either make sure there isn't "no other reason" or to just let the players have their characters rest - and not stress out about that making some upcoming challenge "too easy".

Of course, all the advice in the world on how to run campaigns the way I do doesn't mean diddly - despite it being fun for me, and for my players, and matching quite closely to how 5th edition guidelines set up a campaign - if your idea of fun doesn't match. And if that is the case, which it certainly appears to be from your posts, it's on you to alter the game for your uses (or use a different system, if you prefer that solution), but it is not anything bad about or wrong with the system as it exists that it doesn't match your preferences (just like it is nothing bad about or wrong with 4th edition that my group and I didn't enjoy it).