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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keefe the Thief" data-source="post: 4161198" data-attributes="member: 49552">So, i run an online game every Thursday using Maptool and Skype, set in the FR Moonsea region. I have two players, who are both The Dark Eye veterans and heavily into roleplay - some sessions see no combat at all. It´s a gestalt campaign - Dwarven Cleric/Knight and Moon-Elven Scout/Warmage, and the story and background are taken from the old Pool of Radiance Gold Box game.The "group" went into the slums on a mission for a strange and somewhat befuddled mage named Ohlo. The spellcaster told them that he had lost "something" in the dreaded Old Rope Guild, and he would pay them handsomely if they retrieved it. Only, he forgot what "it" was.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> They had heard about that guild before. One of the <a href="http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/wahrwahrwahr/Proclamations/photo#5158558938381082242" target="_blank">Council Proclamations</a>  warned that some "Giant Men" used the guild as a hideout, and that all bounty hunters who tried to overcome them had failed. Add to that the strange and disturbing rumor about the guild, and they crept stealthily* and slowly towards the entrance...Now, IMC the Old Rope Guild is a nightmarish construction only a madman could devise, a jumble of houses, buildings, shacks and other stuff just shoved together and left to rot. Impossible to map. I use narrative maps a lot in this campaign, but felt that here some other method was called for. Enter the Skill Challenge!The players know that 4e is coming but, the challenge was new to them. I explained how it worked ("you think about interesting and useful uses of your skills and try to sell them to me, and you decide how hard you are going to make it for yourself - i resolve the whole thing based on your rolls, adding up successes and failures"), and secretly noted a 6/3 skill challenge with DCs of 15/20/25.And off we went. The first try was pretty standard stuff: The scout searches for tracks and rolls a 23 - two successes, well done. I immediately saw that the players had a hard time to come up with creative uses of their skills. The dwarf player really had some good ideas, but it was hard work for them. I think, however, that one reason is that they do not have a lot of skills. I give 2 skill points more than written, but non of their classes is a total skill monkey. Anyway, idea nr. 2 was the dwarf using spellcraft to "sense" his way through the guild. I would not have allowed this, but... well.. there WAS some remnant of the original Pool of Radiance hiding in this building, and why shouldn´t he pick up on that? So he rolled well, got another two successes, and we were up to 4/0. The scout botched his next roll, and it earned them 2 misses (we´re at 4/2). Bad luck, narrowly missing the DC. He had tried to remember the lay of the building from an earlier aerial survey he did. I decided that he could use his K(Geography) for this, because he was trained in picking up "mental maps" of places fairly quickly as a scout. Anyway, the party was already scraping the bottom of the well here - new rules, not being used to these amounts of creative thought during skill use, not a lot of useful skills - it all added up. IMHO the main problem was the lack of experience - i´m pretty sure they are going to be much more effective next time.Now they try two things at once, getting really creative. The Scout stays a little more conservative: he tries to use his Search skill to get any interesting documents which could give the party some pointers. He succeeds, and finds a letter from a Merchant´s wife, complaining about "that strange building" they are looking for (but i ruled that this attempt really burned a LOT of time). The cleric is really creative: he asks if he can use Spellcraft in combination with his Portal Master Feat! Now, i didn´t tell them about the Pool, but it IS some of the strangest gates in existence IMC, so.... He rolls, well, but not well enough. 4/4 - challenge failed. But i had ruled that the first fail of the challenge really let them "only" encounter some of the nasty creatures of the Guild. Enter M´rik, Ogre Fighter: TPK material, busily throwing a dead halfling against some wall for sport. Again they used a combination of their resources, good thinking and roleplaying to totally avoid the Ogre! I was pretty happy and ruled that the Dwarf was allowed a second go - he HAD picked up something, after all.And this time (again rolling against DC 20), he succeeded, and they found the building they were searching for! Much rejoicing ensued, and the quest for the strange mage got stranger still.....Conclusion:Skill challenges are extremely useful, but both the DM and the players have to learn the right mindset in order to maximize their <s>coolness awesomeness</s> radness. You get the best results if you play the skill usage fast and loose, using the Horned Helmet of GM fiat a lot. If you consult tables in the PHB skill entries or restrict skill use to the mentioned examples, a lot of potential goes to waste. I´m pretty excited about this skill technique, and think about incorporating it somehow into my Earthdawn and TDE campaigns. * Of course, the dwarf is wearing a Banded Mail, and his excellent stealth roll added up to -7. That lead to an encounter with a wounded Dire Wolverine which was - typically for the party - solved using some good skill rolls, a Cure Light Wounds spell and lots of roleplaying.</blockquote>

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