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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 2407988" data-attributes="member: 63">One thing I tried once in my fantasy game was a set-up like this:Villain has a tower, and the only entrance is guarded by a device that sucks magic and converts it to magic missiles. So they couldn't get in the front. But there was an unknown entrance. See, the tower was a stalagmite in the middle of an underground river, named Needlepoint Spire, so called because of a tiny shaft at the base of the stalagmite where the river had carved a tunnel. It was possible, albeit very hard, to jump in, be shot down the tunnel by the river, and jump out in the basement of the tower. If you missed, you'd get shot out of the tower, then over a waterfall.Once inside, you could get to the front door, disable it from the inside, and let your buddies in. I had a nice chase set up, with the sorcerer's monsters spotting the PC and chasing him toward the entrance, trying to kill him before he opened the door. I figured correctly that either the water mage or the rogue would attempt this (it was the rogue).But I forgot that I had 3 other players. They kinda didn't have anything to do while the rogue slipped in and dealt with the traps and stuff. Looking back, I suppose I could've made it faster by just having the PC sneak in and open the doors easily. Or, if I wanted to keep everyone busy at once, I could have had it so that the party outside needed to stage an assault to distract the attention of the sorcerer inside, so that the party rogue could get through unmolested. Now I'm running a modern fantasy game, and I'm discovering that, sadly, the d20 Modern rules do not capture the action movie feel as well as they could. Sure, combat is good; I enjoy doing combat, and I'm good at it.  But I had a car chase, and it was a bit of a chore (I spiced it up by having it also involve a gunfight).  I tried to have a 'disarm the bomb' scene, and thankfully the psychic PC who got a vision of the bomb was smart -- he hired a retired bomb squad guy to disarm it for him. If he hadn't, it would have been rather boring.The thing is, the rules reduce everything to a single roll, except combat. I wonder if maybe it'd be better to change the rules so that unimportant things only require a single roll. You're fighting the boss, you actually keep track of HP. With mooks, you just make an attack roll, and if you beat their Mook DC, they drop. If you're trying to convince a traffic cop to not ticket you, just make your Diplomacy check. If you want to convince the sorcerer that his dead wife would not want him to let his grief drive him to destroying the world, that'd take a few Diplomacy checks to steer him in the right direction, lowering his Will or something.And disarming a bomb should never be one check. Bombs are too impressive to reduce to a single die roll. Make it one check to figure out how to disarm it, and depending on the difficulty of the device, one or more checks (each one easy to very hard). A simple "cut the blue wire" bomb would be one easy check, once you succeed a hard DC to figure out which wire to cut.  But if you're going up against Dennis Hopper, and the bomb is on the bottom of a speeding bus, connected to the driveshaft and the electrical system, with a bevy of dead-ends and traps involved, you'd need to make a ton of checks to disarm the puppy.What I want to see? A singing competition.Please.</blockquote>

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