Category Archives: 4e

Red Box White Noise

So, the new Red Box is out in common distribution now, and D&D essentials is coming down the pike. I have the former and have pre-ordered the latter, and I’ve been holding off on talking about it too much until I’ve had a chance to really get my hands dirty with it, but a recent Escapist interview with Mike Mearls has created a bit of a furor.

The conventional wisdom is that Essentials is an acknowledgment that 4e was a mistake in direction for the game. This is usually declared with a smug sense of vindication and a plug for Paizo[1] but I find myself disagreeing with this interpretation. I’ve been equally willing to discuss the things I like and dislike about 4e, and I think that a lot of interpretations of Essentials are more about people’s opinions of 4e than their opinion on Essentials.

Now, first and foremost I think Essentials will fall short of what I would hope for in one big way. I do not anticipate it resulting in any new opening of the 4e system, and that’s a terrible shame. 4e is hard for a fan or small publisher to support. The rules for doing so are complicated, and any mechanical elements you may create will be relegated to the ghetto by the online tools. The quality of the tools, which is quite high, creates a barrier to anything that falls outside its bounds.

However, Essentials represents a potential crack in this facade. If essentials characters are sufficiently different from core characters, then the tools might need to be modified to allow for more flexibility. Realistically, I expect they’re just make the character builder offer a branching choice (Create standard character or essentials character) but it’s nice to hope.

This is important though because it speaks to the other problem I have with D&D – the disconnect between the rules and reality. That is to say, when a power does something mechanical like, say, stun two targets and damage and push a third, it’s not always clear what has actually happened in the “reality” of the game to produce that sort of outcome.[2]

This is one of my biggest hurdles in dealing with D&D is this disconnect[3] but what’s interesting about it is that it’s not essential (if you pardon the pun) to the rules. There are plenty of powers that are easy to visualize, and there’s nothing that mandates this confusion, it’s just _easier_. If you think of mechanics first and describe a mechanically interesting outcome, it can be hard to reverse engineer a coherent explanation, and there’s very little incentive to do so.[4] Easier to just add something vague and handwavey.

This also plays into why it’s harder to write martial classes than anything else. The “everyone’s a spell caster model” that is kind of implicit in the power system[5] gives other power sources more tools to fake this stuff. For a martial character, there are only so many ways to describe HIT BAD GUY WITH SWORD with the kind of simplicity that goes into other powers. It can be done with a lot more attention to detail (just listen to any fighting enthusiasts nerd out for a sense of how) but not easily.

The bottom line there is that if Essentials opens up the powers system to support more descriptive and “logical” powers, that’s a very promising thing, something I’d be very excited to see. But doing it part way won’t cut it. With an open system, you can put in most of a good idea and trust in the ecosystem to bring it to maturity. With a merely closed one, you can expect people to find a way around the weaknesses and patch things up. But with a strongly closed system, you’re stuck with what you got, for good or ill. This fact has been far more of an anchor around 4e’s neck than any failure to be “real D&D”.

Because the reality is, 4e _is_ very well designed. It’s a fantastic engine and a well thought out game. That doesn’t make it perfect, or the best or only game out there, but just as people are complaining about the players 4e left behind, it’s important to realize that a lot of people enjoy 4e. Trying to change 4e into something else that won’t support them is a losing strategy. But making it into something bigger, something that can make room for old and new players.

Maybe it will be that. Maybe it won’t. But I look forward to finding out.[6]

1 – And while I mean no sleight to Paizo – they’re awesome – Pathfinder ends up being a blunt instrument that gets misused terribly in these conversations. Pathfinder really is that good, and quite big, but i point out that despite being open and fantastically well designed, it does not invite the same raft of d20 products surrounding it that D&D did. There are many ways in which this is a good thing, but as a yardstick for inspiration it is pretty short.

2 – This is also an issue with things like Daily powers, which I understand Essentials forgoes.(EDIT: Some people have informed me that it’s the martial classes -fighters and rogues – who forgo dailies. I actually kind of dig that).

3 – the boundary of which is really the Druid, as lead to some discussion.

4 – I very nearly killed myself with this on the Witch Doctor because I hadn’t realized how loosely the color was tied to the mechanics in 4e. I designed those powers as color first, then expressed in mechanics, and in doing so I made much more work for myself than I needed to.

5 – Which is why 4e is really such a fantastic match for Earthdawn.

6 – And if it’s not? Well, I’ll probably get back on the heartbreaker horse.

Magic Item Thoughts

I’m not a huge fan of the level of itemization in 4e. The process of filling in “slots” it both a bit too mechanical and a bit too bookkeeping-heavy for me. Thematically, I’m a much bigger fan of fewer items, but with more punch and more story.

Curiously, this is harder than it seems. You can handle the gross balance easily enough by just removing magic item bonuses entirely in favor of an automatic bonus to, well, everything (attack, damage, defenses) of +1 at 1st level and increase it by +1 at levels 6, 11, 16, 21 and 26. Call it a “Heroic” bonus, the benefit of being named characters. This pretty much guarantees the characters stay balanced in terms of numbers, but it doesn’t solve the entire problem.

See, it also strips the character of a wide range of extra abilities, as many as 15 or so. Some may be minor or passive, and there are limits on how many can be used in a given scene, but that’s a LOT of options (for better or for worse).

The easiest way to address it mechanically is to give more feats – if you give the character a feat at every level, that’s about as many extra feats over the course of their career as they have magic item slots. This is a little out of whack since the distribution is over time, but since you can synergize with your existing feats, I feel like that comes out in the wash.[1]

There are two downsides to that approach: First, it wreaks havoc with the character builder software, and second, it overlooks the simple fact that magic items are really cool. We WANT to have a sword whose blade flickers with flame – it’s just that we don’t want it to be lame.

The simplest solution is to use the cool magic item rules, and only hand out artifacts. Yes, artifacts used to mean items of earth-shaking, game changing power, but in 4e they really mean “Magic items that aren’t boring”. They’re potent, sure, but nowhere near as much so as previous editions, and they have numerous interesting (and play-driving) checks in place to make them a practical inclusion in your game.

Now, I can sense the hesitation. Making heavy use of artifacts has historically been a shorthand for monty haul style play, and in the classic usage, a single artifact can really dominate a game. Plus, can you really *trust* players with that kind of power?

To that I can only say: embrace the ways that 4e has changed the game. More than any edition of D&D, this is the story of YOUR GROUP – not Elminster or Bigby or Raistlin or Drizzt – YOU. Own it. If something looks like it’s cool or interesting, then it should end up in your player’s hands, not someplace where they can watch it from a distance (or worse, just hear about it). Previous versions of the game have (sometimes unintentionally) told you that you weren’t cool enough for the things that regularly happened in novels. 4E makes it clear that opinion should be stuck where the sun don’t shine.

So just think about it for a minute – a game where every magic item is an artifact.[2] Think what that says and does for the world, how rich it demands that things be. Power comes intertwined with stories and people, and that’s as it should be.[3]

Anyway, I personally favor using all 3 (inherent bonuses, extra feats and artifacts-only) if I’m stickng to the core rules. A more complicated (but maybe more rewarding) approach is to construct item to grow with the player (and use more than one slot) but that’s a while other post in its own right.

Happy new year, folks.

1 – This wasn’t really an option when the game started, but now that it’s mature enough (and DDI makes it easy to track) there are now enough feats that this sort of option is actually useful rather than just useful on paper.

2 – This includes minor items. One nice upshot of this is that you can get a little bit old school and encourage clever use of items in strange places. A bottle that’s always full of water is a trivial item in terms of power level, but absolutely drips with story potential that is best realized when it’s a one-of-a-kind (or one of a set – sets work too) item.

3 – If you take this route, there’s no reason you can’t use regular magic items, at least as a starting point. The trick is to remember that when you want to use an item, you need to think about what it means if this it “THE flaming sword” not “A flaming sword”. Look at the Adventurer’s Vault products for inspiration – they’re full of neat stories about how an item came to be, but they tend to end with “and now people make copies of that” which kind of saps the juice from it. Take those backstories and bring them to life, and suddenly they’re a resource for your game, not just clever color.

Running a Raid, Part III

First, an aside: I figured out an easier way to handle agro. The boss must spend a number of threat tokens equal to the taunt value of the main tank on attacking the tank before he can spend them on any other attack. Makes the sequence of events much smoother. And a clarification: taunt tokens are exchanged within a given range, and only work within that range. I mention that because there might be 3 tanks in the last phase of the priest fight.

The Fallen Cardinal

I’m calling this guy level 10 because it’s an easy number to work with. I was struck by the idea of the ghost of a crumbling cathedral while I was thinking about ways to bring in the environment. A transition from corporeal to ghostly to demonic seems to offer a great way to call for very dramatic transitions between fight phases.

Since he’s level 10, he starts with 50 “health”, gets 10 menace points per turn, and has an effective attack roll of 25. Quick math in my head says a Paladin of that level probably has an AC somewhere around 24-25, and assuming that’s true, I may have to take that as an argument to move the base attack to [L]+10 and make spending menace point son accuracy something outside of the cost of the power. This has the additional benefit of giving the boss something to do with the spare one or two menace points he might be sitting on, so I’m going to call that the new rule for now.

Quick math also reveals that 50 health might be low. Let’s assume a 20 man raid: even doing badly, they’ll probably accrue 10 “hits” minimum per round, which makes for a quick fight, probably 2 quick. 100 would probably better, and for purposes of scaling with the number of players, the new yardstick is [L]*(number of players/2). So for our assumed 20 man raid, that’s 10*(20/2), or 100

I envision this fight having three phases: the first against his physical form, a rotting corpse in the regalia of his faith (giant hat and all). This will probably be pretty straight up, with a lot of his abilities focused around summoning up other undead minions to go after people, and maybe gaining some health back from their attacks, so taking him down requires managing his minions. The next phase will be his ghostly form, rising up from his body, and this will probably be rough to fight because of the whole incorporeal thing, so he’ll shrug off a lot of attacks, but he’ll also probably take extra hits from radiant attacks. Last, he’ll call upon his demonic masters to pull the whole cathedral into hell. This is partly because I love the visual – lit by flames and magma, with parts of the cathedral merged into the rock walls, the floor falling away to reveal magma below, leaving only a few places to stand, with the cardinal turning into a towering physical demon in the classic mould. The physical part of this fight will be the most straightforward (giving the strikers a bit of a chance to shine) but the environment will be the big challenge.

Designing Stage 1:
Ok, I want a melee attack, a ranged attack, and a summon, all bearing in mind that his usual budget is 10 menace points.

For the melee attack, I envision him just laying about himself with his ornate staff. For 1 menace point, that would be single target, 20 to hit, 1d8+5 damage. Let’s jazz that up a bit, and see what he can do with 4 menace points: let’s keep it single target and just jazz up the damage with a 3 point bump, bringing it to 3d8+5. That’s a hefty hit, but I admit it feels like it’s expensive – taking that as a note to self to possibly consider upping damage a bit.

For range, we’ll make it a smite, and we’ll call it 6 points, 1 base, 2 for range, 1 to shift the defense to reflex, and 2 to bump damage, so it’s a single target base 20 to hit against reflex for 3d6+5 damage. Again, feels expensive for what he gets, and I think this reveals to me the problem – the damage scale I’m using (from page 42) is really scaled for single attack, but I need to scale the raid boss for _group_ attacks. He should be attacking multiple targets every round, and the way these things are pricing out, that’s not an option.

So that calls for another tweak: Attacks will get priced assuming they’re area attacks. If they’re single target attacks, they get a free two level bump to damage. That reduces those two attacks to 2 and 4 menace points respectively, and I’m good with that.

At this point I feel like we’ve shaken loose most of the clunky bits, so rather than continue to show you all the work, let’s get to the end point.


The Fallen Cardinal

Initial Phase: During this phase the priest is a rotting human form in the rich regalia of a cardinal. He summons forth defenders from the mausoleum beneath the cathedral to fight for him, and he draws strength from their service.

Undead Priest Phase

Health: 30
Success Threshold: 10, extra success threshold at 20 and 30.

Attacks:
Unholy Staff
The priest lashes out with his ornate staff of impossibly tarnished gold.

2 MP- Near, single target, vs. AC. Base attack: 20, Base Damage 3d8+5

Dark Smite

The priest calls down a column of darkness to strike an enemy.
3 MP – Long range, single target, vs. Reflex. Base Attack: 20, Base Damage: 3d6+5 (necrotic)

Dark Reckoning
A wave of dark energy washes over the priest’s enemies
7 MP – Long range only, all targets in a single area, vs. Will, Base Attack 20, Base Damage: 4d8+5 (necrotic)
Notes: This is his ugly attack, and if he isn’t taunted enough or he gets too much menace back from his minions, he’ll spam this.

Call Minion
The Priest summons an undead warrior to harass his foes, then crumbles to dust, releasing a stream of black energy back to the priest.
4MP – A 3 token, 8/16/24 threshold minion appears in any area. At the beginning of the Priest’s next turn, the minion is removed from play and he gains any remaining tokens as menace tokens. If a minion “cashes out” for any number of tokens, it also heals the priest for one point.
Notes: The priest will try to spam these whenever possible (especially if he end s up with 12 menace points) , preferably into unoccupied areas like the middle distance, and use the payout to explode in Dark Reckonings.

Phase transition: Once the priest’s physical body is destroyed, his ghost form rises up to strike down his attackers.

Ghostly Priest Phase
Health: 30
Success Threshold: 10/20/30
Special: Insubstantial. Takes no damage from attacks which do not also Push, Pull or Slide, unless those attacks have the radiant keyword, in which case it takes an extra point of damage.
Environment: Lighting one of the cathedral’s candles and saying a prayer will inflict one point of damage. This can only be done from the medium range area, and requires a DC 20 religion check. Failure on this check grants the Priest one MP, just like a failed attack.

Attacks:
Dark Radiant Burst
Blades of shadow blast out from his ghostly form, striking all nearby enemies.
5MP – Short range, all enemies in area, vs. AC, Base Attack 20, 4d8+5

Shadow Spear
A spear of shadow launches at an enemy
3MP – Long Range, single target, Vs AC, Base Attack 20, 2d6+5

Float
3MP – The priest floats up into the air, out of melee reach, and remains there for the duration of the fight, or until he takes a 3-threshold hit (30 points of damage in a single hit)
Note: he cannot use Dark Radiant Burst while floating, so he will freely throw around Shadow Spears.

Circle of Shadows
The Priest draws a circle around himself that shields him from all attacks, and in fact draws power from their hostility.
11 MP – For the duration of the round, the priest takes no damage. Each time he is attacked, he instead accrues 1 MP.

Shadow Apocalypse
The priest has gathered enough shadows to unleash an unholy storm
18 MP -All areas, all targets in all areas, vs Will, 8d10+10
Notes: This is the classic “Do not screw up the tactics, or we all die”. If the priest uses Circle of Shadows, and people keep attacking him, he’ll have enough points to bust this out, which will suck immensely.

Phase Transition:
As the priest falls, he calls out to his demonic master, and the earth shakes and cracks, stone walls shoot up on all sides (or perhaps the Cathedral falls, it is hard to say). In then end, the scene is now a great stone chamber whose features echo the cathedral. Much of the floor has fallen away, leaving only three stable areas, and the Priest has transformed into a demonic figure, ten feet tall with fiery skin and a great flaming sword.

Demonic Priest Phase
Health: 40
Success Threshold: 12/24/36
Special: Fiery: Gains Resist 20 to fire attacks.
Environment: The close, medium and far ranges are now physical locations (the three remaining stone platforms). Moving between them now requires a movement power or an Athletics check with a difficulty of 20. On a failure, the character still moves, but his desperate scrabbling to hang on and the distraction it provides grants the priest 1 MP.

Notes: On paper, this is a pretty simple phase with simple powers, but the demon’s mobility paired with the fact that you can’t let him get off on his own, should allow for things to shift pretty easily, as the demon will always move to the weakest group. His powers are priced with the assumption he’ll jump than use them. Nod to Bartoneus for sending me down this particular direction of thought.

Attacks:
Jump
The demon makes a mighty leap form one platform to the next.
2 MP – The Demon jumps from one platform to another, and is now considered in melee range with the PCs in that range category.

Blade Sweep
The Demon sweeps his blade in a fiery arc through his enemies
4MP – Short range, all enemies in area, vs. AC, Base Attack 20, 3d8+5 (fire)

Blade Hammer
Powerful overhand blows rain down on a chosen enemy
4MP – Short range, single target, vs. AC, base attack 20, 4d10+5

Inferno
The Demon incants a powerful fiery ritual that engulfs another one of the pillars in flame and falling rock
8MP – Any range but short, all enemies in area, 4d10 + 5 (fire) and 4d8 +5 damage (falling rock).
Note: This ability can only be used if the Demon is alone in a given area

So there it is: Does it make sense, and can you see it? This was, honestly, MUCH longer than I expected, so I no longer have any true perspective on it. Normally, I’d sit on it for a week or so to polish, but I’m working on this out in the open, warts and all, so I’m curious as to impressions.

Running a Raid, Part II

Ok, so now that we have the baseline, let’s see about jazzing things up a little. There are three big areas we want to address: we want to make sure there is some reason to use one attack instead of another, we want to capture some way to simulate aggro management, and we want to generally be able to jazz up the fight with special events, terrain and so on.

The first is the easiest, and we solve a bit of the third at the same time. The trick is that you can offload most of the fiddly bits onto the bad guy. The simple gimmick for this is to assign vulnerabilities to the bad guys that reflect tactical situations, and those can be paired with resistances. To give a concrete example, suppose the Boss can turn into a swarm of bugs – for the duration of this it might not take damage from any attacks except those that can hit more than one square. Or perhaps he can still be hit, but he’ll take an extra point of damage from those attacks.

Provided that these vulnerabilities and resistance switch over the course of a fight, you successfully capture the idea that if you know what to do during each phase, you can fight more effectively. Now, admittedly the fact that in a WoW raid this knowledge is gained by dying repeatedly until you get it right, but that knowledge can probably be gotten some other way depending on the venue – for a convention game, for example, it might be part of the prelude.

There’s a temptation to address the second point (aggro) with complex systems, causing certain actions to increase aggro, marking to move it around and so on, but that is unnecessary complication. If you step back, aggro is really just a mechanized way for the boss to “fight smart”, seeking to go after the most cost effective targets – the squishy ones in particular. As a GM, you can already make that decision, targeting healers and more lightly armored PCs, so the only thing we really need is a way to allow the PCs to inhibit this.

So we’ll compromise on a simple mechanic: any time an attack would mark the boss, the attacker gets a taunt token. Taunt token’s can be spent to cancel a menace point which it used to fuel an attack that does not include the PC as a target. This does not cancel the attack, just the menace point – the boss can spend another or, if he cannot, the attack changes targets to the taunting PC. However, we want to model the idea of a “Main Tank” so let’s add one more twist: at the end of a turn (after the last PC, before the Boss), all the taunt tokens need to be given to one character. This also saves the trouble of havign to track everyone’s threat tokens.

For the third and final bit, , we need to add in a little bit of extra variety – enemies that support the boss, terrain features and so on. We don’t want these to be too fiddly, so we’re not too worried about details – what these should take the form of are choices – opportunity cost decisions that give a reason to choose one action or another (rather than provide only one obvious choice).

There will generally take two forms: The first will be special actions that can only be taken at specific times and places. If the fight takes place in a fallen cathedral, perhaps there are candles to be lit (which takes an action from someone in the middle range), and lighting a candle reduces the number of threat tokens the boss has, or grants attackers +1 damage or otherwise provides some benefit. These are easy to design, and simply depend upon the description of the environment. The only limiter is that these are usually only useful in a single phase of the fight.

Representing secondary creatures is a little more difficult. Mechanically, they should be represented as one more power of the boss – he spends menace to make them appear, but since it’s not an attack, it’s not influenced by aggro. Support enemies will appear in a given area and be represented by some number of threat tokens. They work like the boss, in that players can attack them instead, and if they clear a threshold of damage (usually the boss’s level -2) then they remove one of the tokens. If there are any tokens left when the boss acts again, then they get used. What they’re used for depends on the monster: sometimes they’ll be turned in for straight damage to a target or targets in the area their in, but if the creature is more built for harassment, then the boss may get those threat tokens back in addition to any it generates this turn.

Now, with the reminder that this is still just an interesting stunt, tomorrow I’ll try to take this theory and create a sample or two, and maybe discuss how to use some of these ideas in a less over-the-top fashion.

Running a Raid in 4e, Part 1

Gamefiend threw out the question of whether or not you could run a WoW style raid in 4e, and I’ve been finding myself chewing on it. I’m pretty confident the answer is “Yes”, though I admit I think you’d be kind of crazy to try it, since anything that involves juggling that many players is crazy enough to really qualify as a stunt. It’s something you could do at a convention, but it’s probably better suited to online play (heck, maybe it’s a good use of google wave). This is the a window into my thinking on this, and while it’s super, super raw, I figured I’d share it as I work through the details on how I’d make it happen.

Now, you could do it as a straight-up fight, just by making a staged villain[1], probably a triple solo to make sure he has enough hit points to last, but that could quickly end in madness as everyone takes their turn to move and arrange and track their hit points and so on. Also, you’d need to add more area attacks or the things just going to get torn apart by sheer numbers.

So instead, I would probably set it up like an open ended skill challenge with an abstract map. The trick is to capture the two elements of a good raid: distinct roles, and a necessity to change up tactics.

The simplest way to do the “map” is to set up areas of engagement: Near, middle and far. Near means adjacent to the boss (where the main tank and melee damage dealers are going to be), far means at a distance (where most of the healers, buffers and ranged damage-dealers hang out) and middle is the space between, most occupied by skirmishers, off tanks, and specialized roles.

The boss, whatever he is, has a level. That level pretty much determines exactly what sort of threat he is, and also is the basis of most of his capabilities. His hit points are abstracted into the number of “Damage successes” it will take to take him down. I’m calling the ballpark on that his level (which I’ll just call [L]) times 5, but this is totally unplaytested, so that might be off base, especially since it would probably be smart to scale him with the number of players. I’d endorse representing these with tokens, like poker chips, but it could just be that I’m nuts for tokens.

In a straight up fight, things go like this: On your turn you can move one “space” (or two spaces if you use any kind of movement power) or use a power (whether to attack or not). You might also do something else, but that’s much more situational. Moving is hopefully self explanatory, but the actual fighting is something else.

When a player attempts to attack the boss, he can use any of his attacks, with the following limitation. Melee/close attacks require the character be near the boss, and ranged attacks (anything that would invite an attack of opportunity) need to be from the middle or far distance. If a character uses an ability to heal or buff an ally, that works normally.

An attack is always assumed to hit successfully, but most of the time the only thing that matters is the damage dealt – Raid Bosses are immune to all manner of special effects and statuses (except when they are not, see below), but benefits that help allies can still be triggered. If the damage dealt meets or exceeds a certain threshold (probably based off [L]), then it counts as a success, and the boss takes one point of “damage” – accruing damage successes is what ultimately takes the boss down.[2] However, any failure gives the Boss one “Menace Point”.

This matters a lot because, after everyone’s taken a turn, the boss gets to go. He has a number of menace points equal to his level, plus any he’s gained from player failures. He uses them to build his attacks – he should have a list of abilities that have menace point costs, but in the absence of that it works something like this.

For 1 menace point he can make an attack against a single target in the “close” area. It is an attack against AC, where the boss effectively rolls 15+[L] and does damage equal to the low normal damage on the table of the gods (aka page 42 of the DMG)[3]. For each additional menace point spent he can enhance the attack by doing one of the following:

  • Affect an additional target
  • Affect everyone in the area (costs 3 menace points)
  • Target the middle distance instead
  • Target the long distance instead (Costs 2 menace points)
  • Increase damage one step to the right (low normal becomes Medium normal, high normal becomes low limited and so on, costs 2 points)
  • Increase the effective “attack roll” by +2
  • Change the attack to a different defense (Reflex, fortitude or Will)[4]

The boss can make as many attacks as he has menace to pay for, and certain bosses will have special abilities that they can spend menace to trigger that do more than just damage.

This proceeds, round robin, until either all the PCs are dead or the monster has taken enough damage to go down. Simple as that.

Now, this is very basic, and very mechanistic (which is, arguably, very apt for a raid) with very little in the way of tactics. It would be intensely boring because most player will simply do the same thing every round. However, this lays down the baseline for the next step, adding in important things like aggro, roles, abilities and events. And that comes next.


1 – A staged villain is one who, when reduced to zero hit points, changes rather than dies. In most cases this is a physical transformation (like clay statues that have snakes burst out of their chests when they’re beaten) but it’s also a useful way to simulate the changes in tactics that are familiar to video game players. Normally, each “stage” has normal hit points for its level, though you can just as easily make one stage elite or solo (but I normally wouldn’t – the point of this trick is to offset the long dull endgame of solo fights). Easy to budget for it too, as each stage is just treated as its own critter, which is a little bit kind to the players, but I think it comes out in the wash.

2 – As an optional rule, you might allow additional thresholds to speed things along, and to make strikers feel more valuable. So if a creature’s threshold is 11 and a hit deals 23 points of damage, you might decide it removes 2 points of damage and so on. Alternately, that might just be situational, but that’s something for tomorrow’s post.

3 – I am tempted to have damage be measured in healing surges rather than hit points, but I need to think about the impact this has on healing, and whether it means tanks (sorry, defenders) end up insufficiently tough. If damage is in hit points, it’s the one thing that can’t just be handled with different colored poker chips, but the onus of bookkeeping is on players, so it is distributed. That said, tokens or cards definitely have certain logistical advantages, especially for the large combats. Similar thinking could be applied to damage (just say that at-wills, Encounters and Dailies do 1, 2 and 3 respectively) and while that simplifies things, it’s actually a bad idea because it makes things REALLY boring for the player, and removes the tactical choice-making I hope to introduce next.

4 – This is, by the way, insanely abusable, which is why the DM shoud not actually use this on the fly unless he’s willing to show some restraint. It’s a decent yardstick for pricing boss powers though, and I’ll use it later when I craft up some demo raid bosses.

Getting the Most out of 4E Skills

The 4e skill list is very functional, and there are some great ideas for tying it to powers, but sometimes you just want to stretch the bounds of what a skill can do, or as a GM you want to create challenges that might be a little bit more creative than just using skills by the numbers. For folks in that situation, I present the following list that I started pulling together when I was trying to write some non-typical skill challenges.

Unexpected Things Skills May Be Useful For
Acrobatics – Catching spilled drinks, making a dramatic entrance, dancing with style.

Arcana – Droning on and on and on, make fake magic look authentic, repairing old magical widgets.

Athletics – Flexing of muscles or otherwise generally putting on a show, dancing without embarrassing yourself

Bluff – Sincere sounding compliments, pretending you’ve met someone before.

Diplomacy – Insult someone without them being able to call you on it, say the right thing about someone’s outfit.

Dungeoneering – Find exits, talk about architecture.

Endurance – Look attentive through intensely boring conversations, drink all night.

Heal – Discuss hangover cures, spot a limp.

History – Recognize someone’s name, explain politics.

Insight – Read the subtext of a work of art, judge who is really important in a room.

Intimidate – Exude subtle menace, make someone angry, escalate to a superior

Nature – Cook, get along with someone’s dog.

Perception – Judge the quality of someone’s clothes, spot a cheater.

Religion – Give a sermon, discuss philosophy at great length.

Stealth – Escape a conversation, cut into a line.

Streetwise – Know the odds on a horse race, know who’s on an invitation list.

Thievery – Entertain small children, repair small knick-knacks, slip something into someone’s drink.


Feel free to add your own!

Skill Challenge: Changing the World on Your Downtime

If anything, this skill challenge was even more ambitious than yesterday’s. It really steps outside the bounds of what a skill challenge normally does and instead introduces a way to track a situation (the status of the character’s home city) and for players to influence it or not, as they see fit. Cleaning up this Town
Sure, it’s safe for you to walk the streets. Someone tries to jump you for your wallet you’ll probably beat them so bad they’ll be begging you to take their money. For you this is just a nice stepping off point between going off and killing dragons, rescuing princesses or whatever it is you lot do. From where you sit, it must look pretty nice, but us? We have to live here. I don’t expect you to care much, but the least you could do is throw an old man a copper or two.

The city of Valmer is a cesspit of crime, poverty and decay. Once a small mill-town, the construction of a bridge across the river turned it’s sleepy dirt road into a major thoroughfare, and the city grew far too quickly for any kind of planning. The original miller who owned much of the local land now styles himself a duke, and his wealth is such that no one argues. He maintains a number of ‘knights’ who have benefited from his elevation, and he supplements them with mercenaries when absolutely necessary. It’s not a nice place to live, though it’s a decent enough base for an adventurer.

The health of a city is a complicated thing, but the players can impact it. There are several possible successes they can seek to accumulate, each of which touches upon some aspect of life in the city. The main areas they can try to improve are health, safety, quality of life, trade and education. For the more driven, rebellion is an option, and for the less socially interested, that time might be better spent training or turning a profit.

When the characters are between adventures, they may spend their time trying to change the city, for better or for worse as suits their needs. This is an ongoing skill challenge, and the DM may call for the players to describe their actions during the downtime between sessions, and call for a roll to apply it to one of the possible successes. Not every character may be interested in making such a change, so players may also take actions that pursue their own interest.

Setup: You can change circumstances in the city over time through your actions.
Level: Equal to the level of the party.
Complexity: Open ended, zero sum (that is, there is no end condition. Successes and failure both simply trigger events and change the situation, potentially canceling each other out). Each of the six categories (health, safety, education, honesty, quality of life and rebellion) has its own score which goes up and down over the course of play. Players may each take a “turn” on their downtime between adventures, and use this skill challenge as a shorthand of what they’ve been up to while off screen.

Primary Tasks:
Health (moderate DCs): You take time improving the health of the people of the city. You might take direct action, using your heal or nature skills to help out at a clinic, or you might pursue it more indirectly – dungeoneering might help you improve the drainage system, streetwise or intimidate might help you put together work crews to clean up bad areas or you might even use diplomacy or religion to try to get others to help out.

Safety (moderate DCs): You set about making the streets safer. Whether this is by walking patrols (streetwise or intimidate), busting heads (combat skill), through community organization (diplomacy or religion) or even through civil planning to improve visibility or build more streetlights (arcana, dungeoneering or possibly something else) you are making the streets safer to travel and the people less fearful.

Honesty (high DCs): Cities depend on a certain amount of trust. Scales must be reasonably honest, goods must be delivered in a timely fashion, contracts must be upheld; every day is a delicate interplay of these forces, and every corrupt guard or dishonest merchant adds a little more friction to the process. You are taking steps to improve the status quo, calling out dishonest merchants, helping cut through red tape and expose corruption wherever you find it.

You might be a diligent investigator (insight or streetwise) a legal champion (history) or just a pair of fists willing to fight for what’s right (combat or intimidation).

Quality of Life (moderate DCs): This is the catch-all for improvements that don’t fall into any other category, but still improve life in the city. Education, celebrations, holidays, public art projects and many other things can help improve the general quality of life in the city. Players may teach teaching (using an academic skill like history, religion, nature or arcana) or otherwise support teaching, the arts and other pursuits.

Rebellion (high DCs): Not content to change the city, you’re looking to tear down the duke and his men. Violent insurgency (combat), sabotage (stealth, bluff) or even public mockery (bluff, streetwise, stealth) are all potentially tools in your arsenal. If successful, the impact of this will be profound, but the risks that come with this are equally problematic.

Training (moderate DCs): Keep to yourself, mind your own business and practice your skills. You can use almost any skill. If successful, start the next adventure with an extra action point. If you fail, start the adventure down one healing surge.

Profit (hard DCs): You concentrate on making a little bit of money on the side. You put up a little seed money (up to your level x10 in gp) and make the roll. If successful, you gain an amount equal to your seed money. If you fail, you lose your seed money. You gain a bonus to this roll equal to the current honesty score of the skill challenge. Success or failure at this roll does not count towards the skill challenge as a whole.

Exploit (moderate DCs): You concentrate on turning a profit at the expense of your fellow citizens. ou put up a little seed money (up to your level x10 in gp) and make the roll. If successful, you gain an amount equal to your seed money. If you fail, you lose your seed money. You take a bonus to this roll equal to the current honesty score of the skill challenge. Success or failure at this roll does not count towards the skill challenge as a whole.

Establish Connections (Moderate DCs): You spend your time establishing contacts in the city. When you attempt this task, you name an NPC you’re looking to influence – this can either be an existing NPC, or you can invent a new one. The DM determines the appropriate skill to roll, and which task the NPC is active in. If successful, the NPC becomes one of your contacts, and gives you a +2 item bonus to tasks of his type within the city. If you fail, you not only don’t you gain the contact, but you lose one of your existing contacts. Success or failure at this roll does not count towards the skill challenge as a whole.

Other Actions:
The characters may opt to try other approaches.

Charity (Automatic Success): If the characters opt to throw some money at the problems, it can make a difference. If the characters spend or donate an amount equal to the gp value of a treasure parcel of their level, they may gain one automatic success in Health, Safety, Education, Honesty or quality of life. For twice that much, they can purchase an automatic success in rebellion. This can be done multiple times, but a character must use his action to oversee spending the money.

Adventuring (Special): If the characters end up adventuring in the city, the outcome of that adventure should could as at least one success or failure in an appropriate score. If the adventure is a failure, inflicts a lot of property damage, or furthers the interest of the duke or similar parties, it will probably score as a failure, while a successful adventure that removes a threat to the city will count as a failure.

Triggers:
A lot can happen in the city, some of it in direct opposition to the character’s and their interests.

Status Quo (automatic, every round): There is a natural resistance to change that comes from many forces pulling in their own direction. However, there is also a natural tendency for some change to remain in place Every score starts with a status quo value of 0, but it may change over time. After the players have taken their turns, perform the following two steps:

  1. The highest and lowest score each move one step closer to their status quo, so if the score is higher than the status quo value, it’s reduced by one and If the score is lower than the status quo value, it is increased by one.
  2. For each score whose current value is ten or more than their current status quo value, increase that status quo value by 5 and reduce the current score to equal the status quo value. Similarly, if any score is more than ten below it’s current status quo value, reduce the status quo value by 5 and increase the current score to the status quo value. This generally represents some significant achievement or setback in that particular arena.

The Duke (automatic, every round): The duke has his own vested interest in things, and he will reduce one positive score by one, regardless of its status quo. If he reduces the score to zero in this fashion, then it’s status quo becomes zero. He will usually lower the highest score after the status quo event, but for purposes of determining his priority, treat the rebellion score as five points higher than it is.

Martial Law (Triggered at the end of the round when any score is -5): Things have gotten so bad that the Duke cracks down, bringing in troops and bringing the city to heel. All scores are set to a value 2 points below their status quo value. .

Revolution (Triggered when Rebellion status quo becomes 20): The duke is removed and he is replaced with an NPC from the player’s list of contacts, and he now grants a +4 bonus within his area of interest. This new duke may also now forgo the Duke trigger each round. Additionally, the revolution score and status quo both drop to zero.

Notes:
The status quo values represent the general state of the city, with the individual scores representing fluctuations. At zero, the state of that particular score is pretty abysmal, while at five there’s some hope for improvement. At ten, the city is at least at par, and at fifteen, that particular segment is noteworthy and important. At twenty or greater, the city has become an exemplar of that particular field.
For each of the potential arenas, the following describes the state of the city at each status quo value.
Health
0: The canals run brown with filth and food rots in warehouses before it reaches the people who need it. Disease runs rampant, and death carts are not an uncommon sight on the city streets.
5: The sickest and poorest have places to go. Religious charity, poorhouses and improvement in some of the worst sanitary condition keep disease from running absolutely rampant, but it still claims more lives than it should.
10: The water supply is reasonably clean, and while life in the bad parts of town can be hard and dirty, it is not a guaranteed death sentence. There may even be the beginnings of a hospital. This general improvement in quality of life grants a +2 bonus to all quality of life or train skill checks.
15: The streets are clean and open and the water sparkles. Disease is responded to quickly and efficiently, and there is food enough for the churches and poorhouses. At this point there is at least one major hospital in the city. The bonus to other skill checks increases to +3. However, DCs to improve the health score are now 5 higher.
20: The city virtually gleams, streets and waterways sparkling. Several hospitals see to the health of the city, and great warehouses make starvation almost unheard of. The bonus to other checks increases to +4, and DCs to improve the health score are now 10 higher.

Safety
0: It is foolish to travel the streets alone and unarmed, even in full daylight, in anywhere but the finest parts of the city. The city watch is little more than one more street gang, and at night, all wise folks bar their doors and pray for morning.
5: The city watch may be corrupt, but they at least try to do their job. Lamps are lit on most major thoroughfares, and daylight crime is at least fairly rare.
10: The streets are safe during the day, but it is still dangerous at night, especially in bad neighborhoods where the lamps can’t be counted on. The watch is reliable, but they can’t be everywhere. This improved level of safety grants a +2 bonus to profit and honesty skill checks, but applies a -2 penalty to rebellion checks.
15: The watch is honest and the streets are well lit. Children can play during the day without concern, and night requires only reasonable caution in all but the worst parts of town. Crime exists, but violent crime is reasonably rare. The bonus and penalty to other skill checks is increased to +3/-3, and the DCs to improve safety are increased by 5.
20: It is a point of pride that a man may walk the streets safely, and any violent crime will be investigated and prosecuted with extreme prejudice. The watch is renown for its honesty and effectiveness. The bonus and penalty to other skill checks is increased to +4/-4, and the DCs to improve safety are increased by 10.

Honesty
0: Nothing gets done in this town unless you know someone and can afford to grease their palm, and even if you do pay, the outcome is unreliable. Mismanagement is a prevalent as corruption, and the wheels of the city are more or less ground to a halt. Goods cost 25% more than the cost listed in the Player’s Handbook.
5: If you bribe a man, you can at least feel confident he’ll do what you paid for. It is perhaps a stretch to say that things work, but they stumble along in a rough facsimile of function. Trade is slow, but moving, and goods cost only 10% more than the cost listed in the Player’s Handbook.
10: Bribery is less open now, and things can get done without it, though it unquestionably speeds the process. Government is inept, but no more so than anyone expects, and trade moves along adequately. Goods cost their listed value in the Player’s Handbook.
15: Bribery is a rare thing, reserved for high crimes and special occasions, and the government does its job well. Trade flows briskly, and non-magical goods can be purchased at 5% under the values listed in the PHB and the DCs to improve honesty are increased by 5.
20: The city is a well-oiled machine, it’s officers known throughout the land for their efficiency and honesty. The city has become a hub of trade, and non-magical goods can be purchased at 10% under the values listed in the PHB and the DCs to improve honesty are increased by 10.

Quality of Life
0: Life is terrible. Graffiti and busking are the closest things the city sees to art and music, and education is something only the rich can offer their children.
5: Life is bad. A handful of artists get lucky enough to find patrons, but most quietly starve. The handful of teachers trying to teach the basics are overwhelmed.
10: Life is OK. In addition to patrons, a handful of theaters and other venues allow the arts to get by, if not flourish. Education is at least available to some, and a few rudimentary schools have sprung up, improving the ad hoc approach. Improved communication grants a +2 to all skill checks to improve health.
15: Life is good. The arts have blossomed, and the city is home to at least a few artists of reknown. The schools have also grown, and a number of academies have started making names for themselves. The bonus to skill checks is increased to +3 but the DCs of checks to improve Quality of Life increase by 5
20: Life is great! The city is a centre of culture, with arts and education at the forefront. The city draws grand masters of the arts, and its universities attract students from across the continent. The bonus to skill checks is increased to +4 but the DCs of checks to improve Quality of Life increase by 5

Rebellion
0: The government’s iron fist is closed tightly around the city, and his rule is unquestioned.
5: Mutterings can be heard in dark corners and back rooms, voices of those who feel that enough is enough.
10: There is now a movement, a full fledged underground working to undermine the current ruler, though it must operate in secret and it must proceed very carefully indeed.
15: The movement has grown, and almost daily there are strikes, protests and acts of sabotage. Revolt bubbles just beneath the surface.
20: Revolution! The city is up in arms to remove the current ruler. Hopefully, this is fodder for any number of adventures as it transpires, but more importantly, the revolution trigger occurs.


Thoughts

  • There’s a conceptual debt to Birthright here, since this is more or less a small scale version of a long action. For those unfamiliar, Birthright let players play the movers and shakers of the setting – nobles, bishops, guildmasters and such – and between adventures the camera would draw back to the big map, to play the bigger game. At this scale, each character could take one action per month, and most of them revolved around maintaining or improving their respective domains. There were a few non-domain actions for characters who were not so exalted as to have kingdoms to run, but the heart of the matter was in the domain actions. This skill challenge operates on a very different scale, but it’s based on that same idea of coming up with a shorthand way to play the things that happen during downtime in such a way that they impact the game.
  • This engine is, by intent, very generic. The duke is pure color, and could just as easily be replaced with almost anything, just by tweaking the initial dials.
  • This is probably a little bit too fiddly when all is said and done, though it’s not that complex by most tabletop RPG standards. I think I let my desire for some sim-city bleed through a bit too much.
  • I love the inclusion of revolution because it’s unstable. Players can start a revolution, but there’s no guarantee it won’t just burn down whatever they build up. That feels right to me, though it might be a bit on the cynical side – a bit more Danton’s Death than Common Sense.
  • EDIT: Cam’s reminded me that this is also a riff on the social meters from Underground, which was an awesome and crazy little game.

Skill Challenge Hubris: The Siege of Fallcrest

A while back I wrote some stuff for WOTC, much of which did not see the light of day. No harm in that, but among it had been a couple of skill challenges I was pretty happy with (though, of course, I can find warts in retrospect). James Wyatt was cool enough to say it was all right for me to repost them to my blog, so I wanted to roll out a few with some comments and thoughts.

This one was one of the two really ambitious ones which, I think, really pushes the boundaries of what a skill challenge can do. Structurally, it’s designed to be big enough that it could constitute an entire session if the DM is inclined to play a scene for each action taken – that’s certainly how I envision it being played – but it can just as easily be pushed through at speed moving on to the rest of the adventure.


The Siege of Fallcrest
The barking laughter of the gnolls diminished to a low mutter as their leader stepped to the front. Fully a head taller than the soldiers around him, his mane and muzzle were snow white, and his beastial face marked by a cruel scar. In a painful approximation of common he shouted a challenge to the stone walls, and was drowned out by a hundred howls rising behind him.
The arrows from the walls fell short of their mark, but Fallcre
st’s answer to the invader was clear. There would be no surrender this day.

This is an intensely detailed skill challenge, of the sort that the challenge itself may be a large part of the session. Not every skill challenge needs to be as detailed as this, but this is a great illustration of just how much you can do with a skill challenge.

This is a good challenge for players who are about to transition from the heroic to the paragon tier, and are ready to move on from Fallcrest (see The Town of Fallcrest in the Dungeon Master’s Guide) to a larger or more exotic base of operations. Mechanically, this challenge changes drastically with each failure. The first failure allows the gnolls to enter the city, the second presses them further in and so on. This is offset by the trigger conditions (below) which only allow one failure to accumulate per day (which is to say, per pass around the table). Any additional failures on a single round trigger the “Casualties of War” event rather than counting as a failure.

Setup: A force of gnolls is marching out of the moonhills, several-hundred strong, intent on raiding Fallcrest. The town has been warned (hopefully by the PCs) and Lord Markelhay is mustering what troops he can, calling up conscripts and sending riders for reinforcements, but there’s no way to tell if they’ll make it in time. Fallcrest’s walls have been proof against attacks in the past, but her garrison is small and composed of more farmers than soldiers, and without the character’s there’s little chance of success.

Character’s try to hold the walls of Fallcrest against the raiders, and try to catch the gnoll’s leader in battle.

Each round of this skill challenge represents one day of the battle, with each character performing an action for the day. Reinforcements are five days out, so odds are good this will be resolved before they arrive. Players may opt to pass on their turn, but any day that a player passes on counts as a failure. Any healing surges lost over the course of this challenge are not recovered until the character takes a long rest after the end of the challenge.

Level: Equal to the level for the party (usually high heroic tier)
Complexity: 3 ( requires 8 successes before 3 failures).
Primary Skills: Dungeoneering, Diplomacy, Heal

Arcana (Hard DC): Moonstone keep has ancient defenses, pillars of moonlight that have long since fallen inactive. If they can be fixed, it will grant the defenders a great benefit. Failing this roll does not count as a failure towards the skill challenge, and a success does not help the skill challenge. Instead, if the player succeeds, then all rolls made after the second failure receive a +2 bonus.

Athletics (Hard DC, one use): The cliff that separates the upper and lower city slows the progress of the enemy forces. After the second failure but before the third one, a daring group might be able to climb up the cliff (a high DC athletics check) in an unexpected location and strike at the gnolls from behind, forcing them to regroup at the top of the cliff. If this roll fails, the forces committed to this would have been better used at the keep, and it counts as another failure. If successful, rather than count as a success, the gnolls are pushed back and it cancels the second failure, returning the challenge to having only one failure.

Bluff (Moderate DCs): The gnolls are fierce and driven, but they’re not terribly well organized, and it’s entirely possible to try to disrupt them with trickery. Manning towers with empty suits of armor to look like there are more men, blowing horns to suggest that reinforcements are coming and other such tricks all stand a decent chance of disrupting the enemy attack. However, there are limits on how far such trickery can go, and each time bluff is successfully used in this fashion, the DC increases by 5.

Diplomacy (Moderate DCs): The people of the city are scared, and will benefit from strong leadership. Giving speeches and talking to people about victory is a great way to do this. Unfortunately, this is harder to do when you’re actively losing, so the DC goes up by five with each failure.

You can attempt to parlay with the gnolls before the first failure, but the best that will do is buy some time. It is a high DC roll, and a failure will result in the loss of a healing surge in addition to the normal results of the failure.

Dungeoneering (Moderate DCs): Before the first failure and after the second one, dungeoneering can be used to help reinforce the walls and gates (of the city and moonstone keep respectively) and operate the very outdated siege equipment.

After the first failure (but before the second one) then you can set traps in the city. These rolls do not count towards or against the challenge : instead on a success it grants another character a +2, and on a failure, it costs the character one healing surge.

Heal (Variable DC): You may use your healing skill to tend to the sick and wounded, helping keep soldiers in fighting trim. Before there are any failures, this is an easy check. After the first failure it becomes a moderate check, and after the second it is is hard.

Alternately, you can spend time tending to wounded allies. This is a moderate DC check, but if successful, another character can recover two healing surges, with no penalties to a failure.

Insight (Moderate or Easy DC, special): You can spend some time watching the gnolls and get a grasp of how they works. While they are brutal and enthusiastic, they are given to infighting, and most of their organization really comes down to bigger gnolls barking at smaller ones, with Whitemane as the biggest one of them all. It’s clear that if Whitemane were removed from the equation, the army would fall apart.

Once you have made a successful insight check, you may still use insight as a lookout skill (see below).

Intimidate (triggered, High DC, usable only once): Immediately after a failure, the next character to act can attempt to cancel the failure by standing and holding the gap long enough for defenses to get by. This is an intimidation skill check (since the trick is getting them to engage him, not just go around) with a high DC. If successful, the failure is cancelled as if it hadn’t happened (though the players do not accrue a success). If he fails, another failure is accrued. Whatever the outcome, the player loses half his starting number of healing surges (if he doesn’t have enough surges, he drops to 1 hit point).

Nature (Moderate DC): Before the first failure, you can skirmish and scout the enemy forces outside of the wall.

Religion (Variable DC, One Use): One time during the battle, you may rally the faithful, delivering a powerful sermon to inspire the troops and reassure the civilians. There are no atheists in the foxholes, and the difficulty reduces as the battle gets worse. Before the first failure, this is a hard DC check, after the first failure it is a moderate DC check and after the second failure, it’s and easy DC check.

Stealth (Variable DC): Striking from ambush is a powerful tactic, but the Gnolls will grow canny to it. The first time you use this skill, it is a moderate DC check, but the difficulty increases by five on each subsequent check.

Alternately, you may use your stealth to spy on the enemy, using stealth for lookout purposes (see below).

Streetwise (Moderate DC): After the first failure, when fighting is in the streets, you can use your superior knowledge of the terrain to scatter the enemy, launch ambushes and generally engage in brutal street-to-street fighting.

Thievery (Moderate DC): War provides opportunity, and it is not hard to do a little looting of your own when you should be fighting. If successful, the success does not count towards the skill challenge. Instead, you find loot worth one tenth of the monetary value of a treasure parcel of the character’s level. Failures accrue as normal.

Other Approaches
Skills are not the only way to confront the enemy, and there are indirect ways to help.

Stand and Fight (High DC): The character can simply jump into the middle of the fighting, and may roll the bonus to his basic melee basic ranged or ranged basic attack against the DC as if it were a skill. He may also sacrifice one or more healing surges before the roll, gaining a +2 bonus to the roll for each surge spent.

Lookout (Moderate DC): A number of skills, like acrobatics, athletics, insight, perception, and stealth, are not always useful in direct confrontation, but come in useful when it comes to keeping track of the enemy, and delivering messages among your allies. When a skill is used in this fashion, it is a moderate DC check, and it does not count towards the success or failure count. Instead, if successful it allows you to grant another character who is acting this round a +2 to their check. On a failure, the character loses one healing surge.

Triggers
Fighting begins with the gnolls outside the southern walls of Fallcrest, and each failure brings them closer to Moonstone Keep.

The walls are overrun! (triggered by first failure): After the first failure, the gnolls will be inside the walls, fighting and looting from street to street. This changes the utility of some of some skills for the challenge, and moves the fighting to the cliffside, trying to keep the gnolls from moving to the lower city.

To the keep! (Triggered by the second failure): After the second failure, the gnolls have made it down the cliffs to the lower city and are now pressing at the gates of Moonstone Keep.

The gates cannot hold! (triggered by the third failure): The gates of Moonstone keep have fallen, and the players have failed. They now must face Whitemane and his vanguard.

Casualties of war (triggered by a second failure in a single round):
The players do not accumulate a failure, but an NPC ally falls in the defense of the city. They may not be killed outright: it is possible they are captured or cut off from the main body of troops: but their ultimate fate is now tied to the outcome of the skill challenge.

Players may wish to try to rescue particularly well-loved NPCs. This is a moderate DC check (usually streetwise, nature or stealth) if the success only recovers the NPC, and does not count towards the challenge. If the rescue also strikes at the enemy, it’s a high DC.

Ultimate Outcome
Success: The gnolls are held at bay, and you manage to catch up with the retreating Whitemane and his guards. This encounter is one level above the party’s level, and the enemy units are placed before players decide where their characters are coming from. The damage to the city is serious, but recoverable.

Failure: The Gnolls have made it into the gates of Moonstone Keep, with Whitemane at the lead. Still, if the characters can kill Whitemane, the invaders will fall into disarray. This encounter is three levels above the party’s level, and the DM doesn’t need to place his units until after the players do so. If the characters win this fight, they manage to save Moonstone Keep and those within, though the city has still been ravaged.


Some Thoughts

  • In retrospect, this would benefit from a table of what works and doesn’t work depending upon which failure we’re at. The narrative is pretty simple, but I think it’s obscured within the the text, and it goes something like this:
    Before the first failure: The gnolls are outside the city walls. They can be skirmished with, or the city can be made ready for the invasion.
    First failure:
    The gnolls breach the walls.
    After the first failure:
    The gnolls have breached the walls and fighting is happening in the upper city and pushing towards the lower city.
    Second Failure:
    The gnolls push down the cliff from the upper city to the lower city.
    After the second failure:
    Fighting in the lower city as the Gnolls besiege the keep.
    Third Failure:
    The Gnolls breach the keep.
  • Note that one way or another this ends in a fight scene, albeit one that is slanted in favor of or against the PCs. I feel pretty confident that by the time things reach that point, players will be gung ho for some straight up action.
  • I sincerely hope, but am not entirely sure, that the scenes that I consider implicit in a lot of these actions comes through. For example, I consider the Athletics actions to be something of a gimme for how to play out. Someone has a crazy plan that just might work, a heroic PC takes a handful of troops to try to pull it off – that’s exactly how it should go.
  • This would benefit greatly from a bit more guidance on how to run scenes as subsets of a challenge. I actually did write some stuff about that, but that doesn’t help here. The bottom line is that you can run a scene however you like, be it a fight, a roll, some roleplaying or even another skill challenge and then take the final outcome of that seen and “roll it up” as a success or failure in the larger skill challenge. To use the athletics example again, I could do that as a scene with an athletics/stealth skill challenge followed by a fight, with victory in the fight translating into success and defeat into failure. Basic “Dungeon as Skill Challenge” kind of stuff.
  • This challenge favors the PCs. Given the way failures are handled, they will probably win it, and that’s as it should be. What’s important (and much more up in the air) is what the price is going to be. The Casualties of War trigger is in there explicitly to turn failures into pain for the characters, so that you can have them win, but still pay a potentially hefty price for it. I’m a huge fan of this model, but it’s not always easy to pull off.
  • And, obviously, all this assumes an existing investment in Fallcrest. If you don’t have such an investment, then this is an interesting exercise, but it has no teeth. This is designed as a culmination of events in play, after the characters have found allies in the town, have come to hate Whitemane and have already gotten well and truly tied into the events leading up to this.

Anyway, I may post more of these later if there’s an interest, but for the moment, feel free to deconstruct at will.

The Subtle Hand of Awesome

(Posting this in a couple of places, just to see how different platforms handle it)

I’m a big fan of the Birthright setting that TSR put out back in the day. It hit a lot of notes I really liked – the world felt populated, politics had a powerful role, monsters felt mythic – it just rocked. But one subtle note always impressed me. In one of the nations of the game, the default one detailed in the core book, the High King’s throne is empty. The main thrust of events revolves around the nobles and rulers jockeying to either seize it or to keep someone else from seizing it. There are several contenders, but no obvious winner. It turns out that was intentional – as the designer put it, the person they assumed would win the war for the throne would be one of the PCs.

I was reading through the recent Eberron Player’s Guide and came across something that I found similarly appealing. One of the epic destinies in the book is the cleanser of the Mournlands (A nation destroyed by magic and now hidden under an unending shroud of magical fog). It explicitly lays out the character;s exit point from the game; the day they walk into the Mournlands and sacrifice their own life to lift the curse on it.

Now, there are other ways that curse might be lifted in a game – you could have a whole campaign about it – but that assumption that the solution is going to come from a PC is one that I find incredibly powerful, and is exactly what I like to see in a setting. Contrast this to the Forgotten Realms model, where we would know the name, race and class of the SUPER COOL NPC whose destiny it is to walk into the Mournlands and purify them, and if your PCs arereally lucky, you might be able to watch, or maybe even help a little.

I realize there’s an appetite for both of these approaches in gaming. Some players would rather be the audience to the world than the main stage, and that’s fine, but I think they have historically been overrepresented in published settings, and it’s always nice to see a little strike against that approach