Quick skirmishes as pseudo-skill challenges

[Asmor]

I've recently realized that I may only have 3 sessions left before college lets out and my gaming group is significantly altered, so I'd like to speed things up and rush through to the end of the current plotline.

To that end, I'm significantly de-emphasizing combat, which has typically been the lion's share of any given session's playtime.

So one of my ideas to help with that is the concept of skirmishes in place of actual combats. Skirmishes would be things like ambushes, fighting the guards outside the Keel of Ultimate Evil, etc. In other words, minor fights which aren't readily ignorable but also aren't terribly interesting.

The idea with the skirmish is this: the PCs win. That's a foregone conclusion. I ask each player how his character is approaching the skirmish. Then I decide on an appropriate skill and DC based on that approach. If they succeed, then nothing happens. If they fail by 5 or more, they lose a healing surge. If they fail by less than 5, they have to re-roll.

Thus, each PC has the chance to approach the skirmish in whichever way they want and has the possibility of losing a single healing surge. If they don't have a healing surge to lose, they lose that many hit points instead.

 

[silverwhisper]

you know, that sounds perfectly reasonable. if you're gonna spend time in a combat, it should be the stuff against elites/solos, not the incidental encounters that might not even last a full round.

i do wonder if failure by 5+ on the check shouldn't merit an additional healing surge instead of a re-roll, though.

 

[Asmor]

you know, that sounds perfectly reasonable. if you're gonna spend time in a combat, it should be the stuff against elites/solos, not the incidental encounters that might not even last a full round.

i do wonder if failure by 5+ on the check shouldn't merit an additional healing surge instead of a re-roll, though.

Perhaps I didn't make that clear... Here's my intention:

Success: Yay!
Fail by 0-4: Re-roll (with appropriate narration)
Fail by 5+: Lose healing surge

 

[silverwhisper]

nah, that's my being a bit more foggy-headed than i should be given the hour. :>

that looks really good, actually: i like it.

 

[Paul Strack]

I've used challenges like this for things like "moving around an enemy army". Success means avoiding problems while failure means a mistake that leads to the character being hurt.

If you really want to wrap things up quick, I'd use one extended skill challenge for all the fighting leading up to the final encounter. Pick a number of successes the PCs need to reach the bad guy. The PCs can have any number of failures, but each failure costs that PC a healing surge (or hit points if they are out of surges).

For narration, treat the challenge as montage of fighting scenes leading up to the final battle, where each roll focuses on a single interesting bit of action. When the success total is reached, the PCs defeat the last of the minor bad guys and get to the final battle.

 

[Asmor]

I wouldn't do that in general, but for a very specific type of scene (e.g. the characters fighting their way through a battlefield to reach the BBEG), that would be fantastic.