WotBS Tell me about WotBS

[OnlineDM]

My experiences with the skill challenges in WotBS have been good, though I've run them pretty loosely. I'm a member of the "Don't make a big deal of the fact that this is a skill challenge" camp, so I ran them as role-playing with occasional skill checks.

My recollections of the skills challenges I've run in WotBS are as follows:

• Finding the lost dire weasel: I'm glad I ran this. We had a lot of fun tracking the weasel down a street, through a locked temple, into an alley and down a sewer. One of the PCs really wanted to keep the weasel (I had the weasel be very scared but calmed with good Nature skill), but they returned it to its owner in the end.
• Escaping the city. I completely changed the middle section of the first adventure. I had the party get the case of plans in the depository after defeating the fake Rivereye. No eladrin ghetto, no wizard's school, no politics. Instead, they escaped the city via the sewers, fighting through the dwarven crypt first. The skill challenge that came next was for navigating the natural cave system that eventually led them out on the road near Marben's kingdom. This was a very involved skill challenge with some battles along the way, using my PCs' back stories. It was a ton of fun, I think for the party as well as for me.
• Helping Marben. I did run this as two simultaneous mini-challenges, one to fix the machinery and the other to investigate the theft of supplies. The party succeeded on the repair and failed on the investigation. We ran this one fairly quickly. It was okay, but not amazing, and it could be cut.
• Mushroom hunting. I modified this one somewhat as well, having the party collect both mushrooms and flint (which required climbing up the cave walls). Having some treasures buried in the mushrooms was kind of fun.
• Rescuing the dryad children. This one required some hand-waving in the end and I was pretty liberal with the skills I allowed, but it worked out okay.
• Investigating the bridge tower. This isn't written as a skill challenge and I didn't explicitly run it as one, but there ended up being a lot of skill checks (thievery to disable traps, acrobatics to avoid falling damage when the stairs collapsed, athletics to climb up to the next floor, perception to search through the clutter, etc.).
• Calming Tiljann. This was a little awkward, but I allowed the party to do things like heal the unconscious seela to show Tiljann that they weren't bloodthirsty, that sort of thing. It made sense for story purposes, so I was okay with it.
• Gathering information at the seela village. This was interesting in that I ran it as an optional challenge. As the party started learning new information, they wanted to head off right away to start doing stuff (finding Gwenvere, finding Timbre, finding Indomitability). I believe they racked up five successes and two failures and hit the road. Shrug. It worked out okay.
• Gaining Timbre's trust. My favorite part of this skill challenge was when one of my PCs wanted to use Endurance to show that he could relate to Timbre's pain, so he made a little speech and then stood in the flames. That was pretty awesome.

I approach skill challenges as having suggestions rather than hard and fast rules. Some plot things are going to happen, and how well or poorly they happen depends on how skilled and creative the party can be. It's role playing, and it's fun if done well. I think that the skill challenges in WotBS leave plenty of room for DMs to make them their own, which is fine by me.

 

[GuJiaXian]

And...it's ordered.

 

[Skyscraper]

I'm always curious about this opinion about Fire Forest, because it is expressed frequently - yet I consider it the least railroady adventure of the whole series!

Sure, there's a road you have to walk along in the first third of the adventure. But the choices you make are epic. You can literally choose how the adventure unfolds. You can choose which side you take; whether the Seela live or die, whether the forest dies or not, whether you ally with the devil, with the Trillith, or with the Seela - totally up to the players. But people seem to fixate on that darn road!

If the road really bothers you, change the flavour text. It's only flavour text - it doesn't have to be a road. Give it branches if you like and vary the encounters. The important point of the adventure is the massive choices the players make - choices of a scale that I don't believe I've ever seen in another adventure. In my mind, it's the very antithesis of a railroad - it's the most open-ended adventure I've ever seen.

I notice you've just started running the first adventure - I'd be curious to see if you have the same opinion after you've run Fire Forest. Certainly my players told me they felt they were making important choices.

I am, of course, biased.

Yes, I've only read it and have not played it out, so I admit that I can barely voice my opinion for lack of experience on the adventure. What feels railroady in reading it is the single path leading from one encounter to the next. Maybe I underestimate the importance of the plot elements and focus on the format. As you mention, different people experience a game in a different way.

 

[Skyscraper]

Now, this surprises me a bit. Which parts do you feel are railroady? I should think it cannot be the dungeons, since they twist and branch all over the place. It also cannot be the city itself, since the pcs are free to go wherever they like.
Or are you referring to the very nature of an AP itself, i.e. a string of adventures that have to be played through in order to complete it? If so, then, naturally, _every_ AP is railroady.

Yes, that The sequence of events that lead you from 1 to 2 to 3 and so on until the adventure is over. There is little players can do to influence the outcome in Shackled City, really. They need to grind through the entire thing, one encounter at a time.

Yet, I like Shackled City a lot, mind you. I think the setting is superb and the product quality is equally fantastic. I loved reading through it and I love DMing through it.

I've already voiced my opinion in another thread on this site about my hopes on published adventures. I think that railroad or sandbox should not be the only two options out there.

Sky

 

[Skyscraper]

On skill challenges: I like to resolve non-combat situation with skills occasionally, and when I feel they are complex, I'll require a series of skills to be used, as the players come up with ideas, that can be similar to a skill challenge. I just let things happen naturally and when someone fails I have something bad occur, and when someone has a success I have something good occur. When it seems like a good time to conclude the series of skills, well I have the story unfold with success or failure, as the case may be. Personally, I think that the trap lies in a set number of successes/failures: I think this is an artificial structure that should be loosely adapted depending on the ideas that the players come up with. A very marginal idea might not advance the skill challenge as much as a truly unexpected and imaginative idea for example.

Sky

 

[Truename]

What feels railroady in reading it is the single path leading from one encounter to the next.

It's actually not a single path once you hit Act II. And even then, the adventure gives you enough background that you can adapt it to your players if they do something unexpected.