Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 5639088" data-attributes="member: 20323">Great ideas! My thinking is similar to [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] but a little more of a mini-game in approach...Off the cuff there are two things you might want to check out. First, Open Grave has an encounter where the PCs fight off a horde of zombies as a skill challenge. Second, there is a Colossus of Larn skill challenge fight by Mearls on DDI (forget where exactly).Probably, with your example, you'll be going into and out of combat mode/skill challenge mode as needed. There are others ways of driving home how far they’ve advanced besides a skill challenge. For example, say they faced 3rd level standard skeletons at low level, you could have those same skeletons reappear as 11th level minion; the players will rejoice as they drop the skeletons in one hit.IME having a failed skill challenge lead to a fight only works with an overwhelming and eminently clear threat of death, and then to follow up on that threat with an absolutely overwhelming combat. For sure a potential TPK. Otherwise, the group won’t care enough to invest in the skill challenge to avoid the combat (unless you have other dynamic failure conditions). Your situation certainly sounds like a potential TPK – don’t hold back in laying the smack down if PCs try combat for a while.Btw what is the overall success condition? The PCs arrive at their destination safe and sound?It already looks like a fight, and this makes it taste like a fight. Your players are going to be expecting a fight and probably will be confused about how their powers work mechanically in your scenario. I suggest not using damage/healing surges or other things that are reminiscent of a fight (or to use them as backdrop to the main failure conditions).An affliction slowing turning a PC into one of the undead servitors of the dark lord.Or, even worse, a twisted curse turning a PC into the next dark lord. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devil.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":devil:" title="Devil    :devil:" data-shortname=":devil:" />A PC’s dearly departed loved one being forced into undead form/returning as a ghost.Nightmares haunting a PC so that extended rests provide little to no benefit.Loss of a piece of soul, which (among other things) reduces benefit of healing. First, if you have the group trying to sneak, that should be a *group* Stealth check. It’s great that your sneaky guy got a 32, but at least half the group needs to succeed in order to bypass the obstacle as a team. Also, if you’re anticipating players attempting a certain skill (like Stealth) surreptitiously in this challenge, then you’ve got to build in reasons for them to vary their tactics. IOW in this particular situation why would Stealth *not* be feasible, or why would something else be even better?Second, I am not a fan of listing skills and DCs. To me that’s the equivalent of listing powers players can use in a combat situation. Sure, there is a place for that (e.g. terrain powers, special uses of channel divinity, and so on), but it shouldn’t take much design space. The strategies format that first appeared in the Red Box is better, but still it amounts to lists of possible skills.Instead here’s one way you could frame the encounter:Killing the undead is bad for some reason – they’re innocent souls who’ve been corrupted, killing them empowers the dark lord, it curses the killer to join the ranks of the undead, etc. So all of a sudden you have a combat-like scenario that using normal combat rules doesn’t make sense for…your players might buy into this as a skill challenge better that way. Also this suggests some nasty results for failed checks where violence is implied.Then you have a map of the area (not a battlemap, something larger scale) and a stack of tiles/tokens of various challenges (the backside is unmarked or simply a ‘?’). You might have some obvious challenges revealed in play on the map, but others may be hidden or roaming. As the players traverse the map toward their objective you can check for roaming challenges, they may face obvious challenges, or sneaker challenges can surprise them. There’s a sense of “hex-crawling” exploration to this approach, which opens up interesting strategic options, like…Scouting: Ranger knacks, nature rituals, stealth/perception checks, familiars/animal companions, and so forth can be used to scout ahead, revealing the location and nature of hidden tiles and/or expanding the range of vision for obvious challenge tiles.Luring Trouble: Sometimes the best way to fight fire is with fire. In this case, a cunning PC tries to lure a roaming challenge into the current challenge, hoping to pit enemies or hazards against each other. Or it may be one bold PC attempting to move a challenge tile to grant the rest of the party passage through a square/hex.Time Pressure: If the PCs stay in one hex too long (and definitely before they can take a short rest), undead descend upon them in increasing numbers. You might have a particular challenge just for this scenario, one in which the DC of checks gets steadily higher until the PCs moves on. Or you could even throw in a minion fight (of ever increasing waves/numbers) where the PCs get to witness firsthand the difficult of facing an enemy you can’t kill and potentially pay the price for killing some undead.I’m thinking if this encounter is supposed to play out in an hour or so, and dealing with one challenge tile takes ~5 minutes, you’d want to come up with 15-20 challenge tiles in advance. The ideas [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] has might fit the bill perfectly for these sorts of challenges.</blockquote>

Verification