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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MichaelSomething" data-source="post: 4526843" data-attributes="member: 51168">Forked from: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showpost.php?postid=4525348" target="_blank">When did I stop being WotC's target audience? </a>  From post 625 on, this very long topic has gotten into poetry. This leads me to ask the following question:  Suppose your adventuring party came into a situation like this...  Beating the Giant in poetry would lead to a good result, like allowing you to past to the next room. Losing would lead to a bad result, like getting kicked out. My question is which edition would you want to do this in? If your doing this in 4th Edition, two words will come to mind: skill challenge. A skill challenge would be a great way to resolve this and many other things. However, there are also flaws to this. For one, the skill challenge system can be considered to have problems. Past threads have examined this at length. The other thing would be which skills to use? With the way skills have been condensed in 4th Edition, it appears that Diplomacy is the skill that you would roll for performing. It works but it just doesn't jive (that's a word I never imagine I use) very well with me.  For 3rd Edition, it's as simple as opposed Perform (Oratory) rolls! The monster, being a Drama Giant, would have 10 to 15 hit dice since all giants have hit dice in that range. You would also have to include a charisma bonus between 1 and 4. If it were to max out the skill, it could have as high as a +22 to its check! That's an extreme case of course. More likely it would be around a +11. Barring lucky rolls, what PC could match that? A few characters may go "And you all laughed at me for maxing out Perform (poetry)!" but I think they may be the exception. How many characters do you know that have that skill maxed out?  I never played 1st, 2nd, or any other of the older systems. However, thanks to lurking around here I'm willing to take a guess how this would play out. There's only one way to do this old school: Have the players recite poetry then and there. Depending on the players, they may either proclaim, "This is the best encounter ever!" or they may stare coldly into your eyes with a sense of WTF! This depends on if the DM can guess if the players would enjoy such a thing. If he thinks yes when he's wrong then that may lead to problems.  Of course, what edition your using isn't the only factor affecting if the game can be fun or not. A good DM will allow other ways to bypass the Drama Giant. For example, and adventurer may have a Poetry Journal "liberated" from one of the other giants. The poetry in it may be soo bad, it may cause the Drama Giant to jump out of the window (with a flourish) and into the moat to escape.  Or you could just kill it and take its stuff <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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