Skill Challenge - Foraging behind enemy lines.

[Darth_Asparagus]

Any comments?

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Skill Challenge: Foraging Behind Enemy Lines

Travelling through the hostile land of Thay, the PCs have to find food and shelter without attracting attention.
For each day, there must be a single success per PC to avoid starvation. Only some of the “skill roll” failures count as challenge failures, i.e. those that will attract enemy attention. Those PCs not covered by a success will use a healing surge until they have an extended rest with two successes worth of food.
Complexity: Requires a number of successes equal to the number of PCs per day. Once the number of globally relevant failures has reached 4, the challenge is considered a failure. The skill challenge ends successfully once the PCs leave Thay.
Primary Skills:
*Endurance (DC 18): The Character making the check goes without food and sleep without any ill effect. Failure does not count against global failure total.
*Nature (DC 23): The character tries to forage. No easy task in the barren lands of Thay! A successful roll grants one success, for each 5 points above the DC, grant another success. Failure has no global skill challenge effect.
*Streetwise (DC 20): The character tries to buy things on the black market. A failure count as a global failure. A successful skill check counts as two succeses.
*Diplomacy (DC 15): The character tries to get support from people by begging and appealing to their good-will. This can work quite well with some people but is also likely to attract attention. Failure counts as two levels of global failure.
*Thievery (DC 18): Stealing food and sneaking into abandoned buildings for the night is also possible. Failure has a global effect.
Secondary Skills:
*Streetwise or Nature (DC 20): Streetwise or Nature can be used to cover up tracks (socially and physically). A success reduces the global failure level, a failure counts normally.
*Intimidate (DC 18): Intimidation can be used to delay the effect of a failed Streetwise, Diplomacy or Thievery roll for a day. I.e. the resulting rise of failure level only occurs the next day.
Success: Once the characters leave Thay, the skill challenge ends.
Failure: Failure has different levels that you should notify the PCs of.
Level 1: The PCs see black riders and possibly get warnings that agents of Szass Tamm are after them.
Level 2: People recognize the PCs from the many wanted posters that can be found everywhere.
Level 3: A patrol is waiting for them at the next town/landmark but they can easily spot and avoid it.
Level 4: A patrol of the lich emperor ambushes the PCs.

 

[Alex319]

How many skill rolls does each character get per day?

What prevents the characters from only using the endurance and nature primary skills, thus avoiding ever risking increasing the global failure total?

How do the PCs leave Thay and how long do you expect it to take?

How much information are you planning on giving the characters about the challenge? Will they know everything you've outlined above?

Also, the "food requirement" system seems like an interesting system with which to spice up the challenge, but I'm a little confused as to how it works. As I understand:

- Each success gives 1 "food unit" (Some skills give more than one like Nature gives +1 for each 5 points above the DC). Do successes on all skills do this? Even successes on secondary skill checks or Endurance checks?

- At the end of a day each character can spend one "food unit" (FU) to avoid losing an HS (healing surge), or two "food units" to take an extended rest. If they made an Endurance check then they do not have to spend an FU to avoid losing an HS. Is this a correct interpretation?

- Can FUs be saved from day to day?

One strategy I can anticipate if the characters have difficulty getting the right number of successes is to rotate who takes ERs (extended rests). For example suppose that it is a 5 character party that can manage only to get 2 FUs per day. If rather than giving the FUs to different characters to avoid losing HSs, if they simply give both FUs to the same character so he can take an ER, and do this every day rotating who gets the ER, they can make sure that nobody is more than four HSs down no matter how long it takes.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

P2: Demon Queen's Enclave contains a few interesting skill challenge concepts, some including the "operating behind enemy lines" idea.

Without reading them again, a few ideas:
Roll for the skill challenge in certain time units, for example hours.
Each individual hour allows each player character to make one skill check for the challenge. if the majority of checks is a success, the group earns a success. Individual failures can lose you a healing surge.
If the majority of the checks is a failure, the groups earns a failure.
In one of the scenarios, you need merely 10 successes, but each failure means you get delayed (by one hour), possibly facing a further encounter. During that time, you cannot take extended rests (the environment is too hostile), so losing healing surges and so on can hurt a lot.