D&D 4E 4e - be a king

[Bran Mak Morn]

Hi All,

I'm trying to think about a Skill Challenge for ruling and administrating a territory.

Anyone remember of the Companion (green Box) D&D 1E rules? I'm thinking about something similar to be ruled with the mechanism of Skill Challenges.

Let's say an event occur once every 1/2/3 months of game play.

This event may belong to different categories (Trade - Harvest issues -Plagues - Rebels - Brigands - Secret Cults - Administer Justice - Repair Roads and Castles of the Kingdom - the list may go on a lot...)

You need to use various skills (diplomacy/history/religion/streetwise/Intimidation/Insight etc..) to pass the challenge, based on the challenge's category. The number of successes determines different outcomes which may be positive or negative and may give space for an adventure, even at high levels.

I'd appreciate a lot some comments/thoughts/advices on this idea.



thanks a lot in advance

best

Bran Mak Morn

 

[Nail]

Sounds like a good idea.

But....you'll want a plot to knit all of these "rulership" skill challenges together. Unlike combat - which can be gratuitous but still fun - the skill challenges you propose should have a clear path and destination. IMO, of course.

 

[Gort]

Sounds pretty good. If you're a king or the like, you have to be able to rule beyond the reach of your own sword, so using skills like diplomacy sounds very appropriate.

 

[Bran Mak Morn]

Sounds like a good idea.

But....you'll want a plot to knit all of these "rulership" skill challenges together. Unlike combat - which can be gratuitous but still fun - the skill challenges you propose should have a clear path and destination. IMO, of course.

I thought about it, but I guess that very special events (with a clear path and destination) should occur only in case of very bad or very good Skill Challenge outcomes.

My idea is that if a 18th level NPC heard about a big brigands band within his kingdom, he would hire mercenaries/send guards/gather an army/persuade good PC to fix the problem. I'm sure a PC would go himself (for a bunch of more PXs ). I don't like this and this made me think about skill challenges. To show those paladins that a +4 holy Avenger doesn't solve any problem!

I'll try to draft a few examples, translate them and send it over

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

 

[Badwe]

A Skill challenge is a great place to start, but you should know ahead of time that you have a lot of work cut out for you. Long term "sim-style" challenges are not entirely covered by the rules, nor are the skill challenges immediately fleshed out in order to expediently facilitate that. However, skill challenges ARE general enough and flexible enough to reasonably be grafted onto anything.

Let's go over some basics and try to imagine how we could apply them to a king based skill challenge.

1. Granularity: is this a single "Be the king" skill challenge, or is the overarching goal to run a kingdom, punctuated by small skill challenges for certain events such as: unrest in the kingdom, unruly diplomats, etc. Whichever you choose consider below:

2. Representation of skills: In running a kingdom, what does a single diplomacy roll mean? what about bluff? Insight? perception? streetwise? Athletics?! For a given challenge, your players will do most of the imagination legwork IF you give them a good starting point. Give them enough examples and they'll start concocting ideas for themselves on how best to use their skills.

3. Timing: This has been covered in blogs better than I could in a forum post, but the gist is you need to decide how much time passes every time a skill check is made. Are these checks a per-day activity, per month? Can the number of skill checks made in a unit of time change depending on the situation?

4. Coverage and variance: this is another important lesson. Not all your PCs may have diplomacy, and therefore will feel left out. Even then, if a single player has the highest diplomacy score, one would expect them to be "The king" regardless, and then be the only one making a check. Ideally, you will have a DC and a result for every skill, but realistically things like athletics, acrobatics, and endurance are going to be VERY hard to cover. Still, you shouldn't neglect skills like insight, perception, streetwise, or even religion/nature/arcana. Also, try to think of reasons that one player can't keep making the same check. One route is to have events unfold during the skill challenge that lock out certain avenues. Another option would be to allow parallelism. If the king spends the next 3 months being diplomatic, perhaps the rest of the players will need to do something in those 3 months in order to keep up with the pace of the kingdom.

5. Mechanics: Whatever you decide to do, keep in mind the following base ideas of skill checks:
a. for a given number of monsters worth of XP at their level, the PCs should be able to succeed X checks before they fail 3.
b. skill checks are predicated on the idea that the main roller will be assisted in some capacity with a number of +2 bonuses. Without them, the statistical success rate drops dramatically, so be sure to include opportunities for players to gain an edge through assist rolls, utility powers, or rituals.
c. skill challenges are intentionally sparse. If you have your own ideas for a system, go ahead and use it within the context of the skill challenge. The key is a correlation between number of d20s rolled and the subsequent reward of XP and treasure parcels.

Hope this helps.

 

[Bran Mak Morn]

Hi thanks for your support, is more than welcome!

regarding the issues Badwe underlined, my first considerations (very briefly, I need to go home )

1 - I think about multiple skill challanges, one very two three game play months. Each challenge (roll roll..) belongs to a category and implies different skills involved, based on the type of challenge (Trade will not have athletics, of course, while running and participating to a Joust for the king's daughter marriage may eventually involve it)

2- I'm thinking about Be the King challenges carried put by single charachters, not by the entire group. Obviously the other PCs may be involved (is the PC wizard the Court Wizard?), but also NPCs aiding the ruler. What I have in mind is also similar challenges for non ruler PC. Let's have the rogue: why not involving Skill Challenges for running his Guild? (Founding a Guild - Find Underlings - Find the Betrayer - Collect Money - Control the Gambling Houses and so on.) Why not for a wizard running his Magic School (Apprentices - Find Components for the Apprenctices' Spells -Teaching - Dicovery of New Spells (from the Arcane Power? )

3- Regarding the mechanism, I found amazing the Skill Challenge at the end of Thunderspire L, where there was no complete success or complete failure, but different outcomes depending on the number of success and failures reached before the end of the Challenge itself.

thanks

Bran