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Message: <blockquote data-quote="baudot" data-source="post: 4311095" data-attributes="member: 70224">To make forgiveness checks properly dramatic, their should be some kind of pressure on them. This can't be "if you fail the check it adds one to your failures" since that would make them a wash (at skill 9) and undo the whole point. Healing surges, where appropriate, remain good. If the party isn't under pressure for their surges, (i.e. they'll have some other damaging encounter before or after the skill challenge) then it's pretty meaningless.Money costs fit some scenes. Since it represents open bribery in a social challenge, I'd make the costs go up as the party had more failures to erase. They're obviously desperate. Then again, bribing in advance can show you as an easy mark, so that might not be the best either. Room to give the NPC being bribed some personality here. In a crafting challenge, it might represent throwing out less-than-perfect materials partway through the process, and starting over fresh. In a long, spread out challenge, earning a forgiveness could be a mini-scene. As an example, imagine the party needs to win over and rally a town of suspicious villagers before an enemy army arrives. Each success on the challenge represents a villager speaking up for them at the town council meeting, and each failure is a villager that goes out of his way to smear their name. If they pass the challenge they've managed to reverse the suspicions of the villagers to trust. Say this is a major plot point and I want my party to be able to win the village over almost assuredly, but make this brute force way of winning the village costly. I call it a complexity 3 challenge. Each day they can roll one social skill to win over (or anger) a villager, without doing any quests. That gives them 8 days to win or lose the challenge. Because I want them to be able to force a win, I devise 6 individual scenes, each of which can automatically win over a villager, or earn forgiveness from one who the party had previously angered. Typical scenes might be climbing down a dangerous cliff to rescue a lost goat, or volunteering to repair the town's walls for an afternoon. There are unrelated scenes the party could be using their time to perform that are more profitable, like reforging their armor, or researching magical ruins near the village. These do nothing to earn the respect of the villagers, but they have a typical scene treasure reward where the scenes that win the villagers over don't. This is essentially a way of hiding a gold cost in a non-bribery social interaction.In all these cases, not earning forgiveness doesn't count as another failure, but getting the forgiveness does imply a cost. A party that's exceptionally skilled can breeze through without ever paying it, and a more modestly skilled party only starts paying after they've used up their "free" failures.</blockquote>

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