Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chzbro" data-source="post: 5393730" data-attributes="member: 83964">There are a lot of really good suggestions here.Don't rule out the potential for a good skill challenge here in place of the combat, or even a combat intermixed with a skill challenge.You could, for instance, have the WWs when first encountered be protected by a powerful ritual--maybe one that halves all damage they take--and the party has to not only fight the WWs, but also spend actions trying to unravel the ritual. I'm thinking standard action Arcana/Religion checks with a few story-dependent ways to assist, perhaps. This way, 1) the fight is scary-tough, but your bad guys are probably relatively safe, 2) you've got a skill challenge where everyone can participate since there's also a fight going on, and 3) you've got a compelling reason to have the WWs run away: with their magical protection broken (skill challenge succeeds), they decide to retreat, regroup, and come at the PCs later with different tactics. Plus, not only will the PCs have a reason to fear/hate the WWs, your bad guys now have a reason to feel the same toward the PCs.Now I don't know all the particulars of your campaign, so obviously the details of the skill challenge and why it is necessary are up to you, but coming up with something shouldn't be too hard (if the ritual protection doesn't appeal, for example, the fight could be in town and the challenge is to protect an individual victim the WWs appear to want dead; the goal really is for you to make the PCs split actions between fighting/staying alive and completing the challenge--it makes the fight harder, keeps your villains safer, and puts pressure on the players to juggle more balls than they're used to).This also lets you come up with story-related ways for the WWs to escape. Perhaps the unraveling of the ritual releases a clap of magic that stuns the PCs for a round (you can make it an attack roll if that seems too cheap to you) giving the WWs a chance to book. Or, you can just decree the challenge success or failure to end the encounter. I know that sounds a little cheesy, but players who achieve a skill challenge success are generally pretty happy with themselves even if you tell them the bad guys run off when they achieve it.However you choose to run it, a combat running simultaneous to a skill challenge can be all kinds of awesome and might work really well for you in this case.</blockquote>

Verification