NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scribble" data-source="post: 4814804" data-attributes="member: 23977">I like skill challenges a lot. Even so it DID take a little bit for me to get used to throwing them into my game sessions. Did you read the stuff Mike Mearls wrote in dungeon about them? The first one he designs is somewhat complicated, but even so reading them kind of gave me a better mindset about how o think about them, and made running ad-hoc ones much easier for me, which benefited the game a lot. I find it helpful to think of them as not really a new system ENTIRELY, just a new way of processing elements that used to be separate as a whole. (Allowing you to more effectively determine a reward if any)For instance camping and wandering monsters. I've found using the SC system allows me to have the PCs essentially determine (by success or failure) if the wandering monster shows up, or finds them, and if so- how tough the fight will be. Success in the SC nets them XP, so they can still gain XP without expending resources by encountering/fighting the monster. Same with overland travel.To me this info is nothing more then the game showing the referee its math so to speak. IE these are the assumptions the game makes in its "balance." Like when you do a math problem with a variable A + 6 = 9 then you know A = 3, and if you change A then you change the answer to the problem.Treasure Parcels are really just telling you what the game assumed A was. X amount of treasure + PC level = balanced. If you change X amount of treasure you change balance. Either over or under balanced. In my own games I rarely stay at perfect balance treasure wise. But I like that the parcel system lets me know where the PCs lie on the spectrum pretty quickly.I look at the 1/5th value as what a shopkeep will pay an average sucker. It's like the Kelly bluebook value of the car. It's not a mandate, just what is expected.I generally start at the value and adjust based on NPC outlook on PCs, NPC personality etc... PCs can also influence it with diplomacy checks and such (Skill Challenges!)it all balances out in the end. Sometimes they do well sometimes they don't. 1/5th is again just giving me the math the game assumes. A good starting point I can adjust as needed.Yeah... Astral diamonds are a funny concept... but no more so to me then the entire D&D monetary system has ever been.I once tried to implement a way to track different exchange rates, and things like shaved coins and what not... but the amount of extra die rolling/bookeeping I had to do did not get made up for in fun.  So I just take the D&D money system with a grain of salt. <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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