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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorrstagg" data-source="post: 4140803" data-attributes="member: 15863">Actually, looking at this. I see some ideas, and my take on it. Right or wrong..What's the goal of the players in town. This part is where you flesh out just some base brush strokes. Letting them know they've arrived at the village, and noticed the state of said, village, troops that are wounded, others in pain, etcetera. Then leave the door open for your players to begin the adventure for you. Ask them each what their character wants to do in the context of the story. They see a suffering village, and that they happen to be adventurers. What do they intend to do?(The base line here is presenting the experience and letting them seek out the adventure as it were. But doing it in such a way as to let each of them choose how they wish to proceed, with whatever task or goal. And give the players a minute to talk amongst themselves and figure out some basic things.. should they help, should they do something else, should they slink away.. etc..)Once that's presented, they each tell you what they want to do. Take the one that fits your  sense of order as going first, and ask them for the Easy, Moderate, or Difficult test as it relates to their task they wish to do. Which could be, the Warlock uses her streetwise skill to gather information about the village. She takes a  moderate test, and so on.Then go to the next person and ask them what skill they are going to use, to proceed with their goals, and each builds off of the previous player in a sense, thematically. Then go from there, and then build the narrative and when they reach the threshold for success or failure. Then tell them the results within the context.So once the warlock figured out the town was experiencing issues with the burning plague, the ranger, uses perception and spots someone who looks like he's a town elder, and points it out to the group, the paladin goes over to talk to the Elder to see if there's something they can do to help the village. The cleric begins to go to tend to the worst off using his heal skill, the fighter uses her endurance to begin help hauling villagers to the main temple in the village area. The wizard uses knowledge history to understand the cause of the plagues source from a historical context..And so on until they reach the point where your ready to move it to the next stage.My personal guess, and this is purely speculation. But stringing together a small series of social encounters like this, will build a functional narrative that propels them to the rest of the adventure.Heck you could even do what I described in a series of stages, with each stage advancing the narrative to the next stage. In that stage 1 find out whats going on and help as needed or not depending. Stage 2 now they know what's going on, what tasks are they going to focus on the real goal of stopping the kobolds, if they learned of it. Stage 3, haggle/prepare/rest etcetera for the upcoming days events as they go off to "Stop" the kobolds.. and so on.That's the formative part, and you could conceivably have 3 social encounters, possibly tossing in a brief quick combat of kobolds attacking an outlying farm, with the players going to respond and encounter 4 for the day, fight with kobold raiding party.Day 1 over.Day 2, maybe one quick social encounter, that will potential provide some benefit for the upcoming encounters against the kobolds. But then tie in the travel to the lair, as one large social experience. And then they arrive, ready and raring to go. And then.. into the cave they go.See my approach on this is that your actively engaging the players to come up with how they want to approach it all and thus empowering them to be actively a part of the story, and thus also totally helps accentuate roleplaying. And you can reward them with xp, per the difficulties associated with the tasks, etc.. Just an approach I've been trying now since the 4E kitbashed playtest we've put together..At least it's my take on this whole thing so far. And ultimately as a DM, I'm adjudicating the story in the ultimate direction I anticipate it going. But let them take us on the twists and turns that push it forward to the next stage.</blockquote>

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