Lieber Meister Analion....guckst du hier:
The encounter serves as the basic building block of a D&D adventure. In the old days, DMs used their experience, judgment, and sense of drama to build encounters. The 3rd Edition of D&D gave us challenge ratings and encounter levels. They were great tools, but they assumed that the party fought only one monster. In 4th Edition, we’re doing things a bit different. We’re shifting to a system that assumes a number of monsters equal to the number of characters. This change has a few major implications for encounter design:
1. Superior Accuracy: Before we can talk about encounter design, it’s important to note that while 3rd Edition’s CR system is a useful measuring tool, it isn’t always an accurate one. A monster’s AC, hit points, special attacks, and damage all combine to determine its level. In the old days, we relied on a designer’s best guess to match a creature to a CR. While designating a creature’s level is still an art, designating a creature’s level now has more science behind it. By creating robust progressions of attack bonus, damage, and AC, level has become a much more accurate and robust measure of a monster’s power. This step is critically important, as it now allows us a lot more accuracy in determining the threat an encounter presents.
2. More Monsters: Rather than pick one monster, you now select a group of critters. The interplay between monsters is a little more important in design. In 3rd Edition, you had to turn to significantly weaker monsters to put a pair or more creatures into a fight. Unless these monsters had significant advantages when working together, an individual character easily outclassed an individual monster in such a group. In 4th Edition, an individual creature (of a level comparable to the PC) has the AC, attack bonus, and hit points to remain a threat during a fight.
3. Monster Roles: Monsters have roles that define the basics of how they fight. The role functions in only the broadest terms. It dictates a few basic measures of a monster but describes, rather than proscribes, how its abilities work. The real strength of a role is that it gives designers a few basic targets to shoot at it in design, ensuring that every monster we make fits in with the rest of the creatures in the whole game. For instance, monsters that are good at ranged attacks love to have a beefy wall of brutes in front of them to hold back the adventurers. Roles allow you to focus in on the right monster for the encounter and spot obvious combinations.
4. Hazards: Traps, hazards, dangerous terrain, and other complications have a clearer place in the battlefield. The 3rd Edition of D&D gave us one “monster unit” to play with. In other words, the game assumed that the encounter consisted of four PCs against one monster. If you had five PCs, you had to figure out how to get 1.25 “monsters” into the encounter. Even worse, that system had to express traps, hazards, and other dangers as full monster units. It was difficult at best to mechanically represent something that was never meant to stand alone. In 4th Edition, each monster represents only a portion of the encounter. That makes it much easier to design green slime, pit traps, whirling blades, fountains that spray acid, and crumbling stone walls. One such hazard can simply take the place of one monster, leaving you with three or four monsters in the encounter. Since monster level is a more rigorous measure of power, we can turn those measures and scales around and use them to create environmental hazards, traps, set pieces, and other interesting tactical twists.
...oder hier(Dungeondesign):
The year 2000 was a heady time for D&D players. 3rd edition was finally released after a year of previews. A game that had almost fallen off the radar of gamers everywhere came back with a bang. There was a tangible sense of energy in the air at Gen Con that year. People were excited about the toys they read about in their shiny new Player’s Handbooks and, better yet, the toys were incredibly fun.
Thus, it was with some surprise that, when I returned home from Gen Con and set to work on my first adventure, I was a little unhappy. According to the rules, a 1st level party could face a single Challenge Rating 1 monster, or an Encounter Level 1 group of beasts. That seemed reasonable, until I started designing adventures. The rules presented the following possibilities:
* One gnoll
* One troglodyte
* Two orcs
* Two hobgoblins
* Four goblins
None of these really excited me. Four goblins on the map might be fun, but a fighter with the Cleave feat put that thought to bed. I wanted Keep on the Borderlands and the moat house from Village of Hommlet. My dungeons felt boring because I couldn’t fit many monsters into each room.
Admittedly, 3rd Edition brought some sense and standardization to encounters that other editions glossed over, but that didn’t change a simple fact—I wanted lots of humanoids running around my dungeon rooms, and 3rd Edition said I could do that only if I wanted a TPK.
Over the years, my initial frustration with the game never faded. By the time the party was of a high enough level to handle a fight with six orcs, the poor orcs’ AC and attacks were too low to pose much of a threat. In the end, I just fudged my encounters to create the excitement and variety I was. Despite what the game told me, a low-level party could take on three or four orcs without a massacre (for the PCs, at least).
The 4E Way: Monsters, Monsters, Monsters!
In 4th Edition, your dungeons are going to be a lot more densely populated. The typical encounter has one monster per PC in the party, assuming that the monsters are about the same level as the PCs. An encounter’s total XP value determines its difficulty, allowing you a lot more freedom to mix tougher and weaker monsters. Even better, the difference between a level X monster and a level X + 1 monster is much smaller. You can create an encounter using monsters that are three or four levels above the party without much fear. Add in the rules for minions (which will be described in a future Design & Development article), and you could (in theory) match twenty goblins against a 1st-level party and have a fun, exciting, balanced fight.
This shift in encounter design means a lot for dungeons. With all those monsters running around, you need to give them a fair amount of space for a number of reasons:
* The monsters need to bring their numbers to bear on the party. Wider corridors and rooms allow the monsters to attack as a group. A monster that’s standing around, waiting for the space it needs to make an attack, is wasting its time.
* Multiple avenues of attack make things scary for the PCs and make it easier to get all the monsters into the action. The typical dungeon room where the PCs are on one side of the door and the monsters are on the other grows dull after a while. The PCs kick open the door, form a defensive formation in the doorway, and hack the monsters to pieces. There’s little tactical challenge there.
* Reinforcements need a route to the battle. With more monsters in a fight, you can design dynamic encounters where the orcs in the room next door come barging into the fight to see what’s going on. An extra door or passage in the encounter area is a convenient route for the rest of the encounter’s monsters to show up on the scene. Just because the encounter calls for five orcs doesn’t mean that all five start the encounter in the party’s line of sight.
Example: Dungeon of the Fire Opal
As part of an early playtest, I dug up a map that 1st and 3rd Edition veterans might recognize. Here’s an example of an encounter I built using the basic philosophy outlined above.
Notice that the map marks these rooms as separate areas, three 20 foot-by-30 foot rooms. Measured in squares, that’s 4 by 6, small enough that even a dwarf could stomp from one end of the room to the next in one move action. That’s doesn’t make for a very interesting encounter. If I tried to squeeze four or five monsters into each of those rooms, there would be barely enough room for the party and their foes to fit. The fight would consist of the two sides lining up and trading attacks for 3–4 rounds. Few inherently interesting tactical options can even come into play.
Even worse, the map offers few strategic events. The monsters might flee out the secret door in area 9 or one of the doors in area 8, but with such small rooms it would be easy for the PCs to block the exits or move next to any of the monsters before they could run.
When I went back and used this map to design a 4th Edition adventure, I combined all three rooms into one encounter area. Area 9 was a torture chamber staffed by four goblin minions. Area 8 was a guard room manned by two hobgoblin warriors, while the bugbear torturer lounged in his private chamber, area 7. In play, the party walked south toward area 9, ignoring the door to area 7 for the moment. The rogue and ranger tried to sneak up on the hobgoblins in area 8, but the monsters spotted them and attacked. When the hobgoblins yelled for help, the goblins charged from area 9 and the bugbear emerged from his chamber to attack the party’s wizard from behind.
The fight was a tense affair in the T-intersection between areas 8 and 9. Caught between three groups of monsters, the party had to constantly move to protect the vulnerable wizard, heal PCs who fell to the combined attacks of the hobgoblins and bugbear, and spend precious actions hacking down the goblin minions.
I didn’t do anything fancy with the map or add any magical elements to the fight. It was simply a tough melee in close quarters with attackers coming in from three directions at once. The dungeon was a dynamic environment, with three groups of connected monsters responding to the PCs’ intrusion into their area.
So, that’s the first rule of 4th Edition dungeon design. Now that you have more monsters to throw at the party, you can create encounters that spill over greater areas. Opening a door in one area might cause monsters to come from other areas of the dungeon to investigate. With the emphasis switched from one party against one monster to one party against an equal number of foes, you can throw a lot more critters at the PCs.
Homework Assignment
4th Edition is still a ways off, but it’s never too early to start thinking of the dungeons you’re going to design. Here’s a little homework assignment for all of you: Pick two or three closely linked encounter areas on the sample dungeon map. While you obviously don’t have access to the new rules, you can still come up with ideas for encounters. Assuming that you can use four or five monsters, pick two or three encounter areas on the map and turn them into a single fight. Post your ideas in the 4th Edition forums and see what other gamers come up with.
Oder generell gesprochen: Die bisherigen Ankündigungen haben alle mit Kampf zu tun, die bisherig angekündigten Zauber sind zu weit über 90% direkt kampfbezogen. Die Skills wurden weiter vereinfacht, sie geben zu, dass D&D ums Monsterschlachten gehen soll und nicht ums Verhandeln mit Feen, welche mittlerweile böser geworden sind....im Monsterhandbuch wird mit neuem slash-Potential geworben, Marke: Gnome spielen kann man nicht - aber sie töten !
Zudem soll das neue D&D noch mehr mit Miniaturen und Bodenplänen vernetzt werden...wofür brauchst du die? Für soziale Encounter?
Neinenein, entgegen dem was D&D-Fanboys, wie du, nun lautstark verbreiten, wird D&D4e noch kampflastiger, sie schreiben es ja selbst....und das neue soziale-Interaktionsmenü Marke "Ich argumentiere mit dem Wirt..." "...sehr gut, würfle deine mentale Attacke, er hat WIL 23..." "Haha, ich nutze meinen ´Silvertongue`Feat...", ergo, welches wie ein Kampf ablaufen soll, darauf kann ich gerne verzichten.
Zur WoW-Lastigkeit genügt ein Blick auf die neuen Grafiken (Manga-stylisch), sowie das Quest-Card-Design...
