That first encounter looks about right for 5 4th level pc's. Not a cake-walk but not too hard either. The last encounter with Lareth looks pretty tough to me, but from what I've seen of 4e modules and from other's experience wotc's designers do make later encounters a little too tough. I don't know if they're expecting people to take more rests than they are, or if they're just overestimating the tactical abilities of most players, but I heard there were an awful lot of TPK's at the end of Keep on the Shadowfell. My party barely survived although we did lose our cleric. I personally don't care for the whole tactical team approach. Parties of adventurers shouldn't be knuckleheads but neither should they be SEAL teams. That said I think the tendency to assume you have to have such and such roles filled on the team to survive is in most cases false. In my experience a good party of fighters of the right level should be able to tear apart a room of monsters almost as effectively as a carefully balanced tactical team. A full party of wizards is always a bad idea though, if you ask me.
Strange - my experience is that team composition makes a huge difference. We played an attack by a bunch of gnolls on an abandoned village. Our goal was to protect an npc.
Team composition 1: Eladrin wizard (MC ranger), Human 2W ranger, Human Warlord (MC cleric). They kicked the gnolls to hell with the wizard mopping up a lot of the minions at a reasonable distance and the ranger heading out into harms way to take on the tougher gnolls.
Team composition 2: Human fighter (MC Warlord), Human bard (MC Druid), Shadar-kai warlock (MC rogue). Due to a mistake early on (the bard not using her green thumb gloves to erect a wall to slow down the gnoll minions' advance) and later on getting cornered in a building where she no longer had line of sight to heal the fighter who had ventured outside, this party lost the fight.
That first encounter looks about right for 5 4th level pc's. Not a cake-walk but not too hard either. The last encounter with Lareth looks pretty tough to me, but from what I've seen of 4e modules and from other's experience wotc's designers do make later encounters a little too tough. I don't know if they're expecting people to take more rests than they are, or if they're just overestimating the tactical abilities of most players, but I heard there were an awful lot of TPK's at the end of Keep on the Shadowfell. My party barely survived although we did lose our cleric. I personally don't care for the whole tactical team approach. Parties of adventurers shouldn't be knuckleheads but neither should they be SEAL teams. That said I think the tendency to assume you have to have such and such roles filled on the team to survive is in most cases false. In my experience a good party of fighters of the right level should be able to tear apart a room of monsters almost as effectively as a carefully balanced tactical team. A full party of wizards is always a bad idea though, if you ask me.
I have never seen a player group in ANY edition of the game not take a rogue-like character (a striker), a cleric like character (a leader) a wizard like character (a controller) and a fighter like character (a defender) - so that is hardly a good arguement. Especially now with so many options (and not all equal - anyone who thinks a bard is exactly like a cleric in 4E, simply because they are both leaders is dead wrong) you can have almost any combination of characters and still manage to get by.
What I would like to know is how, in your opinions, the edition of the game, 1st to 4th in this case actually changes the tone of this early T1 encounter...it sounds like the first level of the moathouse in the new version is designed for 4th level pcs, a big diffrence from T1, designed for 1st level, so it may be difficult to compare.
Question: What level are the brigands? Are they in the 4ed T1 more than normal, but desperate humans?
If so, IMO this is a big difference.
Do you feel that this encounter is DESIGNED specifically for a 4e fire team mix?
I will keep my Gary Gygax autographed 1st edition 1st printing monochrome copy, thank you very much.
I am sure that the 4e version will not make your original spontaneously combust ...
-You don't know that...
Cebrion wrote:
This could be very interesting, considering what time period this 4e version of T1 will be set in and what changes will be made to it. It could very well forshadow things to come for Greyhawk.
-I think that's what everyone is afraid of...
PaulN6 wrote:
...Each edition places its own spin. 3e turned Hommlett into a cosmopolitan mix of humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and barbarian halflings (shudder)...
-What about ninja half-orcs?
Fortunately, I'm sure that Paul is joking.
cennedi wrote:
IronGolem wrote:
Producing heretical new stuff kills Greyhawk more effectively than not producing anything at all, IMHO.
Anything WotC produces would be/will be Canon...
-Wonderful.
cennedi wrote:
...At one point I asked the Devs why they chose Eberron and not FR or GH and the answer was that the Devs didn't want to have people criticizing and attacking every little thing they did that was not exactly canon. The Devs didn't want to listen to a torrent of complaints concerning the look of a sword or set of armor.
-Then maybe the developers should actually try learning about GH before they start monkeying around with it, or as Iron Golem posted:
IronGolem wrote:
...It takes a lot of time and effort to become familiar with the history of a product line. It may be that developers do not typically have the time or incentive to do that kind of research before producing a new product for that line. In the absense thorough research, a pre-existing familiarity and love of the product line is crucial to producing a quality product. I think Paizo is the perfect example of how this is done right. Erik Mona clearly has a love and familiarity with Greyhawk that made the adventure paths in Dungeon a joy to read.
...and JHSII:
JHSII wrote:
For me it's simple - Imagine that Chevrolet bought the rights to build the Yugo. They then renamed it "Corvette" for the 2010 model year and put one of those little Corvette plastic decals on it.
Any guesses on how popular it would be?
Would any of you want to buy a Corvette ZR-Yugo for $135,000?
This is what Hasbro/WotC is trying to do. They want my business - they're going to have to do better. A whole lot better!!
-BTW, before I seriously started studying this site about two weeks ago, I had no idea how screwed up WOTC (I had heard about the problems about a decade ago when Gygax left the store); all I knew is that the artwork in the 3.5e books suck (Have the artists ever bothered to look at what a suit of chainmail actually looks like? And what's with all the tatoos? The sample PCs look like refugees from a rave that went wrong).
Got my copy. While I can't say that many of the changes are, in and of themselves, all that significant, it appears to me that their cumulative effect changes the tone and feel of the adventure. In other words, it's just not the same Hommlet to me.
(Minor spoilers to follow.)
For example, recasting Spugnoir as a tiefling and Furnok of Ferd as a dwarf isn't all that big a deal in the long run. However, inserting tieflings, dragonborn, etc., while confusing the issue of who Lareth serves somewhat, in addition to all the other changes and coupled with a different rules set, just makes it feel like a different town and adventure. For me it's similar to having a neighbor with an identical house - sure, I can walk in and find my way around, but it's just not home.
My main complaint against the new version is that is stripped the village of all the little things that didn't have anything to do with the adventure but gave the entire thing a personality. For example:
I loved that the church of St. Cuthbert was covered with all these little Cuthbertian sayings. Or the nosey little old lady. Or how about the brothers that thought the end of the world was coming and so had stockpiled food, water, and weapons in their basement.
"old school" published adventure writing seems to fill the area up with lots of little things that were just for flavor... they didn't have any real purpose to the plot of the adventure itself.
I have heard that this is in part due to the writers agreement that WotC has now. WotC and Writers don't negotiate or dicker over price anymore. The writers aren't paid by the strength of finished product but instead by word count, so any extraneous material are edited out to reduce the purchase price. I can see why WotC went this route... in the past they have had a couple of experiences with promoting a product only to have an author pull it from publication when they couldn't get what they wanted for it. Plus they deal with a lot of amateur writers so a simplified writing template and submission/purchase process has a lot to be desired. But one of the consequences is that the materials just aren't as rich as they could have been.
I can second that, Varthalon. That, I think, is the greatest loss in gaming today. All the little details that added richness and interest to products are largely gone. Today most of them read as lists of combat encounters or at least background info for a list of combat encounters. I sometimes compare it to food - today's products provide an explosion of flavor that, while it may be pleasurable, lacks the subtleties and intricacies that one finds in a truly satisfying gourmet meal.
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