Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5034451" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I think for fairly trivial sorts of encounters the initial proposal is not a bad idea. It probably will end up getting tweaked some based on experience but it doesn't seem far off and has the feel of a workable system. I just happened to be working on a bit of a little adventure sequence right now that might be able to use something like this, so I'm going to think about trying it. The scenario goes something like this:The party is 8th level and they are going to arrive at a village which is at the edge of a large, mostly unexplored, and known to be dangerous forest at the start of the next session. Their main goal is exploring the forest but the village itself can present some interesting scenarios besides just being a fairly safe place to return to now and then for basic supplies. I decided that there is going to be an Oni Night Haunter, Ms Trook, who lives a couple miles outside of the village, at the edge of the forest. Once the PCs show up Ms Trook will wander into town in her little old lady guise and check things out. If the party sniffs her out she'll bolt for home. If they don't she'll come back later with a bunch of ogres, which I figure the group will defeat (I'm setting at about a level + 2 encounter, should be a good fight but easily winnable). The upshot being that will almost inevitably lead to them trying to track her back to her lair or at least follow her trail there if they managed to kill her.So I got it into my head that the tracking her back to her lair makes a pretty good skill challenge, but it needs to have an up side and a down side. The party will inevitably get to the lair, its only a matter of time and how many resources they burn along the way. Given that they will be starting out at full strength and MAYBE having had an encounter of modest difficulty they need something to wear them down a bit before they get to the lair. Thus it makes sense to have the tracking skill challenge be a running engagement of some kind where they try to follow Ms Trook as a gas cloud while brushing off some kind of basically nuisance harassment. We have a bit of a running joke with stirges, so I figure its time to dust those babies off again. The regular stirges are level 1, so trivial except in vast numbers. A stirge swarm would be a possibility, but a few Dire Stirges should work fairly well. They can buzz around, popping up from behind a tree or out of tall grass now and then, swoop in for a bite and then either die or fly off to return later. Meanwhile the PCs will be hoofing it, so they won't really want to stop and fight a set piece battle, nor are a few stirges going to do them all that much damage.So it seems like an extended version of something along the lines of what Greyscott is proposing would fit pretty well.</blockquote>

Verification