Sidestep a little . . . .
Posted 6th January 2009 at 05:42 PM by 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
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
Total Comments 0
Comments
Total Trackbacks 0
And yet another word from our sponsors
