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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wik" data-source="post: 5146150" data-attributes="member: 40177">Oh, yeah.  One last thing:  Don't write up HUGE skill challenge rules for the challenge!  They tend to just get you confused and force you to think within the box.  Those massive skill challenges in the DMG 2 are just crazy long.  Ignore them!  You're much better off flexing your improv muscles in a skill challenge.  Srsly, guys.  Here, for those interested, are the entirety of my notes for what wound up being a skill challenge more than an hour long (and we play pretty quickly):And that's it.  I looked at my notes all of once during the challenge, and then threw 'em away.  We didn't use all of the possibilities (the PCs didn't have to shoot out the railway switch, and unfortunately, no Aberration was able to jump on the rail), and some kind of were less interesting than I imagined (the archers shooting at the PCs weren't as crazy fun as I'd hoped, though they were still interesting, and the Eladrin passing by just wound up being a scene, as opposed to something the PCs decided to interact... although they did "interact" with the Eladrin that didn't see the cart coming behind him...).  Anyways, yeah.  Del has it squarely - Skill Challenges are presented as die-rolling exercises, and it can be hard to break out of that mode of thinking.  But I highly recommend the effort - once you start thinking of them in terms of set piece action scenes (or investigation montages, or "red line adventure", or whatever), they are just as exciting - if not moreso!- than 4e combats.  One last benefit - Skill Challenges are a great way to give the PCs more XP, should you so choose.  Rather than making all XP gained in combat (or, at least, most of it), you can put XP in the challenges.  If you use challenges to connect the combats, the PCs are getting XP almost continuosly.  For my group, that's a benefit - we play short, rather intense sessions.</blockquote>

Verification