Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8949734" data-attributes="member: 82106">See, its weird to me, because I'm not sure how any of this is actually MATERIALLY different from an SC. I mean, a complexity 5 SC requires12 successes. Lets say I take a quick assessment of the PC's plan. They want to break into the big boss' place and loot his safe so they can acquire gold to get a Cure Disease to save their friend. So, we have the guard, the safe, and getting out unseen. Each of these is going to take up some part of those 12 successes. So, effectively you have 3 clocks, one for each obstacle (they might be distributed unevenly, maybe the final escape is 2 checks, the others are 5 each). Additionally, I almost always include a planning phase as PART of the SC where it makes sense. So here the PCs might have already ticked some successes before they arrive at the guard on the front door.And I also find it odd how people keep saying things about SCs should be 'tied to the narrative', as if 4e doesn't say that from day one! I know there are a whole bunch of people who OBVIOUSLY never read the DMG who seem to not be aware of that and think its just some die tossing side-game or something. Its not, you work out what it is you have to accomplish and each check changes the situation, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse! Sometimes the change is small (the guard is now thinking over the bribe, maybe you need to offer more?) and sometimes its large (the guard lets you pass, you are now inside and you have to find the safe).So, oddly I both agree with you, and kinda disagree, SCs need to be narratives, and they should mostly ideally involve some related set of obstacles (you can do a complexity one if there's really only one thing to get past, like a guard). I generally figure complexity 2-3 are a couple obstacles, 4 and 5 are 3 or maybe even 4 obstacles. I wouldn't GENERALLY go beyond that in one SC, but as you pointed out elsewhere, granularity is also a question, so a single check could represent spinning a dial on a safe one time, or wiping out a whole room full of minions. And scale can shift within an SC sometimes too. I just think stock 4e actually covers this, though it doesn't always explain it well.</blockquote>

Verification