In the last few months I really got excited about D&D 4th Edition again. I actually wrote a post about this a couple of weeks ago. After not having run anything for quite some time, I was really excited about donning the DM’s mantle once more. In just a few weeks I expanded my 4E library from just the three original core books to quite the collection of used books and new PoD ones. I even invested heavily into ArcKnight’s flat plastic miniatures which I can wholeheartedly recommend. I spent almost every waking minute thinking about the game I’d love to run.
My wife and a friend immediately showed interest when I talked about 4E, but unfortunately I couldn’t really find any additional players on a short notice. I don’t like playing with strangers, so we decided to give it a go with just two players. The problem is: 4E doesn’t play well with small groups. The whole encounter design is meant for a balanced party of about four to five players. At first I tried scaling down existing 4E adventures but this proved more tedious than I anticipated and most of the adventure modules I had access to weren’t really to my liking.
One D&D adventure I always wanted to run was Against the Cult of the Reptile God, which was originally written for AD&D 1st Edition. So I took the module as a basis and created encounters suited for a two player party. This was certainly doable although I noticed that 4E is somewhat lacking when it comes to low-level monsters. But with some reskinning this was not too big a deal. I placed the town of Orlane into the southern part of the Nentir Vale to the west of the barony of Harkenwold and wrote a new introduction to get my players on their way to Orlane. While travelling in the vicinity they stumbled upon a family attacked by hungry wolves. A short combat ensued in which the player characters and the slightly too powerful family of peasants defeated the wolves in a couple of combat rounds. The combat was fun and I really liked making use of these nifty flat miniatures, but I noticed that properly balancing things is harder than I anticipated.
The family thanked the player characters for their help and told them about strange happenings in Orlane. Of course my players immediately took the bait and went to Orlane. After arriving in the village they immediately started exploring and talking to the villagers. This part of the game went pretty smoothly and was a lot of fun to everyone involved. They carefully avoided getting into trouble but were almost ambushed during the night. After about four hours playing we called it a day and talked about what they thought about the game and the module. We all agreed that the adventure had been a blast so far. We had a lot of great roleplaying opportunities and my players enjoyed the exploration and investigation angle of the module. But we also agreed that the module didn’t really allow D&D 4th Edition to shine. I also had to admit that preparing the game had been much more work than planned. After some discussion we agreed that we wanted to keep playing the module but switch to a more suitable system.
Was this D&D 4th Edition’s fault? Of course not. I still think it’s a very cool game and if I ever get the chance again to run a game for a larger group I might pick it up again. Using a 1E adventure was probably a bad idea as well. We are currently trying to decide what we should switch to. AD&D 1st Edition might be the most logical choice but perhaps one of the more recent retro clones or something like Castles & Crusades might work better for us.
If you plan to run D&D 4th Edition in 2025, please don’t make the same mistakes as I did. It’s still a great game and can be a lot of fun but be prepared to put in a lot of work as a DM if you have less players than the game was designed for and/or if you want to use adventures not designed for it. What probably also didn’t help that while preparing for the 4th Edition game, Daggerheart had been released, which I am extremely hyped for (yes, I have the attention span of a squirrel of caffeine sometimes).
Have you tried getting back into 4E recently? What are your thoughts on this controversial edition of D&D? Please share your thoughts and experiences below!
