4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons has a clear focus on “encounters”. Each encounter usually (not always) consists of a setting, like a big room, with a bunch of creatures carefully calculated out to meet the challenge of the party. This is the style we’re used to in 4e, but it doesn’t have to be the only style.
Today we’re going to look at three ways to make your adventure feel more old-school than a typical 4e encounter-focused adventure. Many of these tips come from the most excellent article called Zen and Old-School D&D. Let’s take a look at some tips:
Use Puzzles, Not Challenges
An old-school adventure uses puzzles that must be noodled through by the players at the table rather than skill challenges that must be overcome by the characters and their skills. Instead of a statue that requires five successful arcane or athletics checks to defeat, you have a statue that must be struck by the four swords of the four other statues in the room. Instead of a door with a tricky mechanical and arcane trap, you have a riddle. Old-school adventures focus on the minds of the players rather than the statistics of the characters.
More Battles, Less Monsters
4e encounters typically follow a series of kill rooms with a big pile of nasties that total to the player’s level + or – three. For that old-school feel, ignore the experience budget and throw out fewer monsters. Let the battles go fast and furious with a single high-level elite or a small pack of four minions and their underboss. You might have to houserule some of these smaller parties to make sure the group doesn’t simply storm through them all the time, but a whole pile of these will still do a good job wearing folks down. Try running an elite five levels higher than your party with some minions as backup.
Pay Attention to Mundane Gear
Did the party remember their 10′ pole and their 50′ of rope? Do they have enough torchlight to keep the place lit? Get rid of those sunrods and go back to the way things were when a dwarf had to sacrifice a shield to hold a lantern and life and death balanced on whether the party brought enough oil. Make sure to let your players know before you’re going to start being a hardass about their mundane items.
Run Some Battles Without a Battle Map
4e is a game clearly focused on tactical battles using maps and miniatures, but not every battle needs to be that way. Build a mix between a skill challenge and a traditional battle and throw away the map for this one. Have the PCs focus on skills as well as attacks to defeat their enemies. Perhaps the battle happens on the back of leathery-winged drakes or between two runaway mining cars. Maybe the party is hanging from ropes leading up into a secret chamber from a drop two hundred feet below. Set up some radical situations and return to the imagination as your battle map.
These tips aren’t meant to completely overwrite 4e’s typical system, but every so often you might want to try some things out and see how the old-school style feels to you and to your players. Give it a try!
I have been struggling with this in my 4e games for a while now. How to recapture some of the magic of the old D&D games, where description and thinking through the challanges was the key.
Conclusion I have come to is 4e is great but trying to bend it to fit the old style is counter productive. Those tips above are great just to mix up 4e encounters, but what we do when we want old school is play an old school game. (Dragon Warriors, Dragonage, AD&D).
I think the issue is that 4E is about the Characters abilities (even 3rd addition was to some extent simply by having skills for things that were usually handled by Roll playing).
I do think you could bring some of the old school back by insisting on descriptions for what a character is doing when they make a skill check. So that players start to describe actions and the DM decides what skill is relevant.
Love the blog and associated twitter.
Andy
The biggest way I have found to keep the feel of old D&D is not to allow 4e to dictate the dungeon crawl. I still expect characters to do all the things listed above in the article: explore rooms, look for traps, solve puzzles, dig through cave ins, etc.
It’s really a matter of style though – 4e’s focus on encounters helps bring in new players, especially those from the MMORPG crowd who are used to constant action. But once you get them hooked on 4e, you can start reintroducing the old “crawl” goodies back in.
Awesome post btw – it’s important to remember all the good old elements of a dungeon crawl – and 4e is capable of having them in the game.
I strongly suspect that the reason 4e doesn’t feel old school is that I’m not 14 any more. But it does seem to feel very different and I wish I could explain how. Things like the importance of mundane gear could be a part of it.
4th ed definitely gives off the impression that its all about combat abilities and powers (as that’s pretty much what all the rulebooks are full of) but if you put all of the powers and skill challenges out of your mind for a moment your left with a pretty simple old style game. I’ve been running some 1st ed stuff with my group and some newer Old school stuff and it has worked great. The biggest problem I’ve run into is getting the players (and myself) to shift back and forth from the dungeon tiles to the imagination. When they are looking at tiles they seldom thouroghly search a room and when I’m looking at tiles I often give my descriptions short shrift. All of your article is very good advice.
I wish Wizards would give the discussion a bit of attention. I totally get what they say in various blog posts that the rules don’t preclude any type of play style.
However this has type of post has come up so often their must be something too it, something ephemeral that is missing. This doesn’t detract from the system as a whole, 4E is great and remains the game of choice but I do think some of gamist elements of the rules focus the attention on a square grid so that the players forget everything not on the table. When this happens some of the Richness of the rpg experience can be lost.
If you really want 4E to have an old school feel, one subtle change could make that happen. Instead of giving XP for fighting encounters/killing monsters, give XP for treasure accumulated much like how it worked originally.
This subtle change can dramatically shift how the players view challenges in the game. No longer do they see the dragon as their bucket of XP, but the dragon’s hoard, which means they’ll want to get that treasure without fighting the dragon if at all possible.
All of a sudden that 10′ pole might have a use…
@Matt
Forgot to add this in my post, but my suggestion for shifting from the battle-mat to narrative is to use the battle-mat as little as possible. Wait until the last possible second to throw down the minis. Instead use description up until the point where people are drawing their weapons and about to charge into battle. If you haven’t said the word “initiative” yet, do not draw or pull out the battle-mat.
Use the same method as soon as the battle is over. So, don’t let them “search for loot” while the battle-mat is still out. Throw something over the battle-mat, and then use a transition description to get them back into the narrative… *throwing a region map or something over the battle-grid*, “Sweat drips from your brow as you cut down the last of the goblin bandits. Standing over the mangled bodies of the goblins, you start to catch your breath and recoup. Now what?”
They might refer back to the battle-grid, but it’s covered up now, so they need to use their imagination and your description.
@Michael Pfaff
Great idea with the change to exp for loot. I might have to look into trying that out.
I also like the idea of using narrative up to the point when people have to move around. This drives my players crazy sometimes: “Come on, let me pull off the shirt!”, “That’s not a shirt, its a fog of war, and you have to suffer my flavor text first. Suck it up.”
Great article and replies. I was JUST pondering how to run a battle w/out a grid. Would love to hear more replies about peoples attempts at this with tips and the such.
Also… would love to read another article specifically about this topic *hint hint* *wink wink*
Love the blog!
One thing I do in my old school 4e Vault of Larin Karr game is to use monsters without much regard for party level – my 2nd level PCs have run away from a horde of Orc Warriors and a Roper, successfully defeated a troll and his orcs, a pair of worgs, and a death priest of Orcus. And they had a PC dangling half way down a 150′ cliff grabbed and dragged off by gargoyles.
The main trick to this ‘imbalanced’ gaming is to give the PCs plenty of opportunity to both scout and to flee; use Perception, Athletics etc checks with generous DCs. Also your adventure area should be more of an open or ‘sand box’ design; not a linear series of encounters that need to be defeated to progress the adventure.
A third point is that you need to accept the likelihood of PC death. While I allow Raise Dead, IMC it does require a basically intact body, so if your corpse is dragged off by predators that’s you out.
As a veteran of basic D&D (Holmes version), AD&D, and 3.5e, I’ve had more fun playing and DMing 4e than I have had since high school AD&D (I sat out of 2e). Compared to 3.5e, 4e puts a lot of control back into DMs’ hands. Sure, WotC churns out stat block after stat block, but I look at these as options for DMs, and as time-savers, not as restrictions.
Good suggestion from Michael Pfaff about how/when to use battlemaps. Not that I follow it that much; I love me my décor.
My 4e campaign doesn’t use XP at all. I award levels as “treasure” for character achievements and reaching key moments in the campaign.
Getting rid of the sun-rods is important. PCs need to explore the rooms; there are consequences for wandering into that fog of war. Also you can introduce more sneaking and stealth this way.
As a bonus your monsters can hide in the fog. They can get a surprise round…OR they can listen in..sneak off and tell their masters.
If ppl like to use sun-rods (its 2 football fields worth of floodlighting I worked out). Then NPC are never surprised, are always tipped off as to when the adventurers are coming….oh and no stealth for 20 squares around the party (thats basically the whole map). So they soon learn how lame they are:P
If you use a virtual table top to aid your mapping; things get a lot more exiting when the map slowly reveals. Also with a click of a button you can easily hide the whole map when needed, or throw up a descrption or pic of monster…sounds are nice too.
Some good suggestions in here. I really like old school feel with 4e mechanics.
For some more old school feel have people in the world refer to eladrin as high elves.
It’s looking like the Essentials line might help bring some old school feel back.