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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5859685" data-attributes="member: 42582">If you want the PCs to succeed, and if you can't think of anything interesting to challenge them with, then it sounds like there may be no "scene" here to frame: just "say yes" and narrate things through to the interesting bits.This looks like a case of the players deciding that it's a scene in spite of your preferences as a GM! And unless you're prepared to flat-out metagame ("No, don't spend that daily, there's nothing going on in this tunnel."), it can be a bit hard to avoid.My default response to this sort of situation is a skill challenge. And my default tactic in a skill challenge is to narrate bad things happening to the PCs, that they can try and avoid via their skill checks (and other abilities, where appropriate). To be interesting, I think these bad things have to be more than just losing healing surges - in an environmental context, they can include losing gear, falling down pits (and so getting separated from the rest of the party), cave-ins, alerting other creatures to the party's presence, etc. And play off the players' skill checks - if they make successful Dungeoneering checks to identify tracks or spore, for example, they realise that there is a giant spider lurking nearby that they will have to avoid - so you seed the next check without having to come up with some new, unconnected complication.I'd add - if you do split the party, be prepared to bring them all back together fairly quickly (in real time if not in game time) - the rest of the party find their way into the pit, for example, but not before the PC who fell has had to face off for a round or two against the spider that lives down there.Use the N successes vs 3 failure in a skill challenge as a pacing technique - escalate the stakes with each failure, and at 3 failures or N successes bring the thing to an end. This stops the scene dragging on without resolution. And in tunnels, I would say you shouldn't be afraid to force the thing to a conclusion - the whole things starts collapsing and a group Athletics check is needed, for example (and if they fail then it becomes group Acrobatics to end up on the right side of the falling rock; if they fail that then they're trapped until whatever it was that they were looking for finds them instead, so they have to beat it (or bargain with it) before they can get out).In a desert, the final complication that pushes things to a climax could be running out of water: group Endurance, then (if they fail) group Healing, then if they fail they awake with their enemy (or the stranger they were looking for, or whatever) reviving them with water - now they are indebted to whoever they were looking for, and so the dynamic of the new scene is quite different from what the players were expecting and hoping for - but the game still goes on!</blockquote>

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