Trouble with Skill Challenge Construction

[Rechan]

I want to make a skill challenge to represent the PCs fleeing from the heart of a volcano as it is beginning to erupt. However, I'm hitting a few snags.

1) The PCs are backtracking through the fairly linear tunnels and down the mountain, so there's little reason to make them go for nature/perception checks.

2) The PCs have to haul; the volcano is erupting, so they have to cross a lot of distance. This precludes simply athletics/acrobatics/endurance, but that's fairly boring for a skill challenge. Also, is there a way to impart the urgency of "Flee" with the challenge itself, to ratchet up the tension?

3) The obvious result of failing to flee an erupting volcano means you die. What's a less, uh, permanent and harsh failure for such a challenge?

For reference, the PCs are 3rd level.

Also, I'm having trouble deciding a good monster to represent a Volcano God the PCs battle (and whose subsequent death onsets the eruption). I definitely want a brute-type entity. A reskinned White Dragon could do it, but the White Dragon seems a little... simplistic, or at least, not very interesting.

 

[Tale]

One less permanent penalty for failure, but not total failure, is to introduce a homebrew disease track condition. Let it be something you can justify as skin/lung burns.

 

[Rafe]

2) The PCs have to haul; the volcano is erupting, so they have to cross a lot of distance. This precludes simply athletics/acrobatics/endurance, but that's fairly boring for a skill challenge. Also, is there a way to impart the urgency of "Flee" with the challenge itself, to ratchet up the tension?

Use Endurance, Athletics and Acrobatics as primary skills with any other resourceful uses of other skills as secondary skills. To ratchet up the tension, every individual failure results in the loss of a healing surge.

3) The obvious result of failing to flee an erupting volcano means you die. What's a less, uh, permanent and harsh failure for such a challenge?

Again, loss of healing surges or impose a condition on them (weakened, perhaps). Also, after 3 or 4 failures, the lava could cut off their known route of escape, meaning they have to go for Dungeoneering and Perception to find a new path out. This changes the nature of the skill challenge (less boring) and heightens the tension.

Just some thoughts.

 

[Rechan]

Use Endurance, Athletics and Acrobatics as primary skills with any other resourceful uses of other skills as secondary skills. To ratchet up the tension, every individual failure results in the loss of a healing surge.

I can see that losing some rolls might mean taking -2 to following skill checks with that skill (like: Someone twists an ankle, giving -2 to acrobatics checks).

Again, loss of healing surges or impose a condition on them (weakened, perhaps). Also, after 3 or 4 failures, the lava could cut off their known route of escape, meaning they have to go for Dungeoneering and Perception to find a new path out. This changes the nature of the skill challenge (less boring) and heightens the tension.

That can work.

Any suggestions out there for the Volcano god?

 

[Tale]

Any suggestions out there for the Volcano god?

A straight out of the MM Gnome. He also wears a funny hat. This hat has no magical properties.

 

[davethegame]

Any suggestions out there for the Volcano god?

Gelatinous Cube, with fire in place of acid.

Also, as is my general advice with skill challenges, ask your players what they want to do, and you can adjudicate some of the skill usage there. For example, I ran a skill challenge based around being chased by a gargantuan blue dragon (they were level 3.) I was expecting Nature/Dungeoneering/Hide checks to lose him in woods, but the Warlord used Diplomacy to help direct his party members into effective ways of splitting up, and the Rogue used Bluff to help veer it off from the others.

Escaping from an erupting volcano sounds like a really good use for a skill challenge (that I will probably steal.) I envision a failure meaning one of the PCs gets stuck, but than another PC might be able to use a different skill to him help (and have that count towards the challenge.)

 

[Roger]

An excellent question! I've been thinking about skill challenges for a while now.

You've got a strong initial idea: players fleeing from an erupting volcano. Now it's a matter of growing that seed.

A useful starting point is that old rule of thumb: The purpose of a role-playing game is to generate amusing anecdotes. I like to think about what sorts of anecdotes might come out of our initial idea; often this involves thinking about how similar situations have played out in other stories.

Some random ideas:

* the one guy slips and falls, and the other guy, at great risk to himself, runs back to haul him back to his feet.

* the guy clutching mounds of treasure, dropping a steady trail of coins, must decide whether to drop it all to improve his chance of survival.

* falling rocks and/or lava that blocks the obvious route out, diverting everyone to some other path.

We might use some of these, we might not; still, I find the exercise useful for visualizing the encounter.

It's also useful to consider the end with these sorts of things -- the consequences of success and failure.

Success is usually the easier one. Failure is often a lot harder.

A number of the recent Dungeon adventures have unfortunately, in my opinion, really missed the mark here. A lot of their skill challenges end up being "Success: X happens. Failure: X happens anyway, but the PCs suffer some minor inconvenience."

This is related to a phenomenon I've noticed: skill challenges tend to occur earlier in an adventure rather than later. An adventure that ends with a skill challenge can be very tricky, due to the difficulties in having meaningful failure.

I'm not sure if your skill challenge is at the end of your adventure, but it seems like it must be close.

There's a close relationship between meaningful encounters and quests. I'm not sure what existing quests the PCs might have in your game, if any, but I'd start looking at them.

Not knowing anything else about your game, I might come up with something like this:

There's a town or village at the base of the volcano (isn't there always?) who probably told the PCs about the Volcano God in the first place. Full of mostly-helpful villagers and the occasional cultist. They're used to hearing the volcano grumble every once in a while.

It's now up to the PCs to rush down there and warn them of the huge cloud of poisonous volcanic gas rolling down towards them. The longer they take, the more people will die. This opens up a bit of the partial-success/partial-failure angle which I think improves skill challenges, too.

Some DMs feel the temptation, for various reasons, to keep this dire fate a secret from the players until it's too late. My suggestion is to tell them right up front what will happen if they don't reach the village in time.

In terms of physically staging the challenge, I'd be tempted to use a battlemap in a somewhat abstracted way. Basically just as a one-dimensional line. The PCs are moving forward, and behind them the poison gas is advancing. I think this would allow for some interesting dynamics between the faster PCs and the slower PCs.

Anyway, I hope all that helps a bit. Sounds like your players will enjoy it in any case.

...

You also asked about a Volcano God. Hmmm. I think I would take the 'one big monster that's mechanically comprised of smaller monsters' route.

The Volcano God has two legs which are Magma Claws (level 4 brutes) and two arms which are Magma Hurlers (level 4 artillery.)

Every part has its own initiative. Keep the legs, oh, within two or three squares of each other. The arms shoot balls of magma. The legs can be reached with melee attacks; the arms only suffer ranged attacks (and possibly melee Reach attacks, if your party has that sort of thing.)

When a leg is destroyed, replace it with one of the arms.

This encounter is 700 XP, which might be a little light for a boss fight. Add another Magma Claw as a 'body' if you need more; make the body Elite if you still need more.

This might be a little weird to pull off but I think it'd work well. Lots of anecdote-generating possibilities.



Cheers,
Roger

 

[Fallen Seraph]

People have posted lots of good stuff so just gonna post some more ideas (some repeats):

-Acrobatics: Avoiding steam geysers erupting around them, falling rocks, flying chunks of lava, not stepping on fragile lava tunnels, etc.

-Endurance: If they are beginning to falter and fail, have them make additional Endurance checks to continue to run effectively (if they fail add say a negative to their Athletics) because of the gas, smoke, heat, etc.

-Dungeoneering or Nature: If a player decides to use it, he can give future bonuses to things such as avoiding steam geysers or stepping on lava tunnels.

 

[Doctor Proctor]

Perception might be good for trying to see signs of the way they took in, or finding the way out. For example, a successful check might mean a PC sees more natural light down one route, or can feel the air rushing out one tunnel more than the other, which means that tunnel is a more direct route outside.

If someone fails something like an Athletics or Acrobatics check, you could say that they fall down. Give another PC a chance to make an Endurance check to help them up and carry them along for a bit until they can get going again. Not like a Fireman's Carry (over the shoulder) but like you see in movies where someone helps someone up and then drags them along for a bit to help them catch up. You could even treat this as a "save" roll to erase the failure of the Athletics/Acrobatics check.

Nature might help too because he uses to access knowledge of the lava tubes in a Volcano are formed, and thus perhaps gain insight into what kinds of tunnels they should be looking for to get out.

You could also involve Religion for the Clerics/Paladins by saying that they utter a quick prayer to their God for guidance, and it helps them pick the right path. Similar thing could work for Arcana, by saying that the Wizard uses some minor spell to help figure out a better path.

 

[JoeNotCharles]

The idea of part of the tunnel collapsing and forcing them to find an alternate route is definitely a good one.

For the volcano god, as these are level 3 characters you want the climactic encounter to be higher than level 3 - I'd say level 6 or 7. A young RED dragon is a level 7 solo that would be more appropriate for a volcano. Another option is to pick an elite brute (how about a level 7 Orc Bloodrager, or a level 6 Cave Bear or Blackscale Bruiser) and upgrade it to solo with the Scion of Flame template. The Bloodrager would work well if part of your plot was making sacrifices to the volcano god, so a connection with blood sacrifice has already been established; otherwise I'd go for the Bruiser since its abilities seem like good effects to retheme as giant rocky fists.