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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9197959" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 91/150: Mar/Apr 2002part 2/12Challenge of Champions IV: Many things have changed in the past couple of years, but the guild of adventurers still likes to hold regular competitions designed to test the wits of adventurers of all levels equally. It’s a little trickier to make work under 3e rules though. First is that parties are slightly less likely to fall into neat fighter/wizard/cleric/thief four man bands, between all the multiclassing, prestige classes with odd combinations of powers and alternate power sources like psionics & incarnum. Second is that rather than flat XP rewards and exponentially escalating XP requirements to gain levels, you need to assign an EL to each encounter and scale the XP you gain based on the average party level, which doesn’t really work with level agnostic challenges. But none of these are insurmountable challenges (and neither are the precautions against cheating the guild has) so roll right up, place a wager in the betting pool and get ready for another set of 10 challenges, each of which must be completed in 15 minutes or less, which means the whole thing should fit neatly into a single session with time to spare. As usual, they put extra attention to the illustrations so you have something to show your players, which are mostly in an isometric 3D style this time. There’s also incremental refinement by including a hint which the DM can drop if the players seem to be stumped. These continue to be an interesting diversion that do something different with the D&D rules, with the broader set of options you have spelled out in the new edition altering how the whole thing is handled in ways that are also interesting to compare and contrast. These are still worthwhile inclusions in the magazine and now I just wish they’d do some 3e solo adventures as well, to give people a good idea how you rebalance the difficulty levels of encounters for a single character under the new rules.Critical Threats: Rather than a creature, our second one of these is an environmental hazard. A cave with a multiple shallow streams making the ground slippery, leading to a pit in the middle, which has an ominous vortex of dubious yellow-green liquid you probably don’t want to drink swirling downwards? You’d better not lose your balance. If you then populate the room with flying opponents or ones that use bull rushes, (or heaven forbid, a beholder with telekinesis) you have the potential for some quite scary and dramatic fights. This is particularly interesting because instead of giving just one answer to what’s going on here, it manages to fit several different suggestions suited to different character levels. So this is one you could easily put in any underdark based adventure, possibly even several times by switching up the contents. Modular setups save so much time and effort.</blockquote>

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