Ad Libbing Skill Challenges, session report, and other thoughts . . .

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.