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Message: <blockquote data-quote="King Nate" data-source="post: 5301616" data-attributes="member: 7435">To prevent getting myself in situations that I have to improvise or play off the fly, I created a free online forum with proboards.com. There I encourage group storytelling among the players and DM between sessions. This allows me to get a strong feeling for what the players want to do and also allows us to roleplay out stuff that would be considered a waste of time during actual game play. When it come to the adventure I create the final encounter first on what I would like the encounter to look like. Next, I create an odd number of challenges. These can be skill challenges, combat encounters, non-combat encounters, etc. I stick with five of these but have been known to do as few as three and as many as nine. Each challenge has a way to succeed and a way to fail and the outcome is similar to how a skill challenge works. For example; I might set up a combat challenge that the characters must finish in 4 rounds to succeed. If they take longer, they fail, but still complete the combat. (I of course don’t let the players know this). For each challenge they succeed counts as a success for the final encounter. For each encounter they fail counts as a failure for that final encounter. The more successes you have the better the final encounter will be for the players and the worse you do the tougher the final encounter will be. Now with five challenges that allows me to create seven different final encounter outcomes. 5 successes/0 failures, 4/1, 3/2, 2/3, 1/4, 0/5, and 0/6+. 0/6+ is only for some of the challenges that make the players redo the challenge and they fail more than once.Now I take that final encounter and place it in the 3/2 spot. Then I think of ways to fill the remaining spots. The better ones might have less minions to fight, a weakened boss, a surprise round, a combination of all for the 5/0 spot. The worse ones I might have more minions, the item they are looking for might already be gone, or the boss they were looking for isn’t here, but someone else they weren’t expecting is.On timed pressured adventures I may have an extended rest count as a single failure or if that doesn’t make sense then it would be a failure for the entire adventure and automatically get the 0/6+ spot.</blockquote>

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