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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreyICE" data-source="post: 6031476" data-attributes="member: 6684526">Lemme give you an example of the Skill Challenge I have planned for this Sunday (Players, if you're reading this through some odd coincidence, stop.  You know who you are~)---------For some reasonably complex reasons, a riot is becoming inevitable in the city.  This was brewing a long time before the PCs got to the city, and is due to *things*.  To make a long story short, there's an oppressed quarter of the city that is about to be destroyed in this riot.  The rioters are going to start a fire, and the PCs will probably arrive around when it's getting into full swing.  The PCs, as I see it, have three goals here:- Put out the fire- Rescue as many people as possible- Hold back the riotersHow they go about it will be important.  Putting out the fire could be fairly involved, but we have a TK psion, and water on hand.  They could also wet down nearby roofs (athletics check).  They might also realize (history check) that some of the buildings in the quarter are from a previous era that used a high degree of fireproofing, and use them as firebreaks.  Or they might realize that some buildings are different from a Streetwise check. They could also overload the magical pumps that drive the water (arcana check) to shower the surrounding areas with water for a short while before the pumps burn out (there's 4 of them).  Rescuing people from the fire could be Endurance, Athletics, or Acrobatics, depending on how they go about it.  Rescued people are probably in no shape to help put out the fires, but will obviously be very grateful to the PCs.Any party members can help fend off the rioters at improvised barricades, but stopping the crowd will take more than that.  There's 4 main thrusts, and it'll take someone skilled with their voice to stop them (Bluff, Intimidate, or Diplomacy).  Succeed on a hard check, and they might convince the rioters of the errors of their ways, and get them to help put out the fires in that area.  Success, as I rate it, will be based on the number of buildings saved (there's around 20, and unless they succeed in Athletics or streetwise in the sprint to get there, they're gonna be missing a few off the bat), the number of people the PCs save and organize people to save (yes, they can get the panicked populace to help at any time by organizing them), and obviously stopping the rioters.  Is this rather mechanical?  From the backend, yes.  From the front end, the first warning the PCs will get is a guard captain, face bloodied and blackened from smoke, telling them about the riot, and the dull orange glow of fire in the distance.  Then a madcap race across town to get there in time.  They'll rush into a district under siege, with rioters pushing down the streets and only some hastily thrown-together barricades stopping them.    They'll see panic in the streets, a woman throwing her baby out a window to someone on the ground seconds before the building collapses, and mass chaos.  From there, it's up to them to organize people to stop the fires, save as many as they can, and stop the riots - the guard is really not gonna help them in this (for various reasons).  Could you run this in another edition?  Well... probably.  The skills would be harder to piece together, because they're much less abstract, and the general framework would need some work (fire threatening, because I take 1d6 damage per round, lemme wander around in it for a while).  But 4E gave me the tools and the vision to really make it happen.</blockquote>

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