Is D&D 4e the worst edition for role-playing?

TLDR: No... but you know the algorithm rewards click-bait headlines.

As I was re-reading some of my older books, I had a re-revelation about about some of 4e least-fair critiques, one of which being that D&D 4e doesn't support role playing mechanically.

Now, to be fair, no D&D edition support role playing with very robust mechanics. It is assumed you will play out any NPC conversation with the DM and they might call for a skill roll. That's pretty much it.

But D&D 4th Edition actually adds an element of social mechanics through Skill Challenges. There may be a role-playing goal the party needs to achieve such as a negotiation which may consist of a number of successful skills checks to convince the NPC or group to help the party. The PCs may bring different skills to bear such as Diplomacy, Deception, Insight, Intimidation, or even Performance... Basically anything that might win over the NPC in the negotiation.

This could be a diplomatic negotiation, an interrogation, rallying troops to improve morale before a battle, winning a contest of wits... Basically, it could be anything that relies on the social skill of the PC's. 

Skill Challenges can also be used for physical events that require multiple checks such as a chase scene, or finding one's way out of the wilderness, but my observations are more about the role playing aspects of these challenges. I also discuss the character generation process within the Player's Handbook and how that supports the role playing aspects.

I understand 4th edition is nowhere near perfect. It certain has its flaws. But I also believe those flaws are often exaggerated because reasons. Regardless, I hope you enjoy my video observations on role playing in 4e. In future posts, I'll likely explore the absolute gems that are the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guides. Please like and subscribe to help me out with the algorithm! 

Nentir Vale - Best of D&D 4e

A farmstead burns in The Reaverns of Harkenwold

Best of 4th Edition, Part 5 - The Nentir Vale

In previous Best of 4th Edition posts, I've talked about a couple locations that were ripe for adventuring, Harkenwold and the Chaos Scar.  But, I did not talk about the larger setting, the Nentir Vale.

Let me just put this out there...

In many ways, the Nentir Vale is the best setting available in D&D.

This is coming from a guy who has lived and breathed Greyhawk for most of my life (and a fair amount of Forgotten Realms). The Nentir Vale started its life as nothing more than few paragraphs describing the region around Fallcrest, an example "home base" town in the Dungeon Master's Guide. However, more bits of Nentir Vale backstory and lore were published in 4th Edition adventures such as the Keep on the Shadowfell, Thunderspire Labyrinth, and the Reavers of Harkenwold. I love Nentir Vale so much, I'm currently running my 5th Edition campaign in the setting.

A Tabula Rasa Sandbox Toolkit

As noted, the Nentir Vale is not burdened by a lot of canon or detailed down to smallest the villages and towns. A duchy here, a city-state there, but mostly only vaguely defined geography. The map contains a variety of terrain with a few dots on the map. Temple of Yellow Skulls. Ruins of Fastormel. Raven Roost. Kalton Manor. Kobold Hall. The Sword Barrows. Guardmore Abbey. The Keep on the Shadowfell... What are these places? No one really knows...

Nentir Vale map from 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide

Ok, it is true that some of these locations eventually got their own adventures, but for the most part, the setting is still a largely undefined sandbox within which the DM can build their own sand castles.

To me, Nentir Vale feels a lot like the original Greyhawk map folio or the very, very early days of the Forgotten Realms where there are swaths of land and map features which are largely undefined. However, even Greyhawk feels "settled" by comparison when you look at all the political borders. By comparison Forgotten Realms is over burdened with canon and detail after 30 years. Nentir Vale feels fresh and open. There are even maps of the larger world of Nerrath if you desire more huge tracts of land.

Fallcrest

Artist: Brandon Kruse, D&D Doodles

I've already written about my Reavers of Harkenwold campaign and how my players enjoyed that corner of the Vale. Fallcrest is another wonderful backdrop with a variety of hooks and adventure locations. Fallcrest sits upon a broken plateau with an upper and lower city. Could some natural or magical disaster have created the elevation difference between the city halves? Much of the lower city in ruins, but it is unclear whether the it is the result of Orc incursions in the Vale, or other cataclysms that may have befallen the city. It's up to you to decide!

A number of locations are defined in the Dungeon Master's Guide with several adventure hooks. Further hooks and political intrigues are detailed in Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale. However, like much in the Vale, Fallcrest has a large canvas upon which the DM can fill in the details. I love this city. It's large enough to have lots of different encounter options, while still not feeling so massively sprawling that it is overwhelming for the DM to detail.

Points of Light

The points of light concept from 4th Edition is one which brings D&D back toward its roots. Life in town is relatively safe... but the wilderness is not. You take your life into your hands when traveling outside of the safety of your home, even along important trade routes. Civilization, for the most part, has fallen into a dark age leaving behind the ruins of the past. There are still small, sporadic kingdoms, but no vast empires or major political powers. Leaders hold mainly onto smaller parcels of land and rule locally.

Factions and NPCs

 Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale took the Nentir Vale lore to the next level. As a creature catalog, it was an excellent resource for building non-homogeneous encounter groups. However, the absolute beauty of this supplement was how much NPC lore it contained.

Whether it is Calastryx, the three-headed red dragon, the savage Bloodspear Orcs, the warring Treants of the Winterbole Forest, or the druids of Harken's Heart, there are a multitude of unique villains and faction groups which the PCs may encounter directly or indirectly through their agents.

Take this entry from Vestapalk for example:

Rousted from his lair in the Cairngorm Peaks by dark visions, the green dragon Vestapalk and his kobold wyrm-priest companion are bound by what they believe to be a common destiny.

Threats to the Nentir Vale is a supplement book done right. Not only did it improve upon the monster mechanics for D&D 4e, it is filled to the brim with the kind of setting fluff that sets a DM's imagination on fire. Even if you never played (or ever plan to play) D&D 4th Edition, this book is an amazing read for ideas and campaign hooks.

Final Thoughts

Although the Nentir Vale never got its own full setting book, plenty of setting detail can be gleaned from lore within the Dungeon Master's Kit, Monster Vaults, Hammerfast and Vor Rukoth supplements and occasionally the pages of Dragon and Dungeon PDFs published under D&D Insider. Taken all together, the Nentir Vale is a rich setting filled with potential plot hooks, but sparse enough for DM's to paint in their own details.

Postscript: An amazing collection of Nentir Vale setting lore has been posts on The Piazza. This is your first go-to for a Nentir Vale based campaign.

PPS: Read about more things I love from D&D 4th Edition...

Hommlet - Best of D&D 4e

While the new cover art was pretty cool, it
did a poor job of illustrating the module itself.

Best of 4th Edition, Part 4 - The Village of Hommlet

Wait, what?!? I thought this was about the Best of 4th Edition... 

It is!  You see, during the D&D Encounters days, Wizards of the Coast gave out a limited edition, revised version of the Village of Hommlet to D&D Encounters DM’s. They later reprinted these revisions in Dungeon #212.

In this revision of Hommlet, they altered some of the encounters a bit to tie the moat house bandit activity directly to Lareth the Beautiful’s overall plan. The changes to the encounters give the adventure a bit more internal consistency.

However, Wizards had to fit the moat house on a single poster encounter map, so the scale of the fortress was altered (to the chagrin of some). The revision also includes a bit more detail on the major NPCs and the “delve” page format of the 4th edition version makes it easier to run.

Dungeon - Best of D&D 4e

Dungeon #221, December 2013

The Best of D&D 4th Edition, Part 3

Be sure to also check out Part 1 and Part 2.

As noted in my prior article on The Chaos Scar, product support for 4th Edition flourished under the Dragon and Dungeon PDF publications as a part of D&D Insider subscription. But what became one of the gems of the 4th Edition digital tools, had a bit of a rocky start.

In 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, which also marked the end of the print publication of Dragon and Dungeon Magazines. With the last issue (Dungeon #150) scheduled for release in August 2007, many fans of the magazines, myself included, were saddened and outspoken on Wizards.com forums about the demise of the print support.

The Chaos Scar - Best of D&D 4e

The Best of D&D 4th Edition, Part 2

Wait! Be sure to also read Part 1 of Best of D&D 4th Edition.

The 3rd Season of D&D Encounters (which later became Adventurer’s League) introduced the Chaos Scar in Keep on the Borderlands: A Season of Serpents. This Encounters season was a thematic hommage to the original B2 - Keep on the Borderlands module from 1980. It was not written as a conversion of the original module, as the Caves of Chaos were replaced by the Chaos Scar, a much larger ravine created hundreds of years prior by the crashing of a chaos-infused meteor from the Far Realms into the lands.

The Season of Serpents module was divided into 5 chapters, with 4 distinct 2-hour scenarios per chapter. The plot outlines a power struggle between Zehir and Tiamat cultists which involves machinations to control the Keep itself. Due to the D&D Encounters format (and the limitations thereof), the adventure is a fairly linear checklist of pre-defined combats to be run at game stores in order to introduce new players to the game. But, it is a fun adventure and the Chaos Scar setting itself was also supported through articles in the Dungeon Magazine PDFs, which immensely strengthens the overall utility of this module. The right DM can cobble the D&D Encounters module along with all of the supporting materials into a nice low-level sandbox campaign.

Reavers of Harkenwold - Best of D&D 4e

The Best of D&D 4th Edition, Part 1

If you skipped D&D 4th Edition for whatever reason, you missed out on some amazing adventure content. Wizards of the Coast was testing out a different adventure designs with a publishing layout format requiring individual encounters within an adventure to fit on two pages only (mini-map included).

This format had its pros and cons, but despite its eventual abandonment, the format appears to have wrestled the creative juices out of the designers at the time (or perhaps in spite of it). The longs and short of it is that some of the adventures written for D&D 4th Edition are some of the best I’ve ever run over the course of many editions (for whatever reasons).

In this multi-part article, I will detail some of the best adventure content to come out of the core product and Dungeon Magazine teams that can be adapted to your D&D 5th edition (or any edition, really) game.

Odelyn's Forge - a Hamlet in Nentir Vale

The other day, I detailed a method for adding depth to villages and towns in a campaign. After running down the road with an the idea I used as the example, I ended up with more detail than what was strictly necessary for the article. After a bit more nerd-building world building, I ended up with the newest hamlet in Nentir Vale.

Odelyn's Forge

Location: Northwest of Harkenwold near the Dawnforge Mountains in the Nentir Vale
Population: 600. Human 60%, Dwarf 25%, Halfling 10%, Elf 5%
Government: Feudal. A 10 member Village Council includes representatives elected by each of the village's major trade guilds including two seats for Dwarves from the Dawnforge Mining Cooperative. Ties in the Council are broken by the Baroness' chancellor. The Council manages the day to day activities of the village but is answerable to the Baroness who may overturn any ruling, policy, or procedure put into place by the Council.
Trade goods: Pig iron (raw), iron finished goods (cook pots, plow blades, horse shoes, etc), charcoal, lumber, wool, goat cheese
Resources: Iron mine, forest, grazing lands
Primary Trades: Miners, Founders, Smiths, Iron Merchants, Colliers, Teamsters, Lumbermen, Shepherds
Religion: Erathis is the patron deity in Odelyn's Forge. A modest church of Erathis sit at the center of town. The western transept is dedicated to the worship of Moradin and worship days for both gods alternate on the calendar. Other gods may be venerated in town, but do not have any official chapel or shrine.
Place of interest: Chapel of Erathis, Roche Noire Tavern, Iron Foundry, Mine, Logging Camp

Notable NPCs

Florio Herrera - (Hu/M/Clr3) Pastor who manages the church of Erathis.  Florio is somewhat young for his station and has ambitions to establish a grand cathedral to Erathis.
Benno Sternhand - (Dw/M/Clr5) Curate of Moradin who shares responsibilities for the church with Florio. Benno is on friendly terms with Florio but desires his own separate chapel to Moradin.
Madame Simone Neuville - (Hu/F/Arist 5) Village chancellor for Baroness Dunhill. Manages the taxation and finances of Odelyn's Forge. Non-voting member (except with a tie) on the Village Council and representative of the Baroness in all Council matters.
Guy Dufour - (Hu/M/Ftr1) Hostler and chef at Roche Noire Tavern and Hostel.
Collette Dufour - (Hu/F/Rog1) Alewife and co-owner of Roche Noire.

D&D: Parting Shots in the Edition Wars

A couple years ago, Wizards of the Coast set out to glue back together the Humpty Dumpty that D&D had become due to "edition warring". In an effort to unite old school philosophy with modern game design, "D&D Next" was placed out into the public eye so the fans could lobby for the parts of the system they felt were important, while WotC showed what parts of the system it was lyposuctioning away in order to make a more lean, mean D&D.

There were many, many doubters who said it would never work... And many more, like myself, who thought it might work to some extent, but not so much that it would "reunite the family", so to speak. Interestingly enough, it appears Wizards of the Coast was pretty successful executing their goals.

Old schoolers are coming back. Pathfinders are coming back. Even 4e proponents have found things to like in this new edition. While we don't have sales numbers to go by, the buzz on social media has been that D&D is back, bigger and better than ever and firing on all cylinders. [As you might have noticed, I like my metaphors all mixed up into one giant gumbo.]

But that's not really what this post is about.

This post is about D&D 4th Edition.

D&D / OSR: Two-Hit Minion Variant

Whether you consider yourself "old school" or you play a "new school" set of rules, one of the hallmarks of high fantasy is wading into a large group of opponents, swords swinging and spells a-blazing in order to cut a swath to the big bad. Whether you call them Mooks, Lackeys, Flunkies, or Henchmen, in D&D 4th Edition they were given a specific mechanic and called Minions.

 Oddly enough, Minions were somewhat controversial because the simulationist crowd couldn't wrap their heads around a person or creature that may be "Level 4" but still only have 1 HP. Don't Hit Points represent wounds and hardiness? Do Minions die constantly because they stub their toes?

No, of course not. Hit Points are nothing more than a combat pacing mechanic. And if you want you PCs to plow through dozens, if not hundreds, of grunts like Gimli and Legolas in the Lord of the Ring what better way than to use the Minion mechanic?