Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 5468895" data-attributes="member: 59248">FWIW, Karinsdad, I really enjoy skill challenges, and I'm not enthused by the swamp challenge.I don't think it's the "trudging through the swamp" thing -- sure, that would be dull, day in, day out, but it's fun for a lark.  But the tiny bonuses to a central skill thing just leaves me cold.Were I building it,  if I kept the "Central Nature Check" gimick -- which -is- an interesting gimmick--I'd bump -up- the bonuses you get for helping, not drop them.  Make the target number 35 or so; then use something like the following:Primary Skill: Nature (special: only one Nature check may be used per turn).Primary Skill: Endurance (Special: All players must make an endurance group check every turn; success matters nothing, but a failure is a failure on the overall challenge.)[Keep track of Nature failures and Endurance failures separately.]Secondaries: (by default, secondaries can neither produce a success nor a failure in this challenge, but modify it in other ways.  Narration may change this).Arcane: There are magical current in the swamp that may be used for navigation.  With a moderate check, you can make a compass (or equivalent), giving a +2 to all subsequent nature checks in this challenge. [this may only be done once; further Arcane checks require original ideas]Social skils: Social skills (diplomacy, bluff, intimidate, insight) may be used to raise the group's spirits, granting a +2 to all characters in the endurance challenge for this round.Heal: Heal may be used to bolster a single character against the elements (+5 to the endurance check for one, moderate difficulty).  Or it may be used to repair damage done by the swamp (hard difficulty, erases an endurance-based failure).Nature: Nature may be used as a secondary check -- to erase a nature failure (hard difficulty) or to find food and avoid more troublesome areas (+2 to the endurance check for all characters)Religion: Can once be used to gain guidance from the gods or ghosts in the swamp, gaining a +5 on the nature check for this round.Perception: Can be used to aid the nature check for this round, granting a +4 to the nature check for this round (1/round).  If your Aid grants more than +2, add the difference to this bonus (actually, a good general rule for special Aid rules combining with Aid bonuses)Acrobatics: May be used twice to avoid hazards in the swamp -- hard difficulty, if you succeed, you count as having passed the group Endurance check; if you fail you take a -1 penalty to that check.And so on, really; the only skills I can't see making use of are Streetwise (though in a game that isn't half-urban I'd be tempted to houserule SW to be more useful overall), stealth, and thievery (ok, I could see using theivery as a "raise spirits" skill using juggling or whatnot).That said, even with this (which I think would improve the challenge, as even with a couple of primary skills, the secondary skills would be providing enough of a bonus to be worth using, and to make it feel like they had an impact (+2 to multiple rolls or +4 or +5 to one roll, not just a +2 to one roll), and you could differentiate between success, failure due to exhaustion (endurance checks) and failure due to getting lost), it's a fairly static challenge.  The situation doesn't really change until you succeed or fail.IMO, a really good skill challenge is like a really good boss fight.  You've got your opening situation, and the skills that best apply there.  But success or failure in that opening challenge (and the choices you make there) will change the situation, and suddenly completely different skills will be more important, and more choices will be unlocked.  The skill challenge is still there; it establishes that there's opposition, or a clock is ticking, or otherwise that there's a framework driving failure as well as success.  But there's no reason a skill challenge has to stay static--and every reason for it not to.For instance, the clue chases in the LFR Pain/Agony games (and probably the follower, Dispair, but I haven't played the P3 one yet) are mysteries, but technically they're skill challenges too.  Very big, very complicated skill challenges (and when I ran one, I totally underprepared; you have to prepare this stuff as much as you prep a clue chase in CoC -- and probably prepare the players to be in a mystery chase, and not really an action adventure for most of the game), with a variety of things to investigate, clues to track down, and npcs to question.  And each has their own piece of info, which they'll divulge when asked (and more if you can get on their good side).  The skill challenge is still there, though, keeping track of how many failures you have (how many successes isn't so important; when you know the answer to the mystery, you know the answer to the mystery and what to do!) and making sure that if the players -are- flailing around, the secondary plotline activates instead (the bad guys who -do- know who the killer is attack the PCs and leave them enough clues that they can get back on track--if a little worse for wear from the combat).But this isn't "ok, I roll arcana again" -- instead, it's more "do you head down to the apothecary to ask him about the paste you found?  Or do you go to the merchant you heard of to ask him about a illicit drug smuggling ring?  Or do you head over to the city's official necromancer and see if you can get something useful from him?"</blockquote>

Verification