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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7337532" data-attributes="member: 29398">The adventure might in fact have no function in the overall story arc at all, but instead just be a side quest or even a red herring.  Doesn't mean playing it through will be any less fun in the here and now.The Tibet scene in Indiana Jones was obviously important enough to that story that they bothered filming it and having the actors play it all through rather than just have a character relate it as exposition at some point.So for a similar scene in a D&D game, I'd say play it through in detail.  Don't just reduce it to a skill challenge, as that kinda cheapens the whole thing.  Play out the combat, play out the role-play, play out the exploration (though in that particular scene there really isn't much) - in short, take the time!I don't think this is your intention, but when you describe this it comes across as though you just want to blast through the campaign and get on to the next one.When pemerton describes a skill challenge from one of his games he makes it sound very complex and involved and time-consuming, but my reading of the 4e DMG along with some adventure modules gives me the impression that a skill challenge would normally be pretty fast at the table - a goal is set, the players state how they're approaching it and what they're doing, the dice are rolled (and then adjusted or rerolled based on how the players make use of the mechanical benefits of their PCs), and the DM tells them how they did.  If you're saying you could boil the main action of a whole adventure down to several skill challenges that also means you could easily do the whole adventure in one session; though likely skipping over a huge amount of interesting detail in the process.Quite the opposite to my stance, which is that if I can take something relatively trivial such as finding a map or crossing a desert and make a decent playable adventure out of it, I will.So - the ongoing story has somehow determined there's a map needs finding in a mansion?  OK, that mansion's about to become a full adventure site; and out comes Tegal Manor... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />In other words I'm looking for interesting and fun ways to keep the campaign going longer, not to make it shorter.Lanefan</blockquote>

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