Word. I sometimes regret selling my 4e books to a former player. The rough class balance, the good DM books, the interesting monster mechanics, the Astral Sea vs. Elemental Chaos cosmology ... 5e has never been able to convince me to try it and I haven't felt any regret for immediately re-selling the Core Rulebook after reading it once and realizing it's 3.5 with less interesting options and a revived martial caster gap. Hearing later about the awful encounter balance and boring monsters was the icing on the cake. I'm currently hoping that the MCDM RPG integrates as much of 4e's good qualities as it can.
A few things were cool (healing surges, bloodied) and more were not (minions, too many bonus and conditional modifiers, action points, math was broken making peak optimization mandatory (at least until essentials). Ok to play, but horrible to DM.
@@danhooper3723 It's funny because minions are pretty widely accepted as having been a great addition to D&D. Thematically, I'm not a huge fan. But from a gameplay perspective they are nice, I just make a point of letting the players know which of the enemies are minions so they don't blow a bunch of resources on them. Conditional modifiers are kind of the heart of game design, so while too many can make tracking everything a pain I just have to disagree there. APs are something I could see DMs homeruling out for gritty adventures that aren't necessarily made to make the players feel like heroes. && the math seems mostly fine in heroic, no? There are mandatory feats if you're min/maxing but it's pretty common for DMs to just give players a Versatile Expertise and a Defense Feat for free. In my time playing 5E, what seemed to create much worse outcomes than all of that was the DM being forced to construct multiple-encounters-a-day. If they don't, casters just nova everything and reset. Playing a martial in 5E is already horrible from an agency perspective, but its actually borderline unplayable when the DM isn't designing encounters right. && it's a fairly weird aspect of encounter design too, having to make sure multiple encounters happen a day.
Ok, people criticize skill challenges on 4e, but I could swear that the clock mechanic from Blades in the Dark is an evolved versions of that. Also, you could, with DMG2, theoretically run a 4e campaign without a single combat (although you should warn your players before doing that). That's a quite a funny fact.
I loved the Slaying Stone so much that I made a free (pay what you want) 5e conversion of it on the DM's Guild. If you want to run it for 5e, that's the way to do it.
I played 4e all through its lifespan, and never even heard of this adventure. WotC did a really bad job of advertising the adventures for 4e. I gotta say I LOVE this cover art. It really captures that "points of light" setting ideal that 4e wanted.
Yknow, I always see this module out there, but I've never picked it up. Timely overview as I'm curently going back to a lot of 4e content in preparation for a new campaign.
I never knew about this adventure - looks awesome. Great tips on running skill challenges so they are more organically part of the roleplaying. Thanks - I might get the PDF.
For all the hate people pile on 4e, this is a perfect example of how their modules were laid out. Interesting encounters and advice on how to adjust to your party’s composition. Most 5e adventures won’t say “here is a magic weapon, adjust it to a weapon type your party uses”.
I've run this in 4e, Dndnext, 5e, Micro20, Swords & Wizardy, Basic D&D, and so on... I love this adventure and think it's a great introduction to D&D. I would just start the party outside the Kiris Dahn and give them the backstory to get to the action.
I played this one as a first intro adventure to a group that had mostly not played 4e. Went well. They enjoyed it and there was quite a lot of roleplaying. Befriended the dragon and were able to strike a deal between the kobolds and townsfolk. Although the party kept trying to find ways to flood the town for some reason before that. Also the experienced player played a twin sword ranger, and killed the solo orc mostly by himself in like 2 turns... kind of killed the drama of the moment. But hey, overall good
It drives me crazy about how people would claim 4e is only combat. Granted, I enjoyed the combat so much that it was tempting to act like a hammer and turn everything into a nail, but I never bought the hyperbole about 4e being only combat. It's up to how the DM writes the adventure. I played a minimal combat planescape campaign and it was 4e but didn't rely on just combat, there was lots of ...gasp...roleplaying.
It will be my first 4e adventure I run. I read into it, and it honestly sounds so cool. I'll probably make it an requirement that the players are some kind of detective group like the three ???, so yeah really low level group where everyone got a different skillset and that makes them strong.
Not announcing skill challenges most of the time was a huge improvement for me in 4e which I then took to 5e. I just used them as a background way to see how the players are doing and to keep track of benchmarks to know when the players did "enough" to persuaded someone, do the heist, etc.
Thanks video. What I would be really interested in would be to have a great Adventure Path from 1 to 30 (which makes sense) and which all are good. Also what I find a bit sad is that the maps (for combat) often just dont look that good / look a bit bland.
I've done that for many of my adventures. The most notable being Storm King's Thunder. When I was running it at a game store, I completely reworked the Dripping Caves map from Chapter One to fit on the table. The map in the book is way too wide to fit on most tables. I changed it so it was long and narrow. Same encounters, but much more usable. And the giants lairs later in the book are much too large to be practical even in a virtual setting. I break them up and shrink them down where practical. In other cases, I use smaller tokens to help represent the scale. It can be a struggle, but I am for whatever is necessary to have a good game.
Hello. Thanks for your D&D videos. Good job. I'm writing to you asking for help. I'm returning to D&D after 15 years thanks to my wife who wants to play for the first time. Could you help me make a Game Master panel for 4th edition? I mean the most necessary tables at the beginning of the adventure. Thanks in advance. I will continue to use your channel :)
You called it multiple times a sandbox, but it really doesn't look like one. Just because it is not linear does not automatically makes something a sandbox. I have not rea that adventure, but nothing you showed justifies the label of sandbox, so I wonder, did the adventure itself says it is a sandbox or was that your liberty to call it that?
By my definition, and I am sure there are other interpretations, a sandbox is an adventure where the players have complete control to decide what to do next. They do not even need to follow the narrative of the story. In this adventure, the players are presented with a quest, "Get the Slaying Stone", and an interesting location where it is located. After that, it is completely up to them how to proceed. They decide how to do it and how long it takes to do it. They could even break with the published text entirely and come up with their own solution to the problem. In many ways every adventure could be a sandbox if the table desires. This one is setup in a way that makes it easy for the players to control what happens and for the DM to handle anything that the players decide. Thanks
@@oldegreybeard I would agree on the definition of what a sandbox is, and sure many scenarios can be run in such a manner. Still, this adventure looks like it is just nonlinear to me and not an outright sandbox. Of course it is possible to run it then as sandbox, but that would something the people at the table do and not something that is part of the product. Thus I would say it is better to have a review only be about what is actually contained in the product, and opinions of how it can be used clearly stated as one's own.
Man 4e came with such cool ideas and user friendliness. 5e really took several steps back
Word. I sometimes regret selling my 4e books to a former player. The rough class balance, the good DM books, the interesting monster mechanics, the Astral Sea vs. Elemental Chaos cosmology ... 5e has never been able to convince me to try it and I haven't felt any regret for immediately re-selling the Core Rulebook after reading it once and realizing it's 3.5 with less interesting options and a revived martial caster gap. Hearing later about the awful encounter balance and boring monsters was the icing on the cake. I'm currently hoping that the MCDM RPG integrates as much of 4e's good qualities as it can.
A few things were cool (healing surges, bloodied) and more were not (minions, too many bonus and conditional modifiers, action points, math was broken making peak optimization mandatory (at least until essentials). Ok to play, but horrible to DM.
@@danhooper3723 It's funny because minions are pretty widely accepted as having been a great addition to D&D. Thematically, I'm not a huge fan. But from a gameplay perspective they are nice, I just make a point of letting the players know which of the enemies are minions so they don't blow a bunch of resources on them. Conditional modifiers are kind of the heart of game design, so while too many can make tracking everything a pain I just have to disagree there.
APs are something I could see DMs homeruling out for gritty adventures that aren't necessarily made to make the players feel like heroes.
&& the math seems mostly fine in heroic, no? There are mandatory feats if you're min/maxing but it's pretty common for DMs to just give players a Versatile Expertise and a Defense Feat for free.
In my time playing 5E, what seemed to create much worse outcomes than all of that was the DM being forced to construct multiple-encounters-a-day. If they don't, casters just nova everything and reset. Playing a martial in 5E is already horrible from an agency perspective, but its actually borderline unplayable when the DM isn't designing encounters right. && it's a fairly weird aspect of encounter design too, having to make sure multiple encounters happen a day.
Ok, people criticize skill challenges on 4e, but I could swear that the clock mechanic from Blades in the Dark is an evolved versions of that.
Also, you could, with DMG2, theoretically run a 4e campaign without a single combat (although you should warn your players before doing that). That's a quite a funny fact.
What about the DMG2 allows you to run a campaign without any combat?
I loved the Slaying Stone so much that I made a free (pay what you want) 5e conversion of it on the DM's Guild. If you want to run it for 5e, that's the way to do it.
I'll try to run it as my first 4e game wish me luck :))
@@BlertaPupu Good luck!
I played 4e all through its lifespan, and never even heard of this adventure. WotC did a really bad job of advertising the adventures for 4e. I gotta say I LOVE this cover art. It really captures that "points of light" setting ideal that 4e wanted.
Thanks Greybeard!
Yknow, I always see this module out there, but I've never picked it up. Timely overview as I'm curently going back to a lot of 4e content in preparation for a new campaign.
I highly recommend it. I have enjoyed it as a player (in 4th edition) and ran it (in 5th edition) and the players had fun.
I never knew about this adventure - looks awesome. Great tips on running skill challenges so they are more organically part of the roleplaying. Thanks - I might get the PDF.
For all the hate people pile on 4e, this is a perfect example of how their modules were laid out.
Interesting encounters and advice on how to adjust to your party’s composition. Most 5e adventures won’t say “here is a magic weapon, adjust it to a weapon type your party uses”.
I've run this in 4e, Dndnext, 5e, Micro20, Swords & Wizardy, Basic D&D, and so on... I love this adventure and think it's a great introduction to D&D. I would just start the party outside the Kiris Dahn and give them the backstory to get to the action.
I played this one as a first intro adventure to a group that had mostly not played 4e. Went well. They enjoyed it and there was quite a lot of roleplaying. Befriended the dragon and were able to strike a deal between the kobolds and townsfolk. Although the party kept trying to find ways to flood the town for some reason before that.
Also the experienced player played a twin sword ranger, and killed the solo orc mostly by himself in like 2 turns... kind of killed the drama of the moment. But hey, overall good
It drives me crazy about how people would claim 4e is only combat. Granted, I enjoyed the combat so much that it was tempting to act like a hammer and turn everything into a nail, but I never bought the hyperbole about 4e being only combat. It's up to how the DM writes the adventure. I played a minimal combat planescape campaign and it was 4e but didn't rely on just combat, there was lots of ...gasp...roleplaying.
This is the first adventure I ever ran! Here, have some engagement.
Thank you. 😀
It will be my first 4e adventure I run. I read into it, and it honestly sounds so cool. I'll probably make it an requirement that the players are some kind of detective group like the three ???, so yeah really low level group where everyone got a different skillset and that makes them strong.
Not announcing skill challenges most of the time was a huge improvement for me in 4e which I then took to 5e. I just used them as a background way to see how the players are doing and to keep track of benchmarks to know when the players did "enough" to persuaded someone, do the heist, etc.
This module was pretty good, I used it around level 8 and made the slaying stone something needed to deal with the BBEG of Heroic Tier
This seems like an interesting scenario to get a party to level 2. My group just made it to level 2 in our campaign during our Black Friday session.
Thanks!
Love me some 4e content - sounds like a fun module!
Thanks video. What I would be really interested in would be to have a great Adventure Path from 1 to 30 (which makes sense) and which all are good.
Also what I find a bit sad is that the maps (for combat) often just dont look that good / look a bit bland.
What's your take on shrinking dungeons to fit a practical reusable map?
I've done that for many of my adventures. The most notable being Storm King's Thunder.
When I was running it at a game store, I completely reworked the Dripping Caves map from Chapter One to fit on the table. The map in the book is way too wide to fit on most tables. I changed it so it was long and narrow. Same encounters, but much more usable.
And the giants lairs later in the book are much too large to be practical even in a virtual setting. I break them up and shrink them down where practical. In other cases, I use smaller tokens to help represent the scale.
It can be a struggle, but I am for whatever is necessary to have a good game.
Hello. Thanks for your D&D videos. Good job. I'm writing to you asking for help. I'm returning to D&D after 15 years thanks to my wife who wants to play for the first time. Could you help me make a Game Master panel for 4th edition? I mean the most necessary tables at the beginning of the adventure. Thanks in advance. I will continue to use your channel :)
You called it multiple times a sandbox, but it really doesn't look like one. Just because it is not linear does not automatically makes something a sandbox. I have not rea that adventure, but nothing you showed justifies the label of sandbox, so I wonder, did the adventure itself says it is a sandbox or was that your liberty to call it that?
By my definition, and I am sure there are other interpretations, a sandbox is an adventure where the players have complete control to decide what to do next. They do not even need to follow the narrative of the story.
In this adventure, the players are presented with a quest, "Get the Slaying Stone", and an interesting location where it is located. After that, it is completely up to them how to proceed. They decide how to do it and how long it takes to do it. They could even break with the published text entirely and come up with their own solution to the problem.
In many ways every adventure could be a sandbox if the table desires. This one is setup in a way that makes it easy for the players to control what happens and for the DM to handle anything that the players decide.
Thanks
@@oldegreybeard I would agree on the definition of what a sandbox is, and sure many scenarios can be run in such a manner. Still, this adventure looks like it is just nonlinear to me and not an outright sandbox. Of course it is possible to run it then as sandbox, but that would something the people at the table do and not something that is part of the product. Thus I would say it is better to have a review only be about what is actually contained in the product, and opinions of how it can be used clearly stated as one's own.