Tag Archives: 4E

Deeper Into Skill Challenges, Part Two

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, yesterday I talked about my thinking behind when and how to use skill challenges. Today, I’m going to post a few examples of skill challenges that I’ve used, or am planning to use, in my games.

Finding the Goblins

One of the first skill challenges I designed and ran was in the Storm Point game. The party had heard rumours of a band of goblins in the countryside stealing from farms. The goblins were said to have a map to a lost Arkhosian ruin that the party wanted. The party had to find the goblins and recover the map, incidentally stopping their predations on the rural folk.

Now, in previous editions, either the whole thing would have fallen on the shoulders of the ranger, who could try to track the goblins while everyone else sat around with their weapons ready and nothing to do. Or I could have laid out a map of the area and let the party wander around until they happened across the goblins. But I thought it would be a good way to use a skill challenge to get everyone involved.
I set the level at 1 (they were first-level characters) and complexity 2. To round out the experience to a full first-level encounter, I put together a squad of goblin minions and a hexer. Then I thought about the different ways the party could try to find the party, looking at the skills they had.
Perception was a good skill for tracking. Nature for understanding goblin behaviour and habits. History to know the area and the good hiding places. I wanted to add some social interaction, so I decided that they could talk to the farm folk in the area with Diplomacy, and use Streetwise to find out about a halfling crime boss that had some dealings with the goblins. This latter one opened up more social interaction – they could use Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate to get the information from him. I also assumed that my players would come up with interesting uses of skills that I hadn’t thought of. I like to encourage that; it’s more fun, and it increases the player buy-in to the adventure.
Now, it was vital that the party get the map, or else the adventure wouldn’t happen, so I set the DCs for most of the skill checks to 10, which is the moderate DC for levels 1 to 3. On the fly, based on the approach used, I shifted the base DCs up and down by a couple of points – If they were rude to the farmers when asking for information, I boosted the DC to 12, but if they spent some time helping with chores, I dropped it to 8. 
The fact that I needed them to get the map to move on to the next stage of the adventure also meant that failure in the skill challenge could not prevent them from finding the goblins. So, for failure, I decided that the goblins would be alerted to their coming and set a trap, with the hexer creating an illusion* of the goblins sitting around the fire while they were really hiding in the surrounding woods, ready to ambush the party when they attacked. If the party succeeded with no failures, the party would get the drop on the goblins and have a surprise round of their own. Success with one or two failures meant neither party had surprise.
In play, the party succeeded without any failures, and didn’t do anything really unexpected, so it worked pretty much as I had envisioned. Because it was one of the first skill challenges I created and ran, it was pretty bare-bones, without a lot of variety to it. Still, it fit the purpose I had intended, so it worked.
Descending the Rift
Later in that same adventure, I built a skill challenge to simulate the party climbing down through hundreds of feet of narrow chasm and caves. I did it this way rather than just mapping it out or reducing it to a single skill check. Mapping it out would have lengthened the dungeon crawl section of the adventure beyond what I wanted, and a single skill check wouldn’t add much interest or risk. Multiple skill checks would work, but if I’m having the party make multiple skill checks to accomplish something, I might as well turn it into a skill challenge, right?
Again, it was a level 1 challenge, to match the party level, and I made it a complexity 4 challenge to make it a larger section of the adventure. Appropriate skills I decided would be Dungeoneering, Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, and Endurance, with DCs of 10 – again, the moderate difficulty for the level. As I looked over the other skills, I couldn’t see much that would be applicable outside those five, but I’m always willing to be surprised by a good idea from my players, so I just decided that any other skills would be a DC of 15 – the difficult DC for that level.
I also decided to add an extra complication: this sort of journey would be physically taxing and exhausting, so every round (which duration I set at half an hour), each character had to make an Endurance check, on top of the skill check made to advance the skill challenge. A success meant things continued as normal, but failure meant the character lost a healing surge through minor damage, fatigue, etc. The DC started at 5, and increased by 2 every round.
Again, this was a sort of adventure bottleneck. The party had to get safely to the bottom of the rift to get to the next stage of the adventure, which means that they needed to get to the bottom whether they succeeded of failed. So, I decided that, for every failure rolled, they would run into some difficulty on the descent that they needed to deal with: a rockslide (the hazard from the DMG), an attack by a cavern choker, and an area of bad air that would sap a healing surge from each of them, in that order.
The party made it down, dealing with the rockslide and cavern choker, but it took significantly longer than I had expected. The fight with the choker broke things up a little, but the skill challenge still went on a bit longer than I personally found to be fun. Not enough variety, and with needing 10 successes, it took some time to run through. If I were doing it now, I would cut it back to about a complexity 2.
Navigating the Winter Maze
In my Post Tenebras Lux game, I decided that the Winter Barrow was surrounded by a mystical maze of ice, snow, and magic, that shifted and changed moment by moment. There were a couple of things they could do before venturing into the maze to make it easier on themselves, but they didn’t do those things, so they went in raw.
Level 3 challenge, complexity 5. I set the complexity that high because I wanted them to have to spend a certain amount of time in the maze, dealing with the cold (1d6+3 cold damage per round, the low normal damage expression for that level). I figured the primary skills would be Perception and Nature for navigating the maze, Arcana for dealing with the magical aspects of it, and Insight to spot the illusory parts. I also decided that each of those four skills needed at least one success for the skill challenge to succeed.
This was designed to be a difficult challenge – I set the DC for the skill checks at 12, midway between moderate and difficult for the level. Now, for the adventure to continue, the party had to reach the barrow, but it wasn’t a one-shot thing, like the two previous skill challenges I’ve described. I thought that making failure of the skill challenge equal death or something similar was pretty harsh – after all, they were in the maze taking cold damage every round, so they were already suffering just from the time put in. And, speaking of time, the longer it took them to navigate the maze, the less time they had to investigate the barrow, which would vanish with the setting of the moon. So, I figured that having a failed skill challenge deposit the party outside the maze, forcing them to retry the challenge and spend more time, was appropriate.
I also wanted to emphasize the danger of being in the maze, so I decided that a failed skill check by anyone would cost that person a healing surge, either from the mystical cold sapping their strength or from a magical or illusory danger that they run into.
Now, this challenge went more smoothly than the Descending the Rift challenge, because both me and my players were more familiar with skill challenges and working them into the game. The players were better at describing what their characters were doing, how they were using their skills to deal with the challenge. This is the most fun part of the rules for me, seeing how the players come up with interesting ways to deal with the difficulties.
The tension created by the risk of the challenge – the ongoing damage, the cost in healing surges, the time pressure – kept people more focused on what was going on, and thinking about ways to contribute. For a long skill challenge, it worked surprisingly well.
Find a Campsite
This is a challenge that my players generally trot out, rather than me calling for it. I run it pretty free-flow, with a level equal to the party level, and a complexity of 1, DC set at the moderate value for that level. They tend to use Nature, Perception, and sometimes History and Insight to find a spot that’s out of the way.
The goal is usually to find a safe site that’s fairly concealed, so I let the results of the challenge determine the difficulty of monsters to find it. They usually make a Nature or Stealth check afterwards to increase the concealment, so I give them +5 to that roll if they succeed with no failures, +2 if they succeed with one failure, +0 if they succeed with two failures, and -5 if they fail.
They like this challenge and the way it works, so it’s become SOP for them when they’re in the field. We’ve got the challenge down to the point where it takes about 3 minutes to run through the whole thing. It’s not terribly exciting, but it’s fast, and they like it, so I like it.
Gang War
This skill challenge is one that I designed, but never ran, because the game went off in a different direction. It was set up as a framework for an entire adventure, where the characters worked to take down a criminal network run by a halfling gangster.
I broke the entire thing into a series of small skill challenges, all of complexity 1, each challenge uncovering one piece of the network. I had a set number of businesses for the party to work their way up through to the big boss. Each challenge would take an amount of time based on the kinds of things the party tried – staking out a known criminal hangout watching for runners might take all night, while buying drinks and pumping people for information might only take a couple of hours. Main skills were Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, History, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidation, but I foresaw a number of other possibilities, like Endurance for a stakeout or History to know which areas the gangs traditionally controlled.
Each successful skill challenge would give the party a line on one of the gangster’s businesses. A failed skill challenge would either lead them into a trap or send a group of hitmen out against something the characters valued – family, favourite hangout, whatever.
A total of five successful skill challenges were needed to make it to the big boss fight. I may still use this structure for something else in the future.
So, there are a stack of different skill challenge ideas. Let me know what you think.
*Yeah, I know goblin hexers don’t have that power, but they can if I want them to.

Now, in previous editions, either the whole thing would have fallen on the shoulders of the ranger, who could try to track the goblins while everyone else sat around with their weapons ready and nothing to do. Or I could have laid out a map of the area and let the party wander around until they happened across the goblins. But I thought it would be a good way to use a skill challenge to get everyone involved.

I set the level at 1 (they were first-level characters) and complexity 2. To round out the experience to a full first-level encounter, I put together a squad of goblin minions and a hexer. Then I thought about the different ways the party could try to find the party, looking at the skills they had.

Perception was a good skill for tracking. Nature for understanding goblin behaviour and habits. History to know the area and the good hiding places. I wanted to add some social interaction, so I decided that they could talk to the farm folk in the area with Diplomacy, and use Streetwise to find out about a halfling crime boss that had some dealings with the goblins. This latter one opened up more social interaction – they could use Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate to get the information from him. I also assumed that my players would come up with interesting uses of skills that I hadn’t thought of. I like to encourage that; it’s more fun, and it increases the player buy-in to the adventure.

Now, it was vital that the party get the map, or else the adventure wouldn’t happen, so I set the DCs for most of the skill checks to 10, which is the moderate DC for levels 1 to 3. On the fly, based on the approach used, I shifted the base DCs up and down by a couple of points – If they were rude to the farmers when asking for information, I boosted the DC to 12, but if they spent some time helping with chores, I dropped it to 8. 

The fact that I needed them to get the map to move on to the next stage of the adventure also meant that failure in the skill challenge could not prevent them from finding the goblins. So, for failure, I decided that the goblins would be alerted to their coming and set a trap, with the hexer creating an illusion* of the goblins sitting around the fire while they were really hiding in the surrounding woods, ready to ambush the party when they attacked. If the party succeeded with no failures, the party would get the drop on the goblins and have a surprise round of their own. Success with one or two failures meant neither party had surprise.

In play, the party succeeded without any failures, and didn’t do anything really unexpected, so it worked pretty much as I had envisioned. Because it was one of the first skill challenges I created and ran, it was pretty bare-bones, without a lot of variety to it. Still, it fit the purpose I had intended, so it worked.

Descending the Rift

Later in that same adventure, I built a skill challenge to simulate the party climbing down through hundreds of feet of narrow chasm and caves. I did it this way rather than just mapping it out or reducing it to a single skill check. Mapping it out would have lengthened the dungeon crawl section of the adventure beyond what I wanted, and a single skill check wouldn’t add much interest or risk. Multiple skill checks would work, but if I’m having the party make multiple skill checks to accomplish something, I might as well turn it into a skill challenge, right?

Again, it was a level 1 challenge, to match the party level, and I made it a complexity 4 challenge to make it a larger section of the adventure. Appropriate skills I decided would be Dungeoneering, Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, and Endurance, with DCs of 10 – again, the moderate difficulty for the level. As I looked over the other skills, I couldn’t see much that would be applicable outside those five, but I’m always willing to be surprised by a good idea from my players, so I just decided that any other skills would be a DC of 15 – the difficult DC for that level.

I also decided to add an extra complication: this sort of journey would be physically taxing and exhausting, so every round (which duration I set at half an hour), each character had to make an Endurance check, on top of the skill check made to advance the skill challenge. A success meant things continued as normal, but failure meant the character lost a healing surge through minor damage, fatigue, etc. The DC started at 5, and increased by 2 every round.

Again, this was a sort of adventure bottleneck. The party had to get safely to the bottom of the rift to get to the next stage of the adventure, which means that they needed to get to the bottom whether they succeeded of failed. So, I decided that, for every failure rolled, they would run into some difficulty on the descent that they needed to deal with: a rockslide (the hazard from the DMG), an attack by a cavern choker, and an area of bad air that would sap a healing surge from each of them, in that order.

The party made it down, dealing with the rockslide and cavern choker, but it took significantly longer than I had expected. The fight with the choker broke things up a little, but the skill challenge still went on a bit longer than I personally found to be fun. Not enough variety, and with needing 10 successes, it took some time to run through. If I were doing it now, I would cut it back to about a complexity 2.

Navigating the Winter Maze

In my Post Tenebras Lux game, I decided that the Winter Barrow was surrounded by a mystical maze of ice, snow, and magic, that shifted and changed moment by moment. There were a couple of things they could do before venturing into the maze to make it easier on themselves, but they didn’t do those things, so they went in raw.

Level 3 challenge, complexity 5. I set the complexity that high because I wanted them to have to spend a certain amount of time in the maze, dealing with the cold (1d6+3 cold damage per round, the low normal damage expression for that level). I figured the primary skills would be Perception and Nature for navigating the maze, Arcana for dealing with the magical aspects of it, and Insight to spot the illusory parts. I also decided that each of those four skills needed at least one success for the skill challenge to succeed.

This was designed to be a difficult challenge – I set the DC for the skill checks at 12, midway between moderate and difficult for the level. Now, for the adventure to continue, the party had to reach the barrow, but it wasn’t a one-shot thing, like the two previous skill challenges I’ve described. I thought that making failure of the skill challenge equal death or something similar was pretty harsh – after all, they were in the maze taking cold damage every round, so they were already suffering just from the time put in. And, speaking of time, the longer it took them to navigate the maze, the less time they had to investigate the barrow, which would vanish with the setting of the moon. So, I figured that having a failed skill challenge deposit the party outside the maze, forcing them to retry the challenge and spend more time, was appropriate.

I also wanted to emphasize the danger of being in the maze, so I decided that a failed skill check by anyone would cost that person a healing surge, either from the mystical cold sapping their strength or from a magical or illusory danger that they run into.

Now, this challenge went more smoothly than the Descending the Rift challenge, because both me and my players were more familiar with skill challenges and working them into the game. The players were better at describing what their characters were doing, how they were using their skills to deal with the challenge. This is the most fun part of the rules for me, seeing how the players come up with interesting ways to deal with the difficulties.

The tension created by the risk of the challenge – the ongoing damage, the cost in healing surges, the time pressure – kept people more focused on what was going on, and thinking about ways to contribute. For a long skill challenge, it worked surprisingly well.

Find a Campsite

This is a challenge that my players generally trot out, rather than me calling for it. I run it pretty free-flow, with a level equal to the party level, and a complexity of 1, DC set at the moderate value for that level. They tend to use Nature, Perception, and sometimes History and Insight to find a spot that’s out of the way.

The goal is usually to find a safe site that’s fairly concealed, so I let the results of the challenge determine the difficulty of monsters to find it. They usually make a Nature or Stealth check afterwards to increase the concealment, so I give them +5 to that roll if they succeed with no failures, +2 if they succeed with one failure, +0 if they succeed with two failures, and -5 if they fail.

They like this challenge and the way it works, so it’s become SOP for them when they’re in the field. We’ve got the challenge down to the point where it takes about 3 minutes to run through the whole thing. It’s not terribly exciting, but it’s fast, and they like it, so I like it.

Gang War

This skill challenge is one that I designed, but never ran, because the game went off in a different direction. It was set up as a framework for an entire adventure, where the characters worked to take down a criminal network run by a halfling gangster.

I broke the entire thing into a series of small skill challenges, all of complexity 1, each challenge uncovering one piece of the network. I had a set number of businesses for the party to work their way up through to the big boss. Each challenge would take an amount of time based on the kinds of things the party tried – staking out a known criminal hangout watching for runners might take all night, while buying drinks and pumping people for information might only take a couple of hours. Main skills were Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, History, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidation, but I foresaw a number of other possibilities, like Endurance for a stakeout or History to know which areas the gangs traditionally controlled.

Each successful skill challenge would give the party a line on one of the gangster’s businesses. A failed skill challenge would either lead them into a trap or send a group of hitmen out against something the characters valued – family, favourite hangout, whatever.

A total of five successful skill challenges were needed to make it to the big boss fight. I may still use this structure for something else in the future.

 

So, there are a stack of different skill challenge ideas. Let me know what you think.

 

 

 

*Yeah, I know goblin hexers don’t have that power, but they can if I want them to.

Deeper Into Skill Challenges, Part One

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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A while back, I posted about skill challenges in D&D 4E. My thoughts at the time were that they were a good thing, but needed to be used appropriately. My opinion on that hasn’t changed, exactly, but it has evolved a fair bit, based both on Mike Mearls’s skill challenge articles in Dungeon (including the podcast he did about them), and my experience using them in play. Because of that, and because someone posted a comment asking for more about skill challenges, I’m going back to the well to talk about how I use them now, and what ideas I have for them.

When to Use Skill Challenges

First off, skill challenges represent people trying to do stuff over time. The timeframe may be a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, whatever. But if its something that takes very little time in the game world, I think its better to use a simple skill check rather than a full skill challenge.

I use skill challenges in fairly limited situations. Here’s my current list of when I use them:

  1. When players ask for them. Often times, my players will ask to do something as a skill challenge if they feel that it falls into one of the cases below, or if they feel that co-operation could overcome some inherent difficulty. So, rather than just say, “Hey, ranger. Find us a good campsite,” everyone will pitch in with Nature checks, Perception checks, History checks, or whatever else they think they can persuade me will be applicable. And I let them. Why? Because it fosters creativity in the players (“Hmmm. I suck at Stealth and Perception, so I’m going to use Athletics to help sneak through the woods by lifting fallen trees out of the way, then replacing them after we’ve gone through.”), it gets everyone involved, and it’s more interesting than just making the same sort of check for every character, every round.
  2. When success in an endeavour relies on a combination of different tactics. If succeeding at something requires the use of two or more skills for it to be believable, I might use a skill challenge. For example, finding the way through a magical maze of ice and snow might require Nature, Perception, and Arcana checks. Maybe even Insight, if part of the maze is illusory. I may set a minimum number of successes for the required skills for the challenge to succeed – maybe the party needs at least two Arcana successes and two Nature successes to succeed.
  3. When success in an endeavour could come about through a variety of different tactics. Sometimes, I can think of several ways that something could be accomplished. For example, chasing someone through a crowded city. When this comes up, I leave the how up to my players, and see what their creativity comes up with. So, using Athletics to run after the target, or Acrobatics to swing up to the rooftops, or Perception to keep track of the target, or History to know a shortcut, or… You get the idea. This lets the characters play to their strengths, stretch their creativity, and set the tone of the success – the conversation with the captured runner is going to go a lot differently if you tackled him in the street than if you persuaded him to stop by promising not to hurt him.
  4. When I want to create a montage feel in the game. Like the song says, “Even Rocky had a montage.” They can be a good way to gloss over hours or days of some fairly uninteresting task, while still letting the players put their own stamp on things. So, if the characters have two days to get a keep ready to defend against the advancing hordes, we don’t have to play through the whole two days. Set it up in eight-hour turns, say, and let everyone decide what they’re doing for that twelve hours. Some may drill the troops, some may reinforce the doors, some may dig trenches or lay booby traps, some may examine maps and plan strategy, whatever. Everyone again gets to play to their strength, you the game moves forward quickly, and what the characters do sets the tone of the following encounter. If the fighter spent sixteen hours a day training with the troops and the rogue spent sixteen hours a day digging pit traps in the approach, the fighter’s going to have a better chance at rallying the troops, even though the rogue may have a higher Diplomacy check.

Those are pretty broad categories, but they do impose some restrictions. For example, if the party comes up to a castle gate and wants to get in past the guard, I don’t turn it into a skill challenge using Bluff. Hell, I wouldn’t even let them use the Aid Another rules! Let’s face it – one character saying, “Let me in, because I am the Inspector General!” and everyone else nodding and going, “He really is!” does not sound like a viable way to convince the guards to let you past. If they’ve decided ahead of time that they’re going to use this tactic, then I might turn it into a skill challenge to build the cover identity, using Thievery to forge papers, Streetwise to bribe someone for information, Bluff to work up a disguise, whatever.

Basically, though, I don’t allow a skill challenge when the co-operation of the party would strain the credulity of success, is what I’m trying to say. I also don’t use one when the entire thing takes place in just a minute or two.

The other time I never use a skill challenge is when the result of it just doesn’t matter to the game. Here, I follow the advice from that great game, Dogs in the Vineyard: Say yes, or roll the dice. I just say yes. Want to see if you can seduce the barmaid? Yes, you can. Want to see if you amuse the peasants with your magic tricks? Yes, you do. No rolls involved, unless a player insists. Why? Because it’s a free way to give a player a bit of the spotlight, let them explore their character and have fun, without the potential for ruining the experience with a bad roll.

Success and Failure

So, if you succeed on a skill challenge, you get your objective, right? And when you fail, you don’t, right? Well, first off, the DMG recommends that, if a skill challenge fails, it shouldn’t end the adventure. Good advice, right there. If failing the skill challenge means failing the adventure, you should probably rethink it.

Also, given the fact that you’re accumulating successes and failures, it makes sense to me that the succeed/fail result be a continuum, rather than a binary state. What does that mean? Well, if you succeed, but rack up two failures, it shouldn’t be as complete a success as a success with no failures. In the same way, getting your third failure when you have all but one success shouldn’t be as bad as getting three failures right out of the gate.

I’ve implemented this idea in different ways in play. Sometimes, like in the “find the campsite” skill challenge that my Storm Point players love, I give them a bonus on remaining concealed based on the success vs. failure ratio. Sometimes, as in the “find the temple” skill challenge I ran in the same game, I impose a penalty for each failure – in this circumstance, every failure had them encounter a patrol of hostile humanoids.  And sometimes I just eyeball it and adjust on the fly – trying to find a goblin camp without alerting the goblins, I decide that no failures means the party gets a surprise round in combat, one or two failures means that there is no surprise round, and three failures (complete failure) means that the goblins have set a trap.

You may have noticed that I link everything to the failures, and nothing to the successes. This is because I already know what unmitigated success should look like (otherwise why have a skill challenge, right?), so I use the measure of the failures in order to temper the success.

Now, there’s a bit of a danger to this – it may prompt your players to resort to picking the character best suited for the challenge at hand, and then just using Aid Another to max out his chances. I haven’t had that come up, but I can see how it could. What do you do then? Well, my first instinct is to let them. I think that would make the skill challenge boring enough for them that they won’t do it too often. My second tactic would be to make them describe exactly how they’re helping – if it doesn’t make sense, they don’t get to aid. Combining the two should mitigate the problem.

But what about success? How to determine what success looks like? This is sort of glossed over in the DMG, and sort of assumed in most of the articles you read about skill challenges, but it may be the most important point to consider when designing one. What happens when the characters succeed?

I decide this by asking myself, “If nothing goes wrong in this situation, and everything goes right, what’s the best outcome that could reasonably come about based on the characters’ abilities?” The two key sections of that question are the “reasonably come about” and “based on the characters’ abilities.”

Let’s talk about the first point – reasonable. You don’t want to give away the shop. If you’re using a skill challenge to bargain with a merchant, it’s not reasonable to assume that he’s going to give you his stuff for free. So, let’s say you set a discount that they could reasonably hope to achieve – let’s call it 25%. More than that, and he won’t be able to feed his kids. See? Reasonable.

Now, let’s talk about basing the success on the characters’ abilities. If the characters are making their way through that magical maze of ice and snow I mentioned, they don’t get to cause the maze to vanish just because they made a good Arcana check – at least, not at heroic tier. Maybe at higher levels. But you can also colour the outcome based on the skills they used – relying on Arcana has them using mystical compass needles and runestones to pick the correct pathway, while relying on Nature has them watching the blowing paths of the snow to avoid invisible walls and crevasses, and relying on Athletics has them scaling the walls to follow a straight-line path to the goal.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my points here: success and failure can be used to make the skill challenge more interesting.

Level and Complexity

What level should the skill challenge be? How complex?

Well, as to level, I generally set all the skill challenges at the party’s level. The reason for this is simple: I can usually remember the target DCs for Easy, Moderate, and Difficult rolls for the party level, so I don’t need to look that up. It speeds things up in play, and lets me make impromptu skill challenges more often if I see the need.

If a skill challenge is meant to be an important, memorable event in the game, then I may set it a level or two higher, but this is rare – the DCs in the DMG are grouped by 3 levels: level 1-3, level 4-6, etc. That means that I may have to bump a challenge by up to 3 levels for it to make a difference to the DCs; easier just to shift to the Difficult category, or increase the DCs by one or two.

Complexity is a little trickier, appropriately enough. Most impromptu challenges I set at complexity 1, because I don’t want them to slow down play. In fact, I lean toward setting most skill challenges at lower complexities these days; it really distinguishes them more sharply from combats.

When I use more complex skill challenges, I try to instersperse the skill challenge rolls with other stuff: other encounters, role playing scenes, dealing with the consequences of failure, etc. This tends to make the whole thing a little less static and mechanical, adding variety and interest to the proceedings.

Samples

I was going to offer some samples of the skill challenges I use (or try to use), but I’ve already topped 2000 words, which is enough for one post. Tomorrow, I will post Part Two, where I will show you some of the challenges I’ve built, and talk about why I’ve done things the way I did with each of them.

Check back then.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Last night’s Storm Point game advanced things very little, for a few reasons. First, we got an even later start than our usual late start. Second, one player had to take off early because of an emergency. Third, the single combat encounter went on a loooooong time.

They had found their way to the old eladrin ruin that’s being used as a temple by the shadar-kai who have brought the local humanoid tribes together into an army.  The temple itself is a large villa-style manor, covered in ivy. All the plant life around the temple had died, with the life apparently drained out of it.

Not wanting to make a frontal assault on the building*, they snuck around to the back and found a less-used door. The lockpicks failed them, so they applied the dwarf to the problem, smashing the door in**. Inside was a fairly cramped hallway, and a number of wraiths that attacked***.

The fight was tough for the party, both because it was a couple levels above them and because of the environment. The close quarters meant the group was packed tightly together, and the insubstantial, phasing, shift-six-squares-as-a-move-action wraiths were able to dart around and attack out of walls and stuff. There were doors in the hallway, but the party didn’t want to open them, worried about drawing more monsters in to the fight****.

They won, but are now considering holing up some where for a long rest.

They also built themselves another skill challenge this game, with everyone pitching in to sneak around to the back of the temple, using things like Stealth (an obvious choice), Nature (to understand how to move in the environment and hide tracks), Perception (to follow game trails), and Athletics (to lift fallen trees out of the way). Again, I am happy that they’ve adopted this habit for themselves, and are using skill challenges when they want to accomplish things, not just when I drop one in the adventure.

Anyway. As I said, not much advancement of the plot, but some progress made.

*Which surprised me, let me tell you!

**Phew. I was getting worried that they had mellowed.

***2 mad wraiths, 4 wraiths, 1,300 xp, a level 6 encounter for 5 characters.

****”Don’t open the door! Who knows what’s on the other side?” “Well, a couple of wraiths, for certain…”

The Myth of Balance

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I’ve been doing some thinking about game balance lately. Here’s where I’m coming from.

I remember back when D&D 3E came out. As information was slowly released, there started to be a lot of message threads on discussion boards about how different classes or spells or other features were broken – either too powerful or not powerful enough. When the game was released, there followed a real rush of house rules designed to fix the broken piece.

Same thing happened with 4E. Same rush of complaints, same rush of house rules.

Anything wrong with that? Nope.

But the threads became more strident and angry as time went by, with people arguing passionately* either for or against the broken item. It’s still going on and, with all the new powers in 4E, I expect it to continue pretty much indefinitely.

The issue at the core of each of these discussions is game balance.

A large number of the threads about powers say will say that a given power is unbalanced, meaning (generally) too powerful**. The words game breaker and win buttons get tossed around. And you know what? It’s all a bit ridiculous to me.

In my experience, there are two aspects of balance to consider. One is the balance between characters. This one, I take seriously – if someone feels that they have been slighted by the GM compared to another person in the game, that creates bad feelings, and that can hurt the game. It doesn’t matter if the perception is true or not: if it perceived to be true, then you’ve gotta deal with it as if it were.

These balance issues can usually be dealt with with a little communication. Talk to people. Find out what’s what. If one character is doing a ton more damage than the others, get that player to show the others how he built the character. If someone has more stuff, slant the treasure in the direction of the others until things even out. And if the perception is just plain wrong, look at why someone believes it and address that.

The other type of balance is the balance between the players and the GM. This is entirely illusory – a shared fiction that allows the game to take place.

See, I’ve been a GM for a while, now, and I’ve discovered that I can kill the characters any time I want to. And not just by resorting to Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. Any time I want to, I can just change the numbers on a monster in combat to make it kill the party. I can bring in more monsters. I can pick a monster that’s already just too much for the party to handle.

There’s no balance. I have all the power.

There’s an inherent social contract in gaming, though, that says the GM won’t pull crap like that. The GM will give the party reasonable challenges that the party can overcome. That’s all it is, though: social convention. An agreement that the GM and the players will work together to make the game fun.

So, I have to shake my head when I see a thread complaining about how powerful a given piece of the game is, and how it destroys the balance. Especially when these complaints come from GMs.

Don’t you guys get it? You’re in charge! The characters can have all the toys they can carry, and all the best powers they can think up, and they’re still at your mercy! Have they picked up a power that creates a zone of healing? Keep them out of it, either by having monsters that can move enemies around, or by making the environment so cramped that the zone is mostly inside solid walls. Have they got a power that can kill a target every round? Swarm them with minions. See? And that’s just playing within the rules. If you start to fudge things, the possibilities are literally endless.

There’s another option, too – let it work. Let it be as beautiful and horrifying as you feared it would be. Let the players have the sense of accomplishment that comes from doing well in an encounter. Enjoy it with them.

And plan something tougher for next time.

What’s my answer when players in my games want to take a power that they think might be overpowered? I say, “Sure!” If it looks like it’s out of whack with the powers available to other characters, then I reserve the right to retroactively veto it, but I have never had to do that.

Never. Even with home-made stuff.

In short, balance is a myth in roleplaying games. Rules strive to create fairness, but they can’t cover everything, and they can’t force someone to follow them. Don’t worry so much about balance.

Worry about everyone – you and your players – having fun.

Everything else will take care of itself.

 

 

*And only sometimes literately.

**Very few complaints out there that a power is unbalanced because it’s not powerful enough – those powers just don’t get picked by the players. The complaint about lack of power is usually reserved for class features and other things that players don’t get to pick from a list.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Another Storm Point session this past Sunday. Almost a full house – Dan couldn’t make it, so Milo used the magical plot device we had set up last session to vanish into the Feywild.

This session saw the group make it to the temple in the Trembling Wood. They ran afoul of two patrols while trying to sneak up on the temple, but managed to dispatch them without raising the alert level of the temple inhabitants.

For the patrols, I used a mix of different humanoid creatures: a gnoll huntmaster, an orc berserker, two hobgoblin soldiers, and two dark creepers*. The reason for the mix was to show that the shadar-kai are indeed drawing together disparate tribes of humanoids and getting them to cooperate, which point my players picked up on very nicely.

The first encounter came as they were resting. The group has set up a standard procedure for finding a camping spot each night, running it as a skill challenge with each party member contributing from his expertise. The fact that the group actually asks for a skill challenge makes me think that the skill challenge rules are a good idea. I run it as a complexity 1 challenge of the party’s level, and award experience accordingly. I also use the results to give me an idea of how camouflaged and safe the site is.

Well, the gnoll huntmaster spotted them resting inside a partially-buried eladrin house in the middle of the night, and the fight was on. The party was going to (I think) use the natural choke point of the house’s doorway to control the fight (which may not have worked all that well), but one of them ran outside to fight, and that plan was done for. That turned the choke point to the patrol’s advantage, as the dark creepers tied folks up blocking the door and taking opportunity attacks at those trying to squeeze past.

Still, they managed to defeat the patrol in a flurry of very silly roleplaying**. Once the fight was done, they relocated their camp (another skill challenge) and holed up again.

The next day was spent trying to find the temple without alerting the temple. This was a longer skill challenge (complexity 3), and saw some creative use of skills, including using Bluff to lay false sign to divert the patrols. Unfortunately, they got two failures in the first four rolls, which triggered an ambush by a patrol.

I was a bit of a bastard setting this one up, placing the characters along a deep stream, surrounded by the orc, the hobgoblins, and the dark creepers. The gnoll was on a hill with good cover across the stream, and focused his attacks on enemies that were adjacent to multiple monsters, earning extra damage. The eladrin ranger fey stepped across the swift-running stream to fight the gnoll on his own, which created a kind of interesting side battle, while the rest of the party dealt with the melee combatants. There were some good moments, including a the dragonborn rogue stumbling blindly into the stream after a dark creeper blew up in his face.

We left the game with the party looking out on the overgrown eladrin villa, surrounded by blighted plants, that is being used as a temple by the shadar-kai in their army-building endeavours. Next session, they start their infiltration.

*1,025 xp, a level 5 encounter for 5 characters.

**Wherein it was determined that the only word in the dark creeper language is, “stabby.” Only pitch and intonation allow one to interpret meaning. Also, the hapless orc berserker’s name was Kevin.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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We had a full house for the Post Tenebras Lux game this past Friday night. All six players were able to make it. This is twice in a row, and I’m starting to feel a little spoiled.

Things picked up in the dining hall of the barrow, just after the ghoul fight from last session. As people started taking stock of how their characters were doing and how their resources were holding out, and looking at the time limit they had in the barrow (it disappears when the moon sets, and they weren’t sure where it goes), I decided that they were pretty depleted. Now, I had three encounters left to run – one of which they had bypassed by choosing the path inside the barrow that they had, and one of which was in a secret room. The bypassed one was a level 3 encounter, and the secret room encounter was level 4. They might have been able to handle both encounters, but it would have been tight.

The real catch was the set-piece encounter, which was to take place in the ruined throne room*, was with two harpies and three shadow hounds**. I wasn’t sure they would be able to handle both it and one of the other encounters. To advance the story goals, they had to see the stuff in the throne room, and I really wanted to try out that battle.

So, what I decided to do was lead them to the throne room and that climactic battle, then have the barrow start to collapse, in true action-movie purity, while they race out. If they decided to run out the way they came, fine. But if they went out the other way, they were going to have to face the level 3 encounter they had bypassed***.

Well, the fight in the throne room was pretty nasty. The avenger managed to kill a shadow hound on his first turn, thanks to two criticals, a nice application of power, and the right magic item. I started to fear that the encounter was going to be too easy.

Then the harpies started up.

One would use alluring song to pull the characters into the middle of the room, and the other would use deadly screech to damage and daze them. This worked amazingly well, though it was a little hard on the shadow hounds, who were not immune to these powers. In fact, the harpies managed to deal the death blows to two of the three hounds. And, of course, the harpies stayed airborne so as to deny melee attacks.

There was some interesting acrobatics, some real frustration with the teleporting shadow hounds, and a number of total desperation moves, but the party succeeded. I think one or two of the characters were out of healing surges by this time.

After the battle, they took a look around the throne room, and found, beneath a pillar that had collapsed onto one of the thrones, the mummified body of either a shifter or a lycanthrope in rich, rotted garb, nailed to the stone throne by a large black iron spike through his chest. The spike was marked with the symbol of the Chained God that they had also seen as a mosaic on the floor of a room in the ruins of Rivenroar****, and seemed to be pinning the man’s spirit to the place, as well as his body. And his spirit had decayed as badly has his body.

They tried to pull the spike out, but failed (and the paladin lost a healing surge to its the dark magic), so they resorted to attacking the spike with a sunblade, which sheared it right in half. Of course, this is when the mound began to collapse*****, and they had to flee.

I ran the escape as a series of skill checks, with Athletics checks to stay ahead of the collapse and Endurance checks to keep running in the uphill spiral. Failures of the Athletics checks had those characters falling behind, while failures of the Endurance checks cost healing surges. This added a little dramatic tension to the scene, rather than just having me describe the escape, and I think it worked well. In future, I think I would borrow an idea from the skill challenge rules, and let players make a case for using some other skills to assist, but I came up with this on the fly, so I didn’t think of it in time.

Anyway, they made it back to Witchcross, received the thanks of the Eth Speaker for cleansing the site of the corruption that had claimed it, and started making plans to head down to the Thornwaste, where they have heard that the nomad tribes are getting restless, and lights have been seen in the Lion Tower of the Ghostlord. But I think they’re going to stay in Brindol for a week or so, to take advantage of the market fair coming up.

All in all, a nice conclusion to the adventure, and a solid starting point for the next one.

 

 

*I’ve been calling this a barrow, but really it’s a howe, in that it was a mounded dwelling, not a mounded grave. For those of you who like picking nits.

**1,250 xp, a level 5 encounter for 6 characters.

***Four phantom warriors and a spectre, 875 xp. Considering the devastating effect a party with a cleric, a paladin, and an avenger have on undead, I thought it was pretty good odds for them.

****And this debuted my ongoing storyline.

*****Apparently, it was a load-bearing cursed item.

World Wide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day – Monster Manual 2 – Postmortem

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Saturday, I ran the World Wide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day adventure Into the Silver Caves at Imagine Games here in Winnipeg as part of the launch for the Monster Manual 2. We had a really nice turnout – I had two full tables of five players each to run. Unfortunately, because of some delays, neither group made it all the way through the adventure.

That said, each group made it through the first two encounters, which means they got to fight the rust monsters* and deal with the escaping kobold wyrmpriest**. We didn’t get to do the extended skill challenge that made up the third encounter, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that***. The final battle, while it looked interesting, didn’t really introduce all that much new stuff, so I’m fine with having missed it.

Despite the delays and the unfinished adventures, each group got in about two-and-a-quarter to two-and-a-half hours of play, which is not too shabby. And everyone seemed to have fun. And one player even managed to find a very lucky d20 in the communal pile we were using, which he bought immediately after the game.

So, thanks to everyone who came out to play with me. I hope you had as much fun as I did. And it was nice to meet a couple of folks who read the blog.

Next World Wide Game Day looks to be in September. Get ready.

 

 

*Wow, the fear these instill, not in the characters, but in the players! “It’s gonna eat my stuff!”

**The second group managed to bring her down, but it was just one character facing the harpy while the others were tied up with orcs and drakes, so he let the harpy escape with the book. What the hell am I talking about? Well, obviously you haven’t played the adventure.

***After using them extensively in play, I am shying away from the formalized skill challenges, and leaning more toward using a more free-form structure for them. That said, it’s nice to see something like that make it into an official demo adventure.

Monster Manual 2 and World Wide Game Day

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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First, a quick update about the World Wide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day this Saturday, May 23, at Imagine Games. As mentioned previously, we were too late to get the official support package for the day. However, we were able to get the adventure and maps needed to run the game, and I’ve got just about all the correct official minis, as well. What we don’t have are the official giveaways, so we’ll be making do with some unofficial ones.

If you’re in Winnipeg, and want to come play with some of the new monsters, we start at 12:30 pm at the store. If there’s enough interest, there will be a second session at 3:30 pm. If not, then not.

I look forward to seeing folks there.

And now, about the Monster Manual 2.

It’s a good book. It’s got some very nice additions to the monsters, along with some that I think they could have skipped. Of course, with a monster book like this, that’s always going to be the case, and my idea of a good inclusion is probably someone else’s idea of a waste of space.

A couple of specific thoughts:

  • Rust monsters. I hate ’em. Always have, always will. Yet, according to the official WotC site, they are fan favourites*. This incarnation is a little more lenient on character gear, but still are really just a “screw you” monster. There is a nice little catch to them, though, that might actually go some way towards addressing some of the magic item economy imbalances** – if you let a rust monster eat a magic item and then kill it and cut it open, you can reclaim the full value of that item in residuum. So now I envision places in Sigil and the City of Brass where you can take an unwanted magic item and have them feed it to a rust monster for you, kill the rust monster, and give you back full value, less the cost of the rust monster and a commission.
  • Demons and devils. These are always popular categories, and every monster book seems to have a heaping helping of new flavours. Sure, they’re useful monsters to throw at parties that are in areas that have few options for other creatures***, but that’s something that can be ameliorated by spending fewer pages on demons and devils and more pages on other monsters. I think we could do with less.
  • Angels and archons and elementals. We’ve got a solid base of these, now, which was needed. Let’s not fall into the same trap as with the demons and devils.
  • Metallic dragons. Welcome back, fellas! And my, aren’t you all bad-ass now?
  • Humans and Eladrin. More stat blocks for variations of both. Very welcome.
  • Half-Elves and Devas and Goliaths and Half-Orcs. Nice to have a few stat blocks for them.
  • Elves and Dwarves and Tieflings and Dragonborn and Halflings. Nothing new. I am sad.
  • Gnomes. I don’t like gnomes. Though my players hate them more than I do, so I still use them sometimes.
  • Formorians. Yay! I like these!
  • Firbolgs. Interesting take on them. I like it.
  • Beholders and Mind Flayers. Four new types of beholder, nothing new for the mindflayer. Huh.
  • Barghests. This version is very nice.
  • Gnolls. The new flavours make me happy.
  • Shadar-kai. Now extending up into the mid-Paragon tier.
  • Myconids. Now at least they don’t look like they should be dancing in a Disney movie.

Those are the things that really stand out to me. Anyway, as I said, a good book. Wizards is really keeping the production values high, and turning out some solid material for 4E.

I am pleased.

 

*What is wrong with people?
**Reclaiming residuum from a magic item through the disenchant ritual nets you 20% of the market value of the item in residuum. Enchanting a magic item costs 100% of the market value in residuum (or other components). Thus, it takes recycling five of an item to get enough materials to create an identical item. Also, selling magic items nets you 20% of the market value. So the question becomes, who makes such items, and how can they afford to sell them?
***”All the desert monsters suck. I’m just gonna throw a couple vrocks at the party.”

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Last time, I talked a little bit about the adjustments I was making because of a player on extended hiatus. Well, just to prove that I shouldn’t bother trying to plan things, he came back this session. I met with him before the game to talk about how we should handle it and we came up with the following story:

His character, a young human swordmage, has managed to gain an apprenticeship with an ancient and powerful eladrin swordmage. Training takes place at the eladrin’s sanctum in the Feywild. This master swordsman is very demanding and somewhat whimsical, and only allows his student leave at certain random times, and is prone to summon him back very abruptly. So, this allows the swordmage to pop in for a session through the magic of his mentor, and then get popped back just as suddenly, which allows for the character t come into play only when the player is there to play him.

Yeah, it’s kind of cheesy, but it addresses my primary concerns about the situation, namely that there is an in-game believable reason for the character to come and go session by session, mitigating somewhat the burden of multiple characters being played by one player.

It does create a bit of a situation in the encounters – do I build them for five characters, or for six? Do I adjust them when the sixth player shows up? I decided that, from now on, I’m going to build them for five characters (at least until we get six characters on a regular basis), and not adjust them if the extra character shows. Adding him in will make the fight easier, and will reduce the individual experience point awards. So, that means that when he shows up, the encounters are easier, which makes his contribution to the group a little more meaningful.

And I’m giving all characters the same experience point awards, whether they are in the session or not, so that he won’t fall so far behind as to be useless to the group.

The game itself was a little… let’s say scattered. It had been a while since most of us had seen our prodigal player, so a lot of the time was spent socializing and catching up. Also ordering and consuming food. I had expected the group to make it to the temple and begin scouting it this session, but no go. I realized fairly early on in the session that it just wasn’t going to happen, so I tried to drop some hints about the increased freqency of humanoid tracks in the area, and the fact that there were more than one type of humanoid group stomping around. This gave them some more information about the shadar-kai and their plot to organize the local humanoid groups into an army.

And then I threw a couple of fights at them.

I tossed a party of orcs at them on the plains, and ambushed them with gnolls and hyenas in the forest. The orcs were tough to put down, but not all that exciting in the fight. The gnolls and hyenas were a lot more fun for me, with their powers focused on swarming a single target and putting it down. I managed to give a couple of the characters some bad moments with those, and only the fighter’s Tide of Iron and the warlord’s Wolf Pack Tactics managed to control the positioning to give some relief to the targets.

And that was about it for the game. They managed to make it into the Trembling Wood near the temple, so that’s where we start next time.

And I’ve got some interesting things set up at the temple.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the first Post Tenebras Lux game with full attendance since the big changeover in players.

We picked up just after the battle with the stirges and the vine horror, and the group quickly found its way to the stone circle and barrow they were seeking*. What they found was a meadow about half a mile wide with a tall mound in the middle, surrounded by a ring of thirteen standing stones. Inside the ring of stones, it was winter, rather than the late summer it was outside. Not only was it winter, it was a nasty, blizzardy winter.

They walked the circumference of the circle, then tried to find a pathway leading in to the barrow. Crossing the perimeter of the stone circle inflicted cold damage on them. They had previously bought cold weather gear and potions of cold resistance, and used both at this point. I was a little surprised that they didn’t investigate the standing stones at all – I had set it up so that the stones could be manipulated (or destroyed) to turn off the killing cold. The normal cold would still have been there, but not the cold damage.

So, into the blizzard within the circle. This was the maze of ice and snow that they had been warned about back in Witchwood – I set it up as a skill challenge to find their way through the disorienting snow and ice fog, around the shifting walls of ice, and avoiding the illusionary creatures and traps within the maze. The turns were set up to be five minutes each, with one check per person per turn, and everyone also needing to make an Endurance check each turn to avoid losing a healing surge. Also, each turn inflicted 1d6+3 cold damage. The potions ameliorated some of the damage each turn**, and the cold weather gear granted a bonus to the Endurance check.

They made it to the barrow in two turns, with a couple of people losing healing surges along the way. I expected them to take another two turns or so to open the large stone doors of the barrow, which would have meant that the potions would have worn off, but the tiefling rogue pulled off an amazing Strength check to heave the slabs open.

The room inside was a trap fest. I used the elite ice sheet hazard, the elite version of the crossbow turret trap, and the whirling blades trap, all from the DMG***. The ice sheet was a frozen stream running across the battlefield, and the room was studded with timbers holding up the ceiling and, incidentally, offering cover to the crossbows.

Of course, this meant they also offered cover from the crossbows, but I hadn’t thought of that. Oh, well. Can’t complain if the characters use my own tricks against me.

The restricted mobility created by the ice sheet and the timbers slowed this encounter down a little, as did the widespread placement of the crossbow turrets in the four corners of the large room. Still, they soldiered through pretty well, though the large amount of damage dished out by the whirling blades scared them pretty badly.

Now they were in to the dungeon crawling portion of the evening. Having been very frustrated with the way dungeon crawls worked in Rescue at Rivenroar and the Age of Worms Adventure Path, I’ve been using a more abstract system of doing them. I flowchart a number of encounter areas – five in this case, of which I expect them to work through three or four – and make up description for the rest. For example, the first dungeon room had two ways out. They chose one path, which led them to the feast hall and the next encounter. But it didn’t lead them directly there; instead, I described how the path spiraled and descended, moving through warrens of work rooms and storage rooms, all full of rotted or destroyed furnishings and goods. They searched the area and rolled well, so I let them find a treasure package I had prepared: a carved ivory flute in the remains of a workroom, and a potion of healing in the ruins of an alchemical lab. The path led them on to the kitchen, where they made some good perception checks and heard the ghouls on the far side of the door.

That was the feast hall, and I’d set up what looked to be a pretty good fight****, with a large, U-shaped rotting banquet table taking up part of the room and a burning coal fire pit taking up another good chunk. But all the creatures were undead, and the party had a paladin of Pelor, a cleric of Pelor, and an avenger. Plus a sorcerer with the Lightning Breath power to set up a nasty sustained zone, and a rogue and a ranger that just usually do a lot of damage.

The fight was pretty quick, and the party was never really in any danger, despite the incredible leaps of the ghouls***** and the charges of the famine hounds.

That’s where we left it, with them about half-way through the dungeon, racing the setting of the moon, and starting to get concerned about their healing surges and daily powers. The last half of the dungeon should be an interesting challenge.

There wasn’t much in the way of NPC interaction, what with no actual NPCs showing up, but the mood and the play style from the previous session seems to be carrying over. The players seem to be having fun, and the game looks like it’s turning out to be the kind of game I like to run.

That makes me happy. 

 

 

*Good rolls on the skill challenge.

**According to the Adventurer’s Vault, the resist potions produced effects that lasted until the end of the encounter. I wanted to put a little more of a time limit on that, so I ruled that they would last fifteen minutes – three turns of the skill challenge.

***900 xp – a level 3 encounter for 6 characters.

**** 2 ghouls and 4 famine hounds, 900 xp, another level 3 encounter for 6 characters.

*****I swapped the trained Stealth skill that the ghouls come standard with (and that I didn’t want to use in this situation) with the trained Athletics skill, giving the ghouls a +9 skill check which let them jump over most of the dangerous or inconvenient terrain. Their first turn, one of them leaped over the fire and the table to land right in the middle of the party. It made me grin.