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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6203389" data-attributes="member: 42582">I personally prefer a skill challenge because of its tendency to lead to finality in resolution - when I ran Heathen, for instance, I combined the ideas for skill use in it with the "reduce hp via social skills" approach in Cairn of the Frost King to adjudicate the PCs talking down the renegade paladin as a challenge even while they dealt with the other enemies.The Heathen module says that, if the PCs manage to talk him down, then the paladin kills himself by ripping off his evil amulet. But in my game, when we got to this stage then the paladin PC used an interrupt to prvent this, staunching the flow of life-force as he ripped off the amulet. So he survived.I think this sort of non-railroading makes for a better play experience. So I'm a bit wary of what you say here, that the Duke can't escape. That runs the risk of being blocking for the players. If you're worried that rescuing the Duke would make the minions give up the fight, all you have to do is have the succubus change shape to copy the Duke, and then bluff the minions into keeping going. (The PCs might then knock them out rather than kill them.)I can only think of two really good lurker encounters I've run - one with a solo black dragon in the original design (I know they're widely hated, but for me it ran well, because the wizard PC had a statue of the Summer Queen that he was using to dispel the darkness, at increasing difficulties); and one where a Naldrezu captured the wizard, teleported away and tried to eat him.I think the idea of using the portals to somehow support her lurking is a good idea.</blockquote>My thought on this is that you don't want the PCs to first kill them all (ignoring the portals) then shut down the portals (a bit tedious oustide the combat context). So you somehow need to incentivise the shutting down during the combat - linking it to the lurking succubus seems like a way to try and to this.Also, in my experience these "close the gate" challenges during a combat are very punishing on PC action economy. So to shut down 3 out of 4 portals I would probably run it as no more than a Comp 2 challenge, with every 2 successes closing one of the portals, and this somehow progressively weakening/delurking the succubus.[/QUOTE]

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