Help in Designing a Skill Challenge

[Ktulu]

Not sure if this is the right part of the forum, but it is 4e rules... I guess it can be moved if necessary?

(cross posted at rpg.net)
The city my players are in will be attacked by an army in the next session. I want to have a Combat/Skill challenge involving both using the city's defenses and attaking those who get over the walls.

However, I haven't done a skill challenge like this before and would like some suggestions from my peers.

The city is a decently fortified city (a large port) and the enemy will attack by both Land & Sea. The party is in charge of land defenses.

I want the feel of a battle that rages through the night, so the skill challenge needs to either be low complexity, but repeatable, or large in complexity to last through the battle.

Interrupting the challenge will be a few small waves of enemies who reach the wall and try to kill the soldiers/party.

Any suggestions would be great. The game is this saturday, so I have some time to get the prep done.

Thanks!

 

[Badwe]

First you're going to need to determine what skills will be usable and what the DCs will be. You don't have to consider all contingencies, but you should get a rough idea of the most likely tricks PCs will be using and set appropriate DCs based on the table.

Next, decide the complexity. Since this is a focal point of your current adventure, you'll probably want it to be the highest or second highest complexity level, which means 10 or 12 successes required.

Now, where you're going to start stabbing into new territory is how you'll be interleaving combat with the skill challenge. You have a few options

1) combat on failure. whenever the PCs fail, the enemies reach them and combat ensues
2) combat after X number of skill checks. perhaps 2 or 3 depending on how often you want them to fight
3) both 1 and 2, perhaps you want a lot of combat.
4) perhaps the reverse, if it's a light enough skill check that there are more encounters than skill checks, perhaps success in a fight would trigger an immediate skill check.

Best of luck.

 

[Ktulu]

Thanks for the advice. I went ahead and broke it into three challenges. One protects the walls, failing that they'll have to fight back the onslaught. Two protects the gate from being bashed open. If the fail, they'll deal with oncoming minions.

The third and final is determined by a prior skill challenge. If they had succeeded in requesting help, they'll push back the invasion and fight the commander. If the previous negotiations fail, they'll have to make their way to the keep before being overrun by enemies.

 

[Badwe]

It looks like you have a good idea of creating a recoverable but tangible effect for failing a skill challenge, that should create some urgency. Also, depending on how many skill challenges you're looking to have you might simply do the same skill challenge but change the venue as failures accrue.

Also, consider how the skill checks and types of skills being used would change moving from one venue to another. You don't want things to get stale. Finally, consider that with 3 individual skill checks you'll be giving between 3/5ths (for 3 complexity 1 encounters) to 3 times the XP of a single encounter of the level you make the skill challenges.