My Sunday campaign has just started through H3: Pyramid of Shadows. In some ways, I think it will be the most successful of the heroic tier adventures. Partly this is because I think the encounters should amuse this particular group of players, but mainly it’s because I’m getting more of a handle on how to run 4e adventures.

During the 3e era, I ran a *lot* of Paizo/Dungeon adventures, and, for the most part, they have the role-playing encounters spelt out for you. If you’re meant to talk to this monster – here, have a role-playing encounter. If you’re meant to fight them, here’s the combat tactics. Of course, players could (and would) enter encounters the opposite of expectations, and Paizo (especially) rarely gave nothing for the other approach; you could run encounters either way; but you generally knew how you were meant to run them.

Both 4e’s H1 and H2 look a lot like a bunch of nothing but combat encounters. And, being new to 4e, this is mostly how I ran them. However, 4e encounters are really a lot like 1e (Gygaxian) encounters: the DM can run them any darn way he or she feels like! And good and, perhaps more importantly, experienced DMs will do so. 

(To be honest, there’s a bunch of home base roleplaying in both H1 and H2, but it doesn’t feel that way once you hit the dungeons).

This is the disconnect that I’m now trying to overcome. Interestingly, it seems like the module designers are also seeing that the DMs are taking the encounters to be too much “combat-based” as well; both H3 and P2 have dedicated sections explaining how to run encounters as role-playing encounters rather than pure combat encounters.

So, in H3, instead of the plant creatures just attacking the party, they got into a conversation with them – the result of which seems to be an uneasy alliance. Running the adventure this way does need quite a bit of application and creativity from the DM, for you only have the broad strokes of how to run the NPCs, but it is achievable and the possibilities are rather exciting.

I also have Vyrellis to interact with the characters (intelligent artefacts are always fun), and the PCs are serving the evil wizard from the previous adventure due to a botched final combat (it works well within the context of the campaign, in fact). 

So, I think I’m getting a lot better at running modules in the 4e style.