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Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Finally got together for another Storm Point session this past Sunday.

We’d left the previous session with everyone somewhat beat up from the wraiths, and they spent the first part of the session trying to decide if they should try and find a place inside the villa to hole up for an extended rest, or to retreat and find someplace in the forest to camp for an extended rest. No one thought they should push on, which was interesting to me – obviously, they felt that they’d taken some serious hurt. Listening to them discuss it, it seemed to me that the issue was less about how injured they were, and more about the fact that they had pretty much all used up their daily powers*.

If they had retreated and hidden in the forest, I was planning to let them use one of the skill checks mentioned in previous reports to find a concealed camp site. However, upon return, the forces in the villa would have been reinforced.

And there was no way in hell I was going to let them find a safe spot inside the villa to rest.

They decided on a fairly subtle plan*: rather than go wandering the halls, looking for someplace to rest, they pried loose a couple of planks in the ceiling and climbed up into the room above, which was an abandoned indoor garden, with dead plants in pots and planters everywhere. It was sparsely visited, judging by the signs on the floor, and the door was swollen and stuck, but it showed some signs of being opened in the not too distant past.

This is where they decided to camp.

I figured that the shadar-kai and their minions were searching the building after the noise of the battle, so I rolled a d6 to see when they would happen on this room, multiplying the result by 30 minutes. So, an hour and a half into the rest, an ogre kicked down the door.

The fight did not go the way I expected.

See, I wanted to simulate hordes of humanoids, backed by a pair of shadar-kai. My plan was to have a base bunch of monsters* attack and, every time a minion was slain, another would join the fight the next round. This replenishment would stop once the two shadar-kai were killed.

So, what went wrong? Well, one thing was that I let the players level up between the last game and this one. That let the fighter take the power rain of steel, which is one of the better mook erasers in the game. In general, though, the minions just weren’t enough of a threat to the party. They didn’t hit often enough, or do enough damage when they hit, to really be much of a factor in the combat, especially after the swordmage’s opening round of multiple area of effect attacks.

Also, I  made a mistake in trying to get the shadar-kai into the fight. They shadow jaunted into the room, past the dwarf fighter corking the door, to attack from behind. This left them the main focus of all the other characters in the room, and they got spanked in about three rounds.

In that time, I got another wave of pretty much every group of minions – and two waves of the ogre – and had the orcs bash holes through the lath and plaster walls to let the rest of the minions into the room. It was too little, too late, though, and the fight just wasn’t as tough as I’d planned it to be. Something I’m going to have to keep in mind with using minions in the future*.

Anyway.

Afterwards, they smashed the altar to Vecna in the main court, cleaned off the blood that had been used to mark the place with his holy symbol, and searched the villa. They found a teleportation circle, whose symbols they have noted down, and a chest of money and magic items sent by Tolvas Shadowborn to aid in an assault against Storm Point.

Hopefully, they’ll be able to do something about that.

*This is something I’ve noticed more and more in 4E. Resource managment is spread among all the characters, where in previous editions it was primarily the concern of spellcasters. Now, characters can keep on going if they’ve used up their big daily powers, but they start to try and assess what sorts of challenges lie ahead, and figure out if they need to refresh that particular resource. Healing surges are almost a secondary concern, at least in the groups I’ve run. Back

*At least, by their standards. Back

*A shadar-kai witch, a shadar-kai warrior, eight goblin cutters, eight hobgoblin grunts, five orc drudges, and an ogre thug – 1,524 xp; a level 6 encounter for 6 characters. Back

*WotC has noticed that the minions just weren’t as much of a viable threat as they might have planned. The minions in the MM2 now have roles and a little more in the way of effective powers. Back

Groundwork – The Phoenix Covenant

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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For those who are interested, I’ve finished the preliminary wiki for The Phoenix Covenant on Obsidian Portal.

Now, I’m in an interesting position, game-prep-wise. I’ve got the world pretty much designed, but the design is not current with the game – it is 500 years out of date. This was deliberate: with the village of Covenant being sealed off from the outside world, all they have is information on what the world was like when they closed the Phoenix Gate. Nothing on how it has changed.

Of course, that means that I don’t know how it’s changed, yet, either.

That’s okay, though; I don’t need details on all the changes just yet. I don’t have to worry too much about whether the Imperial City still exists, or if there’s a smoking crater where it once was. It’s going to take some time before my two intrepid explorers make it that far south. What I need to know right now is what changes have occurred around Covenant and Stayyin Keep. In short, I need the first adventure.

Way back a long time ago, Ray Winninger wrote some brilliant articles on building a D&D campaign. They were published in Dragon Magazine as the Dungeoncraft column*. A couple of pieces of advice from those columns – things he referred to as the Rules of Dungeoncraft – have stuck with me over the years, and I’m going to try adhering to them as much as I can.

The first one is the advice to not create more than you need to. Stay focused on the things that the characters are going to interact with at this point in their adventuring careers. So, for starting out, give them simple things: a home base, some wilderness to explore, and one or two adventure sites.

Now, the fact that I have created the wiki detailing the entire Empire may seem to violate that rule. I felt I needed the high-level coverage, given the campaign premise. If you look through the wiki articles, you’ll see that most things get only a few sentences. The details are saved for the history of the Empire (i.e. “Why are we locked underground?”) and the village of Covenant (i.e. “So, what’s it like where we grew up?”). The rest is pretty sparse.

The other piece of advice I’m trying to stick to from Ray’s column is the suggestion that, whenever I create something important about the campaign – a place, an NPC, an organization, a religion – I create at least one secret about it. You write these down on index cards. When you build an adventure, pick a card from the stack, and drop a little clue to that secret into the adventure. I did this in the Broken Chains campaign to great success, even seeding some of the clues into the campaign newspaper for the characters to follow up on. It creates a great way for the players to pick and choose which things they care about, and provides direction for the game.

Which brings me to where I’m at right now.

To get the game ready to play, I need to flesh out the area around Covenant and Stayyin Keep, both detailing the region and creating the secrets deck. In doing this, there are certain design goals I need to keep in mind:

  • I’m planning on opening up the game to more people, playing successive groups leaving Covenant to help restore civilization to the world. The initial area has to be able to support multiple groups doing different things.
  • I want more of a sandbox feel to the game than in previous campaigns I’ve run, with the players free to explore where they want and set their own priorities and agendas.
  • I want different types of encounters in the game – some combat, some skill challenge, some roleplaying, some combinations.
  • I want things to be dynamic, with changes based on the characters’ actions.
  • I want meaningful choices for the players, so that their decisions determine the encounters and situations they come across, rather than just which order they fight the monsters in.
  • I want to maintain the mix of post-apocalyptic feel with the general D&D fantasy milieu.

So, given those goals, I have some basic idea about what the area is going to contain:

  • Lots of choices, with different areas and things to find.
  • Ruins, some inhabited, some not. Also, other signs of an epic magical war leaving scars on the world.
  • Different groups in the area with different agendas that the characters can interact with in different ways.
  • Some nasty-bad mutant monsters*.

And this brings me to my next steps in getting the game ready:

  1. Create a player map of the area circa IY 897. This is what the players will have to guide their initial explorations.
  2. Create a GM map of the same area showing what’s changed in 500 years, and marking out all the various sites and encounter areas.
  3. Deciding what the current situation at Stayyin Keep is.
  4. Deciding how much of a dungeon crawl I want the initial departure from Covenant to be*.
  5. Mapping out the dungeon crawl (probably in flow-chart form rather than a traditional map) and setting the encounters in it.
  6. Doing up the monster stats and treasure package distribution.

Now, steps 1 and 2 are probably going to take the longest. Really, I need to make sure that I have step 1 done, then work on steps 2 and 3 while concentrating on steps 4, 5, and 6, which are going to see the most immediate play.

And that’s what I’m working on for the game right now.

 

 

*The articles are available here. I hasten to add that I have no idea about the copyright status of the articles, or the legality of them appearing on this site. I have my own copies. Back

*Okay, so this one isn’t a product of my explicitly stated design goals. But this is a D&D game, where there should be nasty-bad monsters, and it is a post-apocalyptic game, where there should be mutants. So… Back

*I know I want it to be a bit of a dungeon crawl, for a few reasons. First, it hearkens back to the first Fallout game, where you have to make your way through a cave full of rats when you first leave the vault. Second, it gives me a chance to start showing some of the changes in the world brought on by the war. And third, it allows me to stick in another jumping-off point for other exploration of deeper caverns and maybe even the Underdark. Back

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the latest session of the Post Tenebras Lux campaign*. Only four of the six players were able to show, so I decided not to advance the plot too much, and to keep things centred around Brindol. At the same time, I didn’t want to spend the whole session shopping, with the players looking through books and counting out their pennies to see what magic items they could afford and chatting amiably to random insignificant NPCs.

As a solution, I told the players that they could do their shopping via e-mail after this session, and that I would make sure they had all the information they needed to do so*.  I also encouraged them to do some research to see what they could find out about the Ghostlord and the Thornwaste, which is their next objective in the game. And, of course, I had a few encounters on hand to spice things up.

So, the party spent a little while scouting out the market fair, buying some ale and tankards, sending letters home, and doing some research. On the research side of things, I had about a page and a half of information about the Ghostlord, with DCs on getting it going up to the mid-twenties. They managed to get it all in the minimum number of rolls that it could have taken, because they were rolling hot.

They took a little time to talk and think about the information, and then they started looking a little antsy, like they wanted to hit the road. I didn’t want them running off from Brindol on the mission just yet, so I pulled a bandit encounter out of my notes, and an encounter with a group of priests of Ioun coming to view the ruins of the recently cleared Rivenroar Castle, and decided that the priests were ambushed by the bandits on the road. One guard escaped and carried word to Brindol, and the temple of Ioun asked the party to help*. 

Now, when I run something off the cuff like this, I tend to like to be pretty vague about the setup, and let the players show me what they want through the choices they make. So, when they asked where this had happened, I told them it was a couple of hours outside of town. When they asked if they could borrow horses from the temple, I said sure. Then, when they asked how they could sneak up on the site and scope it out, I said, “Skill challenge.”

I set the DC of the skill checks at 12, and didn’t limit their skill choices in any way. I told them to tell me what they were doing with each turn, and then, if I liked the idea, I dropped the DC by 2. If the idea was boring or a repeat, I boosted the DC by 2*. Based on what they did, I decided that they found the site, found evidence of elven archers, a shallow grave holding most of the guards, and a trail leading to an abandoned farmhouse in the wooded hills near the road.

They continued on with the skill challenge, using it to get the drop on the bandit hideout. That meant that I mapped out the area on the battlemap, and told them to place themselves wherever they wanted, as long as they weren’t in line of sight of one of the enemies* they could see.

It was kind of late when we got to the combat, and it ran kind of long, but it was a fun fight. The party almost had everything their own way, but they got a couple of surprises, as well, from the hidden bandits. Everyone got to do something interesting, and the fight ranged over most of the map – even off it, in two situations.

So, we wrapped up after that, but I’m pretty sure a good time was had by all.

 

 

*For those who are wondering what’s up with the lack of Storm Point updates, well, there hasn’t been a game in some time, thanks to busy summer schedules of the players. We’re hoping for this Sunday. Back

*Because of the way I hang on to the character sheets between sessions so that I have them on hand if a player can’t show, sometimes the players aren’t sure how much coin they’ve got. This is aggravated by the fact that I use Campaign Coins for the money; strangely enough, I’ve found that, if they have the actual physical coins, the players don’t seem to count them very often. But everyone likes jingling them. Back

*After all, they’d been the ones who had cleared Rivenroar Castle in the first place, back when this was still on the Scales of War adventure path. Back

*This is an idea I have stolen gleefully from Robin D. Laws and Jonathan Tweet’s brilliant RPG Over the Edge, where boring descriptions of combat tactics get you a penalty to your attack. Back

*They could see two sentries on the hills around the house, and an archer up in the loft of a barn that was nearing collapse. In total, there were three human bandits, three elf archers, a dwarf hammerer, and a half-elf bandit captain, for a total of 1,200 xp; a level 5 encounter for 6 characters. Back

The Phoenix Covenant – Starting a New Campaign

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, this past weekend, my friends Penny and Clint asked if I would be interested in running a small game, just for the two of them.

In the past, I’d run a fairly long-lived Eberron game for them, but it got lost in the shuffle of some non-game things intruding on my life*. By the time my schedule had cleared sufficiently to go back to the game, we’d all lost the thread of what was going on, so we let it die. Well, in the midst of the discussions this weekend, I told them how I had envisioned the final few adventures (we were about six or eight sessions from wrapping it up), so we got a little closure on it.

So. A new game. I asked them what they wanted to play, and they really didn’t know. Penny suggested something post-apocalyptic*, and Clint suggested one of the campaign frameworks I had proposed for the Hunter: The Vigil game that is slowly moving towards start-up. I sent them an e-mail when I had had some more time to think about things, outlining the things I’d be prepared to run. These included a new 4E Eberron game, a modern fantasy game using pretty much any set of rules I had, other World of Darkness games, Star Wars, and even Star Trek*.

The other thing I suggested was something that I’d been working on for some months – strangely enough, it was a post-apocalyptic 4E campaign, based on things like the Fallout video games and the Earthdawn setting. I called The Phoenix Covenant, and here’s the opening pitch:

The Empire of Nerath faces destruction.

King Elidyr takes up arms against the Ruler of Ruin and his seemingly endless horde of rabid gnolls, calling on the old covenants with the other free folk of the world to aid in their defense.

Ancient magics are unearthed and new ones created – magics that can rend stone and split the skies to unleash fury and death.

Bargains are struck with powers from the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos, with the rulers of the Feywild and the dark mistress of the Shadowfell.

Some fear it will not be enough. And some don’t think that the Ruler of Ruin will stop with Nerath.

And some fear that the powers arrayed on both sides may sunder the world forever.

The wise folk of the world gather together on the eve of destruction, and create the Phoenix Covenant.

That the Light shall not be forever extinguished.

And here’s the Phoenix Covenant Declaration:

Whereas the free nations of the world, and the allies thereof, whom shall be called the Light, face the armies of the Ruler of Ruin, and

Whereas the armies of the Ruler of Ruin leave naught but devastation in their wake, and seek neither to claim land nor to build upon it, and

Whereas the advance of the armies of the Ruler of Ruin show fair to overwhelm the defenses of the Light, and

Whereas in the loss of the Light, many wonders of civilization, culture, and learning would fade and pass from the world, and

Whereas such a loss is deemed unacceptable by the wise of the Light:

Therefore let there be founded now the Phoenix Covenant, which members have affixed their names hereto, with the following goals:

First, to survive the coming war.

Second, to preserve from destruction those matters of value which form the core of the societies of the Light.

Third, to hold in trust for the survivors of the coming war the wherewithal to return to the heights of modern civilization.

Fourth, to provide such resources to the survivors at the conclusion of the war, in order to assist them in regaining what they have lost.

Fifth, to nurture and train such heroic members of our band as may be necessary to defend and effect our goals.

Unto these ends, we shall take a collection of wise and skilled folk, representative of all races and crafts, apart from the nations of the world into a secret place, called Covenant, where they shall be hidden safe from discovery by the most powerful magics available to us. Covenant shall be provisioned and provided with all necessary substances to allow the inhabitants thereof to survive in perpetuity without need of congress with the outer world, such arrangements created through our enchantments. All contact with Covenant, save only through the Phoenix Gate, shall be proscribed and prevented, whether from the material world or any of the adjacent planes. The remnants of our society shall open the Phoenix Gate after the scourge of the Ruler of Ruin has abated, and it is time for our society to fulfill its purpose. Should no member of our outer society survive, then the Phoenix Gate shall open after a period of five hundred years, and the heroes of Covenant will be sent forth to explore and reclaim the land.

May the gods favour our undertaking, and grant us the faith and fortitude to see it done.

Done on the 8th day of Full Spring, in the 14th Year of the Reign of Elidyr, feared to be the last Emperor.

And here’s the final sting to get the campaign rolling:

No one ever came to let you out.

So, you prepared, honing yourselves into the heroes that the world would need, learning what you could from the Masters of Covenant. You learned to fight, to lead, to work magic and deception. You learned the words of the gods and the whispers of hidden powers. You pored over maps of the Empire of Nerath, though you knew you would find everything changed.

You made ready.

Now, the day is almost upon you. In two weeks, the Phoenix Gate will open, and the heroes of Covenant will return to the world.

All you must do is prove that you are worthy to be among them.

Well, they picked this idea for the game. Part of the allure is that it is heavily influenced by the stuff we’re all playing as a video game right now. Another big part is that I already had a bunch of background, including a map*, written and ready to go.

There were a few concerns, though. First off, I had planned this for a big campaign ramp-up in the fall, inviting all my gamer friends to play, but spiltting the respondents into two groups if more than six wanted in. But that’s easily fixed; I can still do that in the fall – the story will just change slightly so that a smaller advance group went out a couple of weeks before. Everyone who wants to will still get to play the game.

Second was a bigger problem. Running 4E with two players is going to be a tough balancing act. I’m still somewhat concerned about being able to properly set the encounter strength, and the small number of players means that I’ll be running smaller numbers of monsters. Most worrisome, though, is how things will work without all the roles covered*.

I’m addressing this concern in a couple of different ways. First, I’m starting the characters at 3rd level. That gives me some breathing room on the experience point budgets for creating encounters. Second, I’m giving them some really nice things with the Bribe(TM). This time around, I’m asking for four things (one of which is mandatory), and giving them the pick from a list of four choices (each choice only once). What can they pick up with the Bribe(TM)?

  • +2 to any one attribute.
  • One extra 1st-level At-Will Attack power.
  • One extra feat for which they qualify.
  • One extra trained skill from their class skill list.

Looking at the list, I think it’s almost a recipe for munchkinism. However, given the nature of these two players, and the fact that there are only two characters in the game, I’m willing to risk it. Besides, I can always up the challenge of the encounters if it looks like the characters are just walking through them.

Anyway, we’re going to wait until after July 21 to create characters – that’s when Divine Power hits the shelves, and I want them to have the options in the book, because at least one of them is talking about multi-classing into cleric for some extra healing.

I’ve put up my background notes and the map on Obsidian Portal if you’d care to take a look. You’ll notice that a number of the names (Nerath, Arkhosia, Bael Turath, Cendriane, etc.) are lifted right from the 4E books. I thought that the folks at WotC did such a good job building a loose backstory for the world that I decided to use it in my game with only minor changes.

First game will be either early August or late August. Mid-August, I’m going to GenCon.

 

 
*Work got very busy, I ran out of time to prep. Back

*All three of us have been playing a lot of Fallout 3. Back

*What can I say? The recent movie got me so excited about the universe again, that I started to think about running a game in it. Back

*Done in Campaign Cartographer 3, using their Mercator style, from the 2008 annual. I was very pleased with how it turned out. Back

*From initial discusions, it looks like they’re leaning towards playing a sorcerer and a ranger. My players just looooooove the strikers! Back

Eberron Player’s Guide Review

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I’ve been dragging my feet over reviewing this book, because it’s really only half the setting, and therefor somewhat incomplete. The setting won’t be complete until the Campaign Guide comes out next month.

But I’ve always had a soft spot for Eberron. It is, hands down, my favourite official D&D setting, from any edition or version of the game. The mix of noire and pulp sensibility with the high fantasy of D&D, the predisposition to cinematic scenes in play, and the rich (and largely unexplored) backstory of the game world just really appeal to me.

The Player’s Guide is, overall, a good book. It’s certainly got me wanting more. There are some things in it that I’m not so sure about, and some things that I think are missing, but that’s going to be the case with any book. This book delivers more than enough to fulfill its purpose: giving players what they need to play in an Eberron game.

Let’s go through the book chapter by chapter.

Introduction

The introduction features Ten Important Facts, which are very similar to the original ones that were printed with the initial relase of Eberron for 3E. They’ve dropped the point about new races in favour of one on the Draconic Prophesy, and the order has been slightly rearranged. It winds up highlighting the interplay between the Draconic Prophesy, the Dragonmarked Houses, and Dragonshards, which is not a bad thing.

Chapter 1: Life in Eberron

This chapter covers the basics of geography, history, religion, power groups, and day-to-day life. It introduces some of the main themes and conflicts inherent in the setting, and just generally gives a player a nice overview of what the world is like from the ground level.

There are two pages of maps here, miniatures of the poster map that comes with the Campaign Guide. And I have to say that, if the full size version lives up to the promise of the miniature versions, they will be some of the nicest world maps ever done in a D&D product. The maps in the main campaign book were always one of my pet peeves about 3E Eberron – the large scale map didn’t show the political borders, roads, rails, or cities, and the small-scale maps didn’t show those things outside the border of the nation they depicted. It made the maps somewhat less than useful. The 4E version doesn’t seem to have that problem.

Chapter 2: Races

Changelings and Kalashtar are back, and Warforged get a full write-up. The other common races each get about a half-page to show how they fit into Eberron. The backstories for the Devas and the Eladrin in particular struck me as very nicely done.

The 4E implementation of the Changeling is very close to just being a straight lift from the 4E Doppleganger, which is fine. The mechanics seem solid, and the two powers nicely reinforce the sly, deceptive possibilities of the race.

The Kalashtar are… interesting. Without the Psionic power source (coming in Player’s Handbook 3), they don’t have that synergy working for them yet. However, they do get a nice psychic defense power and telepathic communication, so the groundwork is laid. A lot of the rich Kalashtar backstory from 3E is not in this book – understandably, from the point of view of space in the book and concerns about overwhelming the reader with information. They have been given more of a “flirting with madness” vibe in this edition that I think works*.

The Warforged write-up seems pretty much a rehash of the Dragon article on playing them. Nothing really new, but nice to have it in one book.

Overall, the races section delivers the goods. I’m very satisfied with it, and delighted by one or two bits.

Chapter 3: Classes

One new class – the Artificer, of course. A pile of new paragon paths, and a smattering of epic destinies.

The Artificer was previewed as a playtest feature in Dragon some time ago. Since then, it’s undergone some substantial work, and the result is pretty good, in my opinion. As an arcane leader, it shares some design space with the Bard, but (as is common in 4E) fills the role in a way that is qualitatively different and fresh. Artificers still get to power up weapons and items with funky temporary boosts and enchantments, but now also get to build little constructs to help you with various things – including combat. This is handled using the summoning rules, and just thrills me. The idea of an Artificer tossing down a pile of sticks, metal, and crystal and then conjuring an elemental spirit into it to animate it and send it in to battle just tickles me to no end. They also get to produce a number of different conjurations and zones, making them good secondary controllers.

I’m getting happier and happier with paragon paths. At first, I didn’t like the idea that a character who hadn’t multi-classed all through heroic tier would be forced to take one, but the increasing number of choices provided in the supplements, and the broader and more interesting requirements for them, are changing my mind. For example, the Alchemist Savant paragon path has as its only requirement the ability to make alchemical items. There are also paragon paths for each of the Dragonmarks. Nice and juicy, all of them.

The epic destinies tie strongly into the ideas of the Draconic Prophesy, the Last War, the Mournland, and the Silver Flame. As such, they are very flavourful, and linked directly to some of the primary themes of the Eberron campaign world.

So, the classes chapter also gets a big thumbs-up.

Chapter 4: Character Options

Feats, equipment, and rituals here, including the extra alchemy rules and items that are so important to the feel of Eberron.

The feats are the usual mix you might expect, mainly tied to world-specific things like the new races, the nationalities, the new deities, and Dragonmarks. I was again disappointed with the Shifter** – no real love there, when I thought the Shifters and their feats were one of the most interesting things in the 3E Eberron.

Dragonmark feats deserve some special mention. They have been redesigned to grant bonuses and boosts to certain character capabilities, and to allow the marked character to master certain rituals tied to the mark. No more spell-like abilities (or powers, as they would have been in 4E), and each of the marks now has something to offer to an adventuring character. I like it.

The equipment section has a smattering of Eberron weapons, some specific pieces of gear (ID papers, inquisitive’s kit, spellshards) and Dragonmarked House services, and those alchemical rules I mentioned. These latter are a very nice supplement to the Adventurer’s Vault alchemy rules, including fun things like clockwork bombs and woundpatch. The magic items are primarily devoted to implements for the new deities, artificers, and some Dragonshard items and Warforged components.

There are 20 new rituals, as well, and while they all tie in very nicely to the themes and feel of Eberron, they are also all very applicable in other campaign worlds. This brings the official published rituals up around the 200 mark, and that makes me happy, though I still hope to see them expand into the Martial power source.

Character options gets a grudging nod, despite the fact that Shifters have once again been shafted.

Chapter 5: The World of Eberron

This section walks through the world, using it as a source of character backgrounds. It starts with the Five Nations, moves on to the rest of Khorvaire, and then expands to take in the rest of the world and other background elements such as Dragonmarked Houses and professions. It does a good job of giving a decent overview without going too much in depth on any single topic.

I would have liked to have seen them revisit the trick they used the 3E Five Nations supplement, where each nation had a sidebar with five things everyone in that nation knows. I found that a brilliant way to encapsulate the mindset of the average person of that nation, showing what they find important, and what they think about many things. The section on backgrounds in this book would have been a perfect place to do that again.

This section holds the single piece of art in the book that I think fails. The picture of Sharn on p 127 just doesn’t do it for me. Sure, we get a nice view of the towers, but the whole thing looks like a piece of wargame terrain set on a flat table. The art from the Sharn: City of Towers 3E sourcebook did a significantly better job of showing the way Sharn is really built on more Sharn, reaching down into the depths of the headland. And the floating neighbourhoods would have been nice to see.

And that’s the book. On the whole, I like it, though I think there were a couple of missed opportunities, and some things (like the Psionic nature of the Kalashtar) that are going to take future supplements to bring to fruition. But, as a start, it certainly does its job. It’s got me thinking about running a new Eberron campaign***.

*Can you tell I like Kalashtars?

**I mentioned this back here.

***No, I’m not going to do it right now. I’d have to drop something else, or convert one of the current games over to Eberron, and I don’t think the players would be happy about those options.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Friday, we had another Post Tenebras Lux game. Almost full attendance; one person couldn’t make it.

The session was a little strange, in that the events in it existed for a meta-game reason, rather than for an in-game reason. See, the party was traveling back to Brindol, where there was going to be a market fair, to spend some of their treasure before heading down to the Thornwaste to investigate rumours of the return of the Ghostlord. While prepping for the game, I saw in my notes that I had not distributed a large amount (480 gp worth) of the monetary treasure they should have received in the previous level. That would put a significant damper on what they could and could not buy, so I decided they needed to have a cash injection before the market fair.

Now, I couldn’t just hand them the money – I’d already done something like that to adjust the balance of magic items during the great player shuffle – which meant I needed an adventure on the road from Witchcross to Brindol. The standard convention is a party of bandits or wandering monsters, but I wanted something more interesting, something that could fill an evening of play, and not just revolve around combat.

They had stopped at a roadside inn on their trip to Witchcross, and I decided to use that as the adventure site. I did some looking through the books, looking for an interesting threat, and came up with corpse vampires, from Open Grave. Now, the party is pretty heavy against undead, but corpse vampires aren’t vulnerable to radiant damage – it just turns off their regeneration for a turn (more on which later). This was going to be the only fight in the day, so I figured I’d make it a tough one: two corpse vampires and four zombies*.

The setup was that a corpse vampire had come to the inn and slaughtered everyone, producing a few zombies and a new corpse vampire in the process. The two vampires were now hiding in the inn, getting ready to head on to Brindol and the rich feeding there. One hid down in the cellar, lurking in the hanging hams and cheeses and onions from the cellar ceiling beams, with two zombies in beer barrels. The other hid up in the attic, under the eaves, with a pair of zombies under the dustcovers with the furniture. They would act to attack isolated characters who wandered in, but otherwise wait to get the drop on the whole party, and reinforce each other if needed.

The first part of the evening was spent with the party leaving Witchcross and making their way back down the road to Brindol, shadowed for the first little while by the unicorn they had glimpsed in the Witchwood. When they got to the inn and made their Perception checks, they noticed the quiet and the fact that the door was ajar. They approached stealthily, half the party circling around back to come in through the kitchen, and the other half keeping an eye on the innyard. Inside, they found a great deal of slaughter, and went to work investigating.

I had made up a set of detailed notes on the kinds of clues they would find in the inn with various skill checks – not a skill challenge, just a set of skill checks. Unfortunately, I then left this list at work, and had to wing it. It didn’t go badly, as I could remember most of the salient points from making the list, but it didn’t have the depth of detail that I could have had with my notes in front of me. Oh, well.

Anyway, they wound up sending the avenger down into the cellar to check on things, and he rolled an amazing Perception check, spotting the vampire hiding in the ceiling beams, and an amazing Stealth check, so the vampire didn’t spot him. Surprise round for the party. Everyone squeezed down into the basement, and took care of the vampire very quickly – more quickly than I had anticipated, in fact. I had decided that, if one vampire was attacked, the other would join the fight (with zombies in tow) on round 3. The vampire went down on round 2, after soaking up several concentrated Striker assaults.

The zombies lasted a little longer, and we wound up with the Sorcerer facing the newly-arrived reinforcements alone at the top of the stairs. She used a nice, sustainable area attack  to augment her cover from the bar she was hiding behind to hold the undead off until everyone downstairs finished off the zombies and came scooting up to join her.

And that’s when I realized that I had forgotten about the vampires’ regeneration ability.

Too little, too late. The remaining vampire kept getting blasted with radiant damage, keeping the regeneration from kicking in. They put it down in a couple of rounds, and mopped up the zombies afterward.

Now, the way the encounter wound up split in half, when I had planned on it doubling up, and the way I had forgotten the regeneration certainly made it an easier fight than I had intended, but that was all my fault. I’ll know better next time. I handed over the treasure (robbed from the bodies of the inn victims) an the xp, and the party said some prayers over all the corpses, piled them in the common room, and burned the inn to the ground to prevent any of the dead to come back.

And that was pretty much the evening. I think it went well, and all the players seemed engaged in the murder-mystery/horror miniplot. Everyone seems to be liking the move away from straight dungeon crawls and the opportunity to use their skills in different situations.

So, win.

 

 

*1,200 xp, a level 5 encounter for six characters.

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.

Other People I’ve Been

By | | What's he playing?
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I noticed the other day that all my game posts are about games that I run. I have been remiss in not mentioning the games I play in, and have played in. So, here’s a greatest hits of my player career:

  • Barabas – Barabas was a half-elven fighter/thief from Waterdeep in a home-brew AD&D game run by my friend, Michael. He was the first character I played for any length of time – up to that point, I’d mainly been running games. Barabas was surly, with a quick temper and a dislike of elves. I had conceived him primarily as an urban character, and the first session had the city of Waterdeep occupied by an orcish army and my character on the run throughout the Realms. He got into trouble a lot because he hated people telling him what to do, and tended to do the opposite. He wound up losing his home, his best friend, his eye, and his mortality, as he threw himself into a battle bigger than he could imagine, and wound up tapped to be a god because of it.
  • Jeyg Costin – A human from a Skyrealms of Jorune game, again run by Michael. It only lasted one (extended adventure), but I loved that game. Jeyg was a sneaky, tricky private eye type, who knew everyone and how to make contacts even in strange cities. He was also a deadly knife-fighter. In best noire traditions, he wound up addicted to a powerful narcotic after bearding the main villain in his den.
  • V’dreyn Heartshadow – An elven cleric in the continuation of the game that Barabas started in. He worshipped a god of self-sufficiency, and tended to a calm, measured, horrificly stubborn character. Once he got his heels dug in, not even death could shift him. I spent a lot of time as Heartshadow working through the theology and philosophy of such a deity, an exercise that I found surprisingly rewarding. He wound up sacrificing himself to prevent a TPK when our group of 11th-level character ran into a pit fiend by surprise*.
  • Anthony Vespucci – My Vampire: The Masquerade character; your basic Ventrue mobster. Again, one of Michael’s games. Anthony wasn’t all that bright, but he was good at following orders, convincing other people to follow his orders, and just not dying. One of his greatest moments was a face-off with the angry sire of one of the other players and his squad of gun-toting henchmen. The sire forbade Anthony to kill a priest (who was right there in the alley with them), so Anthony unloaded his Uzi into the priest’s chest, threw down his gun, and let the six vampires above him fill him full of lead. And then he stood up, brushed off his ruined suit, and asked them if they were finished screwing around. He wound up blowing his own head off with a white phosphorous grenade to prevent him being used by his enemies. He came back after a brief hiatus as a draug bent on vengeance.
  • Tom Kozlowski – Anthony’s replacement in the Vampire game after his suicide. Word of advice – it is very, very, very hard to believably bring in a new PC in a game centred around suspicion and paranoia. Tom didn’t fit well, and didn’t last long.
  • Julian the Apostate – My friend Clint ran a great Vampire: Dark Ages game, where I got to play the ex-Byzantine Emperor. Clint actually suggested the character, and it seemed like such a cool idea (especially after a little research) that I jumped at it. Julian was an okay warrior and a decent leader, but he really shone when working ritual magic through a system that Clint and I developed for him. He was also renowned for always having a plan and a back-up plan, which he would often neglect to tell his companions. Julian saying, “I have an idea,” became one of the most frightening moments in the game**.
  • Gaha’el – An angel of healing in a shortlived game of Everlasting that Clint ran. He was fun to play, from a very alien point of view: I tried to make him very different from mortals, not really understanding their interactions. He was great at dishing out healing, but had no compassion. And he was just as quick to draw his sword. I played him as God’s misericord – he would end suffering, one way or another. And his history was pretty cool***. Unfortunately, the system was convoluted and work-intensive for the GM, so the game folded after only a couple of sessions.
  • Asariel, Dee’s Angel – Asariel and Gaha’el were separated by years, but I eventually came back to the angel idea for a steampunk Victorian superhero game Clint ran, using Mutants & Masterminds. Asariel had been summoned during the reign of Elizabeth I by John Dee, and both Asariel and Dee were surprised to find that the other didn’t know how to get Asariel back home. He was a much more human character than Gaha’el, as you need in a superhero game, but still very cool to play. One memorable conversation had another of the heroes asking me about her dead husband, and if he was happy in heaven. Player scheduling killed that game.
  • Synry – Clint ran a small D&D 3E game for his wife and me, and my character was a human fighter/wizard. He started as a kind of socially maladjusted ex-soldier with some wizard training, but over the course of the game he wound up being quite the diplomat, spy, spellcaster, planar traveler, and power broker. He also inspired the greatest volume of game fiction I have written for a character.
  • Michael “MoJo” Johnson – My friend Erik ran an Unknown Armies game, and I was determined to play someone who was clued in to the supernatural but had no actual supernatural abilities. I made him the webmaster of MojoWeb.com, your one-stop Internet weirdness outlet. He was a manic, paranoid conspiracy theorist who knew more about what was going on than the mages and avatars around him, and so flipped completely out at the stupid things they would do. Of course, he believed most of the stuff on his site without any sort of critical thought, so he was wrong about a lot of things.
  • Ladimir Csabor – Michael invited me to play in an Iron Kingdoms game. I’m not a huge fan of Iron Kingdoms, partially because I’m tired of steampunk and partially because I think the world undercuts a number of fantasy gaming tropes that I like. But I like Michael’s games, so I came up with an Umbrean fighter – very plain vanilla. But a melee warrior in a party of ranged fighters and spellcasters really stands out, and he has become a man of action! He joyfully throws himself into the craziest stunts and fiercest battles, sometimes just because he’s tired of all the talking that’s going on. In a world I don’t really like, I’ve managed to create a character that I love.
  • Dunael a’Wemistarrin – An elven warlock in Clint’s current 3E game. He treats the oaths and pacts with the powers that give him his abilities in a very shamanic way, viewing them all as small gods that he has little rituals to appease and entreat. He tends to get fixated on one thing at a time, which sometimes makes him seem very cold, and other times just the opposite.

So, there’s a list. It’s almost complete – barring a couple of characters that weren’t all that memorable.

Listing them like this is interesting to me; I’m seeing patterns and commonalities that I hadn’t before. I mean, we all know that we like to play certain types of characters, and that the characters we build tend to share certain qualities, but until you see it all laid out in front of you, you may not see them as clearly.

My characters? Usually a couple of dominant traits:

  • Pride. Pride bordering on arrogance in some situations. In other situations, living so deep within arrogance, they can’t see the border any more.
  • Stubborn. When they care about something, there is no shifting them.
  • Action provoking. My characters all tend to like to make stuff happen.
  • In the know. They all like to be in on the secrets of the world.

Now, having listed all these characters, I leave the comments open for those who have known them to comment, and for others to spend a little time telling me about their favourite characters.

 

 

*Well, surprise for us. The pit fiend knew right where we were.

**Followed closely by, “The Domina has some questions for you,” and, “Let’s go into the forest.”

***I wish I could find the write-up I did, where he prevented Moses from entering the Promised Land and was both St. George and Dracula.

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…”