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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 5472186" data-attributes="member: 1210">I want to give another example of a skill challenge that I think was particularly successful, although I don't have a write up of it that I can find.My 1st 4e campaign's climactic bad guy was a death knight named Arawn. (If I hadn't moved a couple hundred miles, there was plenty of room for more bad guys later, but this is how it panned out.) Arawn was one of those undead haunted by the lost love etc etc. To (over)summarize, his love, Dawn, had been murdered by his bishop (he had been a paladin) to cover up some important corruption, and when Arawn found out he fell and fell hard, ultimately becoming a blackguard death knight (in 3e terms- he was around in the background for quite a while). When the pcs confronted Arawn and battled him, they slew him, but he just laughed and began to reconstitute himself over about a minute. At this point the pcs put together a bunch of clues they had accumulate and figured out that, in order to kill Arawn, they had to lay Dawn's spirit to rest.This led to them spending their minute of grace rushing to Dawn's chambers (where Arawn had centered his lair, creating several freaky shrines to her) and trying to lay her to rest even as they were beset by hordes of minion zombies that reanimated the round after being killed unless you hit them with fire or radiant (from Open Grave, they are technically Strahd's, but hey, a lot of Arawn's story is based on the same archetypical story as Strahd, so why not?). In addition, there were some other, non-minion bad guys that arrived, and of course, several rounds into the whole thing, Arawn himself rolled in and things got even uglier.The non-fighting-the-bad-guys part of this encounter was, of course, a skill challenge- a high-complexity, high-difficulty skill challenge. Starting with finding Dawn's chambers, then moving to figuring out where her remains are, then figuring out how to lay her to rest, and finally laying her to rest. It could have gone any number of other ways, too- it wasn't predetermined that they would take those steps to lay her to rest, only that they had to lay her to rest and the skill challenge would be high-complexity and high-difficulty.As far as how it went- fantastic.  It made for a great climax to a great campaign. The players really enjoyed it, the added complexity of having a running battle while performing a skill challenge meant that the pcs had important tactical decisions to make (attack and move? double move? skill check and move?) and the addition of the skill challenge meant that it took a lot of work to win. And when the party did, they gave each other some high fives and cheered.</blockquote>

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