Because the next best thing to adoration is ABERRATION!

This one’s going to run a little long ’cause I have a lot to say. Just warning you. Also, I’m selling my PHB3, $25 (which includes shipping) anywhere in the States. International listeners, eh, we’ll talk. Shoot me an email if you’re interested.

But now let’s take a peek at cursed items. Back in earlier editions, a cursed item was basically a “gotcha;” the big middle finger from behind the DM screen. It looked like something cool until you found out it actually sucked – and then you couldn’t get rid of it or it killed you. Great for gritty “realism”, not so good for heroic storytelling. For the purposes of 4E, I think of three basic types of curses.
First, minor curses – downfalls or oddities that are fairly situational – are ok to spring on your PCs without warning most of the time. The 3rd edition version of the Backbiter Spear (though I would avoid the 1st or 2nd edition versions), an Elven Cloak that fails to work for dwarves, armor that makes you vulnerable to radiant damage while in direct sunlight and a healing potion that also turns you Smurf blue for the rest of the day aren’t going to be game-breaking and perfectly legitimate as surprise curses. If your curse is mildly annoying, easy to circumvent or simply played for laughs, you can put it on any magic item that seems feasible and have the curse only identified when it actually occurs for the first time.

I prefer the second class of curses, ones that a player can put aside if they want, but are tempted to endure for the sake of power. Think about cursed items in literature. Everyone in LotR knew what the One Ring was and exactly how it worked. Elric could put Stormbringer down any time he wanted to, but he didn’t. These are the kinds of cursed items you want to mimic for the bulk of your game. A necromancer’s wand that drains a healing surge the first time it is used each day but adds an extra d6 of damage to critical hits is going to entice players to keep using it so that the loss of the healing surge doesn’t go to waste. The dagger of a famous traitor that adds another die of Sneak Attack once per day, but only after it is has struck one of it’s wielder’s allies (for base d6 damage dice, of course) is another good option. When creating an item like this, you’re asking your players to make a sort of bet. They ante with an upfront cost and then hope their bet pays off. This keeps the curse in play and the item in the character’s hand without forcing it with a “this item can not be discarded without a Remove Curse” entry. Also consider a mechanic like the one in the Summoning Wizard’s class article from Dragon 385 where if you don’t use the item or do what it wants you to do, it “misbehaves.” Imagine a set of boots that give +2 speed but if the character doesn’t move at least half their speed on a turn, the boots will move them their full speed at the end of their turn – and never somewhere helpful! Characters who try to identify these types of items should probably at least know vaguely that something is wrong ahead of time if not the full nature of the curse.

If, however you are the sort of sadistic DM that needs to inflict horrible punishments and crippling infirmities on your PCs just because you can (and for whatever reason you’re still playing 4E), then let your players be heroic in their suckiness. That is, let them choose to be cursed, take up the weapon that can’t be sheathed or wear the ring that can’t be removed. But who’s going to choose being cursed? I bet the paladin in your party would rather be unable to put down the immensely powerful but soul-draining cursed sword rather than let it fall into the hands of the villain. I bet the party psion already hears enough voices in her head that she could deal with a supernatural possession better than that 10-year old orphan over there. And I bet the party rogue is willing to be mute or take a -4 to all saving throws if it will help him get through the dungeon to the hoard of gold at the end. You can hand your PCs the 2nd edition Backbiter Spear in 4th edition so long as they know how it works in advance and it will be an interesting, compelling item when used. A good DM will know the characters’ (and players’) motivations and can use them to convince said characters to willingly take on horrifying curses.

Since first writing this, Quinn Murphy of the At-Will Blog has put up a list of his own cursed items and I strongly encourage you to go read it. He and I had a lengthy discussion on the topic and turns out we have vastly different design philosophies. Namely, his items are far more complex and harder to get rid of, but you get the fun stuff before the curse hits. Mine are simpler and not so permanent but I make you deal with the curse first before you get the fun stuff. It’s all a matter of taste really. I have posted my versions of his two cursed items – Gamble and Valor – below.

Before I end, I should probably address the save-or-die curses. Some are fairly simple to import, like the Necklace of Strangulation. In 2nd edition this item dealt 6 points of damage per round to its wearer until their corpse fully decomposes, removable only with a wish or miracle! For 4E, you would probably want to give three saves, assisted by Heal checks, to prevent death so that it works more like a petrifying gaze attack. Don’t put these in every treaure chest, but once or twice per Tier, something similar could be quite a fun surprise! The scarab of death which after being worn for at least 10 minutes suddenly insta-kills … not so much. It’s just not the right fit for the heroic genre. Leave it be.

Feels good to be behind the microphone again. It’s been like 6 weeks since I actually recorded something, so I’m hyped to get back into it. For the next couple weeks, we’re going to talk about putting the magic back into your magic items.

Think back to your 1st, 2nd or maybe 3rd edition days. You just found some crazy magic item in a dungeon and you had no idea what to do with it. So now you’ve got two options: either stow it somewhere until you can get someone to explain it to you or screw around with it until it does something. You’ll end up paying out the wazoo for the chance (and I do mean CHANCE) to have an NPC identify the item so you can use it. If you do experiment, good luck because you’re probably going to get yourself or another party member killed, polymorphed or otherwise hosed. At best, you use the item at the wrong time and lose it. Before anyone gets on my case, yes, there is something fun about having to figure out how to use an item and the magic items of the time were commonly CRAZY awesome; it’s one of the charms of that genre of gaming.

However, 4E is a game of fantastic heroes managing resources. It assumes you are always going to be able to get maximum potential from your items and rarely if ever suffer penalties from unknowingly putting on the wrong hat or something. Can you imagine if Fafhrd or the Grey Mouser just suddenly keeled over dead from drinking from the wrong pool of water? Even Indiana Jones, who did in fact face that very situation, had a bunch of chalices to choose from and some foreknowledge, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I admittedly don’t really like the 4E magic item system in some ways. It’s too.. predictable. I want my players to pick something up from time to time and go “what the heck is THIS?” The uncertainty makes it more interesting. An item with multiple functions under different circumstances also feels magical. But how do you balance the wonder of something unknown against the pointlessness of the thing never being used? Your PCs have to know how and when to use something, but not what it is. This is obviously tricky.
I came upon one solution to this problem several weeks back, something I call Compound Items. Here’s something one Power Source Campaign party found in the belongings of what amounted to a flesh golem – it’s called Patchwork Synthetic.

See what I did there? I combined a slightly better Healing Potion, a suit of Delver’s Armor and a ritual scroll of Make Whole into one item. The players have a meaningful decision to make about the item and if I describe it correctly, they’ll know when to use it even if they’re not entirely sure what it is. I didn’t describe it well, though, since the group seems to have forgotten about it. An unused item is a pointless item. On the other hand, the Eifa tree I gave the other group that combined a healing potion with a stonemeal biscuit and a suit of Darkleaf Armor with a Tethercord seemed to draw their attention more. It may be because I gave the party’s artificer all of the options right upfront, so Casey, make sure Kaitlynn gets to hear this because I think Tullie is still carting it around*. Despite bad presentation so far I think the idea is sound so I will continue to toy with it and let you know how it works.
Once again I’m dangerously over time, but I have more examples for you, so watch the forum as I will post them when this show hits. Next week – curses and cursed items.

*Casey and Kaitlynn are players in my home campaign; Tullie is Kaitlynn’s character.

It’s time for the last segment on Skill Challenges, which is good because I’m getting kinda tired of this and ready to get on with something else .

When “Chatty DM” Phil Menard was on a few weeks back, he mentioned something he calls “Mouseguarding.” This is of course, a reference to the Mouseguard RPG; specifically page 91 of the core rulebook (which I own!). The text on the page reads as follows: “One of two things can happen and the GM gets to decide which one he wants. You can fail to overcome the obstacle and the GM can inject a twist into the game or you can succeed at your attempt with some cost. The GM can’t apply both options to one test.”

So what we’re actually saying here is that your PCs can fail a skill check and still succeed.. sort of. The concept needs to be translated slightly since Mouseguard has ongoing status conditions closer to Star Wars: Saga Edition’s condition track rather than 4E’s combat conditions and tends to use said conditions as the cost of success. If you’re in combat, you might be able to succeed on the check but are then Dazed until the end of your next turn, representing the extra focus required for the task that pulls you out of the fight momentarily. Outside of combat, though, we’re shooting for spirit rather than letter of the law.

I believe I may have used this example at the beginning of the series, but I’ll use it again because it’s good. You fail on an Athletics check to climb a cliff. The DM can simply say that you can’t find a good handhold and must locate a new way to your destination – the twist – or charge you some toll for the successful climb A healing surge or having to temporarily leave behind your armor immediately come to mind as costs. For a full skill challenge where the party is trying to locate the next major villain, the cost of failing the skill challenge could be an increase in the number of bad guys in the next combat or being stuck on the business end of a surprise round. Depending on the situation, these might be preferable to the pure fail, which is having to wait until the villain make his or her next move.

Most of the time, I recommend you go ahead and ask your players outright what they’re willing to sacrifice for the success. I am of the school of thought that meaningful choice, not just immersive narrative or setting, is the heart of the tabletop RPG and so I’m willing to step back into the metagame for a little bit to let the players mull it over. You can choose for them in secret occasionally, but I find it preferable more often that not to put that decision squarely in the players’ hands.

Why do this? Why add these complications or costs rather than simply failing? Several good reasons – first, it’s an extra layer of plot glue in case your PCs come up short on the rolls to move the story forward. If your skill challenge is built well based on the other criteria from the last few weeks, you shouldn’t need it, but better safe than sorry. Second, it helps the players feel engaged, even when they fail. There’s still a meaningful choice to be made. Grognards tend to be hard on “new school” gaming for being ‘soft’ when it comes to abject failure and character death. This is primarily a game genre issue and something I’ll revisit later, but remember that you as a DM want to encourage your players to keep playing. Besides, forcing characters to live with the ramifications of a bad decision is almost always worse than simply killing them or otherwise removing them from the game. Finally, imposing a toll can help expand the content and depth of what you already have written rather than being forced to improvise all the time.

I’m almost out of time and really, this isn’t something you write into a skill test or challenge inherently but a technique you use in play, so I won’t point out any DMG2 or RPGA module references. And with that (does it count if I say it?) we conclude the series on skill challenges. Next week – making magic items feel awesome and unique again without technically breaking the 4E magic item schema.

Section 3 of the Skill Challenge series – dead skill challenges.  What do I mean by a dead skill challenge?  A dead skill challenge is one that does not create a feedback loop, a back-and-forth with the PCs.  I used to be a big proponent of the idea that a skill challenge should feel like and be run like a combat for this very reason.  I don’t feel quite so strongly about that anymore since not every skill challenge needs to involve NPCs or forces antagonistic to the PCs.   You can have “friendly” skill challenges, like..  L..  alright, I have a sort running metaphor and I promise I’ll keep this modest but hold on a second.  (BBC Warning).  Making love to your spouse is a skill challenge.  I don’t care who you are or who you married, it’s a skill challenge.  I think many of you would agree with me.  But it’s not openly hostile to you — unless you’re into that sort of thing I guess.  Point being, if your partner just lays there you’re not going have as much fun.  In the same way, if a skill challenge just “lays there” as it were, it’s not going to be much fun.  It needs to respond to the PCs and prompt a response from them.  I have three primary methods of making skill challenges feel alive and interactive to share with you today.

First off, narrate your player’s successes and failures along linear time.  If you’re using various techniques and such with your partner but there’s no excitement building towards a climax, someone’s going to end up frustrated.  Similarly if your players are making various skill checks but you don’t narrate the events as being related to one another and getting closer to (or further from) the goal, it’s going to break immersion very fast.  Remember that your PCs should be navigating a small scene from a beginning to an end when involved in a skill challenge.  The challenge needs to tell the entire story of the scene, not just the beginning and end. “The Rushing River”, pg. 94 of the DMG2 does a very good job of this, splitting up the challenge into a sequence of smaller location-based checks; the characters literally move from one place to the next with their checks, giving them a sense of progress.  Encounter 3: Preparation from LFR Module CORE1-3 “Sense of Wonder” on the other hand, does not do this well.  The narration provided does not connect any skill checks to any other skill checks, requiring the DM to make a coherent story of the ship’s repairs.

Second, there’s structure.  Sometimes a little direction in the bedroom goes a long way – “faster” “softer” “higher” help convey individual preferences to common practices that maximize enjoyment.  In a skill challenge,  forcing a couple skill rolls is an excellent way to convey flavor without restricting number or type of primary skills.  A long forest hike that requires half the group to pass an Endurance check every once in a while is going to give the same feel as if Endurance were a primary skill to passing the challenge.   More aggressive lovers might employ a “do unto you so you’ll do unto me” approach.  Mimic this by occasionally giving your skill challenges a roll of their own against the PC’s defenses or passive skills.  Avoid doing this often or  when your PCs are near their last failure, obviously, but if they’re just breezing through the challenge without really paying much attention, a quick hit in the collective Fortitude or Passive Acrobatics is going to make them sit up and take notice.   “Traveling through Gorgimrith,” pg 92 of DMG2 really takes this concept and runs with it.  Dictating ALL of the PCs skill rolls in this way can be a little too rigid and domineering, making the PCs feel railroaded, so you probably don’t want to build a challenge quite like this one.  The point of the game is to interact with other people, not just perform a set mechanical routine, but it’s a goldmine of ideas for forced rolls.

Finally – branching.  Branching means that are several ‘paths’ through the challenge that open and close based on decisions the characters make and which checks succeed or fail.  For example, if the character succeeds on a Stealth check to sneak towards the door, the character can continue on the road to infiltration with a Theivery check to pick the lock.  On a failure, he or she may have to use Bluff or Diplomacy instead to convince the guards that he’s supposed to be there in the first place.  You can also just hand the player the opportunity to choose which path to take to involve more r-o-l-e-playing vs. r-o-l-l-playing.   Unfortunately, I don’t have a sly, risque analogy for this one, so you’ll just have to make do.  Sorry.  On to the books,  DMG2 pg 98 “Moving Through Suderham” by Mike Mearls involves a TON of implicit branching and branching by purposeful choice.  In terms of pre-written challenges, this is the gold standard for branching.  Encounter 2: Sava from EAST1-2 “Marauder’s Spear” is also good and far less complex.

Next week – we are rounding third and heading home to the last segment of the series.  Complications and Mouseguarding.  Thanks for staying with it!

This is Part 2b of my Skill Challenge series, now covering skills in context of the challenge itself, not just the system.   There are two points to consider for skills when writing a skill challenge:  which skills and how many skills are primary.  The latter question is easier to deal with, so we’ll start with that.  As a quick guideline, the more primary skills you have, the better off you’ll be.  You’ll undershoot when writing a challenge  more often than you overshoot.  Now that being said, this is still supposed to be a challenge.  If every character could hit effectively off of every attribute in combat, you’d have a much more difficult time making combat a challenge.   You still want your players to be following specific skill paths or roles, but have several such roles available – Face, Tracker, Strongarm, Healer, Magician, Scholar and Thief to name the most common.  Assuming your skill challenge is of sufficient complexity, you’ll find this gets built in automatically.  I shoot for a number of primary skills just about equal to the number of successes required, but no less than 2/3 of said value.

Having figured that out, what skills will be involved in the challenge?  There are two ways to approach this: emphasize roleplaying or emphasize mechanics.  You see, some people aren’t really comfortable play-acting and just prefer to roll dice.  If you know your characters’ skills, this gets a lot easier.  Choose one or two skills that only one PC has, and then fill out with skills that multiple PCs have.  If you don’t know your characters’ skills, pick out about a quarter from the low tier I mentioned last episode, half from the high tier and then fill out with mid tier skills.  You want to reward and spotlight characters who have specific training but not rely on them to carry the challenge.   This method will force you to craft the story of the challenge around the mechanics and some people may not be OK with that, but you can be sure that your characters will at least get through it.

On the other hand, you could simply write out a number of skills that make sense given the story of the challenge.  I consider this the default way that most people write skill challenges and there’s nothing wrong with it.  You may find, though, that you tend toward the more specialized low and mid tier skills since things like Acrobatics, Diplomacy and Thievery feel more “skillful” than say Athletics or Insight.  These type of challenges also tend to wind up requiring only a single role – usually the Face but occasionally the Thief or the Strongarm.  I recommend throwing in at least one or two high tier skills, even if you don’t quite know how they work, so that none of your PCs just get stuck.  Let them figure out why its a primary skill and then run with it.  They’ll feel smart for figuring out your “secrets.”

With only a minute or so left, I’ll quickly point you in the direction of some good and bad skill challenges based on number and type of skills.  I’m going to move fast so if you have your material out, you may need to pause the recording to look them over.  Starting in the DMG2, page 89 “Closing the Portal” is pretty solid; four successes, three skills (one in each tier!) and plays across the Magician and Thief roles.  Two roles for a Complexity 1 challenge is fine.  The very next skill challenge, though, “Opening the Ninth Ward” calls on the Magician and the Tracker and requires ten successes on four primary skills.  That’s less than a one-half ratio and gets pretty repetitive.  “Hunting the Mastermind” which I mentioned last week is on the same page, is of the same Complexity and has six primaries across at least three different roles – a much better option.  Really, most of the DMG2 challenges are pretty good for skills..  except “The Restless Dead!” If you have the LFR mods available, Encounter 3 “Into the Shade” of CORE1-1 blatantly splits up the primary skills into ‘Legal’, ‘Stealthy’ and ‘Social’ so you can really accentuate your characters’ skill roles.  On the other hand, Encounter 2 of CORE1-5 “What’s Your Name, Little Girl?” is a little short on available skills.  It really requires only a Face and I can tell you having played through it several times myself that I find it mind-bogglingly boring.  Encounter 3 of MOON1-3 “Roughing It” is also short on skills and is distinctly aimed at the Strongarm and Tracker roles.  In other words, don’t bring a Wizard.

And that’ll do it for skills.  Next week, we try to resuscitate some dead skill challenges.  CLEAR!  ::ZZZAPP::

We’re talking about the Skills themselves now in Skill Challenges. As I prepared my notes, this topic got a lot bigger than I expected, so I’m actually going to cover it in two segments. Today I want to open up the math of the Skills and then next week we’ll look at them in deeper context with Skill Challenges. When I say the ‘math’ of the Skills, I’m not just talking about DCs. Earlier this week I went through each class (including the PHB 3 and Assassin, but excluding the Runepriest*), figuring out the odds that any given class could be trained in any given skill, excluding feats and backgrounds. I then averaged the probabilities universally and across power sources and roles. This information is similar to the information on pg 85 of the DMG2, but more detailed and because it takes into account the number of skills each class can train and not just which ones are available, I think more useful. If you’re interested in the full data set, I can give it to you but I want to share here a few interesting things I found buried in the system itself.

The 17 skills arrange themselves fairly neatly into three bands or tiers of probability for any given character. The High tier skills each have a 32-38% chance of being trained for any given character based on class alone. These skills are Athletics, Arcana, Endurance, Heal, Insight and Intimidate. The Mid tier skills, at 24-28% chance of training are Diplomacy, History, Nature, Perception and Religion and the Low tier skills at a 12-18% probability are Acrobatics, Bluff, Dungeoneering, Theivery, Stealth and Streetwise. Now admittedly, the standard deviation here is 8.5% but for our purposes I think this tier system is a reasonable approach.

Off the bat, this makes me take a good long look at the Heal Skill. It’s in the High Tier, yet not one Skill challenge in the DMG2 includes Heal at all and looking through my collection of LFR mods, I found Heal as a primary skill once and secondary once for about every dozen or so adventures. A good third of your party is likely to have this skill, yet outside of combat it’s almost pointless. I have two suggestions to change this. First, you could alter Nature such that it only deals with non-sentient things (the weather, plants, directions, tracking, navigation, etc) and use Heal for animals/monsters as well as people so that its more like the Saga Edition Knowledge, Life Sciences. The other option is to expand Heal into something like the 3rd edition Profession skill and have it include heal checks. I haven’t tried either yet, so if you do, let me know how it goes.

Second, we find that in a five-person party, you’re likely to have only one person trained in Diplomacy, where you probably have one or two trained in Intimidate and Insight each! This should clue us to lay off the Diplomacy rolls a bit to let more characters have some face time and be involved in a social situation. Expand Intimidate to include stating the importance of any threat to the NPCs involved, not just one from the PCs and allow characters to actually make statements using Insight, particularly about the character’s personal life or culture. Reserve Diplomacy for negotiating and bargaining so that everyone, even the Fighter, can get in a word edgewise.

Also, what about Arcana? According to my numbers it is, in fact, the number one most-trainable Skill, but its use in skill challenges is primarily that of gaining information about the presence or absence of magic or the occasional vague manipulation of energy to close and open portals and junk. Here’s where I think some earlier edition books and the willingness to improvise can be a great boon. You see, Rituals are nice because they always work, albeit at the cost of some time and resources, but even though 4E has 225 of them at the time this segment airs, there are some beloved spells from previous editions that aren’t included. Consider letting your trained Arcanists (also Religion or Nature or what have you) cast spells or use Rituals free of cost to accrue successes in a Skill Challenge. The trick here is that they will have to pass an appopriate DC to do it and the spell’s effect is limited to the stakes of the challenge. For spells from previous editions, set a DC equal to 5 + 5 times the spell’s level (10 for level 1, 20 for level 3, etc). For rituals, simply add 15 to the half of the current Ritual’s level. You’ll want to limit the usage somehow, but that’s primarily an issue of the group’s taste. You could have each eligible character record some sort of spellbook, use a spell only once per Challenge to earn successes , whatever suits the needs and flavor of your campaign.

As an aside before I close out for the show, it turns out that only one type of themed party – and by that I mean all one power source or role – could be trained in all 17 Skills. Only an all-Striker party could have access to all 17 skills; every other role or power source has a skill gap, although an all-Leader, all-Arcane or all-Psionic party could arrange such that only one skill was left untrained. That’s all for now – next week, we’ll look at example Skill challenges to see which ones have the right number and mix of Skills to keep the party interested and engaged.

*This segment was created just prior to PHB 3, but the emergent results aren’t vastly different with the Runepriest included.

 
(Intro music discussion omitted)

I want to talk this first week about setting up proper goals and complexities for your skill challenges. We’ll look at some DMG2 challenges as well as a couple from the RPGA. The first one, and let’s start with a good one, is from CORM 1-1, “The Black Knight of Arabel.” This encounter, Encounter 2B, has you chasing the Black Knight of Arabel to try to catch him. Now that initially sounds kind of lame for a skill challenge, but once you read it you find out that you’re actually chasing him at night through a forest, so that gives you a couple of complications to play with, opens up more skills and makes the whole thing a bit more narratively interesting. Furthermore if you look at the victory conditions, you’ll find that the players always catch the Black Knight whether they succeed or fail. It’s merely a matter of ‘in what condition’ – whether the players get a +4 initiative bonus on a success or the Black Knight gets a surprise round on a failure. Add in the fact that there are a few optional scripted events as you go through the challenge and the DM has some really solid ways to provide varying degrees of success and failure based on how well the PCs do. Even at Complexity 3, this is a good, solid skill challenge, worthy of 8 successes to finish.

On the other hand, we have page 93 of DMG2 which contains the skill challenge “The Restless Dead.” No $%#!. That’s how your players are going to feel after this one. In this skill challenge, the PCs are trying to obtain information from some guardian ghosts about an upcoming puzzle trial they’re going to have to endure. That’s pretty much it. There’s no complications, no time limit, the ghosts aren’t going to lie to them, it’s just “get information.” It’s also information your players need to complete the puzzle so it’s kinda already smelling funny from the beginning as a skill challenge. Furthermore, it’s complexity 5. That’s twelve successes, ladies and gentlemen, TWELVE on FOUR primary skills – Arcana, Athletics, Dungeoneering and Diplomacy and you can barely count Dungeoneering since I think only three classes have it as an option for a trained skill so you’re really looking at twelve successes on three primary skills. Not only that, the Diplomacy check is a hard DC for the level and though you can replace it with Bluff, it’s still probably the same party member – the face – doing the same thing over and over and over again. So other than that, you’re looking at Athletics and Arcana checks to vaguely impress these spirits as to just how awesome you are. You see why I don’t like this challenge? I could even give it some bonus points for including multiple stages of failure (for every two successes you get, you gain a new piece of information), but why not make it a Complexity 2 challenge with six successes and give a new piece of information for each success? Why drag this monstrosity out twice as long as it has to be? This is just a bad skill challenge. It’s too long for not enough complications and the DM is going to burn out of ways to describe how you made a fool of yourself after the first couple rolls. Plus even after it’s over, the PCs are still in the same place, at the same time, facing down the same problems. Since the players need the information to continue, it’s not even a good skill challenge premise in the first place – at best a Complexity 2 but even then there should be another complication like “also determine if the ghosts are lying to you” or something. For 12 successes, you should be able to go through the entire puzzle trial. If you must use this skill challenge, shrink it down. Otherwise, just skip it.

For a better example of a long skill challenge, check out page 90 of the DMG2 “Hunting the Mastermind.” This is by James Wyatt, adapted from the Eberron Campaign Guide. This is a Complexity 4 challenge and the only goal is apparently to “find the demon” but if you read it carefully, this is really two skill challenges jammed together. The first half (5 successes) is “learn about the demon” where the second half, the last five successes is to physically locate the demon. Thus you can think of this as two Complexity 1 skill challenges (maybe Complexity 2) back-to-back. Here again, there’s not as much active opposition as I would like – there’s no time limit, no one is trying to protect the demon, no one is trying to stop you. The challenge is a little bit too passive for my tastes, but admittedly the PCs are physically moving around the city the whole time so there’s a nice change of scenery (always helpful for a skill challenge) and there are six legitimate primary skills with which to complete the challenge. Like “The Black Knight of Arabel,” the PCs will always end up at the demon’s lair whether they succeed or fail – it’s merely a matter of the circumstances under which they do so. So go ahead and take this one. You’ll have to fill in some of the details on your own and bring it to life a little bit more but as a framework or skeleton its really pretty good.

So that’s my rant on complexity and length. Next week, we’re going to talk more about primary and secondary skills in particular.

 
I’m launching a short Aberrant Rules series this week about skill challenges. I have four major problems with the way skill challenges are generally written and run in most preset modules, so in true Ryven fashion, I’m going to break them up into four segments to be aired at the end of the next few podcasts. I’m briefly going to cover each point in today’s show and then go into more detail using some RPGA modules as examples in the weeks to come. So here we go.

Point 1 – Scene Resolution and Mismatching Complexity. A skill challenge is best used when the characters are trying to resolve an entire scene – that is, the result of the challenge, whether passed or failed, will move the party on to a new plot point. A skill challenge to convince some guards to let you through a door isn’t all that great. It’s a single task. Do some roleplay, make a single skill check and be done with it already. Now having a two-hour dinner with the king and trying to convince him of your point of view while simultaneously fending off the opposition and maintaining courtly demeanor? THAT’S a skill challenge! It’s also worth mentioning at this time that the numerical complexity of your skill challenge should match the in-game complexity of your challenge. My rule of thumb is one level of numerical complexity for each complication in your challenge concept. Thus “scale the wall” is at best a Complexity 1 skill challenge and should really be considered for a single roll as task resolution. “Scale the wall at night in under half an hour” now has two complications on it and is more worthy of a Complexity 3 challenge. Don’t require your PCs to have eight successes to chase the bad guy through an open field. Just do it in three or four rolls and get on.

Point 2 – Managing Expectations. This has been said a hundred thousand times before but it’s crazy important so I’ll say it again. Do your PCs need to pass this skill challenge to move the story forward? If so, your challenge is invalid. Rewrite your challenge or add complications such that failure doesn’t kill the plotline. You don’t want to back yourself or the PCs into a corner. Skill challenges are for side advantages or disadvantages surrounding the main story, not the main story itself. Furthermore, make sure your players don’t feel like there’s only one right way to complete the challenge. I think Bonus Tokens (shameless self-promotion!) are an excellent way to do this, but however you go about it, let your players know that any reasonable idea will be acknowledged.

Point 3 – Dead Skill Challenges. If your skill challenge is unresponsive, your characters will be unresponsive as well. Don’t be afraid to have the challenge “bite back,” forcing the characters to make rolls they weren’t planning on in the beginning. A monster that doesn’t hit you back would be really boring. In the same way, a challenge that doesn’t react to what the players are doing is essentially dead. Furthermore, if your PCs are solidly whooping the challenge, a few unforeseen and awkward skill checks can push the tension factor up and leads nicely into my fourth point which is…

Point 4 – Complications, Not Failures. This was mentioned a couple weeks ago when ‘Chatty DM’ Phil Menard was on the show – he calls it “Mouseguarding.” A failed skill check doesn’t have to mean ‘no action’ or ‘no interest.’ As a DM, you can only tell your players “you don’t (whatever)” for so long before it simply gets lame and frustrating. So say one of your PCs fails a climb check on a wall-climbing challenge. Rather than simply tell him (or her) that the character doesn’t climb the cliff, say “You get partway up but the effort is exhausting you. You’ll need to make an Endurance check to keep going or lose a healing surge or leave behind some gear or something.” As much as possible, give your players a secondary skill roll and/or a couple of roleplaying choices to deal with the effects of the failure. In this scenario, the Endurance check doesn’t count as a failure for the purposes of the challenge if they botch it – it only forces the character to take the roleplaying route.

Here at Aberrant Rules, we try to keep the ideas more or less within the bounds of standard 4th Edition D&D play and they usually tend towards storygame elements so far. Today, I present you with something distinctly mechanical and well outside the realm of the core rulebook, so proceed with some caution.

One of the things that bugs me about turn-based combat both in 4E and anywhere else, really, is the lack of simultaneous action. Obviously having everyone take a turn sequentially makes things easier to deal with, but sometimes I really want two things to happen at the same time. So taking a cue from the old SNES game Chrono Trigger, I’ve developed a rough sketch of something I call Combined Powers. It’s actually a bit detailed so I’ve written up a PDF and sent it in to Jared* for him to include in the show notes, and I’ll just give you a brief rundown here.

A Combined Power occurs when two characters use Powers simultaneously to achieve greater tactical effect. The combined Power counts as a use of each of its component powers for both frequency and action type. One character must ready his or her component Power as an immediate reaction/interrupt to the other character’s component Power in order to initiate a Combined Power. Important – a character can only be involved in one Combined Power per encounter.

Then there’s a bunch of guidelines as to how to deal with all the numbers and such. They aren’t exactly hard-and-fast rules and you may find a loophole for something here or there, but I think it’s a darn good start. Let’s take a look at an example of a Combined Power. You are a Swordmage. Your allied wizard tosses a Scorching Burst to ignite your bonded weapon and you then sear everyone next to you in the same way you would normally Sword Burst. The new power is called:

Fire Whirl gives up Sword Burst’s ability to distinguish friend from foe and Scorching Burst is sacrificing range and targeting ability. Also, someone is losing an immediate interrupt action, probably the wizard. For this trade, though, you get an extra ability modifier on a single hit (good for overcoming nasty resistances) and half damage on a miss. It’s better, but given that you can only do one of these per encounter (the power itself is still “at-will” because it’s composed of two at-wills), it’s not game-breaking.

I’ve included a couple more examples in the document, so please – take a look at them, decide if you like them or not, see if they add something unique to your game and then send me feedback, either on the forums, at ryvencedrylle@gmail. com or on Twitter as ryvencedrylle. I’m looking forward to your input!

*for the full pdf, go here!

 
Here we are once again at the end of the show and I’ve got some weird and wacky mechanic for you to try in your game. The idea this week isn’t so much something I have done as it is something I want to do; wish fulfillment. You see, I get bored of my 4th edition characters very quickly – far more than any other game I’ve ever played. I think this is because WotC dishes out so many shiny new toys on a weekly basis that I get distracted. Fears, powers, builds – I want to try them all. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think that 4E has abandoned or isn’t conducive to immersive roleplaying. I love immersive roleplaying and I love 4E. With the game mechanics so intricate and yet transparent, I can’t ever seem to get into character nowadays because I’m thinking of all the little things I want to explore and fiddle with mechanically. This, by the way, is the reason I can never play Magic: The Gathering. I’d have to have all the cards – ALL of them from the very beginning over a decade ago up through today or I’d never feel like I could play completely the game fully. My own little personal brand of OCD, I guess.

So here’s what I’d like to do sometime. I want to be the entire party for a change. Yes, I know this is supposed to be a cooperative multiplayer game, but darn it I have this whole stable of crazy characters who don’t really quite work right until paragon tier, and I don’t want to have to trudge through 10 levels of LFR just to get there. I’ve got this John Woo-style dual hand crossbow ‘gun-fu’ ranger, another ranger multiclassed to druid with a beast companion and a homebrew feat that lets him be his own wolfpack, a polearm fighter who augments his fighting with Quick Draw and Alchemical Opportunist, a possessed Barbarian/Warlock Hybrid and who knows whatever else – I’d have to go look through my hard drive to find them all. You know what, I.. I just don’t want to have to work my way through all these levels!! I just want to throw them down on the table as is and go nuts!

So why wait – why not start at level 1 and hack my way through all the levels like I’m supposed to? Because when PHB3 comes out, I’m going to have another half-dozen or so builds that I know I’m going to want to play. Seekers, Psions, Ardents… I can’t even remember right now all that’s in PHB 3, it’s sort of eluded me. And it’s not like you could even do this efficiently in 3.x Edition because making a character above 1st level took so long, doling out skill points and picking out spells and everything else. Making one character was hard and tedious enough, let alone four or five. And 1st and 2nd editions, while also having fairly simple character design, just doesn’t have the breadth and flexibility of options that 4th Edition does. To me, the game is just sitting here begging me to make a whole squad of my own guys and run them. I imagine that wouldn’t make any sort of a decent campaign, but as a one-off, a one-shot? Eh, maybe. The next time your regular game group comes up a couple players short, let whoever’s there bring out two or three character of suitable level, bust out a prebuilt dungeon from the WotC site and have yourself a good old-fashioned story-light beatdown. Then let me know how it goes. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get some pizza rolls and a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics and see if I can’t scratch this itch myself.