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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8272186" data-attributes="member: 29398">Just read your dinner-with-the-Baron example and yeah, that works.  You spanned the skill challenge out across the whole role-played episode rather than do it all at once.My counter-example comes from the WotC 4e module Marauders of the Dune Sea.  In it, assuming the party follow the proper breadcrumbs, they reach a permanent sandstorm in the middle of a desert.  I forget the mechanism by which the module informs the players/PCs that they need to enter the sandstorm in order to continue (when I ran it I had them sent in there on a broad-based mission that something's goign on in the sandstorm and important people want to know what it is), but in they eventually have to go.The whole business of the party finding its way through the sandstorm to the small dungeon within is reduced to a single skill challenge; succeed and you reach the dungeon, fail and you're back outside the sandstorm (I think in a random direction but might always be where you started - it's nearly 10 years since I ran this) after some time has passed and can - I think - try again.  Nice and fast to resolve at the table perhaps but horribly boring and a bit disconnected: the module author goes to all the trouble of providing an excellent terrain/environment set-up and then IMO rather wastes it all by reducing the passage to a few dice rolls.When I ran this I got a lot more granular with resolving this piece; also inserted the idea of wandering monsters inside the sandstorm (i.e. the dungeon inhabitants weren't always just going to stay put), and got about a session's worth of good adventuring out of it rather than the five or ten minutes a skill challenge would have taken.</blockquote>

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