RPG Ike´s last blog post: MOTHS!

“You feel the ground rumble beneath your feet as you hurtle down the corridor and burst through the iron door that now hangs unsteadily from one hinge. There are two ways out: a narrow, upward-sloping passage along which chunks of the ceiling are beginning to tear loose, and a more solid-looking corridor that stretches northward, probably paralleling the wall of the fortress.” That gives them an opportunity to discuss (read: argue) about which path to take.

Alternatively, or additionally, you could try adding a combat element. Along their flight from the fortress, they stumble across a small band of the overlord’s minions. They’ll need to either fight their way past — and quickly — or convince the minions that they all need to work together to escape with their lives.

Your ideas have me questioning whether or not I should make escaping the crumbling fortress a skill challenge. Certainly it’s got the stakes for a skill challenge, and I can easily scale the number of failures and successes all the way from getting crushed to death, to catching the villain as he tries to escape with the artifact.

My problem is that there’s little to no room for roleplaying in the challenge as I’ve set it up. What do you think?

@ Greywulf: I had been avoiding Tiny Adventures for months now out of Facebook fear, but you’ve convinced to go check it out.

Thanks again.

RPG Ike´s last blog post: MOTHS!

While not quite as elegant, I push much farther into the nonsense zone, enjoy!

Donny_the_DM´s last blog post: HAVE A TPK NEW YEAR!!

I definitely agree with what you’re saying here.

I look at skill challenges as a framework for tying roleplaying to game mechanics. Tons of systems do this already, but D&D has stayed out of doing this until the introduction of skill challenges.

Obviously I’ve been working on a lot these lately, and in working with them I’ve been realizing a few things…

1. Skill Challenges don’t have to be group affairs. I think that skill challenges can also work for individual scenes as well. A SC could easily be the rogue sneaking into an enemy encampment, or the fighter getting into a duel with his arch-rival, or two wizards having a duel. You have to be careful or the whole party ends up watching one character do their thing, but you can manage that in a way to keep everyone else from being bored.

2. Skill Challenges are about actions, not skills. Yes, this is like my mantra, but it has lead me to some interesting places, like the Powers for War at Jonathan’s site, and a few more ideas that I are bubbling up to the surface and shall be revealed.

3. Skill Challenges don’t have to have three failures. The other major option you have here is to have open-ended SCs and count failures, with some chart that referrences what x amount of failures means. So, you could have a search for a place happen, and the amount of failures could mean the difference between another group getting there first, or some NPC being alive or dead. In fact, one of the WotC published modules (Demonweb Enclave?) has an open-ended SC that does something similar to what I suggest.

If this gets longer, it’s going to be a full out post.

P.S. Scott, I’m going back to the paladin powers this week for an edit. What you said was dead on, and needs some addressing by yours truly.

gamefiend´s last blog post: Pitch for the Slaughtervale.

It’s not that this sort of thing wasn’t possible with earlier editions, but it relied entirely on the GM extrapolating from the printed rules. Now it’s codified in the printed rules.

“The skill challenge mechanic should be used only when there’s a real chance of failure and real consequences for that failure” — I couldn’t agree more. Also, it is NOT a substitute for roleplaying. One of the complaints a friend of mine had recently about S.C. (who is not in my game, btw) was that, from his perspective, skill challenges simply slowed the game down. Whereas before, in 3.5E D&D, a single diplomacy or survival check might be needed to see if you convince the king, or find your way out of the forest, in 4E skill challenges break these sorts of things down into many rolls. My response… Yes.. exactly. That’s the point, SCs act to granulate the action outside of combat. The interaction with the king is much more than just one roll – its a whole scene, and (assuming you are willing to put your roleplaying into a framework) its success of failure should represent multiple actions.

Also, SC’s are good because they allow the whole party the option to participate in previous challenges that would have been left to one player. How many times can I remember the brusers of the group simply sitting back and having no interest in the roleplaying – now they can still contribute.

JONATHAN´s last blog post: The Two BEST RPG Blog Posts in 2008