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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5444244" data-attributes="member: 42582">For most of my campaign so far, I've been using modules (modified to a greater or lesser extent for my own purposes) and so have had maps and stats ready for combat encounters. But more than once I've had the players approach an encounter from a social rather than tactical point of view, and have improvised a skill challenge to resolve it (eg the duergar in Thunderspire Labyrinth's Chamber of Eyes, and the tieflings in Thunderspire Labyrinth's Well of Demons).Now I'm getting into a series of encounters that are fully designed by me rather than adapted from modules. For some of these, at least, I'm statting them up as both combats and skill challenges - in the sense that I'm making notes of what page of the book monster stats can be found on, and also making note of skill challenge DCs. Depending which way the players approach it, I'm ready to sketch up some battle maps on the fly, or to run a skill challenge with a few prepared notes about NPC history and motivations.When it comes to the complexity of these skill challenges, my general rule of thumb is to set the complexity at a degree that will yield the same XP as the combat encounter would.As for mixing combat and skill challenges, I haven't really come up with a good approach yet. I've done something a little bit like what Piratecat desribes in his pigeon example, although only involving one PC - the party fighter had to sneak in to a goblin stronghold to find a safe path for his fellow PCs to make their way in, and I let him use combat powers to deal with guards - a successful check on his close burst encounter power and he'd knocked the guards out, whereas if he'd failed they would have sounded the alarm.On another occasion, as the party was fleeing a collapsing temple the party wizard wanted to kill an NPC (one of the Thunderspire Labyrinth tieflings) on his way out, by magic missiling him. I had him make a simple Arcana check, and on a success just declared the tiefling dead. There didn't seem any point to get the full combat rules going for that sort of action. (And no one at the table seemed to care that, if the tiefling had got involved in a "proper" combat, he would have had more hit points than a single magic missile can take down in one hit.)</blockquote>

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