Going to run Keep on the Shadowfell as a dungeon crawl - any tips?

[Rui]

Hello playground! :smallsmile:

Not long ago, the group wanted to try something new - dungeon crawl. They chose me to DM it. Honored to the task, I went and read Keep on the Shadowfell. Everyone I played with told me it's a 4e dungeon crawl, and it was for starters so my group (who is used to 3.5) could adapt easily.

I am experienced with 4e and being a DM, but yet I wanted to ask - is there anything I need to know? About dungeon crawls in 4e, about the adventurer or anything else that matters.

Thanks ahead,
rui.

[GPuzzle]

I advice not using Keep on the Shadowfell. Try using a more recent adventure (from the Essentials series).

[Tegu8788]

http://slyflourish.com/master_dm_sheet.pdf
http://blogofholding.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/printablemm3businessfront.gif
http://newbiedm.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/xp-budget-chart.jpg

With those three, you can build just about any fight on the fly. I have slyflourish up regularly, whenever I need a skill check or monster.

[Kimera757]

Keep on the Shadowfell doesn't have a good reputation. It also uses out of date monsters, not surprisingly.

Advice:

Buy the Monster Vault if you don't have it. If you do have it, substitute monsters from the adventure with similar monsters from the Monster Vault. If you have DDI, use those, just be sure to use newer monsters. (They have much better organization too. If it's organized by action type, it should be safe to use.)

Keep on the Shadowfell had some unfortunate squishing issues, meaning too many rooms filled with monsters right next to each other. Actually, it had too many encounters in general. I'd cut the number of monsters in most rooms in half, but when a fight breaks out, monsters from multiple rooms could converge on the PCs, so the PCs won't be fighting "half strength" encounters, and could easily find themselves fighting very hard encounters. I would treat a group of rooms (eg the entire hobgoblin area) as one giant encounter, rather than several less interesting encounters. I'd also look at the encounters in the keep itself and see which ones aren't interesting enough to use, and just render those rooms empty.

Don't be afraid to just give out XP or levels when necessary. The PCs should be 4th-level at the end of that adventure, but mine were only 3rd-level. In hindsight, I would have told them to level up before the final session. (When my group was running Pathfinder, we also didn't track XP.)

The boss is incredibly poorly-designed. He has great defenses (due to his high level and the elite defense bonus that has been removed from more up-to-date monsters) so the PCs can't really kill him, but he has boringly few options. Once the PCs run out of encounter powers, there's just a slog as they try and fail to down him with at-wills, and he himself can only respond with his own at-wills. Find an elite monster of around 4th-level and replace Kalarel with him.

[neonchameleon]

Hello playground! :smallsmile:

Not long ago, the group wanted to try something new - dungeon crawl. They chose me to DM it. Honored to the task, I went and read Keep on the Shadowfell. Everyone I played with told me it's a 4e dungeon crawl, and it was for starters so my group (who is used to 3.5) could adapt easily.

I am experienced with 4e and being a DM, but yet I wanted to ask - is there anything I need to know? About dungeon crawls in 4e, about the adventurer or anything else that matters.

Thanks ahead,
rui.

Honestly, 4e is terrible out of the box for dungeon crawling and Keep on the Shadowfell is a terrible dungeon crawl. Keep's terrible because dungeon crawls are about resource management, and once you reach the keep it's just a series of loosely connected fights. 17 of them IIRC in not terribly interesting places.

So my first piece of advice is to get yourself a decent dungeon crawl and convert it. Something more mysterious and that's less just an excuse for fights. My recommendation: convert Caverns of Thracia (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/127336/Caverns-of-Thracia-1979).

My second piece of advice is that dungeon crawling is about resource management and as much about avoiding fights as having them. Which means you're going to have to houserule 4e because out of the box it ... isn't. I therefore recommend the following house rules:

1: Use encumberance. Or rather don't. Use Matt Rundle's Anti-hammerspace item tracker (http://rottenpulp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/matt-rundles-anti-hammerspace-item.html). (Give everyone all six slots - no need to penalise them for wearing armour). They can carry what they can carry. If they run out? Sucks to be them.

2: You gain one level for each new layer of the dungeon you put both feet on the floor of. (1 level for entering the dungeon, another for making it to level 2, and so on). No XP for combat. You only actually level up by schlepping back to base camp (that's an hour's hike from the dungeon) and spending the night sleeping - 8 hours. Base camp also contains basic supplies and replacement PCs.

3: Roll for wandering monsters every ten minutes of in-character (as opposed to real world) time. 1/3 chance of an encounter wandering wrong EL=the dungeon level they are on. This only doesn't apply to base camp. You don't necessarily have to fight wandering monsters (hiding for five minutes as the patrol goes past is just fine).

4: Short rests take 30 minutes. End of encounter powers last for five. Resources matter. Especially with how little they can carry.

5: Long rests take three days of carousing, resting, or meditating back in the town you are from - which is a further two days on foot from base camp - and each hour in the wilderness, hiking, is a wandering monster roll (so they need to leave something in the tank).

[Inevitability]

Going to repeat what the others say: Don't play keep on the shadowfell. If you want an introductory adventure to 4e, I recommend the Twisting Hallways, which can be found in the Red Box. Just don't use that box for character generation.

[Rui]

Thank you all for the answers! :smallsmile:

I will back away from keep, and will move on to either Twisting Hallways or a converted Caverns of Thracia. Now that you mention it, the dungeon seems squeezed with monsters.

But I have a new question - can 4e handle a dungeon crawl better than 3.5/PF? Even though I like 4e more than the other two, can they be better for a dungeon crawl weekend? (I'm not starting an edition war. I enjoy all of them :smallsmile:)

Thanks ahead,
rui.

[Inevitability]

But I have a new question - can 4e handle a dungeon crawl better than 3.5/PF? Even though I like 4e more than the other two, can they be better for a dungeon crawl weekend? (I'm not starting an edition war. I enjoy all of them :smallsmile:)

4e has a tendency to get a bit long-winded with its fights. Fights last long, and you don't want a new encounter to be met with an 'oh boy, better sit down for the next hour while fighting foes that are just filler'.

3.5 is rocket-taggy, with all that comes with it. An encounter can be over within only a single round, though.

I personally'd recommend 3.5 for a dungeon crawl. Then again, nowadays I am preferring 5e over both, so if it was an option, I'd choose that.

[Kimera757]

Thank you all for the answers! :smallsmile:

I will back away from keep, and will move on to either Twisting Hallways or a converted Caverns of Thracia. Now that you mention it, the dungeon seems squeezed with monsters.

But I have a new question - can 4e handle a dungeon crawl better than 3.5/PF? Even though I like 4e more than the other two, can they be better for a dungeon crawl weekend? (I'm not starting an edition war. I enjoy all of them :smallsmile:)

Thanks ahead,
rui.

Fourth edition is built around exciting tactical combat. Because combat is the "meat" of the game, battles tend to be long, complicated, and interesting. This means you can't do a lot of battles per session. While at 1st-level I could do about four (in a five hour session), now I can only do two (at 9th-level). Admittedly, much of the time is taken up doing things beyond combat. If I were running a dungeon crawl with little RP, I could probably do four battles per session.

So it's not that 4e can't handle a dungeon crawl, but only certain types. If it's a dungeon filled with boring rooms with 1d4 goblins each, that's not setting up an exciting tactical encounter. If you're creative about setting up interesting terrain, mixing up "monster types" and so forth, it'll go a lot better. Every encounter should have at least one trap and one piece of interesting terrain in it, hopefully that either side can use. I like the idea of a thick mud wall splitting the battlefield almost in two and giving improved cover against non-melee attacks. Anyone could, with a successful Strength check, shove part of the wall over onto creatures on the other side, dealing damage, knocking them prone, possibly pinning them in place... and losing the cover.

"Monster types" meaning roles. An all-hobgoblin encounter is fine. Also, tip: make "bosses" elites of about the PCs' level. Solos have too many hit points, and standard monsters can be nova'd in one round, even if they're higher level than the PCs. So if the PCs were clashing with some hobgoblins, I'd probably have a couple of warriors at the front, some spearmen trying to slip around the PCs' front lines, an archer or two in the back shooting "squishy" PCs, and the warlord would be an elite version of the Monster Vault monster, rather than the standard one.

[neonchameleon]

4e has a tendency to get a bit long-winded with its fights. Fights last long, and you don't want a new encounter to be met with an 'oh boy, better sit down for the next hour while fighting foes that are just filler'.

3.5 is rocket-taggy, with all that comes with it. An encounter can be over within only a single round, though.

I personally'd recommend 3.5 for a dungeon crawl. Then again, nowadays I am preferring 5e over both, so if it was an option, I'd choose that.

Part of this depends on how fluid you are with combat and which level. I'd recommend 4e over 3.5 for various reasons if houseruled as I've suggested, partly for the better focus on resource management - but it will only work if you make healing surges matter and blitz through combats. But neither is especially good - I'd recommend either the Rules Cyclopaedia or Torchbearer as the best system.

[Geoff]

But I have a new question - can 4e handle a dungeon crawl better than 3.5/PF? Even though I like 4e more than the other two, can they be better for a dungeon crawl weekend? Depends on what you mean by dungeon crawl, I guess. If you want to run a protracted exploration of an underground environment in 4e, you certainly can. You'd probably make best use of the system by creating a Skill Challenge (or several of them) for the overall exploration, punctuated by battles when the PC reach certain areas (or fail certain checks). You could 'explore' a very large complex that way, primarily using narration, without requiring the players to make detailed maps or describe their painstaking approach to every doorway and paving stone as they search for traps. But, nothing stops you from requiring mapping, and using many lower-complexity challenges, traps, and encounters to model the dungeon in detail as the party crawls through it.

The dynamic of even such a dungeon crawl will be a little different, though, not because there's no attrition, but because it's different in nature. In an old-school, traditional dungeon crawl, hit points are an attrition resource - you don't get hit that often or that hard, but neither do you heal up all the way, so you have this sense of slowly being ground down, in hps. Slightly less-old-school is using the Cleric's spells mostly for healing, so you don't get ground down in the sense of hps, but in the sense of running out of spells used to restore hps. In 3.5, attrition moves to blowing through spells used for offense and utility, as healing is taken over by Wands of Cure Light Wounds. Similarly, in 4e, surges heal you up between combats, so it's not your hps that are suffering attrition, and you do recharge encounters, as well, so the attrition factor is with your most powerful attacks (dailies), and healing surges. (The typical dynamic, IMX, is that party start out conserving dailies and using surges for in-combat and between combat healing. Once surges run short, they start trying harder to leverage daily attacks & utilities to shorten fights and reduce the damage they take. Obviously, there are other possibilities.) 5e, if anyone cares, goes back to the less-old old school tradition of tapping your Cleric (and other healers) out, making spell slots useable for healing the key attrition resource.

KotSf had a lot of combats because it was trying to apply that attrition model in full force. The group I was in took on as many as 9 combats a day grinding through KotSf. Attrition was definitely a factor, but so were new 4e mechanics that mitigated against the 5MWD. Every other encounter you earned an Action Point and an additional Item Daily use, which made pressing on to the next combat more practical (and you lost them if you rested). If you found an item with a Daily late in the 'day' it was very likely someone had the daily use available to activate it, for instance. Obviously, Essential did away with the item aspect.


So, to not actually answer your question: 4e can handle a dungeon crawl just fine, it just might handle it better in a less traditional format. In the traditional format, 3.5 and 4e have a similar attrition dynamic, in that both can rely on a resource (Wands/cheap items or Surges, respectively) for between-combat healing that brings everyone to full hps without using up offensive spell capability. In 4e that resource is fairly generous from the beginning, but doesn't really expand much (the occasional non-surge healing item or utility) beyond being proportional. In 3.5 that resource starts out dear or unavailable, and rapidly becomes cheap and even trivial, but is non-proportional, so represents spending a /lot/ of standard actions casting 1st level CLW overandoverandover, which can generally be hand-waved.

Played in a less traditional mode, 3.5 and 4e both have skills you can use to shortcut through traditional map-making and trap-finding antics, but 4e has Skill Challenges as a workable (after several rounds of errata) system for structuring the use of those skills in a more 'balanced' and playable way that gives you a better shot at keeping all players engaged for the exploration as well as combat phases of the adventure.

4e comes out a little ahead in combat (if you like combat) with fairly serious, tactically interesting, dynamic battles. That's because 4e was designed specifically to avoid the shortcomings of 3.5 combats, which tended to be 'static' (with everyone taking no more than a 5' step so as to make full attacks or use other full round actions - or locked down by magic) and, as has been mentioned, tended towards 'rocket tag,' with both PCs and monsters having very high damage potentials and high-save-DC SoDs flying around everywhere. So 4e had more hps relative to damage potential for both PCs and monsters, and no SoDs, 'saves' were completely re-imagined into more of a duration mechanic. So, in a sense, spells always worked, but in another, they tended to wear off quickly. Also, while 3.5's CR system defaulted to ganging up on one big monster of CR = level with larger combats involving lower-level monsters, 4e's defaulted to facing a more numerically equal number of 'standard' monsters of the same level, with boss fights using a same-level 'Solo.'

The boss fights in KotSf and other early modules used over-level Elites in place of Solos with pretty aweful results. Early Solos weren't quite right, either. MM3 and Monster Vault monsters were generally better, particularly the Solos.