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<blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 4866044" data-attributes="member: 2">It wasn't really. As much fun as it is to use <a href="http://www.lavarules.com/" target="_blank">Lava rules</a>, I decided that three failures meant that a PC would take their starting base hit points in damage from the lava; so if you started with 30 hp, you'd take 30. That would suck if you were down below half your hit points when you failed the third check, because it would kill you, but any other result would leave you at negative hp, balanced on the narrow pathways, and dying.This seemed like a good way to handle it because (a) the other PCs would be close enough that with a few skill checks they could get to you before you died, (b) skill failures were removing healing surges instead of hp (at least until you ran out of surges), (c) I wanted to encourage the other PCs to help you via aid another, (d) I knew there likely wouldn't be much other combat for the rest of the day, so losing lots of surges wouldn't make the pace of the adventure worse, and (e) I wanted it to feel deadly without being an automatic insta-kill. In actual practice, the teamwork and aiding was good enough that we only had one or two failures total out of six PCs. There would have been more if they hadn't cleared off the treasure. I judged the entire skill challenge to be a little bit on the easy side (say, 4/10 difficulty) because the group used good teamwork; it would have been a little on the hard side (6 or 7/10) if they hadn't.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Piratecat, post: 4866044, member: 2"] It wasn't really. As much fun as it is to use [url=http://www.lavarules.com/]Lava rules[/url], I decided that three failures meant that a PC would take their starting base hit points in damage from the lava; so if you started with 30 hp, you'd take 30. That would suck if you were down below half your hit points when you failed the third check, because it would kill you, but any other result would leave you at negative hp, balanced on the narrow pathways, and dying. This seemed like a good way to handle it because (a) the other PCs would be close enough that with a few skill checks they could get to you before you died, (b) skill failures were removing healing surges instead of hp (at least until you ran out of surges), (c) I wanted to encourage the other PCs to help you via aid another, (d) I knew there likely wouldn't be much other combat for the rest of the day, so losing lots of surges wouldn't make the pace of the adventure worse, and (e) I wanted it to feel deadly without being an automatic insta-kill. In actual practice, the teamwork and aiding was good enough that we only had one or two failures total out of six PCs. There would have been more if they hadn't cleared off the treasure. I judged the entire skill challenge to be a little bit on the easy side (say, 4/10 difficulty) because the group used good teamwork; it would have been a little on the hard side (6 or 7/10) if they hadn't. [/QUOTE]

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