Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="D'karr" data-source="post: 4090213" data-attributes="member: 336">I played the "Escape from Sembia" adventure and the DM did a magnificent job of showing the strengths of the 4e system.  The best part of this "scene" was that it was interactive and it required the involvement of the whole party.  We were encouraged to play to the character's strength.Our goal was to Escape from the town without getting caught.  We were allowed to play the scene completely free-form.  We all rolled initiative and in initiative order each player decided which of the 3 paths to escape they would follow:  Marketplace, Crowded Street, or Dark Alley.  Once in their "path" they decided what they would do to get away from the guards without getting caught.Our Ranger, Paladin, fighter and warlock decided to go for the marketplace, the cleric decided to head into the crowded street, and the wizard decided to use his racial advantages for stealth in the dark alley.The paladin saw a man holding some horses and talked the man (Diplomacy) into allowing him to get close to the animals by getting in their saddle bags.  The man laughed heartily but allowed the paladin to do so.  So the halfling climbed into a sack and attempted to hide.  He rolled pretty good and gained our group a success.The ranger saw an open stall and stood on it yelled for the crowd, "fellow citizens, come see great feats of acrobatics!"  Performed a somersault and as he landed tossed some coins into the street, catching the attention of the crowd and getting them all in the way of the guards.  He aced that roll with a 29 (max).  That gave him a success.  The warlock saw the opportunity and used the distraction of the crowd to attempt to conceal himself near a stall.  He rolled well and the DM granted him a bonus due to the impressive success of the previous player in capturing the attention of the crowd (circumstance bonus).The fighter used her strength to tip over a stall as she ran through and with the distraction of the crowd ducked into a nearby stall.  She succeeded (STR check) and garnered us another success.The wizard moved stealthily though the alley trying to avoid the guards.  He also succeeded and got us another success.Then it was the cleric's turn, he looked at his sheet and noticed that he did not have good diplomacy or bluff, so he asked the DM if he could attempt to gather support from the crowd by using Religion instead.  The DM agreed and gave him a slight penalty on the circumstance bonus.  The cleric rolled poorly in addition to the penalty and we got our first failure.  He also angered the crowd making it more difficult for him to escape.The paladin attempted to hide and failed.  Second failure.The DM used our passive perception scores to clue us in to the trouble in the crowded street nearby. The ranger, warlock and fighter got some more successes.  The wizard also noticed the problems in the crowded street and stealthily moved in that direction.  The cleric attempted to convince the crowd that his god indeed did not suck and failed miserably again.  Now the whole situation was turning sour.  The group in the market place was going to escape but the cleric was going to be caught.  The warlock used stealth and his powers to create fiery diversions for the cleric while hiding on a nearby rooftop.  The rest of the party moved towards the crowded street to assist the cleric.  The Ranger performed another sommersault held out his hand as if he was going to toss coins, yelled "come see my next performance in the crowded street!" and used his fey step to teleport enough to be out of view of the crowd.  The crowd followed to the crowded street and the warlock was able to provide enough distractions for the cleric to get away.That was a scene to behold and all the player's got involved.  That right there sold me on this skill challenge mechanic.We did not get to choose to do an easy, medium or hard task.  We described what we wanted to do and the DM simply assigned a value, that we did not know, to the task.  We also did not know how many successes we needed.  We just knew that we wanted to have more successes than failures.  In the end we had 10 successes and 4 failures and were able to escape the town.YMMV</blockquote>

Verification