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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9782064" data-attributes="member: 42582">Only Fea-bella emptied hers - because she'd refilled them from the rivulet flowing out from the pool with the corpse in it. But the others hadn't emptied their waterskins, and those were the ones that got tainted.Think of it as a bit like a skill challenge, but with checks on both sides resolved via slightly intricate rock/paper/scissors. Feint vs Manoeuvre means that each side rolls independently - but the Manoeuvre successes provide buffs and impose debuffs for the next action; whereas the Feint does "damage" - and I got enough successes to get a full victory, so the players never got the benefit of their Manoeuvre successes.The second spirit's success doesn't require any sort of separate resolution or action economy - that was the goal of the spirits in their Trickery, and how well they achieve it depends on (i) whether they win (they did) and (ii) how much "damage" they suffered on the way to victory (in this case, none). A win with no "damage" suffered is a total victory, so the spirits achieved their goal of tainting the PCs' water without being noticed.At the table, the players knew the spirits had won completely (except they thought there was only one spirit), but I deliberately didn't tell them what that victory consisted in, because I didn't want to warn them away from having their PCs drink their water.The players, as their PCs, conjectured that the spirit was a dead spirit (of the corpse). They were trying to persuade it to go to its final rest. I knew from the outset, based on my scenario prep, that the spirits' goal was to sneakily taint the PCs' water: that's the spirits' raison d'etre. (Their stat block includes Instinct: Defile all clean drinking water and Nature 5 (Defiling, Swimming, Tricking).)If the players had succeeded in the conflict, then (depending on how much "damage" they suffered on the way through) they would have realised the truth about the spirits, and/or what they were trying to do (at least in part).In my example, the secret is maintained; but the players know they've lost. The way the system works allows this easily, because in resolving the declared actions I have to speak the part for the spirit, but don't have to reveal its true goal. I think a skill challenge could be done similarly: revealing the count, but not necessarily revealing the full consequence for the players of the PCs losing. (I don't recall now if I did this in any 4e skill challenges, as it's a bit of a while ago.)</blockquote>

Verification