Failure stakes for a travel Skill Challenge

In short, I wish to reflect the dangers of travel in a "Points of Light" setting in early Heroic tier via the Skill Challenge mechanic and not simply color. Even though the PCs travel along a road, and so there is little to no chance of getting lost, when they must spend the night or extended periods outside the safe havens of civilization, they take risks. Travel between points of light is a risky venture!

It's easy enough to imagine complications for microfailures--lost healing surges, combat encounters with wild beasts, bandits, etc.--but would you help me brainstorm possible stakes for failing the SC entirely? I presume a "fail forward" ethos, and so simply not arriving at their destination or getting lost is off the table. What could serve in their place?

I believe such stake-setting is usually best negotiated intra-group, but indulge me here with some possibilities to present to the PCs.

Arriving fatigued, or otherwise with reduced resources?

For travel I prefer to use the alternative. Instead of failure stakes, I would reward them for doing well.

Examples:

Doing well in the SC allows them to take shortcuts, or quickly bypass conflict, allowing them to arrive in town a few hours earlier, and get a head start on the next part of the adventure. Maybe they arrive just in time to be able to talk to the duke before he retires for the evening.

Doing well in the SC allows them to have additional time for exploration during the travel. Maybe they have time to find a shrine, or talk to another traveler, gaining important infomation about their destination? Where as if they are failing the challenge they don't have time to stop and check these out.

For non dangerous travel stuff I definitely prefer to accept that they will arrive in their destination unharmed and without random encounters, but doing well should give them a bonus or two.

Is this Heroic Tier? I'm just going to assume so. If you could provide the Character Themes, I could come up with some specific stuff based off off that.

Heroic Tier generically:

Hopelessly Lost!

Perhaps wicked fey constructed an illusory road so they took a wrong turn at Albequerque and stumbled through a Crossroads into some terrible parallel (and very dangerous place in the Feywild. Level +2, C3 SC to find their way back.

Sinkhole Shenanigans!

Like the above except the earth opens up abruptly, swallows them into the pitch black Underdark, and completely immovable rubble has them stuck. They have to find another way out. Level +2, C3 SC to find a way back to the surface.

Stumble Upon a Lair

Oops. Very difficult Solo encounter with lots of Challenging Terrain, Minion Parasites that feed on the creature's leftovers, and Hazards that the creature is immune to.

Flash Flood!

Maybe they're adjacent to a river. A 100 year storm erupts and the river floods horrifically. Animals panic and stampede upon the PCs. They're separated. The trees in the forest are surly, living things...and don't appreciate being climbed upon...especially when they're soggy from the rain. Level +0, C1 SC and failure means being half-drown and attacked by Pneumonia (Level +2 Disease).

A Dire Bear's Favorite Meal

A Satyr (Minion - make that clear) is under attack by a Dire Bear and her cubs who are especially excited by Satyr flesh. He probably has an Encounter Power Recharge 6 that lets him use his pipes to get a +4 bonus to Defenses. If the good guys can keep him alive, they can have a Companion Character (Leader - with some kind of Trait that Buffs, an At-Will Rider that Buffs, an Encounter Power Minor Action that Heals).

Uncover an Unwanted Truth

Something relevant to one of the PCs' Themes.

Someone precious is captured and there is a terse ransom letter.

Someone they thought they could trust is implicated in something terrible.

An ancient, terrible omen is scrawled on a moss-covered rock right before their eyes. The Elder Primal Spirits have been betrayed by the people of the region. For 1 year, verdant, fertile lands will yield a crop that only kills...the creatures of the forest will thirst for human and demihuman blood.

As I've often posted about, I find doing overland travel well a challenge (of my GM skills!), including in 4e.

The issues I have with some standard approaches are:


In 4e in particular there is also an issue with making a harder combat the consequence of failure - a harder combat gives more XP, and so isn't any sort of penalty, and depending on the context may be more enjoyable/interesting than an easy combat - so why gate it behind failure?

Here are some things I've had success with (in 4e and BW):


With depleted resources, there is the potential for death spiral but in 4e at least I think that limiting access to resources works better as a type of penalty (if only because it makes the players sweat a bit more while not actually death-spiralling them given their depth of resources, at least above very low levels) than does imposing numerical penalties to actions, which can start to destabilise the maths.

Ultimately I think that, in the context of 4e, having the fiction change in some adverse/undesired way is generally better than mechanical penalties or hurdles. (In BW it's different because while penalties can produce a death spiral they can also make it easier to get checks at the difficult needed to improve character abilities - whereas there is no analogue to that in 4e.)

I think that the problem is more related to the rest & recovery rules of 4th Edition. If you change the extended rest rules - so that an extended rest only work in a totally safe environment such as an inn where you do not have to have any guard duty - you are going to have a very different game. While doing overland travel and sleeping in the wild, you only regain 1 healing surge, and if there is any interruption, you do not regain any healing surges. You are going to find that the players will be more cautious when doing overland travel. It will also allow you as a DM to build more interesting overland travel challenges. Some rituals that can warn of enemies, or create safe environment, suddenly have a very high value.

Manbearcat said:

Is this Heroic Tier? I'm just going to assume so. If you could provide the Character Themes, I could come up with some specific stuff based off off that.

<snipping out a bunch of useful stuff>

Uncover an Unwanted Truth

Something relevant to one of the PCs' Themes.

Click to expand...

Yes, Heroic Tier, currently level 2.

The PCs, builds and goals:

Half-Elf Vestige Warlock of the Raven Queen, Ghost of the Past, Vistani heritage; a lesser grandson of House Markelhay (hereditary rules of Fallcrest in Nentir Vale), former student of Kalarel, who turned out to be a betrayer.

Beliefs:
 I am willing to pay any price to obtain the information I seek.
 Like my ancestor Vistan, I will learn to travel the pathways between planes.
 I will seek out and destroy the rising cults of Orcus.
 I will claim the ancestral sword of House Markelhay as my own.

Drow Cleric of Sehanine|Warlord/Assassin, Secret Apostate; cut off from her home of Erelhei-Cinlu with two dozen kinsmen in the surface world, she had a religious experience and conversion to Sehanine; was captured by Kalarel and her kinsman was sacrificed in the ritual to open a rift to the Shadowfell. Slain in a fight with Kalarel's reincarnation as a wight, Sehanine intervened and saved her soul in return for her agreement to stop the slavetaking of Wood Elves by her former Drow kinsmen in the Harken Forest, thus necessitating travel to that locale.

Beliefs:
 I will rescue my kinsman from the Shadowfell.
 I will not allow that selfish Warlock (above) to distract me from my goals.
 I will displace drow culture’s worship of Lolth with that of Sehanine, the Moon goddess.

Religious Orthodoxy:
As the goddess of love, moon, and trickery, Sehanine’s teachings are simple:
 Follow your goals and seek your own destiny.
 Keep to the shadows, avoiding the blazing light of zealous good and the utter darkness of evil.
 Seek new horizons and new experiences, and let nothing tie you down.

Halfling Rogue, Son of Alagondar (refluffed as Lowtown in Fallcrest), a childhood friend of the Warlock, recruited by a mentor figure in rescuing the Warlock from Kalarel.

Beliefs:
 If you can’t hold onto your possessions, you don’t deserve them.
 My Warlock friend needs a keeper, and I’m the one who can do it best.
 No one needs to know I seek a greater purpose in my life.

(This character is less fleshed out than the others.)

Half-Orc Ranger/Cleric of the Twins Erathis-Melora, Sentinel Marshal (refluffed as mercenary company remnant of the fallen Empire of Nerath, the Last Legion), half-brother to the Warlock.

Beliefs:
 I seek to restore the heir to Nerath’s throne.
 I will brook no injustice.
 I will sacrifice myself for the greater good.

Religious Orthodoxy:
As the goddesses of life, justice, and the balance between civilization and wilderness, twins Erathis and Melora’s teachings are simple:
 Work with others to achieve your goals. Community and order are always stronger than the disjointed efforts of lone individuals.
 Defend the light of civilization against the encroaching darkness.
 Protect the wild places of the world from destruction and overuse.
 Hunt aberrant monsters and other abominations of nature.

pemerton said:

As I've often posted about, I find doing overland travel well a challenge (of my GM skills!), including in 4e.

<snipping a bunch of good and useful stuff to address this larger point>

Ultimately I think that, in the context of 4e, having the fiction change in some adverse/undesired way is generally better than mechanical penalties or hurdles. (In BW it's different because while penalties can produce a death spiral they can also make it easier to get checks at the difficult needed to improve character abilities - whereas there is no analogue to that in 4e.)

Click to expand...

I agree wholeheartedly. I suppose this helps me narrow my question further: in what interesting ways might the fiction change as the outcome of failure in a SC representing travel in this way? I was loath to post too many specific detail in the OP because I want to think about this issue more generally rather than just in the context of this one particular impending journey, but I reckon the details I provided in response to Manbearcat's inquiry above do address this particular instance.

Myrhdraak said:

If you change the extended rest rules - so that an extended rest only work in a totally safe environment such as an inn where you do not have to have any guard duty - you are going to have a very different game.

Click to expand...

Definitely. For this new game, we have implemented the house rule that PCs can only level or take an extended rest in a point of light or sanctum of some sort (the latter deliberately vague to allow this to develop from the fiction).

Thank you, one and all, for the help here already; so much of it will prove useful!

I don’t have the time to commit to reading through each of the PCs right now, but I will afterwhile and give you some PC-centric stuff to consider.

My time is short, but I’m going to take a brief moment to disagree with @pemerton on a few things as this is probably the only TTRPG issue we discuss where there is daylight between our views.

1) A game like Dogs features significant wilderness trekking, but the premise of the game is exclusively about what happens in the Towns. Consequently, travel in between is fast forwarded and treated as a collective time for reflection upon what just transpired in the prior Town.

Although you can certainly play D&D in a similar vein (site based adventure and social conflict), and plenty do, I definitely feel that something can be lost with the perilous journey being fast forwarded. I feel like this is particularly true in a PoL setting (like 4e, BtW, DW, etc).

a) A lot of the themes and tone connect to and come from the wild.

b) Without firsthand experience of the encroanching, suffocating “darkness” of the wild, the encircled, unique “light” of civilization will invariably be muted. Perilous journey through that darkness is a strong (when done right) way to enhance the juxtaposition.

c) When done well, there is a diversity of obstacles and conflicts that can’t be reproduced elsewhere (which will tie into PC archetypes).

2) On gating excitement and more XPs behind failures, I have a few thoughts.

- I don’t look at Failure in 4e as a penalty for the players. It’s a penalty for the PCs in that it brings about some adverse condition that they would rather not have to deal with. So failure should definitely produce as much excitement as possible! In fact, I would go so far as to say that Failure in 4e is more exciting than Success because the situation changes more dynamically...meanwhile it isn’t so punitive so as to engender “turtling.”

- With XP in 4e being merely a pacing mechanism for content escalation (via PC growth), however the XP rolls in, it rolls in! C’est la vie!

3) While Heroic Tier PCs are certainly less robust to perturbations of the Action Economy and maths when compared to their Epic counterparts (where 4e maths starts to shutter toward 24 or so...but it doesn’t matter as PC scaling is occurring on different axes to make up for it), they’re still quite robust to smaller perturbations (especially with Themes and Backgrounds). So yes, you have to be cognizant of the prospect of death spirals when using things like the Disease/Condition Track and/or gating Rests behind gamestate/fiction conditions, a skilled 4e GM and players (especially skilled ones) should do just fine.

4) I’m confident that pemerton could easily develop his repertoire of wilderness obstacle/conflict handling if he chose to (even if he hasn’t been an outdoorsman in his life). Social conflict, wilderness conflict, urban conflict, physical conflict is all about pressure points and relevant tropes. Once you know those and become practiced, they’re all the same in terms of GM-side creativity!

darkbard said:

In short, I wish to reflect the dangers of travel in a "Points of Light" setting in early Heroic tier via the Skill Challenge mechanic and not simply color. Even though the PCs travel along a road, and so there is little to no chance of getting lost, when they must spend the night or extended periods outside the safe havens of civilization, they take risks. Travel between points of light is a risky venture!

It's easy enough to imagine complications for microfailures--lost healing surges, combat encounters with wild beasts, bandits, etc.--but would you help me brainstorm possible stakes for failing the SC entirely? I presume a "fail forward" ethos, and so simply not arriving at their destination or getting lost is off the table. What could serve in their place?

I believe such stake-setting is usually best negotiated intra-group, but indulge me here with some possibilities to present to the PCs.

Click to expand...

You don't tell us why they're making the trip, or what degree of urgency is involved, or whether you've any pre-set plot ideas; but my first thought would be that if they completely blow the travel SC you could have them stumble into a different adventure entirely than whatever it was they expected....something they're perhaps not as prepared for. Example: if they were geared up for an urban adventure at the end of their journey, have them stumble into a situation focused on wilderness and-or dungeoneering and see what they do with it.

Just a thought...

Myrhdraak said:

Some rituals that can warn of enemies, or create safe environment, suddenly have a very high value.

Click to expand...

Most of my 4e play has been at levels/tiers well above [MENTION=1282]darkbard[/MENTION]'s, but rituals to allows safe rest - since upper paragon, that's been Hallowed Temple - are valuable to the players/PCs, because as a general rule I take the view that "resting" in the Underdark or the Abyss doesn't enable any sort of resource recovery.