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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pukunui" data-source="post: 4503559" data-attributes="member: 54629">Well, I did the skill challenges last night. I don't know that they went down all that well, though. I think most of my players don't really "get" the concept.With the first one, I read out the hobgoblins' dialogue bit and set the scene. I gave people a few examples and had eveveryone take a turn. Some people seemed to get it -- the cleric and the paladin tried to reason with / bluff the hobgoblins, but the ranger wanted to fight them. The wizard successfully tricked the hobgoblins into thinking that they'd lit a fire right on the other side of the doors with ghost sound and an Arcana check. When I had the hobgoblins unlock the doors with Balgron's key and push them open a little bit, the minotaur fighter pushed them shut again and then jammed them together with some pitons. He rolled a natural 20 on his check, which I've houseruled counts as two successes, so at that point I decided the hobgoblins wouldn't be able to get in short of totally destroying the doors (and, in their arrogance, they figured they could just wait till the PCs came out, so they didn't do that).So that one went OK.Then the next one, which I think might have been too long ... one of the players complained that it was, anyway. I had them get creeped out by eery feelings and stuff (and the wizard could actually see flitty spirits). I had them all roll Endurance checks and made a note of everyone who failed. The cleric and paladin both came up with the idea of taking some holy water and painting their deities' holy symbols on all the PCs to ward away the spirits. They rolled well enough together that I allowed it to work.But then the spirits came back in a more material form that everyone could see. I did a Raiders of the Lost Ark thing and had a beautiful eladrin ghost come up to the wizard and transform into a hideous undead thing. More Endurance checks. This time they tried reasoning with the ghosts. And the eladrin successfully used History to relate an old eladrin tale about putting ghosts to rest peacefully or something (I forget exactly). One of the other PCs tried to convince the ghosts that they were there to help. So the ghosts told them that their bodies had been disturbed and that if the PCs really wanted to help they would find the bodies and put them to rest.Then Sir Keegan appeared and slaughtered his family in front of them. More Endurance checks. They tried reasoning with him (but oddly enough the player of the paladin of Dol Arrah, of whom Sir Keegan was also a paladin in my campaign, didn't use this to his advantage, not even after several of us had pointed it out to him ... sigh) but were not successful. At this point, I didn't really know what to do. I didn't want them trying to fight a ghost or anything, so I just said that he disappeared as quickly as he'd come and chocked it down as a failure.Then the sleeping. I told them that in the night, they had lots of bad dreams of death and destruction and such. More Endurance checks. This time, unfortunately for me, they all made their checks, so the dreams didn't affect them and I wasn't able to do any of the "sleep strangling" and stuff.And that was that. They got more successes than failures so I just tallied up all the times that individual PCs had failed their Endurance checks and then told everyone that they got all the benefits of an extended rest less the number of failed checks in healing surges. The ranger made all his checks, so he was fully rested the next morning and couldn't understand what was bothering everyone else ... it was just a few ghosts after all. Who's afraid of ghosts? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />After that, I decided that Ninaran would "lure" the hobgoblins away and then get the PCs to follow her back to town for the Dead Walk encounter. I had it snowing the whole time, which wasn't as fun as I thought it would be because it ended up just being "Don't forget! -2 to hit because of the snow!" And then the cleric cast Bless, so it was only -1 to hit.Anyway, as the PCs were making short work of all the minion skeletons, I decided to make things more interesting and had the magic circle rejuvenate the skeletons every few rounds. It took beating down the skeletons and having them all get back up again a few times before the players caught on to the idea that this would keep happening until they deactivated the circle. That made things more interesting -- and one of my players said he enjoyed the skill challenge mixed in with the combat more than the pure skill challenges.I have to agree that the dynamic of having some of the PCs trying to do the skill challenge while other PCs tried to keep the enemy monsters away was pretty cool. I can see that working really well in the future with things like complex locks or traps that some PCs have to deactivate while the others fight off a guardian monster or something. If I keep the trap room in KotS, I think I might put a monster or two in there as well.</blockquote>

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