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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5408246" data-attributes="member: 7006">I agree that this kind of thing could easily be a skill challenge, and that there's nothing wrong with running it that way.  And I would disagree Darsuul and Karins Dad that these are encounters where the guards should be warning the rest of the camp more often than not.  In actuality... these "guard post" encounters (in my mind) are ones which are more interesting because of the possibility/attempt to eliminate them without putting the entire camp on alert.  This encounter is meant to replicate the action movie trope of the heroes popping up from behind guards, killing them instantly and then dragging the bodies away into the night.  So you don't want there to be like a 50/50 chance of the group being discovered or an alarm being sounded.So I actually think a skill challenge makes the most sense here.  Set the Complexity to start with at 1 (4 successes before 3 failures), which represents one "guard post" of bullywugs.  If they complete that, they can choose to keep going for more and more successes, with each complexity level they reach equaling a guard post that gets taken out.  So if they can reach a Complexity 5 (12 successes before 3 failures) then they have eliminated all 5 guard posts surrounding the camp.What it good about this, is that the party can choose to stop the challenge at any point, like for instance if they've hit 2 failures and are afraid of getting that 3rd (thereby getting spotted by the guards and setting the whole camp on alert).  But by leaving some guard posts alone... those guards are now available to enter the "inside the camp" combats within a couple rounds as needed.  So the party has to make some hard choices whether or not to risk continuing and trying to take out the guards silently rather than leave some of them alone only to have them join the open combat later.Now because in this format the compound is not alerted to the party unless all 3 failures occur... you'll probably want to put in some smaller penalties upon the first failure and the second.  Losing healing surges always works, but I'm sure there are other fun and interesting penalties you can come up with too.So all in all... for an encounter like this, where the whole raison d'etre of the "guards on the perimeter" is to have a "non-combat" combat encounter... the skill challenge I think would work wonders.</blockquote>

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