Is this all there is?

We had another gaming session on Friday night, and it went well enough; no one died, new creatures were encountered and their "special traits" were seen. The players (and characters) used some good tactics, but weren't taxed - it was a good night for experience gains.

But it was also a night of combat. And combat. Oh, and a little clue found there in that pile. But that's it, and that's what this module has started to feel like - just a dungeon crawl.

Not that there's anything wrong with a dungeon crawl; fighting monsters, especially ones that are new, or that challenge you to fight with some strategy, is definitely something core to 4e D&D. And, yes, the characters assume that there's a reason they're muscling through the area, seeking the right wrongs and such, as heroes often do.

And I know that previously, I've commented that these combats have been welcome, because we needed to learn the new combat system of 4e, to get a feel for moving from saving throws to defense attacks and for the plethora of powers we now have to manage.

But I want something more. Yes, this adventure has a story in it, and there are hooks that have the characters' motivations fueled, and they have a goal, and a name of some baddie out there, but it just feels very off-balanced towards combat combat combat. We had some roleplaying in earlier sessions, but there's only so much you can do with a mindless opponent, one that doesn't seem ready to parlay.

I know that, as the DM, I can add whatever I like - but I'm trying to follow this adventure as close to written as I can, just to leave it in someone else's hands to invent this time around as we all learn the new rules. I guess I had hoped that a published Wizards of the Coast module would be a little more balanced in such things, since they're the professionals. I like to think that my own adventures mix things up a bit. Perhaps the characters are just going the wrong way, the hack-and-slash way, instead of mixing it up the way the adventure expects.

That's right - always blame the players.

DMG - Adventures

This was a large chapter, full of pretty decent information for the starting Dungeon Master, but of somewhat limited use for those who have been doing this for over 20 years.

The section on using published adventures talks about how to introduce the players to the adventure, which is usually covered in the module itself, and also gives some hints on modifying them to adapt to your own campaign setting, or modifying the level to better fit the party.

The Fixing Problems section is a sampling of the articles found in the old and new Save My Game articles from Wizards, which have always been some of the better articles that they've put out (from a DM's point of view, anyway).

The next few sections cover the meat and bones of making an adventure, and can definitely be helpful to newer DMs. Because running an adventure is similar to telling a story, DMs need to have some storytelling knowledge, such as having a start and end, keeping the pace going (even when the players might drift from the intent), and of course the player characters are the star protagonists of the story, and thus must figure predominantly throughout the story. Different from normal storytelling, however, is that the players are expected to guide the story by their own decisions, yet in the end things are meant to go as the DM planned. Giving the players the freedom to choose, yet still end up where the DM intended requires a fine balance of hints, hooks, and subtle nudging that this chapter can help the DM refine.

More technical than storytelling is the short section on the encounter mix, ensuring that the story feels dynamic and non-formulaic. Because the adventure is a story, the encounters need to feel like events that would happen day-to-day -- that is, day-to-day for heroes of the land, anyway. As discussed in the Noncombat Encounters chapter, the story isn't just a series of fights, but can include encounters of skill, encounters of dialog and encounters of wits. These encounters could be with blatant enemies, obvious friends and neutral bystanders; but also involving villains with which the party might have common goals, or misguided heroes that must be stopped. This idea is continued later in the chapter in the Cast of Characters section.

The setting are an important part of any adventure, and this is given a good amount of attention here. Early Dungeons & Dragons was all about dungeons, its namesake, but now adventures can range far and wide through any number of environments. The dungeon is definitely the easiest setting for a Dungeon Master to help ensure the flow of the adventure -- there are only so many passages that the characters can follow, and they will eventually get to where you need them -- but these can lack the sense of freedom that the story should provide. Wilderness can provide the sense of the unknown from all directions and the feeling of being lost; urban settings can lead to paranoia and distrust, as there are so many NPCs around, and any of them could be friend or foe. Planar settings provide that extra bit of the fantastic to any adventure, when dungeons, wilderness and cities are starting to feel mundane, even when crawling with dragonborn, mind flayers and dragons. This, to me, is the most useful part of the chapter.