I definitely agree with you that roleplay can be squeezed into the adventure modules, but I think there needs to be more explicit opportunities. Basically, I’m with you, 100% –I love 4e. I’ve been having a great time with the system. It’s just that I feel adventures are a showcase of what your game can really do, and the published adventures, which are what most people will have access to (I know a lot of people are hesitant about DDI, which has via Dungeon many adventures that truly showcase the system), don’t do this. And I want them to. I want those adventures to draw people right to the game.

Dave mentioned Paizo earlier, and I’m on board with that. They really do make some strong adventures. D&D needs a touch more of that while keeping their high production value.

Thanks for stopping by, and sorry it took me so long to hop back on and respond.

But can’t you do that with the store bought stuff too? I mean, why not throw a RP timeout in the middle of whatever module you purchased? Will it break the module? I know, it’s about time. But after the few encounters you play in any given session, when starting any given module, you should have a sense of what it’s all about and tweak it to fit your group, can’t you?

Anyway, since everyone is putting it out there, I love 4E. It’s one of the best systems that I have ever played. I encourage any haters to play a session or two with my crew. You would see why any negatives are actually positives. It is all what you make of it.

Scepter Tower is brutal. Fight fight fight fight fight. Rest, repeat. There’s interesting background and a couple of spots here and there, but there needs to be a better overall story that’s touched at several spots along the way to provide a sense of continuity, provide more opportunities for roleplay, and just improve the adventure all around.

I’m planning on running “Scepter Tower of Spellgard” for my friends and I’m having a hard time finding spots for role playing in there.

I expected the published adventure to be mostly combat, but I kind of expected it to leave some “holes” to fill up with other kind of activities.

I’m having fun preparing the whole thing, but it really beats the idea of “ready-to-play” adventure to the ground.

@JackofHearts 4e combat can be a bit fiddly. Do you use any props to help track status? One of my favorite tricks these days is to get a bunch of blank index cards. As conditions get applied to PCs, I just toss them the index card to put right on their character sheet. When the condition goes, I take it back. As for tracking monster stats, I usually try and keep some tokens and what not available to mark conditions. It can be a lot of extra props, but they can help everything go smoothly. I feel that the flow of 4e combat takes some getting used to, but I like it. I run my own material definitely for adventures. It’s the way I’ve always done it, and the way I like to do it. But to me, adventures are what give a peek into the soul of the game. I feel like WotC’s giving the wrong sort of peek into their game.

@Dave Yes. Yes. Yes. That would be the best of all possible worlds for me. One thing I feel is lacking in WotC’s 4e adventures are good characters. We get some interesting opponents, but no one character or group of characters for players and GMs to really interact with and that are memorable.

@Oz I agree with you completely and do very similar things in my campaign. I haven’t had to rule in secondary skills, but I do reward story achievements highly and am shifting the game to less and less combat for the sake of it and more combat with meaning.

My campaign differs greatly from that design, and as a result I’ve house-ruled stuff in such as secondary skills and making fights more meaningful (players should only fight when they have to, not as an excuse to get loot). The biggest thing to remember is to reward the players for story accomplishments as much (if not more so) than combat encounters.

As far as Pathfinder adventures go, if WotC could come up with as good concepts as some of those adventures do, but apply the WotC level of design to it, I would be very happy.

Agreed. The adventures just need more ‘oomph’ generously applied to make them really sing. More story elements to supply meaning/context to the battles. That drives roleplaying, and I think it will drive more people to and through the adventures. Right now I mostly buy the adventures for the maps and some encounter ideas. I haven’t even thought about running on yet.