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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 5424770" data-attributes="member: 40522">I use vignettes, although make them relevant to the events at hand. I use them for exposition, to explain background in brief snapshots. Many of my players don't really enjoy dealing with background, so I give them a shot at detailing it through these flashback vignettes. I keep them short (usually 10 minutes or less) and use very few die rolls. Sometimes I use them as part of skill challenges, but I never use these background vignettes to screw them over--even if they fail, something relevant happens to the current adventure.My typical method for 4E is to base them around trained skills. Here are some examples from Keep on the Shadowfell that I'm running now.When the characters first arrived at Shadowfell Keep, I pulled aside the players who are playing characters trained in Arcana. I ran a short vignette about a strange astrological conjunction that occurred ten years ago (when most of them were around ten-fifteen years old). I asked them to describe their mentor, whoever trained them in Arcana, and the people without characters trained in Arcana played those mentors. they sort of made it up together on the spot. Then, we reenacted a brief vignette where the characters and their mentors had all journeyed to Winterhaven to meet Valthrun. When the conjunction occurred, strange energies were causing barriers between the world and the Shadowfell to grow thin, and the characters had to work to enact a ritual to strengthen the planar boundaries and stop creepy stuff going on during the conjunction.When the characters went to the graveyard where they fight Ninaran, I had another little vignette after the encounter. Everyone trained in Heal worked to stop a plague in the Nentir Vale about two years ago, and some of the victims of the plague were buried here. I can't really talk too much more about it since we haven't concluded the adventure and I don't want to put out spoilers for my players, but it'll be cool. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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