A Pack of Vicious Grithiks
One of my favorite parts of fourth edition is the ease with which it’s possible to create monsters that are fairly assured to be a reasonable challenge for the party. Given a careful selection of powers, there’s not much to worry about; a monster of a certain level, when placed with sufficient other monsters of around that level in an encounter, will provide a decent challenge to the typical party of around that level. To top it off, Asmor’s provided a wonderful tool for automating most of the annoying bits that remain.
As a result, I find myself developing custom monsters a lot more often than I did in third edition. Case in point: in my most recent game, the PCs found themselves delving into a massive cavern system chasing a lead. (Apologies for the vagueness, but I don’t want to give away any potentially still-active plot points when my players might read this.) This cavern was home to, among other things, a clan of troglodytes.
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Hacking Skill Challenges
In my previous post, I mentioned that skill challenges could be adapted to cover even more situations, provided you, as gamemaster, were willing to bend their rules a bit. There are a few ways of accomplishing this.
Extend the Failures
There’s no reason why every skill challenge has to be based around three failures. If the PCs are allowed to fail more checks before the challenge fails, the challenge is made easier to pass, all else being equal.
You could simply extend the challenge by proportionately increasing the numbers required. A skill challenge requiring 8 successes before 6 failures is the same as one requiring 4 successes before 3 failures, but will take roughly twice as long. This might be useful if you game with a particularly large group (more than 6) — it gives everyone a chance to participate. It also extends the roleplay surrounding the challenge, so even with a smaller group, you might find this method better if the challenge deals with a major campaign event.
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4e Monk project update
I’ve completed the latest revision to my 4e Monk project. The largest changes this time around are to the Inner Eye and Quivering Palm mechanics.
Inner Eye no longer allows the use of Wis bonus to AC and Reflex instead of Dex or Int; feedback rightly pointed out that this made monks depend on too few attributes for comfort. I think I willfully overlooked that for a while in an effort to preserve some of the traditional feel, but this way does work out a little bit better for gameplay. As an alternative, instead of granting a straight +3 AC bonus, you could let Inner Eye provide half the monk’s Wis modifier; this is a little weaker at heroic levels and a little stronger at epic levels, but shouldn’t cause a large balance issue. (Remember to round down, though.)
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What Skill Challenges Aren’t
I’d promised this post a little while ago after reading Jonathan’s statistical analysis of skill challenge success rates over at The Core Mechanic. I’m wary of the “echo chamber” effect — At Will has been posting a lot of skill challenges lately, there was a series of war-related challenges on The Core Mechanic recently, and Asmor offered some very good advice at Encounter-a-Day.
After thinking it over though, I remain convinced that there’s more to say. The mechanic itself is pretty integral to the fourth-edition experience — it’s the first time a structure has been offered in D&D for long-term non-combat challenges involving the entire party.
It’s also one of the messiest and most misunderstood portions of the rulebook, even with the errata. And this is a pity. The designers of 4e developed a mechanic that could take the game — the default, rules-as-written game — into territory far beyond what was possible with earlier editions as-written. And then they flubbed the execution and created widespread confusion.
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Happy New Year!
Here’s wishing all of you a safe and pleasant 2009.
I have, alas, no gaming-reslated resolutions for the year, but if any of you have them and care to share, I’m all ears.
