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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merlin the Tuna" data-source="post: 5109469" data-attributes="member: 55638">In response to these comments, I will point out that Monument to the Ancients in Dragon 170 had a pretty good skill challenge/puzzle thing that you two might appreciate.  I haven't run it, but it looks pretty well thought out.[sblock]The PCs have a MacGuffin that consists of 9 glyphs and an object with unlabeled slots for each.  They can determine where a particular glyph should go via a skill challenge played out over the course of days, with some general use skills and some that will only work for particular glyphs, and can also get auto-successes by obtaining information elsewhere in the module. Each success also earns them a journal entry of flavor text, which helps shift the focus away from "Roll a skill check to not eat dirt."Anywho, in the final battle, they need to have all 9 glyphs in the right place to send the big bad packing for good.  Whatever they didn't figure out in advance can be done during battle via what is basically a game of Mastermind, so a party that performed well and planted 7 of the glyphs in advance will have an easier time of things than the party that has 1 glyph figured out and has to futz with the last 8 at random.Admittedly I haven't read up enough to know if there's a reasonable justification as to why "guess and check" wouldn't work in the days leading up to the combat.[/sblock]And Rodney, on the off chance that anyone around the office says "Why do they want less combat after we went and put so much effort into making an awesome combat engine?" I would remind them that one of the big steps forward for 4E was getting us away from needing 4 encounters per day to keep things on an even keel.  Please let us use the wonderful innovation of not needing to pad our adventures with 3 more fights than we actually intended to use! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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