Putting 4e Through its Paces: the Newbie Files

Heather at The Things They Still Carry is really putting 4e through its paces by converting a 3e adventure to 4e. And she's blogging it while she goes. Not only do we get to see how an encounter gets transformed by swapping out monsters wholesale, we also get to watch as she uses the rules in the DMG to modify existing critters:

The harpy that was supposed to be in the next room presented another challenge. It was not a simple matter of finding harpy in the MM and rolling with it. This would call for more serious modification because the Harpy I wanted (alluring song) was a level 6 controller (ack!). I needed to tone her down a bit. To do this, I was looking at building a whole new monster…kinda.

What makes this especially intriguing is that Heather isn't some beardy grognard who's been playing the game since dinosaurs walked the earth. She's fairly new, and is doing a lot of this stuff for the first time. So not only do we get a fairly in-depth view of how 4e performs behind the screen, we're also seeing how newbie friendly the rules are.