4E Test Run: Forest of Doom – The Game

I decided to start Project: Old School with Forest of Doom for several reasons:

1. While I do own a copy of Keep on the Shadowfell, the structure of that adventure was set up so that it would probably take more than 1-2 sessions to play it.
2. Forest of Doom was designed for first level PCs, and as a 3.0 module had encounter levels already in place.
3. Forest of Doom was set up as a lot of little discrete encounters, rather than as an extended dungeoncrawl, giving me a chance to play with a lot of different settings and also to play with the Action Point and Resting rules more.
4. I was always a fan of the mushroom plantation encounter when I played the gamebook and I wanted to see how well it would translate.

Converting things over took me about a week of futzing around in the evening. As I mentioned in a previous post, 4e is very GM friendly once you master the nuances of its encounter building system (in particular I was initially caught off guard by the fact that you have to watch out for monster levels as well as XP values when building encounters – thankfully I caught myself, or that first ogre would have exterminated the PCs); it’s easy to adjust monster levels up and down to provide an appropriate challenge and NPCs are fast to stat.

I changed the adventure locale and backstory from Titan to Oerth in part for aesthetic reasons (I’ve been rereading Gygax’s Gord series and I wanted to see how the new system “felt” in old-school Greyhawk), and in part for design purposes since my philosophy was “use core monsters whenever possible”; I wasn’t confident enough to design too many new monsters, and the idea was to test the core rules, not adapt them specifically for Fighting Fantasy. As it happened I did end up doing 4e stats for the infamous Blood Eel, but since none of the party ended up in the river they never got tested (darn those good rolls).

Due to the 4th of July/Treason Day holiday (you keep Christmas in your way and I’ll keep it in mine, ok?), only Bob (Jerkxes) and Scott (Alodar) were available to play, so I had to scale all the encounters down by half last minute. For the most part this worked well except for the succubus (originally a Fire Demon, but 4e doesn’t have an equivalent low-level demon, and using a succubus and substituting enslaved humans for the Clones gave the encounter a nice twist) who would have charmed both PCs in 2-4 combat rounds, even as a Level 5 monster, had I not done a little fudging. In general, the north-of-the river encounters were on the tough side, largely because I expected the game to end and the party to level before that point.

I’m sure Bob and Scott will chime in with their own opinions, but here are my impressions:

Pros:

• Convenient: Quick and easy to design and stat encounters.
• Plays fast: we made it through two to three times as many battles as we do playing 3.5e
• Intuitive: the system’s been pared down to basics and there isn’t much to look up except for details on various powers.
• Flexible Characters: A 3.5e Ranger and Wizard would have found this tough going once the Wizard had burned off his spells for the day. The 4e party was able to keep moving along nicely, generally resting after 2-3 major encounters.

Cons:

• Repetitive Combat: the management and specialization aspects of 3.5e are almost nonexistent in 4e at low levels. You use the same powers in combat again, and again, and again rather than being able to change your spells and strategies. The new emphasis on positioning and terrain makes up for this a little, but combat still has something of a rinse-and-repeat feel. Perhaps this problem is lessened at higher levels when the PCs have more choices.
• Cardboard Opponents: one Human Bandit’s pretty much like another Human Bandit. Varying your descriptions helps hide this (my PCs treated the treehouse primitives, the hillman bandits, and the charmed Furyondian soldiers very differently even though they had the same stats), but the fact remains.

On the whole, I enjoyed running the game and though the mechanics certainly felt different, the feel was, for me, very similar to past iterations of D&D. It certainly captured the feel of both the Fighting Fantasy gamebook and the Gord the Rogue series, which is I suppose either good or bad depending on how much you like Livingstone’s or Gygax’s style.

Either way, the second part of that hammer’s still out there and I’d like to see if they can find it…