Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8711023" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Basically, he had fallen into a trap that a lot of DM's I knew in the 4e era had, and, to be fair, some adventure writers as well.  Because 4e has Skill Challenges, there was a sense that you "had" to have Skill Challenges in an adventure.  And while there were good Skill Challenges, there were also questionable ones (IMO, at least).I fell into this trap as well a few times without realizing it.  I would be converting an old Dragon magazine adventure for my group, or even just an "old school" style adventure out of whole cloth, when I'd pause and realize "oh, I don't have a Skill Challenge!". Thus, rather than organically making it as part of the adventure, I would be adding it after the fact, and sometimes, this turned out to be rather clunky as a result.I never stopped using them, and, in fact, I tried to get creative with them (there was an adventure where this portside town was being attacked by aquatic creatures- I had like 4 actual encounters, and then between them, I had a running Skill Challenge to represent the mass battle, and the total number of successes would determine the fate of the town.  Of course, I underestimated my party, and they got the "golden ending", lol, since they didn't fail any checks, which, in retrospect, made me wonder why I had bothered!), but I no longer felt like I "needed" them, and that made my sessions run more smoothly.Of course, when I decided to run White Plume Mountain, that's when I realized it was a bad fit for 4e- most of the exploration challenges weren't really an issue for my group, even my attempt to buff a lot of the encounters fell flat, and even when I explained the mechanics of the giant crab fight, they decided to go full strength against the crab and not care about bursting it's bubble- and sure enough, they won, despite the damage of the boiling water!I threw in the towel after the Sir Bluto fight, where I realized I was going to need to go back to the drawing board on the whole adventure.</blockquote>

Verification