thread: 2011-09-08 : Trad vs Indie: FIGHT! pt2
On 2011-09-09, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
An aside:
"On 2011-09-09, Jonathan wrote: [various games] can do improvized encounters, but 4E is less flexible, partially due to the importance of well-designed maps"
Really? I ran a 4E mini-thing for a several sessions and found it delightfully easy to set up improvised encounters. The detailed "build an encounter" system was the single thing that impressed me most about the game and which I think is the feature most worth imitating.
Specifically, I popped the XP values for all the monsters I wanted to use for the particular environment, quickly generated several packages of beasties that would constitute an "easy" encounter, and then used these as modules to build harder encounters. Sticky notes in the monster manual helped me flip to the right pages in a hurry. And as for maps, I just scrawled stuff on my friend's battlemap, sometimes with a little sketching before session. They seemed to provide enough tactical interest.
(N.B. Where I did find 4E cumbersome was how LONG it takes to attrite away each side's hit points at higher levels.)
