All right, it's been ages since I wrote the first one of these, and I haven't been as regular with blogging as I wanted to be, so I'm going to babble a little about some of the stuff I'm working on right now.

I'm actually working on material for two campaigns -- one heroic (4th level PCs) and one that has just reached paragon (11th level PCs).

I'm offering this walkthrough of my process as a demonstration of the sort of very relaxed, zen process I'm using to create custom opponents for my campaign. It's very, very light on the math -- I mostly just make stuff up and then check it against what's already there to see how it measures up. Let me know what you think . . . .

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For the Heroic campaign, I'm bringing a plotline involving goblin invasion by sea and the gnome effigies that I've mentioned before to a head. The gnome effigies are a new creation for me -- I need to come up with a variety of opponents for the party that are based on these animated gnome dolls. (I play a lot of rogues in WOW, and when you pick pockets there one of the ubiquitous things you loot is a "gnome effigy" -- that has been the inspiration for this collection of opponents)

Gnome Effigy
The gnome effigy is the weakest, most basic instance of the effigy creatures. I want these guys to be annoying, but no more than that. About the weakest single creature I can base them on is the kobold minion, so that's what I'm going to work with. However, I want to give them a slightly different flavor. In a previous post I mentioned these guys and said that I was going to give them the clay scout's limited invisibility, but I've since decided that I don't really like that for them -- it's a frankly a deeply stupid choice on my part if I don't pair them with creatures that can daze opponents, or give them the ability to daze opponents themselves. So, I want to come up with something else. In the end, I think I'm going to go with the gnome's reactive stealth and make sure they're trained in stealth (on top of the Kobold's existing stealth bonus, that would give these little buggers a +9 to stealth).

Gnome Tickleyou
My original plan for these guys was to just use the clay scout, and make them bigger, non-minion versions of the effigies, but I've since decided to throw this idea out entirely.

Effigy Swarm.
This is my replacement idea for the tickleyou. It's a mob of effigies, working together in a tightly packed unit of lilliputian anger and menace. Swarm models for these guys could be the rat swarm, the needlefang drake swarm, and a few other similar swarms in the compendium. Swarms seem to be pretty consistently marked by their resistance to melee and ranged attacks, their vulnerability to area and close attacks, and their auras. Most swarm auras just let them make their basic attack again, so that's all pretty easy to do.

I'm going to go ahead and use the rat swarm as my basis for the effigy swarm. That gets the stats pretty much right, but I'll want to make a couple of changes to create my flavor. I see this as a teeming swarm of stuffed gnomes. They've grabbed small blades, bits of broken glass, etc, for weapons, and the rat swarm's basic attack works just fine for my purposes, but I'm going to remove the ongoing damage. In it's place, I'm going to include a collection of alternate attacks that build on each other.

The Attack will still be 1d6+3 and will grab a target. If the target is grabbed, it will knock the target prone (flavored to pull the target down). If the target is grabbed and prone, it will do 2d6+3 damage.

This is very simliar to the Needlefang Drake swarm, but it's not quite as deadly in pure damage, but it will be harder to escape, which I expect will be scary for the PCs.

Effigy Golem
The fey baddies who have created the gnome effigies that are helping the golins attack the city have created one more monstrosity -- a sort of golem created out of packed-together effigies, bound into a single being through fey sorceries blah blah blah.

I spent a while looking for a construct that made sense as a model for this opponent. I didn't find much in the level range that I'm working in. So, I broadended my hunt, deciding that what I really wanted was a basic brute of some sort, and decided to use the Orc Beserker as my primary model. But, I flipped over to the Golem pages to look at the golems there for something that was a standard golem flavor. Golems have a power called Golem Rampage, which should work well at just about any level, so I'm going to slap that onto the orc beserker in place of the warrior's surge. I will also adjust the attack -- rather than the 1d12+5 (with the high crit) that the orc beserker has, I'm going to go with 2d6+5 and leave off the high crit. This is somewhere between the high damage values for levels 1-3 and 4-6 in the DM (p 185). It'll average out at 12 points of damage, one point lower than the 2d8+4 that is the high damage at 4-6 on that table, so it's just about right.

So, that's my collection of Effigy beasties -- the minion, the swarm, and the golem. In all three cases the design was very quick and dirty, and the whole set was inspired by what I wanted to achieve in story terms. I spent most of my time flipping through books and the compendium looking for models and ideas -- the rest was just copy-paste and a little tweaking. And, really, since I'm going to use these monsters for a session or two, and then they'll never be used again, I don't want to spend hours and hours putting them together.

Radiating Gnome

Reading the most recent article in Mike Mearls' skill challenge series, I got excited. Once again, the ideas and mechanics in his dramatically different variation on skill challenges shook up everything I was thinking and I went back to the drawing board for this week's game session.

If you have not read the article (and you should), his article details a skill challenge that does not have a "number of successes before a number of failures" mechanic to it at all. Instead, he has used pieces of the core skill challenge mechanic, added some new ideas, and come up with a rich gaming experience that looks very different from the skill challenges we have been playing with.

The two important variations I'm seeing are these:

1. Party skill checks. Rather than track specific successes and failures, everyone in the party makes a skill check. If the party gets more successes than failures, they get a success in the skill challenge.

2. In this challenge, successes mean no change in status, but failures in those skill checks add a failure to an ongoing condition track that measures the ongoing effects of the party's bumbling. In this specific case, since the PCs are trying to move discretely through a hostile city, each failure makes the city's defenses more and more alert to their presence and makes it harder and harder for them to operate.

Those are pretty significant changes, but what's even more exciting is the idea that even the bedrock mechanics of skill challenges can be adapted to fit your specific needs. I mean, a skill challenge that doesn't track successes? If you can do that, and it's still a skill challenge, what CAN'T you do?

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So, given that, I sent out to rewrite the skill challenge I had planned for my group this weekend. Here's their situation. They are in a major city where the are minor heroes. They have been asked by the Duke to go out among the people during a week-long festival and to be visible, heroic, and to counter the public opinion that is being generated by the pretender prince who is in the city with his army of knights, who are trying to convince the people that the city needs their help to protect them from a looming goblin threat. The Duke fears that if he takes this prince's help he will be tied in fealty to a man he is not sure he wants to serve. All of this takes place during a street festival that is inspired by Mardi Gras.

So, I created five different quarters of the city, described the, the people who live and work there, and how they party during the festival. The idea was that the PCs would move through the city over the course of the day in four phases -- at the end of the day, if the PCs had a majority of successes in a majority of the phases (sort of electoral college style), they would earn a victory in the skill challenge. Each quarter of the city had a risk of some sort associated with it -- something that might happen while the PCs were there (for example, in the big marketplace, the risk was a pickpocket, who made an attack on the PCs' reflex defense and if it succeeded the PC lost 5gp). I also details some specific RP events that would take place in each quarter -- things that would move elements of the game's plot forward one way or the other without being a direct part of the skill challenge. This included things like spotting a Fagan-type trainer of cutpurses and finding a quiet courtyard where a couple dozen of the Prince's knights were practicing (which gave the PCs present the opportunity to earn a reroll they could use in the future in a fight with one of those knights -- to represent having studied their tactics and being able to anticipate them).

Then I took my list of skills that the PCs could reasonably use to try to win the hearts and minds of the people in the city away from the prince and his army of knights, and set DCs for them based on the quarter (following Mearls' example on this)

I decided that the day would play out in four phases of about 2 hours each. In each phase, if the PCs were not in a quarter of the city, the Prince's men in that area would earn a success for their side in the contest to win the hears and minds of the city. Each of the PCs could make a check in the quarter they were in to try to earn a success there.

How did it play out?

Pretty well -- not perfect, but pretty well. Over the course of the day, they figured out that they needed to be in many places at once to stop the knights from winning successes. They decided to save the Dockside quarter -- a part of the city they already had a following and had won successes in the meta-challenge earlier in the week -- for the last phase of the day. But by the time they got to the last phase, they realized they were in a situation where they had made tenuous gains in other parts of the city, and the only way to win the overall challenge was to stay in those parts of the city and not allow the Prince's knights to have the last word. So they had to stay away from the end of the day party with friends in the dockside quarter and to spread themselves pretty thin across the city (and splitting up the party is scary enough for a group of veteran players).

What we came away with was a skill challenge that, including all the ancillary RP stuff that I mixed in, gave the PCs some tough decisions to make, taught them a lot about the city they're in, gave them relationships with some new contacts, and that has set the scene for a lot of fun to come. We played it out in a 3.5 hour session, in which they avoided any combat they might have gotten in to, but still had some good RP fun, had to make some tough, dramatic choices, and even better, the challenge has helped me develop setting and world details that would have had to be boring exposition otherwise.

I had hopes for trying to keep the skill challenge out of the player's line of sight, but there wasn't a good way to do that, IMO. To create the drama of the mounting successes for the other guys in other parts of the city, I needed to show the party some sort of indication of those successes. I could have held that back completely, but in our particular case the players would have lost the challenge and not had the tough choice to make to give up on partying with their friends back at the docks, because they would not have been able to see the strategic situation. And I could have couched the relative success that the knights and the party were having in the different sections of the city in description, rather than using a game mechanic like successes, but that would have added the wrong sort of description and detail to the game, I felt. I needed the visible scaffolding of the challenge to help the players see what was at stake and to help them see it in a strategic way.

In the end, I was pretty happy with the results, although I don't think I want to try to run challenges like this one too often. For one thing, it takes a LOT of work -- far more work than preparing a couple of combat encounters would have taken. I spent several evenings this week scribbling like mad in my game journal trying to come up with enough ideas and events for the PCs to interact with over the course of the day. The work paid off, and we had a good session, but it did take longer. Look at the example challenge in Mearls' article -- that's pages and pages, where one of the more traditional skill challenges in one of the print adventures takes perhaps half a page. I think the work is worth it.

Radiating Gnome

If you've been suffering along with the blog posts I have been making lately, you know that I've been experimenting and playing around with skill challenges, and the way they work, especially responding to the way the designers are driving the evolution of skill challenges since the initial release of the game. Ideas about skill challenges have changed a lot since the game was first released, and it seems like they still have some room to grow.

In last week's D&D podcast and in the dragon article about skill challenges, the ideas and evolution took a little more form. I like the direction things are going in -- even when I think they're going in directions that I've argued against in the past, I can see the case they're making and I think they're right, in the long run. But there are still questions that I have, and clarifications that I would like to see.

1. Tell or Don't Tell?

This was addressed in a question in the podcast -- should you tell your PCs that they're in a skill challenge or not. The answer they gave was sort of the one I prefer -- that it depends upon the skill challenge -- but I think they could have put better emphasis in their answer on the idea of making a choice, and discussion the advantages of each option. Instead they talked about skill challenges that are just rolling dice and making checks as the lesser of the two options.

And, well, I can see plenty of opportunity for challenges that are primarily tactical -- making skill checks and using a very visible scaffolding to structure the challenge -- and see them as engaging moments in the game session. That's very, very different from the narrative style, story-driven skill challenge. But I don't think that it's necessarily any less interesting.

They also mentioned, in passing, the idea of grand-scale skill challenges -- challenges that have other encounters embedded within them. I think that's terrific, and I've been playing with similar ideas.

In past posts -- in the blog and in other forum discussions -- I've frequently asked or wondered what advantage there is to gain from having a skill challenge without showing the structure to the players. My point at the time was that the structure allows the players to react to the challenge as a game -- to use tactics and teamwork to beat the challenge, and without the structure being visible they don't have that available to them.

But my opinion is changing on that note; there are some pretty important advantages to the DM using the challenge structure even if he is not going to show the structure overtly to the players. The challenge structure gives a DM a template for building this sort of narrative element into his game -- and it gives the DM a structured way to reward the players for those sorts of encounters. So, I do want to back off on that criticism of the idea of not showing the structure to the players. I still think there are moments are reasons why you might want to show the structure to the players -- probably in much smaller scale challenges, challenges that are more about a tactical situation than a narrative one (you need to cross a chasm or pick a lock, not woo the princess or convince the crew to mutiny).

2. In narrative challenges, how do you handle including everyone? How do you adjust for rampant assists?

One of the things that I liked about the initial incarnation of skill challenges was that in most cases the DCs were high enough that it took the entire party to succeed -- in most cases you needed to have half or slightly more than half of the party providing assists checks just to get enough. And the challenges were handled in a sort of round format, with the DM making sure everyone was contributing something to the challenge. There were problems, however -- some PCs were just not suited for some challenges and if the were not given a way to try not to hurt the party's chances of success by staying in the background the challenge would be doomed to failure.

The update that revised the DCs and failures changed that landscape a great deal -- now there is no reason for assisting, since the DCs are by and large 8 or 10 lower than the original ones were. Skill challenges have gone from moments that require teamwork and planning to complete successfully -- and that are achievements during the game -- to moments in the game that are just about as much a guaranteed success as combat is.

Now, the only way to challenge the party is to create a sitation where the party members cannot assist each other. That seems to run counter to the ideas that are so built into the rest of the game -- the party that works together and supports each other will be able to defeat combat encounters that are far too tough if they don't.

In my own opinion, assists should -- at least some of the time -- be a part of the structure of the challenge. My recommendation would be to make all checks that are made to assist "medium" or "hard" checks (using the medium or high DC) rather than a simple 10. After a certain point, if the assist check DC does not go up, it becomes an automatic +2.

I would probably also add +1 to the DC for every PC that can potentially assist. So, to push down the door, you can have one PC make the check and two others assist, the DC should be set at +2.

In the more narrative challenges -- in which the PCs are inventing their own solutions to challenges, writing their own story as they go, and things are much more unstrucutred and open, it seems like it's much more difficult to give every party member something to do in the challenge. In a more "tactical" challenge, it's easy to work around the table and figure out what everyone is doing, but when you start buliding challenges in which each check represents a stage in the challenge, it starts to move completely away from giving everyone something to do. The only potential way to try to achieve the same indended inclusiveness of the challenge is to try to write it so that there are stages in the challenge that other PCs can be good at.

So, if the challenge is about trying to navigate through a haunted forest, and each success creates a new situation for the PCs to respond to, the challenge will be to build stages at which the PCs discover something or open up an option that involves a new skill that will include another player. So, the initial nature check to find the path might lead the party to a ruin that would open up a history check that might open up a dungeoneering check that might open up a stealth check . . . and so on. I'm not sure I am totally comfortable with that idea -- I'm going to be very interested to see if these values that seemed so important to the initial skill challenge design just end up discard on the side of the road.

3. Why are we still calling these skill challenges?

Even though the primary tool players use to handle these moments in the game will be skills, those will not be the only thing they use, and calling them Skill Challenges is conceptually limiting.

I think we can create a much more interesting tool if we talk about "Challenges" -- a sort of umbrella term that brings with it the basic structure (DCs, successes vs failuers, etc). Then we can start talking about challenge types:

Skill Challenge -- the more tactical, smaller scale challenges
Narrative Challenge -- the more grand-scale, story-driven challenges

and perhaps some others, like . . .

Combat Challenge -- unlike combat encounters, a combat challenge is a challenge that can be completed using combat skills (think of an archery tournament or a jousting match).
Meta Challenge -- a challenge that does not actually include any individual checks of it's own -- successes and failures are earned by completing other encounters and challenges.

And so on.

Radiating Gnome

I've been using my blog to post my planning notes for the campaign I'm running -- we play every other saturday, and we just had the first session of play involving the notes that I've been posting for the adventure I've planned that is very heavy on skill challenges (I had intended for it to be ALL skill challenges, and then backed off that a little).

We had a great session, 4 hours of play with only a single short 45-minute combat encounter as we played through the first two days of the festival. The players were engaged and creative in ways that surprised and impressed me, and I'm very pleased with the result -- but it also helps me support and flesh out some of my half-formed ideas about skills challenges in 4E.

The skill challenge structure works exceptionally well, IMO, as an aid to DMs who are trying to ad lib with their players. With just a few notes scratched down for yourself, you have all you need to set DCs and determine how successful your players have been -- without needing to think too hard ahead of time about options they might come up with. It certainly doesn't hurt to come up with those ideas, but if you feel like you need to plan out all of the available options for your players, you're going to make yourself crazy.

What Happened

So, by way of illustration, note the challenge I created to start off the festival -- the PCs had a goal to somehow counter the effect of a ritual honoring long-dead high kings and undermining the support for the current duke. I sketched out some ideas for what they might try (being included as a part of the ceremony themselves, disrupting the ceremony in a negative way, doing nothing). But the most important information I had in my notes, when we sat down to play, was the complexity (6/3), the base DCs (7/21/17), and the basic situation.

The PCs came up with an idea for an alternative ceremony, tied to and based on things that had happened earlier in the campaign, and provided such a perfect answer to the Prince's ceremony to honor the high kings that I am almost ashamed to say I did not see it coming. Almost, because it's a whole lot of fun being surprised like this.

To begin with, they reached back to two things in previous game sessions. They have been adventuring at sea for a while. In one adventure they captured a goblin catamaran and had been sailing around on it; in another, while sailing around, they came upon a sinking wrecked fishing boat, with one survivor, a terrified boy clinging to the mast while sharks circled in the water around them.

In that encounter with the boy on the fishing boat, they had to try to deal with the sharks while getting the terrified boy onto their ship -- but when they tried to sail right up to his sinking boat, they bumped into underwater parts of the wreck and pushed it down faster -- so they were struggling to with trying to find a way to help the kid -- who was so scared he wasn't going to let go of the mast. They did pretty badly, eventually getting a rope around the kid and pulling him forcibly off the mast -- into the water -- and then failing to get him back out of the water before the circling sharks could get to him. This failure has haunted them -- with no additional prompting from me -- and it's still a pretty sharp point with them.

That failure led to an encounter -- actually a series of encounters I had not planned for the night before the festival. The PCs talked the Duke into sending them with some money for the boy's family. They found the boy's mother and sister -- all that was left of his family -- hungry and poor and having had no word yet about their missing father and the two boys who had been on the boat. The party blamed the deaths on the Goblins, gave the family the money, and did their best to try to feel better about things.

At that point, I decided to mess with them as DM. They also decided to stay in the poor dockside residential quarter where the fishing families live, asking around about others that were missing or lost in the closing goblin blockade. There were a lot of people to talk to -- lots of missing fishermen -- and in a little while a crowd had gathered around the PCs. What made the scene a bit contentious was that the crowd had also heard that the PCs had delivered a gift from the Duke to the one family -- other families with missing fathers and sons and husbands wanted to know if they were going to get some sort of a handout -- what made the one family special.

Of course, the players were not about to admit that the one family was special because they felt guilty about getting the boy killed. So they had to think fast and backpedal . . . and that left them with a lingering feeling of having not quite gotten the visit to the fishing families right. They spent a lot of time talking about giving the families the goblin catamaran so they could use it to fish in . . then realized that most wouldn't want to fish in something that was painted with blood that could certainly have been the blood of their missing family members. So, they moved on, without having come up with a satisfying answer yet.

Then they got around to trying to find a way to deal with the planned ceremony to honor the dead high kings. They need to do something to steal the thunder from the event without making the Duke look disloyal, and without squandering their own fledgling fame. My plans for the encounter figured they might become part of the ceremony and pay their own respects to the long dead high kings, but their idea was better, and a total surprise to me.

They planned to deliver the catamaran to the square outside the temple during the ceremony, so that as people emerged afterwards they would find the catamaran there in the square. The families of missing and dead fishermen -- and anyone else with dead or missing family associated with the goblins -- were all invited to come and place a token of their lost family members in the catamaran -- an offering of flowers, a keepsake, something -- and then the catamaran was taken down to the harbor at the head of a large procession where it would be launched, burned, and a big wake would be held for the common people to remember their lost loved ones. The PCs made the arrangements, funded the party, and delivered speeches standing on the catamaran in front of the stunned people coming out of the ceremony while the poor came forward to honor their own dead.

I handled it as a skill challenge. A couple of checks to make plans the night before and get the word out to the poor. Another couple of checks while giving speeches, and then finishing up with some checks for the Wake -- having the notes (6/3, 7/12/17 DC) in front of me made it easy to handle the challenge on the fly, as we talked out what happened as they executed their plan.

The players whose characters were tasked with making speeches outlined their speeches for the group -- sort of half-speaking in character and half not -- which was pretty good for our group, mostly made up of novices.

They did have one failure -- the dwarf barbarian tasked with getting the drink for the wake rolled a failure on her check . . . we played that one out by saying that she had made the mistake of having only strong dwarven spirits to drink -- not the lighter fare like wine and beer that the crowd of human mourners, much more than half women, would be comfortable drinking. But a little quick roleplaying and another character making a good diplomacy check to convince nearby tavern owners to swap the dwarven spirits for more appropriate drinks.

And they had their Wake, celebrating the immediate losses suffered by the common people in the city, rather than the distant, long-dead high king. It went off well, and made an important step in their overall goal of winning the support of the common people back for the Duke and away from the pretender prince.

There were ways I could have screwed with the plan -- maybe the cloak knights would have gotten word of their plans ahead of time, but overall I was very pleased with their creativity and connection to the story of the campaign -- they made their choices based on story elements, not on the skills they had the best chance to succeed at, and their engagement with the ongoing story of the campaign is getting stronger.

So What?

This isn't going to be the way things always go. We had a handful of other skill challenges over the course of the session, and most were not as imaginatively handled as this example was. But it only takes this one shining creative success for my players to have a very positive feeling about the session.

What did I do? I gave them a fairly detailed but open-ended challenge, one where I didn't give them any specific hints about how to solve the problem. I'm fairly certain that the primary option I detailed in my writeup didn't even occur to them, and if it did it went by so quickly I never saw them consider it seriously.

They did, however, reach back to what had come before in the campaign. They used props and plot elements that they had already played through -- things that I did not expect them to use. If that were the first session of the campaign, they would have had a much harder time coming up with a way to handle the situation. So, don't expect that your players will come up with brilliant ideas right away -- the campaign needs some time to develop some narrative momentum.

Also, remember this: YOU don't get to decide which details you present to the players are the important ones. They decide. In this case, the encounter with the boy who was eaten by sharks was never meant to be more than a little side encounter to show off the sharks I'd developed (basically adapted crocodiles) and fill an encounter slot in the adventure I was writing. But because they failed to rescue the kid and that failure stings, that throwaway encounter has turned into an important narrative thread in the campaign. It would be a HUGE mistake on my part to do anything other than work with that plot element. You need to be ready to accept those opportuinties when they appear.

What does this mean for Print adventures?

If you're a DM who uses print adventures rather than home-grown stuff -- Dungeon adventures, etc -- its a lot harder to find opportunities for this sort of skill challenge -- and you'll see that in the way challenges are written in these sources. You'll also see that it's continuing to change as time goes on -- the challenges in adventures publish today compared to the ones from 6 months ago are VERY different. I'll write a future blog post about incorporating Story-level skill challenges in a campaign that's using print adventures.

Radiating Gnome

Day 2 - Day of the Crown

(note: as I prepared for our next session, which was yesterday, I became concerned that I would move through these skill challenges too quickly, and so this day includes a couple of combat encounters to fill time. I was running out of time before the session, and combat takes a lot longer to play through than skill challenges . . . . that's why there are a couple of combat encounters here. MY next post will be a report on the action from yesterday's session.)

The Day of the crown, symbolized by the Crown of the High King, is a celebration of commerce, craftsmanship, and all things financial in the Isles.

This is the day, each year, when masters take on new apprentices, pass apprentices to journeyman status, promote journeyman to masters, and the new masters are given a chance to show off their work in the guild halls and marketplaces of the city. Craftspeople from all over Ikaria save their best work all year to bring to Ikarport for the Day of the Crown. In the evenings, the guilds hold whatever elections and annual meetings with their entire membership.

This is a special day for moneylenders, who traditionally calculate their annual interest and debt amounts on this day.

On this day the Duke or his representative visits the city's debtor's prison to select one prisoner whose debts he will pay off. This selection is made in a different way each year -- in some cases based on merit, in other years through drawing lots, games of chance or skill, etc.

Before dawn, craftspeople flood into the city and set up stalls in marketplaces and plazas. The streets will be packed from sunup to sundown with shopping -- any vacant corner is usually quickly filled with an impromptu game of chance.

After sunset, the guild halls hold great feasts for their members and any important nobles they can convince to attend. It is a mark of great status to have a member of the royal family attend a guild's feast, so frequently the family is split up and sent individually to different feasts to spread out that status among as many guildmembers as possible.

Chad, an officer of the Cloak Knights with a bad case of poison ivy and a serious case of the hates for the party has decided to use this day as his big chance to try to get some payback. He has arranged for some minor embarrassments for the party over the course of the day. Also, the PCs are new heroes in a city badly in need of heroes. A handful of the assorted guilds in town will ask the PCs to attend their banquets that evening.

Challenge 1: Shopping & People Watching

The PCs can't help but spend some time prowling the streets looking at all of the fine goods being offered. The entire City is a street festival, crowded with goods and food carts and music and buskers and so on.

Scene 1: Gnome Effigies

The players catch a child running away from a vendor from whom he has stolen a clay drinking mug shaped like a dragon's head. The child is no practiced thief, is easily caught, and surrenders quickly. Any questioning at all reveals that the child was put up to it by "Bennit" -- who turns out to be her brand new gnome doll, tucked into her tunic. When he's pulled out, Bennit announces "I'm a Monster. Rawr." Bennit will also say "I think you're pretty" and "You smell like bacon". When examined by a PC, Bennit says "Soap and Water won't kill you, you know. Lemme go!" or something like that. Bennit mostly says his usual three messages, and shows no other sign of sentience, except for at key moments when he seems to either get in a good barb or encourage the child to do something naughty (like steal).

Asking around a little, The PCs come upon a toy vendor selling a massive pile of stuffed gnome dolls to eager children -- empty sacks and crates make it clear that he has already sold dozens, if not hundreds of the little dolls, and the children and clamoring for more.

The Vendor, who calls himself "Stonemeal" is respectful and insists that he's a simple toymaker who has been working all year to bring his talking gnomes to the city. It's a harmless enchantment that brings joy to lonely children -- just look at them, how happy it makes them to each have their own talking friend.


The PCs are out and shopping among the people. They come upon a scene that has been organized by Chad, who is not at all subtle in his methods. But he, himself, is being used by Fey agents in the city who cannot show their hands.

During the day the PCs are attacked by some urchins throwing dung. Once the PCs have been pelted, the kids run for it. A quick chase (Skill challenge, 4/3, DC 5/10/15) allows the PCs to catch one of them and question him – which reveals that the kid was hired by Chad, who was watching from a nearby window.

Chad, of course, didn’t come up with this on his own – he was put up to it by a fey agent (the doppelganger at the kiln), in the guise of another Cloak Knight. The Dung is actually special dung, carrying an odd scent. And, shortly after the PCs are pelted with it, a pack of 3 Fey Hounds (shadow hounds) appears and attacks them.

A few minutes later, before they can clean up, the PCs are attacked in the street by 3 Fey Hounds.

(Fey Hounds are modified Hell Hounds).

The Crowds – There are three crowds of people -- one that is 1x1, one that is 2x2, and one that is 3x3 (using the streets of shadows dragontiles for this encounter). The crowds panic once the fight begins and move 1-6 spaces in a random direction at the end of each turn until they finally leave the board. They will not enter the space of a hound. Any PC who moves into the crowd, who the crowd moves on top of, or who starts his turn in the same space as the crowd, must make a save or be knocked prone. If the crowd moves on top of a hound, a person in the crowd is killed. Crowds provide cover

The hounds were intended to be untraceable, but a investigation of the bodies of the hounds reveals some interesting red clay packed into their foot pads – there’s brick kiln on the outskirts of town that uses this sort of clay, and this might be some sort of clue.


Scene 2: People Watching and Observation
A repeat of the investigative challenge from day 1. More clues and details provided . . .

Scene 3: Beanie Baby Ambush (Combat Encounter)

(this encounter happens whenever the PCs decide to investigate the brickworks)

Tracking the clay back to the kiln leads the PCs to the brick warehouse that houses the fey portal that the doppelganger has been using. She has been sent to try to kill the PCs by Lady El. She has also been given a small army of the stuffed gnome effigies o protect her hideout.

• Doppelganger Sneak (150)
• 2x Tickleyou (250)
• 24 x Effigy Minions (25@)

Monsters:

Gnome Effigy Level 1 Minion
(Kobold minion, with the clay scount limited invisibility rather than shifty)

Gnome Effigy TickleYou Level 2 Lurker
(Clay Scout, with guard creature rather than guard object)

Scene 4: Guild Feast.

The PCs are invited to several feasts -- as city heroes they are celebrities and having them attend a guild's feast will be considered a great honor.

The PCs have to choose which feast to attend:

1. The Merchant's Guild
2. The Metalcrafter's Guild
3. Shipwrights and Chandler's Guild
4. Hoslter's Guild
5.

What ever guild they pick, the encounter is basically the same. The PCs have a chance to win the support of the guild for the Duke's efforts ot maintain independence if they can behave well and make a good case for it during the dinner.

Complexity: 6/3
Difficulty: 6/11/16
Primary Skills: Diplomacy, Insight, Bluff, History, Streetwise (may vary a little with the choice of guild).

Radiating Gnome

The first day of the Festival of the Goddess is a day devoted to remembering the dead. It's primarily intended to honor those who have died in the past year, but it is not at all unusual for people to make smaller offerings to honor important dead in their family -- parents, spouses, etc.

The temples, shrines, and cemeteries are packed all day long, and the day traditionally ends with a sober, quiet feast with no planned entertainment other than music, if the particular celebrants can afford to hire musicians.

Skill Challenges:

1. Ritual for the High King

If the PCs are keeping any sort of tabs on what Prince Fillin and the Cloak Knights are up to during the festival, they can't help but be aware of the plans for a major ceremony planned in the primary temple in Ikarport, at which Fillin and every cloak knight in Ikaria will make an offering to honor the dead High Kings and other Kendricks of the past. This is an unusual ceremony -- on this scale -- because the High King, Fillin's alleged great grandfather, has been dead for 80 years. But the Ikarian people have always been proud of their continued allegiance to the missing High Kings, and given the current favor that Fillin has in Ikarport, the plans for the ritual are largely approved of, and a massive turnout is expected.

Complexity: 6 successed before 3 failures
DCs: 7 easy /12 medium /17 hard

Primary Skills (any, if DM feels the idea is appropriate)

What can the PCs do? Anything they can come up with, really. This is a very wide open Skill Challenge.

Some possibilities:
(Most of these ideas will require multiple skill checks from the party members involved -- the DM will need to use some discretion as this plays out).

They Do Nothing: The Ceremony is a thing of beauty, and at the same time a demonstration of the strength of the Cloak Knights. If the PCs don't try anything and make no appearance to counter the ceremony, the combined effect earns the PCs a failure in the Meta Challenge.

They Disrupt the Ceremony: Given the deep feelings being expressed by Fillin and the cloak knights -- feelings echoed by the public -- anything that the PC do that disrupts the ceremony that can be traced to them -- even indirectly -- results in a failure in the challenge as the PCs are seen by the public as disrespectful to the High Kings and the Goddess.
If, on the other hand, the PCs disrupt the ceremony but manage to avoid any connection to the disruption, the effect disheartens the public, casting a pall over the festival which results in a -2 penalty on all future social skill checks for the rest of the festival.

The PCs could join the Ceremony. This will require a few skill checks (medium) with Mother Cathair, high priestess of the goddess, to arrange to have the party added to the program for the ceremony. After all, they are not nobility, family members, or (probably) members of the Goddess's clergy, so adding them to the program will be very unusual. 2 successes using social skills will be enough to get the PCs added to the ceremony. If the PCs use intimidate, however, Mother Cathair's resentment results i a -2 penalty on future checks made to conduct the PC's part of the ceremony.
Once they're part of the ceremony, the PCs must make the remaining skill checks using religion (medium), arcana (hard), bluff(hard), or history (hard) to conduct themselves appropriately during the ceremony. Each participating PC should make his or her own check (no assists); any PC that decides not to join the ceremony can observe; this allows them to make an insight or perception check (hard) to gather a piece of information during the ceremony (below) but does not earn a success in the skill challenge. During their part of the ceremony, the PCs taking part in the ceremony may make one skill check each.
If, once the ceremony is over, the PCs have not completed the skill challenge, they can take turns making speeches to the gathered congregation (diplomacy or bluff) earn any remaining successes. Each time a single PC makes another check, it becomes harder (-2, cumulative) as the audience gets tired of listening to them.

If the PCs manage to succeed, they earn a success in the meta challenge. If they don't succeed or fail, nothing happens. If they fail, they earn a failure in the challenge.

They can arrange another ceremony to honor the Duke's family. This will work in much the same way as the party's efforts to join the ceremony to honor the Kendricks.

2. Eyes and Ears

With so much pomp and circumstance, this is a great day to watch people, follow people, gather information and try to get the lay of the land. This skill challenge will allow the PCs to observe and learn about what's going on in and around Ikarport over the course of the first day.

Each success in the skill challenge represents a day spent watching, following, spying, rumor-gathering, and just plain asking around. Each success will provide a bit of information -- a clue about something going on that the PCs can follow up later.

Any PC that decides not to take part in a ceremony during the day can make a second check in this challenge.

Once the PCs have earned 3 failures in the challenge, they are done gathering information for the day.

Once the PCs have earned 6 successes in the challenge they can continue to make checks to gather information, but they will have earned a single success in the meta-challenge.

Complexity: 6/3 *
DCs: 7/12/17
Primary Skills: Perception, Insight
Secondary skills (none)
Special: There are six lists of information that PCs can gather -- three for each skill, one at each difficulty level. PCs only earn successes in the skill challenge if they make their check at the medium level, but they still see something, albeit simple if they beat the easy DC. If you run out of information at one level you can give the PC information from a lower level in the scale.

Easy Insight (DC 7; does not earn a success)
(coming)

Medium Insight (DC 12; earns a success)
(coming)

Hard Insight (DC 17; earns a success)
(coming)


Easy Perception (DC 7; does not earn a success)
(coming)

Medium Perception (DC 12; earns a success)
(coming)

Hard Perception (DC 17; earns a success)
(coming)

Radiating Gnome

(planning a skill-challenge-heavy adventure for my home game, part 1)

The Meta-Challenge is the overarching challenge mechanic that provides structure for the events that take place in and around the Festival of the Goddess in Ikarport. Successes and Failures in the challenge are not earned with individual skill checks -- instead, they are earned through succeeding or failing in other skill challenges and encounters over the course of the adventure.

To explain the meta-challenge, I'm going to have to detail some backstory.

Ikarport is the capital city of the Duchy of Ikaria, an island in the Moonshae Isles (don't look for it, I stuck it in there myself with bubble gum and duct tape).

The Moonshae Isles, up to the time of the spellplague, were ruled by a High King, but the High Kings disappeared in that cataclysm, and since then the individual settlements have been pretty much on their own. Ikaria has remained largely loyal to the High Kings, the Dukes traditionally not following the fashion of many of the other vassals in the isles and taking the title King, etc. But it has been 80 years -- generations -- since the High King was present.

Recently, a pretender has arrived in the Isles -- rumors came to Ikaria from other settlements of a man claiming to be the heir to the High King -- a grandson of one of the High King's children that was smuggled away and hidden overseas for the past 80 years. This man, calling himself Prince Fillin Kendrick, has been traveling the isles under the protection of a military order called the Cloak Knights, who claim to be the reconstituted Knights of the Cloak from the old kingdom (see the regalia below).

Fillin and the Cloak Knights arrived recently in Ikaria, just in time to be able to offer their help as goblinoid raids have been stepping up in frequency and ferocity. The price for Fillin's support, and the military aid of the Cloak Knights, is the official recognition of him as the rightful High King -- and the promise of the Duke's help in regaining the lost Kendrick lands.

The Duke, raised by his father and grandfather to be a good vassal to the absent High King, would bend his knee in a moment, and would be happy to provide what support he could for the effort to regain the Kendrick lands, but he has very grave doubts about this Fillin.

Fillin and the Cloak Knights, however, have been doing everything in their power to make sure that the people of Ikaria see the cloak knights and Fillin as their salvation in these troubled times. On several occasions the Cloak Knights have come to the aid of Ikarian merchants, nobles, and soldiers, and there is a strong sentiment among the people that without the help of Fillin and the Cloak Knights, the kingdom will be overrun by goblins before winter.


The Regalia of the High King

I mentioned the Cloak of the High King earlier -- the Cloak is part of the Regalia of the High King, a set of three artifacts that were the symbols of the high kings united power over the Moonshea Isles.

The Cloak of the High Kings, a gift of from the Northman lords that swore fealty to the Kendrick High King, had protective magic and was the symbol of most of the military forces of the high king, at the head of which was an order of knights called the Knights of the Cloak (and informally the Cloak Knights).

The Crown of the High King, a gift from the Ffolk lords that swore fealty to the Kendrick High King, had magic that was more tied to commerce, agriculture, and sailing. An order of knights called the Knights of the Crown served as the guardians of commerce and tax collectors for the High King.

The Chronicle of the High King, a gift from the Fey lords that swore fealty to the Kendrick High King, had special magic that allowed it to record the true life story of anyone whose name was written into the book (up to that point in time -- it was not a book of prophecy, only truth). An order of knights called the Knights of the Chronicle (informally the Knights Scrivener) server the Chronicle, recorded history, and acted as Justices in the lands of the high king.

All three of the relics were lost when the high king disappeared, and any remnants of the orders of knights that served the three relics also disappeared shortly after the Cataclysm.

The Cloak Knights

The current body of soldiers calling themselves the cloak knights may or may not have some connection back to the original Cloak Knights of the High King's time. They claim it, but that doesn't mean it's true. They have a main training facility and do a lot of recruiting in Snowdown, an Amnian colony in the Isles, and most of the knights are more mercenary than knight, although they all train in special combat techniques -- cloak-based, highly-mobile, spinning styles that make them very challenging opponents.

Back to the Meta-Challenge

The PCs have just returned to Ikarport, having had a couple of successful adventures facing goblins. They've battled goblins on the sea, on an outpost island, and even in a remote part of the Ikarian mainland. And they've returned with a hobgoblin prisoner.

Their return is the first glimmer of hope for the Duke's effort to retain some autonomy in a long time. Other groups have either been lost or rescued by teams of Cloak Knights who happened to be in the area.

The PCs, in their most recent set of encounters, ran into a team of Cloak Knights that were in the area of a goblin camp the Pcs had been sent to investigate. It is probable that they were sent there to be ready to step in and save the party as the CKs have so many other groups in the past weeks.

But the PCs foiled that by discovering the cloak knights, joining their camp, then tricking them into drinking too much, then dragging their passed out bodies into a patch of poison ivy. While the Cloak Knights were cursing and scratching their way back to Ikarport, the PCs managed to deal with the goblins in the camp and take their prisoner.

(Gotta love my PCs for coming up with that one.)

While the PCs might not rate invitations to the more high-brow events in the festival, their celebrity status as heroes in a time when the tiny nation really needs heroes will get them access to a lot of events they would otherwise not attend. Especially since the Duke sees them as an important part of his effort to stay in control of Ikaria.

The Duke visits with the PCs and lays out the challenge for them. They need to do everything they can in the festival to discredit the cloak knights and promote Ikarian independence, without creating problems that will make it impossible for the Duke to get the help of the Cloak Knights against the goblins should that prove necessary -- and to do so in a way that will be subtle enough that the Prince, should he become High King, will have no reason to remove the Duke from his throne. It is a very delicate tightrope the Duke is trying to walk -- to try to protect his small nation without committing himself to a possible fraudulent heir.

The Metachallenge

This meta-challenge involves a bunch of other scenes, encounters, and challenges, each of which can earn the PCs successes and failures in the meta challenge.

The Pcs need to earn 10 successes before they earn 3 failures. There will also be ways for the PCs to try to remove failures, if necessary.

The Festival takes place over the course of 7 days. More on the festival in a future post.

Radiating Gnome

So . . . in my handful of recent blog entries I've been ruminating about "story-level" skill challenges that ask the players to engage with the story on a level that calls for and encourages an appreciation and understanding of the story and campaign world as much as it does on simply the rules of the game.

It's a very interesting topic to me -- and I'm not ready to drop it entirely -- but I'm afraid that I may have wandered down a blind alley, and have gotten myself into trouble. I've been working on drafts of the next entry in the blog and not been satisfied with the results yet, so I think I'm going to sidestep a little and write about something else -- related, of course, but a break from the ongoing thread.

The Festival

My players have reached a point in my home game at which I would like to give them a very complex set of skill challenge encounters. They have returned to the home city of the campaign, Ikarport, to a city that is on the one hand preparing for the biggest annual festival ( a week of events) and one that is preparing for an expected Goblinoid attack and facing other threats.

My plan is to create a series of skill challenge encounters in and around the festival -- to try to build an entire adventure's worth of content -- all set in and around this festival and the fear associated with the coming threats.

These are my goals:

1. A single, meta-challenge that is the backbone of the adventure. Rather than skill checks, successes and failures are earned in this challenge in other scenes, through other skill challenges, etc.

2. A series of set-piece scenes that offer layered, parallel skill challenges that ask the party to deal with conflicting priorities.

3. Opportunities for combat if the players push scenes in that direction, but build the encounters and scenes so that skill challenges are the preferred solution.

With that in mind, I'm going to post several entries this week as I try to work out what I want to do -- I'm going to use this blog as a work space so that anyone who is bored enough to read it can see the way I'm thinking, where I'm going with it. That's a safe option, because none of my players in this game reads this site . . . fools . . .

-j

Radiating Gnome

In my previous blog, I talked about the differences between Scene- and Story- level skill challenges -- and I mentioned the idea that a key ingredient is player choice. Building those choices well -- and making interesting choices for our players -- is an important part of building good challenges.

In a Scene level challenge, as I said, the choices tend to be much more tactical -- climb the wall, bluff the guard, or hide under hay in a wagon to get into the fortress. Players have, in the core rules, lots of ways to get a feel for what they can try and how successful they may be.

In Story-level challenges, though, it's much harder for the players to make those sorts of choices because decisions and choices need to be made based on the setting and story much more than they do on the game rules. Suddenly we are asking players to make these choices based on what they get from the DM, not what they get from the books.

And that's why, when I read Mike Mearls writing about skill challenges and recommending that we "start early" so the players have more options, I start to see potential problems waiting in the wings. It's not black and white, there's a whole lot of gray area between scene and story level challenges, but moving back away from the Scene level, to open up more options, moves players away from choices based on their abilities as defined in the rules and towards choices based on the setting and story.

So, the important question I'm trying to get to is "How do you build Story-Level Skill Challenges Well?"

Let them do the math

This is a very important point, something that is really, really easy to miss, but it can make a big difference. For example, lets imagine this bit of dialog:

DM: "Well, guys, you need to find a way to get in to talk to the king. You could probably go talk to the captain of the guard and convince him to take you to see the king, you could figure out where he goes hunting and wait for him in the woods, or maybe you could bribe a servant to get you into the palace."
Player: "Well, we have good stealth, so lets go wait in the woods."

That works -- it gets the job done, the players have decided where to go next. But it's boring, and no one is going to remember it. The problem is that the players have not had to work at all to make that decision -- they're only engaged mentally with making the decision on the most basic level, and they are not given the opportunity by the DM to come up with solutions that the DM may not have considered. There are, after all, many more than three ways to get in to see the king, but because of the way the DM framed the situation, he artificially created a set of three choices.

He did that because it's easier for the DM to prepare for three choices (and he can probably guess which one the players will choose given the way he framed the choices) and because it's actually easier to give the players this distilled information in this way.

Now, consider this slight variation.

DM: "Well, guys, you need to talk to the King. You know that the king likes to hunt, that he goes to the temple once a week for mass, that the household servants are resentfully underpaid, and that the captain of the guard, who controls who gets in to see the king, hates you for that thing you did last week. How do you want to get in to see the king?"

In this case the DM has provided the same basic set of limited options, but he's done so in a way that offers the players information that they have to interpret to get to their actual choices. This does open up the field of options -- for example, lets say the players still latch on to the hunting idea and want to use that as a way to reach the king. Because the DM didn't suggest "you hide in the woods" they still have a ton of creative options available to them. They could start to spread rumors about a white stag, hoping to get the king to come out to a place they indicate in their rumors. Or they could set up one of the party members as a famous huntsman from another country, come to visit. That starts to bring in other skills and ideas, and it gives the players room to create and shape their options that they did not have in the first case.

Of course, that's not perfect. But the trick is to give the PCs bits of observable information, not conclusions. Don't tell them the inn has been set on fire by brigands, tell them that the inn is burning, with fires growing in both the barn and on the second floor, and the flames are spreading very quickly. Let them come to their own conclusions.

Avoid Blocks of Exposition

Here's the ideal I think we all want to be driving towards:

DM: "Well, guys, you need to talk to the King. How are you going to get some time with him?"
Player: "Well, we could just go up and talk to the captain of the guards, but he doesn't like us much. Bribery might work, but there's a good chance we'll get caught, and money is tight anyway. How about we arrange to accidentally encounter him in the woods when he's out hunting? Can we manage that?"

What's different about this one? The DM didn't need to give the players any information to help them decide what their next move, they already knew the information they needed. Of course, that information came to them from the DM, but it has probably been delivered over the course of several encounters and scenes that have already taken place. The further back the player has to go to find the key piece of information that he needs to come up with the solution for the situation they're in, the more they feel like they've created something new and interesting in the story.

The trick is trying to give the players tons of backstory and setting information without boring the snot out of them. And, don't get me wrong, it's not easy. If your players are like mine, you'll see their eyes glaze over before you get to your second sentence of prepared text description of a room or scene. That's not all players, of course, but it has been my experience that because we don't engage players enough on this sort of story level, and they don't need the information in the setting and backstory information to make the sorts of choices that will be important in the next scene (because those choices will be based on the rules and their character's abilities, not on the setting or story), there is no need for the players to pay attention.

So, how do you deliver information without exposition? In small bites, over time. As you get started with new settings and NPCs, you're going to need to feed your PCs the information they need, as the DM in the second example does, but as your campaign matures, the players should start to build up enough information about the world that they can start to fill in some of the details themselves. With that in mind, I'd suggest that you structure your campaign so you keep important NPCs -- allies and enemies -- around for a while, rather than disposing of them after a single scene or adventure. While you're doing that . .
1. Give each NPC a passion or interest that sets them apart, even if you're not sure what use that will be down the line. We read a lot of advice about giving our NPCs quirks and details like a lisp or a scar to help distinguish them -- and those help -- but it's hard to imagine how that might prove useful to the players down the line. But give the king a passion for hunting, give the Steward a hunger for cash, and give the captain of the guard a grudge against the PCs, and you've got fodder that can prove useful down the line.
2. Don't be subtle. Remember, this is a detail you're hoping that the players will remember weeks from now. You could remind them, sure, but it's more fun for them and for you if they remember on their own, so don't mess around with these details. Don't give more than one to an NPC, and be more obvious than you think you need to be.
3. Let them do the math. Once again, you need to engage the players by giving them information that asks them to come to their own conclusion, rather than feeding them the conclusion. It doesn't have to be a big leap, but asking them to connect even a few simple dots will cement the detail in their minds. So, in roleplaying the King, don't have the king walk around saying "Boy, I just love to hunt. Don't you love to hunt? I wish I could hunt every day." Instead, have him introduce the players to his master of the hunt, who is the most well-dressed and equipped NPC in the king's retinue. And show the PCs his hounds, in their kennels, where his dogs live on the same food that he feeds to his servants. You give them a detail they can observe, and leave them some room to figure out that the king loves to hunt.

Of course, if you're going to plant these sorts of seeds, you're going to need to keep settings and npcs around for a while -- if you adventure in a totally new location, with new NPCs every week, it's harder to build up these sorts of details unless you do so on an organizational level (an order of knights, a guild of thieves, a coven of witches, all that seem to keep turning up). So, part of the recommendation here is to think about keeping your settings and NPCs around for more than a single session.

So, How Does This Relate to Skill Challenges, Exactly?

We need to roll back to the idea of these sorts of Story-level Skill Challenges. Rather than putting the PCs in front of a scene and say "now you have to talk the guards into letting you in to see the king" we are being asked to back up and present the players with "You need to talk to the king, what do you want to try to get to see him?"

And, I think that's a good idea, but I'm arguing that it's hard to do well, and the more we pull back away from the scene, the less we have in the core rules to help us. And I'm recommending that you don't plunk a couple of pre-digegsted and prepared choices in front of the players, but that you give them observational sorts of information that they can use to make their own judgements. And I'm recommending that you plant seeds in your campaign that you can hope will pay off later.

But, seriously, how the heck do I do that? And once I do, I'm going to be opening up a whole flood of new ideas and options that my screwball players are going to come up with -- how do I handle that as a DM? How do I prepare?

That, I'm going to have to leave until my next blog entry.

Radiating Gnome

Is a skill challenge a multi-roll test to disarm a trap or work thorugh hazardoust terrain? Is it a large-scale story buliding tool? Can both be skill challenges?

In reading and thinking about skill challenge discussions on the main Wizards site (here and here) and in discussions on ENWorld (like here) it feels, to me, like we all have a good idea about what we're talking about, when we talk about skill challenges, but we're not always talking about the same thing, and part of the problem is that we don't necessarily have the same language to use to talk about them.

We have some terms already set for us -- primary and secondary skills, success and failures, DC, level and complexity of the challenge, etc. But it seems to me that we need a little bit more jargon to help talk about these sorts of challenges.

Also . . . and this will come up later . . . the key components of all skill challenges are choice and chance. A player makes a choice (what skill check to try, etc) and takes a chance at success (rolls the dice). Both are important -- without being able to make interesting choices, and without the chance for both success and failure, the skill challenge is a dud.

Scene and Story Challenges

The Skill Challenges presented in the DMG are primarily Scene challenges. They take a particular moment in the story of the game, and play it out with the structure of the skill challenge. The players need to negotiate with a brigand leader, disarm a complicated trap, or navigate through a treacherous swamp -- those are scenes, even if they take a bit longer than a single combat in game time (the swamp navigation, especially, might require hours).

The articles that Mike Mearls has been writing seem to be talking about a new scale of skill challenge. He recommends that we "start early" so that the challenge can be more flexible, and that makes a lot more possibilities open to the players. I'm calling those Story level challenges -- and they do seem to be very different animals than Scene level challenges. I like the idea that we can have a system that handles both, but it's probably useful to talk about them distinctly -- they do have some very different components and uses.

Another challenge when talking about skill challenges is that -- much more so than combat -- skill challenges depend very much on the skill level, experience level, and inclincations of the gaming group. That's most clear in the case of diplomatic challenges -- some groups like to have the exposed structure of the challenge, some like to just role play and let the DM tell them when to roll and hide all of the challenge structure in the roleplaying. That's a matter of style, taste and skill, and the system can handle both.

Scene Challenges

I'm not going to elaborate too much on scene challenges -- they are a fairly well-worn path. Scene challenges come up in places where many decisions about how to handle the situation are already made. Another way to think about Scene-level challenges is that they are tactical, not strategic. They represent the efforts the PCs make on a given path that has already been chosen, either by the adventure or the players themselves.

Scene Challenges:

• take place in rounds, minuntes and sometimes hours
• may engage part of the adventuring party -- the more involved the better, but in the case of some very specific challenges, it's possible to have a challenge that involves just one character (a rogue disarms a trap, etc)
• allow PCs to make tactical choices, like whether to bluff or intimidate, or whether to climb or jump, and which party member is best suited to make those checks
• run best when the PCs can clearly see and make choices about their tactical situation, much like combat. This means that the PCs need to know appropriate information about the tactical situation -- where they can hide, how hard it will be to climb the wall, a rough idea of an appropriate bribe, etc.

Story Challenges

A Story challenge is one that steps back a bit further and puts the more strategic possibilities in front of the players. They represent efforts the PCs make to solve a problem when a given solution to the problem has not been preselected. They represent the efforts the PCs make in a wide open field to find a way to solve a problem.

These sorts of challenges are very useful for someone running a home game, and far less useful for someone writing an adventure that will be played by many different groups of players -- for this reason, I expect that we won't see too many story-level skill challenges in RPGA adventures, Dungeon adventures, or print products. There's a continuum here, though, and it's possible to see examples of Story level challenges that could work in a print adventure -- but the more you extend the idea of "starting the challenge early" the more you make it hard to write the challenge for a generic audience.

Story Challenges:

• take place in weeks, days, and sometimes hours.
• should engage the entire adventuring party
• allow PCs to make strategic choices, like where best to use diplomacy (which contact might be the most help), who might respond to bribes or intimidate, or where taking alternative paths (like sewers or rooftops) might help the PCs reach their goal.
• run best when the PCs can clearly see and make choices about their strategic situation. They need to be able to draw on information from the campaign setting -- what they know about the world and how it works, and that means that the players need to be informed and invested in the game world. When a story challenge starts, the less the players know about the world they're playing in and how it works, the more the DM is going to have to spoon feed choices to them.

See? I said choice would come back! I'm actually going to devote another blog post to building choices, so if you're not bored, check back!

Anyway . . . This is all just some jargon and definitions that I'm using in my own head to try to understand what I'm creating for my players. The idea of the Scene and Story levels of skill challenges helps me understand and explain the way I think about some of the different types of challenges -- and talking about them in this way helps me identify some of the special opportunities inherent in the sorts of Story level challenges that are being proposed.

More soon, I'm sure . . .

Radiating Gnome

So, my first minicampaign ended a couple of weeks ago, and I'm thinking about what to do next. First, let me explain -- our group has two DMs, and we're taking turns DMing. I ran a campaign that lasted through levels 1-5; the other DM has just taken over at level 6 and will run until the party hits 11, when I will take over again. We play for about 6 hours every other sunday, so I figure I have about 4-5 months until I'll be taking over the group again.

So, with some time to really think, it seems like a good idea to spend a little time looking over what was working for me early on, and where I really want to make some changes. What follows is some notes, in no particular order, just when they cropped up . . .

Skill Challenges.

I've been very interested and excited by skill challenges since I got the books this summer -- our group were playtesters, but the playtest material we had to work with didn't include much along the lines of skill challenges, just combat encounters, so that was when I first got a chance to take a look at the game. But these are one of my favorite new things about 4e. That said, I think ti's clear that there are good ways and bad ways to run skill challenges. I do have an earlier blog post about skill challenges, but I think some ideas bear repeating.

For one thing, skill challenges are best when they are not just about rolling dice anymore than combat is just about rolling dice. I've run plenty of this sort of skill challenge, and they can be workable in small situations. For instance, there's no reason to get too worked up about a skill challenge to disarm a trap that a single PC will be trying to complete while the rest of the party is fighting the monsters in the room. But if the skill challenge is going to be the scene, it needs to be much more involved. I'm sure I'll be writing more and more about skill challenges in the future, so I'll stop for now. I'm reading the recent articles about skill challenges -- and a lot of the other posts and discussions about them in the forums, and my ideas are sort of evolving. I'm also in the process of trying to write one as a contribution for an adventure a friend is trying to coordinate for a sort of mini-D&D Championship at a local convention, and it's really making me think about what makes sense in that context, too.

Too Much Story

Wait! Don't Shoot me yet! Let me explain!

Here's the deal. I had a grand idea for what I was going to do with the PCs in this minicampaign. I figured I had 10 sessions, and I had a grand plot for that arc, as well as episodic story going on along the way. The story I ended up trying to tell was just too much -- too big and grand for the time I had, and in the end the whole thing seemed to be a bit of a rush. So, even as I look towards a paragon tier adventure, I want to think in terms of telling a smaller story -- few places, less variety in opponents, etc.

For example, one session in the previous minicampaign took place in a desolate, war-torn and winter-locked city occupied by skirmishing factions of the Fey army that had conquered the city decades before. There was a unicorn-led all-female group of eladrin, a lycanthrope and shifter band, a group of cyclopses, and an enclave of dryads, eladrin, and gnomes, all in different quarters of the shattered city, waiting for their collective mistress, the queen of winter (eladrin cold wizard) who was all wrapped up in some jilted lover crap that left the various factions in the city leaderless and very much up to their own devices.

That setting could have been the home of a rich and detailed series of adventure settings -- if not the whole minicampaign. But, instead, it was just a single session's stop along the way. There's detail and development I did for that city that the players will never see -- and even more that would have been developed if we were going to spend any real time there at all.

There were many other settings where the players could have spent a lot of time. Instead . . . well . . . they got to have 6 encounters. I need to make sure that I try to tell smaller stories -- tell them with more detail and get the PCs involved in the story in a more meaningful way -- but I need to do that by lingering in a single place for much more than a single session, if not for the whole 8-10 sessions of the minicampaign.

I'm sure I'll be posting more soon . . . and I want to blog more about whipping up my own monsters, too . . .so much to rant about, so little time . . .

-j

Radiating Gnome

I've been posing in some of the forums a bit more lately that in the past, and it's gotten me thinking about some 4e stuff, especially some concepts about monster design, encounter building, and writing a good adventure.

There is only one "rule" that really matters once you sit down at the game table. Your players need to have fun. In a perfect world, you'll have fun too, but I'm betting that's not really a problem for you.

There are some 3rd edition mindsets that are very difficult to break -- the idea, for example, that we build monsters by digging through a variety of books to look for a base creater, apply some templates from some other books, maybe even a few levels of a class or two, and after a few pages of math and notes, you've got a finished creature that you think will be fun and interesting for your group.

And that's great -- and there are people like Blackdirge whose work in that vein I can only admire from the cheap seats -- there's a ton of room for imagination and creativity there, and I've always been impressed with what people do along those lines.

4e, though, has a different philosophy. There are some templates, but for the most part I don't like them very much. I've come to that opinion the hard way -- using them a lot in my home game. I find I'm happiest and most successful when I let all of that go and embrace the Zen of Monster Design.

Some ideas to keep in mind -

There are no "rules" you need to follow to keep your opponents "fair" for the PCs. I mean, if you're actually building something from scratch, I'd make sure you're sticking to the ballpark stats laid out in the DMG -- there's a pretty strong math base to the game, after all, and that'll help you stay out of trouble. BUT other than that, forget about building your monsters "by the book". Just sit back, think about what would be cool and interesting and fit the theme, and then just write it down. If you need to model a power based on something in the PHB or MM -- something another creature does that's similar -- just swipe it. No harm done.

In a lot of cases, though, it's easy to find a creature that already exists that just needs a little rewrite to work for your needs. Usually it's just a matter of writing some new flavor text, rename some powers and change some damage types, and you're good to go.

A couple of quick examples:





Use Elites Sparingly

Another hit from the 'learned this one the hard way' files. Look at what you get, in most cases, when you take a given creature and make it elite -- you give it nearly double it's hit points, a bonus on saving throws, and maybe a few cool new powers to go with it -- but in most cases its existing powers don't hit any more often or any better.

So, the primary thing that an Elite has over a normal monster is that it's going to be around a whole lot longer.

And, in your XP budget, that Elite cost the same as two of the base monsters.

There's a rough equivalence here -- you trade two actions a round for one action in twice as many rounds, roughly.

If you're using a lot of elites, you may be finding that your players are breezing through fights that have XP budgets that should be too high for them.

If you look at the economy of actions, you can see what you're doing to yourself.

Take a sample party of 6 PCs, facing off against an encounter of 6 NPCS. Each round, each "team" gets the same number of actions (6 standard attack actions, roughly).

If that party faces an encounter consisting of 3 elites, each of those elites only gets 1 action per round for a total of 3 to the party's six standard actions.

To keep the example simple, lets assume the PCs can take out one normal monster per round. Both fights will last 6 rounds, but over the course of the 6 rounds, the PCs will be subject to 21 ( 6!, or 6+5+4+3+2+1) actions from the normal monsters and 12 (2x3!, or 3+3+2+2+1+!) actions from the Elites.

That's a HUGE difference in effectiveness. If you are using elites a lot and your players are plowing through your encounters like gamers at a pizza buffet, start pitting them against normals and see what happens. Throw in some minions for spice.

There's a whole lot more to say about "Zen and the art of Monster Design", but I think that's just going to have to become a series for me. Time to fade away . . .

Radiating Gnome

I've been running two different home campaigns since the release of the new edition, and I've been working with variations of Skill Challenges to meet my needs along the way. Some of them have worked better than others, but here's what I've done.

1. Individual Skill Challenges. For one particular chase scene, I decided to try to put each player through his or her own skill challenge to try to keep up with the fleeing urchin (a pickpocket). The primary skill -- athletics -- could be replaced with other skills once during each player's chase -- so, an acrobatics check to jump over something, a streetwise check to find a shortcut, whatever. It was a simple challenge -- 4/3, and each player who succeeded was able to be on hand when the scene with the captured urchin started -- the others took a round to catch up for each failure they had in the challenge.

This worked okay. There's ample precedent for individual skill challenges (a rogue trying to disarm a trap is, in most cases, making an individual skill challenge). But there's a sort of philosophical problem with it. The existing base system of skill challenges is really about succeeding at tasks as a team, not as individuals. So, I have resolved to use this method sparingly -- only in situations where, for story reasons, it seems important to break down that team dynamic in the game.

2. Degrees of Success. The players were involved in a tricky negotiation skill challenge. The Duke who was their employer was going to send them on a mission; the negotiation was to determine what sort of support they would have on that mission. Rather than create a single challenge at a specific level, I created possible results at a variety of levels -- and used the skill challenge to see how many successes they could get before they got the three failures that ended the challenge.

Complete Failure: The Duke puts the PC's rivals in command of the mission.
4 successes: the PCs are in command, but the Rivals must be taken along as advisors and support.
6 successes: The PCs are in command, and the Rivals can send along a single observer.
8 successes: The PCs are sent to operate on their own, without interference from the rivals.
10 successes: The PCs are sent to operate on their own, and the Rivals are sent to create a diversion that will make it easier for the PCs to succeed later.

I loved how this worked, and I'm planning to use it more in future challenges where it makes sense. Not all challenges lend themselves to this sort of degree of success treatment, but many do, and this is a simple way to work within the structure of the system to represent a more variable set of possible results.

Radiating Gnome

I've been DMing ever since the game arrived, so when I got to play on sunday in a short pickup game, it was a nice change of pace. I haven't been able to actually be a player in a game since the second phase of the playtest, around January.

We were playing a converted D&D Open adventure from last year -- my friend and co-DM for our group had adapted the adventure to 4e as a sort of practice run for this year's D&D Championship. I was very jetlagged, having arrived home from England the night before, but that's no excuse for the CRUSHING DEFEAT we suffered at his hands.

Seriously, it was bad.

Encounter 1: TPK.

Reboot characters to start encounter 2.

Encounter 2: Too Expensive.

This was one of those never-ending encounters where new enemies keep popping up each round, and the party needs to escape the scene rather than stick around and fight to the bitter end. We didn't move fast enough to the exit -- we all lived, but ended up spending far too many dailies and healing surges.

Encounter 3: trap room

We managed to get out of the trap room without making a mess of it. The first bright spot in the day.

Encounter 4: TPK.

And that was where we had to stop.

Add to that the fact that it took us more than 4 hours to play just those 4 encounters, and I think it's pretty clear that our D&D Championship team (only two of us were playing in this session) needs some serious training.

Still, even being eviscerated like that, it was a lot of fun to play for a change.

This coming sunday . . . I finally get back to my home campaign. VERY excited.

Radiating Gnome

So, I was supposed to be playing two different games this weekend -- DMing both -- but both games ended up being canceled.

The saturday game had a lot of sick and tired people, and a bunch of absent players, so we ended up just going to see a movie instead.

The sunday game I decided to go ahead and cancel at 4:30 AM when I was still in the emergency room with my wife, who had taken a pretty bad fall, sprained an ankle, banged her artificial knee pretty good. The game was supposed to start at 10:30 am, and I still had some prep I had been planning to do before the game, and I just couldn't see how I would get it all done in time and be any use as a DM for the session, so I canceled it. I really regret the decision, though, as it comes just before a vacation and we won't be able to play my campaign now for another couple of weeks. Very grim.

Radiating Gnome