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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Master Witch" data-source="post: 4398093" data-attributes="member: 71055">I personally see 4E as having three kinds of activities, skills, skill challenge, and combat. We all know what combat is, it’s when you smash stuff with force. Now how I see skills and skill challenges is that skills are for fast on the spot fixes to a problem done by a single PC (no XP) and skill challenges are for things that need time to deal with and can be done with more then one PC effecting the outcome (get XP). For example in your adventure the PC trying to not fall prone when the wave slams into the deck, this would just be using a skill (one turn, one PC). Now let’s look at those PCs and NPCs in the water trying to get back in the ship. You have waves rolling them up and down giving them one heck of a ride. They have to find a rope ladder or some other way to climb back on board. This is something that takes time or in games concepts, turns (more then one turn and if they help each other more then one PC). It might take skills to keep doing something each round but the outcome from one round to the next does not influence the other. Now if the people in the water do not find the ladder (fish net, ext) the may end up on the beach or drown failing their skill challenge. Their actions in the skill challenge effect the options they have on their next turn. I personally would let the PC that fall prone from not passing their skill check to fall in the water with the rest of them … adding them to the skill challenge.Now lets look at the over all encounter. You say you want a skill challenge, then make that be the focus. If you use my example of the PCs trying get back on the ship you as the DM need to get them in the water. Inter the monster with tentacles twisting and turning the ship. I would lay it out like this… you have a skill challenge with two parts. Part one getting one deck. Part two, getting out of the water and back on deck. If you have a PC that starts on deck and never ends up in the water they just got lucky but still get the points to keep PC leveling the same. Now after the monster has been used to get the PCs into the water and made it hard to get on deck comes combat. If the PCs never get back on deck then the monster sinks the ship and they have to deal with that outcome. </blockquote>

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