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.

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.

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.

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.

Also… would love to read another article specifically about this topic *hint hint* *wink wink*

Love the blog!

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.”

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.

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…

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.