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Message: <blockquote data-quote="covaithe" data-source="post: 4656659" data-attributes="member: 46559">The scene where the PCs meet Laicos and he tells them what's going on was fairly straightforward.  He didn't have a whole lot of information to give the players, and what he did know he was perfectly willing to pass on.   And it's a scene that's pretty common for  PbPs, so everyone's familiar with it.  Soon the players were moving into Overgrowth.  I picked Overgrowth because I knew that it was a seedy neighborhood in Orussus where criminals might be likely to hang out.  Graf introduced it in Closed Eye, but didn't elaborate much.  I emailed Halford, who was DMing it at the time, to make sure that my ideas about Overgrowth matched his:  [sblock=email to halford about Overgrowth]> Hey, Halford. In my new L4W game I happened to mention that the bad guys are hanging out in Overgrowth, thinking I knew something about the area. But searching back through Graf's proposals for Closed Eye, I find that all I know about it is that it's "a neighborhood", with (spoilers elided).>> What I thought I knew about it is that it's a run-down area of Daunton close to the forest. The buildings are mostly ruins abandoned by their original owners, and occupied now by squatters, and are all covered with vines and weeds to varying extents. The guards leave the squatters alone, finding it difficult enough to keep the few main streets mostly free of open violence. The maze of side streets, alleys, and shortcuts through buildings too fragile to live in, on the other hand, are mostly lawless.>> Does that mesh pretty well with what you have planned for Closed Eye? I don't want to step on your toes, but my players are asking what Overgrowth is like and I want to be able to tell them something. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />[/sblock]I wanted to jump right into the skill challenge when the players went to Overgrowth, but I didn't really know much about skill challenges other than that a lot of people seemed to think they were broken for some reason.  I did some reading, got fairly confused, did some more reading, and realized that the important thing is to make sure that the story advances whether or not the skill challenge succeeds.  You want for it to be beneficial to the PCs to succeed, but really the only mistake you can make as a DM is setting up a situation where if the PCs fail, the story stalls.  If failure is OK and recoverable, then it doesn't matter what the mechanics are or if they're perfectly balanced.  In my case, I didn't have much trouble coming up with a downside for failing the skill challenge that left the adventure intact and interesting:  if they failed, Hoofchew would have found out they were after him and taken steps, such as preparing an ambush on terrain of his choosing.  I somewhat arbitrarily picked a DC of 15.  I set the social skills as primary ones, and added perception because the ramgers in the party seemed excited about doing some scouting.  I also gave myself permission to change things up halfway through if I felt like it, because I no longer greatly cared about the mechanics.About this time I started taking some notes, because I was having trouble figuring out how to give out information leading to Hoofchew's location in twelve incremental steps, corresponding to the successes needed.  Also, I didn't know what Hoofchew's location was.  And, I was having trouble remembering the names of all my PCs.I usually take notes in Google Docs.  I post from three diffferent computers on a regular basis, and others occasionally, so I need to have my information in the cloud as much as possible, rather than confined to one place.  Rather conveniently, it also lets me show them to you by publishing them as a web page, like so:<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dpqtc9m_26ftwgzwvf" target="_blank">Long Arm of Lauto 1: Algarezh...</a>My notes at this point consisted of the names and descriptions of the PCs, the fact that Hoofchew was hanging out in an old tavern, and half a dozen ideas for bits of information that could lead to his location.  Eventually, with some luck, this led to a reasonably satisfying skill challenge.  I found this to be the hardest part of the adventure by far, though, and I'm very glad my players were happy to chat amongst themselves a lot and give me time to figure things out.  One other thing about the skill challenge.  The PCs eventually found the lair by making contact with the Redboots.  But there were any number of other ways they could have found it, if they had chosen to use different skills or go about it some other way.  They could have gotten it out of the kid who tried to run off and warn Hoofchew.  They could have been friendly to the other street kids.  They could have simply scouted the area and waited to find some orcs moving around.  They could have made friends with, or intimidated, pretty much anyone they met on the street who could have pointed them to the Redboots or the street kids who know where everything is.  You get the idea.  The point is, I didn't prepare the successful path through the skill challenge ahead of time, I was trying to respond to what the players did.  Next:  combat and mapping</blockquote>

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