Plot Blocks

This was written two years ago, and it wasn’t the thing I was hoping it would be.

So I wrote this. It’s what I was hoping it would be. Having read it over, it feels a lot like what skill challenges were really trying to be.

Flavor in Game Design

I read an article talking about how Monte Cook is wrong to suggest that giving a dwarf with an axe a +1 bonus to hit because dwarves love axes. Story, the article said, is not tied to giving bonuses for stereotypical racial traits, and in fact make it more difficult to build characters outside of those stereotypes.

Except, the person who wrote the article didn’t even really bother to read what Mr. Cook was saying. Cook wasn’t at all talking about story. He was talking about flavor, and those are two very different things. Story is certainly a part of flavor, it is the thing that carries the weight of a game’s narrative, whether it’s a role-playing game, a board game or chess. The story of chess is very simple, and mostly implied, but it’s there. More important, though, the flavor of chess is has nothing to do with that implied story. Knight, pawn, bishop, queen. Each piece is named for a figure of medieval Europe.* This flavor is divorced from the story of “You are a commander. You meet an enemy on the field of battle.” The two are not one and the same. See, I could make a game with all of the pieces from chess with a totally different story, but it would still have chess-like flavor because of the nature of those pieces.

Flavor allows us to make assumptions about a game. If there are dwarves in your setting, there are some concessions you need to make to people who know what dwarves are. In some cases, you’ll need to strictly adhere to the tropes of the dwarven people. In other cases, you’ll run counter to those tropes. But in both situations, you need to be keenly aware of what those tropes are, what people are expecting from your inclusion of this flavor, and how to cater to or subvert those assumptions.

What Cook was suggesting was not that story should be dictated by +1 bonuses to hit with axes. What he was asking is “Should the fact that dwarves stereotypically like axes be reflected in a game’s mechanics? How closely should the tropes of the epic fantasy genre affect the design of a game with that genre’s tropes?” And it’s a fair question, one that begs to be answered by Ron Edwards. System matters, and how a system ties to the flavor of the game is an important point in how the game will be played. The systematic concessions made to setting determine the texture of the game, how it feels in your mouth while you’re chewing on it. This is one of the biggest reasons I’m worried that the Assumed Setting of Fifth Edition D&D will be the Forgotten Realms. I believe that any system designed to specifically cater to the Forgotten Realms as a setting will by necessity play more like Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

And while I love me some Second Edition D&D, I’m not really looking to play something that feels like it right now.

So, to answer Cook’s question: Should flavor determine mechanics? Yes. How much should it do so? As much as it makes sense in your design. I mean, I don’t know what you’re cooking up yet, so I can’t really speak to any given set of mechanical curiosities. I don’t even know if we’re looking at a top-down or a bottom-up design yet. In a top-down design, it makes a lot more sense to try and capture the flavor of the game mechanically. In a bottom-up design, you’ll be looking much more closely at how you can crow-bar the flavor to the kick-ass mechanics you’ve built.

Which actually makes me wonder how much thought has gone into the overall design philosophy this late in the game’s design. From what I understand, there is already a playtest-ready version of the game floating around. If we’re confused about fundamental design questions regarding the depth of flavor’s influence on the rules, color me slightly concerned.


*Yes, even pawn. Etymologically, it’s linked to the word pedonem, or foot soldier, in Anglo-French.

Why Fourth Edition Died

So, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition has been announced, and the news has struck the sort of reaction I expected it to. People are hoping for this feature or that. Others are expressing their dismay at the fact that a new edition is coming so soon on the heels of D&D: Essentials. Yet others are suggesting that this heralds the end of Dungeons & Dragons, that a new edition will make the already split RPG community even more fractious. There are yet others that have met the news with incredible, soul-crushing apathy. So, there’s that.

To be honest, I’m not even really sure what to say about the development. I could talk about how much 4E and Essentials stuff I have on my shelves right now. Or I could talk about what I want to see from the new D&D. Or I could talk about what I think would be the best possible direction for the game to take (which is quite different from what I want to see, truth be told). I could talk about a lot of things, but I think what I’m going to talk about today is design space, design philosophy, and why Fourth Edition failed.

See, we wouldn’t need a Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons if Fourth Edition was given the sort of design team it deserves. And by that, I don’t mean folks like Monte Cook. Mr. Cook is an incredible designer and makes good game, and for that I think he deserves a stalwart salute and as many dollars as the industry can throw at him. Under his guidance, Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons revitalized the industry, but his is not the sort of hand a design like Fourth Edition needs. Fourth Edition needs someone like Mark Rosewater. Fourth Edition needs someone like Keith Baker. Fourth Edition needs someone like Kenneth Nagle.

You will note that all three of those names are attached to people who design cards. Two of the, Rosewater and Nagle, are Magic: The Gathering designers. Baker is responsible for Gloom, which is incredible and does something no other card game did before he came up with it. This isn’t to say that I think Fourth Edition needs to be treated like a card game, far from it. It needs to be treated in a way that only men of this design tack can treat a game.

The problem with Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, arguably the biggest problem that any edition of D&D has ever faced, is that the people who were designing it didn’t know a goddamned thing about Design Space. I’m not talking about James Wyatt or Mike Mearls. I’m talking about the Matt Sernett’s of the world, the Rob Heinsoo’s. The guys who make Power books and the guys who put out new campaign settings. The people who are the life’s blood of a role-playing game production.

See, Wyatt and Mearls put together a hell of a game. Say what you will about it, it is impossible to deny that the thing was well designed. There are hundreds of moving pieces, thousands of possible combinations, just in the first book, and those things come together beautifully. In many ways, the core Fourth Edition was like the first Magic: The Gathering set, or Gloom. It did things no one had ever done in role-playing games before, and it made an incredible show of it. What’s more, the framework left behind by that first book was amazing. There was design space all over the game, and it was waiting to be plumbed by talented designers. The first showing we had of that was the second Player’s Handbook, where we started to play around with how powers fit together, and how classes were built. There was an incredible and untouched plaza of design waiting to happen around races, with racial feats and racial powers barely touched. There was room left open for the creation and invention of magic items, and the powers framework lent itself to customization beautifully. There was a ton of space in the way monsters were put together (so much so that I found myself drawn to concepts like the Fourthcore Bestiary because of innovative aura designs – understand that for a moment… AURA designs; one tiny little speck in the whole of the game). Seriously, though, let’s take a look at some of the things that weren’t properly explored in Fourth Edition’s brief history:

POWERS

We saw a lot of books filled with powers, and one book that actually did something neat with them. Having loads of powers doesn’t make for customization, having powers that work in strange ways makes for customization. Understand that the only interesting powers in the whole of the game were those in the Player’s Handbook and those in the Player’s Handbook 3. The originals and the _only_ set of powers that were at all different or strange. One could argue for the powers from Essentials, but seriously, fuck one. The powers presented in those books were half-assed concessions to the players lost in the Pathfinder Exodus, and nothing more. If you wanted to make powers interesting, here’s a one-sentence answer to the problem: Magic cards are still interesting.

Seriously, and this is incredibly important, Magic design is where the D&D crew should have looked for more interesting power designs. Not the cards themselves, mind, but the philosophy behind those cards. Magic cards constantly break the rules of the game they’re played in. That’s the whole point of the game. What the designers of D&D tried to do was create a homogenized environment in which none of the powers effectively broke the rules, and that’s really the wrong way to build a game that’s made out of a bunch of crazy powers. You need each power to break the rules of the game in an interesting way that helps you win that game. Then you need to do the same thing to the monsters they’re fighting.

Moreover, there is an element of randomness in Magic: The Gathering that D&D really could have used sometimes. It had this when wizards were forced to memorize their spells each day, because the wizard would try to guess at which spells were going to be needed and prepare those ones in advance. Magic solves this by randomizing your hand. D&D4E solves it by not solving it at all. There was no need to pore over your powers, because after a short nap, you’d have them all back again, right as rain. This isn’t the way to go into this territory at all. There is nothing about this that’s suspenseful or fun. Sure, players like getting all their powers back at once, but what the players want and what is good for the game is seldom the same thing.

The design space here is mind-boggling. Off the top of my head: a whole list of Encounter Powers that could be made better by giving up a Daily; Encounter Powers that take two full rounds to use; Daily Powers that change when in certain circumstances (underground, flying, in the sunlight, whatever); a list of At-Will powers you can give up using for the rest of the encounter to make way better; a list of At-Will powers that are as strong as Daily powers, but use up the character’s healing surges as a cost; Lifetime powers, powers that can only ever be used once, ever; uncontrollable powers that go off in certain circumstances, but the player has no control over them; come-back powers that allow you to do incredible things for the cost of an action point; counter-powers that allow a player to stop another player or NPC’s powers from going off as an immediate interrupt; mind-drain powers that steal another character’s powers for a turn, or treat that power as spent; dramatic powers that allow you to influence story events in subtle (or, for dailies, not-so-subtle ways)… Seriously, this is just what I came up with in the time it took me to write this list… I’m sure some of them have been done, or variations on them, but I know a bunch of others have never been touched, and that’s a damned shame.

RACES

One of the things I was most looking forward to in the creation of D&D4E was the promise that races were going to get a lot more attention than they had gotten previously. Elves could be wicked-cool at being rangers, sure, but they could also be wicked-cool at being, y’know, Elves. And I rather liked that idea, being one of those strange kids that enjoyed playing D&D when Elf was a class. We were promised feats, Paragon Paths (which is sort of a suck concept, but I’ll get onto that in a bit), epic destinies, and I thought this was going to be a big deal when they were talking about it.

Turns out, it was just one more path towards optimization, when it could have been so much more. Again, the amount of design space left open by more focus on races and their interactions is staggering. One very simple answer is to make race-specific classes using some of the design space we have available in the POWERS section, but that’s hardly where the buck stops on racial design space.

I mean, design isn’t just a matter of rules, however much that may be unapparent from the way Wizards of the Coast has handled it. A lot of it comes from flavor, and rather than focus on any given flavorful concept (even their own Points of Light flavor, the thing they’ve touted around for so long without actually exploring it at all), the Fourth Edition answer has been Add More Races. Which is problematic, because there are only so many places one can go in that direction, and this trip has ended with People Made of Crystals, which is fucking stupid. And no, the right answer doesn’t lie in making subraces, because the gods alone know I can’t put up with another Kender. No, the answer lies in making interesting and powerful cultures for the people of already established races, and building off of that.

Eberron proved this in Three Point Five. You take elves, just normal everyday, boring fucking elves, and you give them a continent that they rule, and suddenly we have the Undying Court and crazy Inca-inspired magic, and weird-ass traditions and rules that affect elves still living in Khorvair. And we haven’t changed elves at all. They’re still elves, they still have the same bonuses and flaws, they’re still the same elves we know and love and/or hate, nothing has changed about them, but they are entirely, completely different. Same goes for Baker’s treatment of the Drow. Same goes for Weis and Hickman’s decision to put dwarves on horseback and have them ride around nomadically. Same is true of every human culture in every fantasy setting ever written.

And it sort of looked like backgrounds were going to be how this worked itself out, but they backgrounds were generally pretty lame unless they were overpowered schlock from a single campaign that wormed its way into the Character Builder. And then themes looked like they were going to get this figured out, but themes never took off the way they should have. To be perfectly honest, themes are the sorts of things you want in a core book, not a campaign setting, and they’ve never really gotten the spotlight time they deserve.

CLASSES

This is one of the most prominent complaints about Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons in my store: it’s not as customizable as players want it to be. Your fighter has a type, and deviating from that type usually means that you are going to be crippled in combat. There are a few good generic powers for each class, but the best usually focus around the template’s specific niche abilities. And that’s just bad game design, guys.

I’m going to, again, look at Magic: The Gathering as a good example of how to do much the same thing. See, the point isn’t to make certain abilities work better with certain templates, the point is to make a bunch of abilities that work on their own, and have a level of synergy that make it desirable to play those things together. I can build a green deck out of whatever the hell I want, but if I’m trying to ramp into a host of big beaters, I’d best be looking for some Llanowar Elves and some Birds of Paradise, ne? There is nothing saying I can’t play Birds of Paradise in any other deck, I certainly can, but if I’m looking to ramp mana, I put birds in my deck.

The same is true of powers in D&D. Every power should work well on its own and do something valuable that the rest of the party can build on, but if you build synergies into your powers, your players will find those things on their own, and they will build their characters according to whatever build they want to make.

The funny thing about this is that it changes exactly nothing. You’re still making templates for your fighters, you’re just not making the powers exclusive to those templates and letting the players suss them out for themselves.

Moreover, there are a lot of things you can do with the class system that simply were not done. Again, I point to racial classes. Again, I point to the way powers were never filled out the way they should have been. And I also point to the fact that there has never been a martial controller. And I also point to the fact that there is a nearly endless number of possible combinations of power-types and class archetypes. They’ve covered the basics, sure, and having an endless number of classes isn’t really all that important, but having a lot more customizability in your classes and having those class combinations rotate around the niche system you’ve established would go a long way towards building a much more playable, designable game.

And with themes, paragon paths, and epic destinies at your disposal, you have a lot of room to build in extra customization as you build your game. Paragon paths in particular were an unplumbed font of design space that could have really changed the history of the game. Prestige Classes defined Third Edition D&D, and the amount of effort that went into creating a whole bloody host of them is evident in the fact that there’s a whole bloody host of them. The number of prestige classes available to a player of 3.5 D&D is “too many to choose from.” Paragon paths, not so much.

And Epic Destinies… Oh man, would I have done the Epic Destiny entirely differently. That may actually require a different post, so let’s not talk about that just yet. Let’s just say “FATE,” and move on.

SKILLS

One of the biggest advances Third Edition D&D made to the game was the introduction of a universal skill system. It wasn’t pretty, and it definitely had its problems, but it made the game flow in a totally different way than any edition previous. And while I don’t think that the introduction of the skill system made Fourth Edition any better (I actually think it made it quite a bit worse), it was a damned fine piece of gaming tech, and I understand why they kept it around.

Having played a bunch of First Edition D&D this year, I think they made a rather incredibly horrible mistake by including skills in the game at all. I often tell people that I think Fourth Edition D&D plays more like First Edition D&D than any edition between them, and I still think that’s very true. The difference, the place where I find Fourth boring, is between battles. In First Edition D&D, you had to be on your toes, you had to be thinking, you had to move carefully from room to room and solve all sorts of insane problems just to survive. And that doesn’t involve much in the way of skill rolls from anyone but the thief, and most of the time your thief isn’t good enough to make any of his or her checks anyway. Skills, as they are presented in Fourth Edition D&D, are a crutch used to hand-wave away problems solving and role-playing. In Third Edition, they absolutely made sense, and they added something great to the game. In Fourth Edition, all they did was make it dull.

And the designers couldn’t have possibly known that going in, and I don’t at all blame them for the choice of including a skill system, but I don’t think I will ever play with skills as they are written in Fourth Edition ever again.

Again, this idea might require an entire post to talk about in any sort of comprehensive way, so I think I’m going to move on to…

FEATS

When I first wrote this, I actually completely forgot about feats, which should give you an idea of how important I think they are to the Fourth Edition of D&D. Like skills, feats were a defining feature of Third Edition D&D. They were, in a word, incredible. In many ways, they allowed you to do things that were, in Fourth Edition, performed via powers. Cleave and Great Cleave were powerhouses of efficient fighting. The meta-magic feats gave magic-users a powerful advantage. Feats meant something to Third Edition.

In Fourth Edition, they’re basically an afterthought, which is a damnable shame, because the amount of design space opened up by feats is insane. I mean, when you break feats down, they’re just a talent tree, with feats building off of other feats to create more powerful combinations down the line. The only feats worth taking half the time, though, were Toughness and the Wintertouched/Lasting Frost combo.

And that is really, deeply stupid.

Like much of what I’ve been talking about today, feats are a layer of character creation that provides a powerful range of customization tools that can be used to make your game better. It’s these layers that add to the fun of building a character, and they’re the sort of thing from which an entire path of feats can be built. When utilized properly (providing actual, wicked-ass bonuses to the people who take them) bonus/flaw systems can be incredible.

What I guess I’m getting at here is that every layer of the D&D game has a bunch of really wicked design space that is laying open for us to tinker with. Class, race, skills, feats, themes, backgrounds, whatever. And the fact that it hasn’t been tinkered with in any meaningful way is really deeply disappointing.

COMBAT

Combat in Fourth Edition D&D is a fucking mess.

I say this with all the love in the world for the designers and the game itself: it is a fucking mess and needs heavy reworking to make it marginally playable. This is especially true of any level over 12, which is entirely disappointing because much of the system was designed to solve the Sweet Spot problem. Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition’s sweet spot is levels 1-10.

Combat takes too long. Characters, both the NPCs and the Player Characters, have too many hit points. Figuring out tactics and powers is a time consuming and mind-numbingly dull process. After twelve rounds, even interesting bad guys become a slog and I have players checking their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

There are a few problems with combat in Fourth Edition, but none of those problems are problems of Design Space. Still, they are worth mentioning in the context of “this is what killed Fourth Edition D&D,” so I’ll be taking a brief look at them.

I’m going to make this as simple as I can: when you make a game, include all of the things you need to play in the box. If your game needs dice, include dice. If you game needs miniatures, include miniatures. If your game requires a grid map, you’d best include a grid map. The creeping reliance of Dungeons & Dragons on miniatures is perverse, commercialistic and sad. You didn’t need miniatures to play D&D1E, and you could certainly get away without them in D&D2. It was in D&D3, with the invention of “flanking,” that the miniatures stopped being a good tool and started being a necessary element of play, and Fourth Edition continued this trend with a gusto that bordered on sinister. As a games retailer, I often found that this increased my sales, but not of Dungeons & Dragons product. Chessex got a lot of money from the lack of production inclusion in D&D, and Reaper made most of the rest, especially after Wizards pulled the plug on their miniature lines.

Moreover, miniatures do not make the game more fun.

Maybe I’m in a minority here, but I have always found my imagination is plenty capable of determining what is happening with a crew of wererats, and I find that putting them on a board in front of me dulls the imaginative blitz of combat. Also, fiddling with toys takes time, and the largest factor against D&D combat is that it takes entirely too much time already. Give me a sheet of graph paper and my imagination any day.

Of course, this does reduce one of the branches of power design that was horribly abused while making Fourth Edition: movement and combat advantage (which are, in reality, the same fucking thing). I’m okay losing that space for the sake of a cleaner, faster D&D experience.

Changing gears: we don’t need this many hit points. Killing player characters  is very difficult in Fourth Edition, which is okay. I get it, we’re supposed to be heroic adventurers, not meat for a grinder. Except that without a threat of player character death, combat becomes dull, an exercise in whittling a monster down to zero. Killing player characters more often is not a bad thing. Your players will thank you for combat encounters that take less than an hour.

And one more time: DO YOUR MATH!!! Paragon tier is a mess. Epic gets even worse. And the Monster Vaults only helped marginally. Do your fucking math, guys, figure out how much time it’s going to take for a level 12-14 party to kill a level 13 solo, because I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that it’s longer than your ideal play flow.

SMALLER GRIPES

Item creation is stupid. The economy is wrecked. Character Builder software is basically necessary. And the alignment system is stupid.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

This seems pretty obvious to me, but I’m going to spell it out anyway.

We need a very simple, very basic version of Dungeons & Dragons. Abilities, race, class, basic combat powers, hit points, armor class, non-armor defenses… go! I want to see a core Dungeons & Dragons that is so incredibly simple I could teach it to an eight year old in under a half hour. These will be the core and most basic rules of the game, the rules everything else is designed to break.

Then we start in on the options. Hundreds of powers. New races, new classes, new racial classes. Themes, integrated from the beginning of the game. Backgrounds that are good for more than a +2 skill bonus. Feats that actually matter. A skill system. An expanded skill system for things like “profession” and “craft” skills. Magic items that are interesting and strange and setting-defining. A variety of spell/attack/power systems. A couple of interesting morality systems. Fill your boots with optional content, but leave the core of the game as simple, pristine and clean as possible.

Then explore the optional design space ad infinitum.

And I think this is maybe the most important thing in the world: invite your players to do the same. One of the shining achievements of Third Edition D&D was that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people working on the game at any given time, and that meant that there was an enormous glut of product available to anyone who wanted to find it. I have a book about African adventuring that is both brilliant and terrible (and Eurocentric and insensitive and empowering and informed). That would not have existed, that _could not_ have existed without the framework that the OGL provided for creating new and interesting content. I want to see that sort of exploration go into the newest version of Dungeons & Dragons, and without a specific invitation from the Guys Upstairs, we aren’t going to have it.

One Page Role-playing Games

My friends and I like to come up with crazy game ideas all the time. Once in a great while, I'll throw down the gauntlet and challenge people to actually write a goddamn game. Not like, a seven hundred page monstrosity, just a wee little one-page or 24-hour game design. It doesn't have to be great, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a role-playing game, and you have to finish it. 

So now I'm issuing the challenge to the rest of you: write a role-playing game in less than a thousand words and put it up on your blog. The Rules are only this: It has to be less than 1000 words, it has to have a mechanic I've never seen before (or a kick-ass variation of a mechanic I have seen before), and you have to send me a link, either in the comments here or to my e-mail at friggert@hotmail.com or to my twitter at @warpgames. Go create!  

Wee Little People 

A Role-playing Game in One Page

The Point: You and your friends play the tiny people that live inside your house. Your characters are roughly mouse-sized and must overcome many challenges to simply survive. Also, you must never reveal the existence of your people to the humans, as they will kill you or eat you or something. Humans are terrible.

Tell a Story: One of the players is the Storyteller. He or she describes the situation in which your Wee Little People find themselves. The rest of you play Wee Little People and try to do stuff while the Big People in the house are clumsy and oblivious. Doing Stuff can include collecting food, thiefing things, fighting with the cat, disposing of garbage discretely, pilfering Tim’s weed stash, moving dice to where they will be most likely to be underfoot, building shelters under cupboards, finding water, defending your home against cockroach attacks, invading mouse holes for their supplies… You’ve got options. Alternatively, you could try and tell an epic tale of adventure on a tiny scale. But you already know how to do those.

Character Creation: Choose a thing you are good at, a thing you are bad at, a skill you have learned, and an item you possess. None of these may be the same thing (for instance, you cannot be good at climbing and have that also listed as your skill). When you attempt an action that relates to the thing you’re good at, get a +1 bonus to the roll. When you attempt a thing that relates to the thing you’re bad at, take a -1 from the roll. When you attempt to do a thing that relates to your skill, once per session you can succeed on the roll automatically. When you attempt a thing that relates to the item you possess, you ignore any penalties on that roll unless that penalty comes from the attempt relating to a thing you are bad at.

Rolling Dice: Whenever someone attempts something and the outcome is in doubt, roll a six-sided die. If you roll five or higher (counting all bonuses and penalties), you succeed. If the result is four or less, you fail.

Failing is Bad: Whenever you fail at a thing, mark it off on your character sheet. You are only allowed to fail at something six times over the course of a single session. If you fail more often than that, Bad Things Happen. The Bad Thing is decided by the player to your left, and you are out of the game until the next session.

This is Your House: Wee Little People is set in whatever place you happen to be. The setting is whatever is already around you. If you’re in your living room, for instance, that might include your couch, coffee table, TV stand, bookshelf, and the half-eaten pizza in the box on the floor. The antagonists are you. The Wee Little People cannot make their existence known to you, so whatever it is they’re going about doing, they have to try and sneak around you and your friends to do it. When Jim gets up to grab a soda, the kitchen is no longer a safe place. Scatter!

  

Discovery: If Bad Stuff happens to all of you, you’re discovered. If you are discovered, it can be safely assumed that you and your friends have cashed in on the existence of the Wee Little People and have left them to be tortured by scientists forever. You sick fucks. Or, you could spend the rest of the evening arguing about what you and your group would ACTUALLY do if you found leprechauns in your underwear drawer. Up to you, really.

On Skill Challenges that Suck

Sometimes, skill challenges suck. I'm not one of those people who thinks that they need to be stricken from the game forever, but I have certainly run skill challenges that were not at the top of their form. In fact, I ran one on Monday, and it was mostly terrible. The challenge was getting across the Tibean Wasteland. For the most part, the development of the challenge wasn't as important as the act itself, which should have been my first clue that the challenge wasn't even needed in this case, and I would have been better off making it a series of role-playing moments, a combat encounter, and some investigation. Honestly, I think an investigation skill challenge would have been more fun in its place, and now I'm a touch sad that I didn't run one. I'd offer to do one this coming Monday, but I have different plans for this upcoming session. Maybe when we reach the Spine of the World, or the city of Sternum...

I think that's probably the one thing that differentiates skill challenges that are awesome and skill challenges that suck: what they're for. I understand that some players hate them in general; the math is screwy, or they believe that the challenge would be better left to good role-playing. Personally, I disagree, but I'll admit that when a skill challenge isn't going to clearly effect things, it's pretty stupid to have a skill challenge at all. Whether they passed the skill challenge or not, my players would have crossed the Tibean Waste. Making it a skill challenge didn't add any tension or drama to the act, and if it had, I think I would have failed as a DM. That's not a thing that should invoke tension, it's a simple act and it should just get done. Travel, meet some people while you're travelling, fight some bitches what get up in your grill, then be done with it.

When you're crafting a skill challenge, it has to mean something. I think that's part of what made the Night at the Opera skill challenge such a success; the players knew that if they did not make their show a success, they would have to come up with a different (probably much more difficult) way to get into the Mayor's house and get the information they need to open the Dungeons & Dragons Inc. Lodge. That is a damned fine skill challenge. Development for that makes a big difference. If you succeed, you get to go to a fancy party, and when the guests are all unconscious or fucking, you can do what you need to do. If you fail, you have to bust in the door, deal with the guards, find a way to subdue the mayor and his guests, and get done what needs doing. The first way is much more fun, much less trouble, and is better for role-playing and story-telling purposes. The second way involves a lot of combat, a bunch of unwanted attention, some trouble-shooting and an uphill battle to get to your goals.

And I think that is what a skill challenge should really be about. When you're planning these things, keep your goal in mind. And your goal should be fun. What would be the fun way to get this goal accomplished? What would be the less-fun way to do the same thing? Now, make the fun thing the reward for accomplishing the skill challenge. Make the unfun thing the penalty for failure. Set this up from the beginning, let your players know what is at stake before they start trying to figure out how they're going to roll this, and make them think about the actions they'll be taking to use those skills effectively. That will add tension to the challenge, make it worth doing, and make the whole experience a lot more fun to play through.

Penalties in Skill Challenges

I really like running Skill Challenges. I like how dynamic and different they are from normal combat encounters. I love how they represent a story complication rather than Yet Another Battle. I love how much role-playing goes on during one, and how players come up with new and creative ways to use their skills ("I'm going to use my Thievery to try and 'steal his heart.' Kay?"). They get players invested. They get players thinking. Most importantly, they're fun.

They also a ton of fun to write. Trying to think about how a particular skill may relate, especially skills that are peripheral to the challenge, is an interesting mental exercise for me. For instance, in Social Encounters, I've come to reorganize Intimidate in my head. It isn't just about scaring people; I mean, it's really good at scaring people, but that's not the whole of it. Where diplomacy is about the art of persuasion and bluff is the art of conversational jujitsu, Intimidate is about force of personality. From now on, Intimidate is the skill I go to for performance, for stealing a crowd, for being a force of nature that people just cannot ignore. I expect that, as I delve deeper into the system, I'll begin to do likewise with other skills as well.

Part of the problem in dealing with a skill challenge, though, is coming up with new and interesting penalties for skill checks. DMG2 gives us some ideas for penalties on a failed skill check, but they're pretty narrow, really. Coming up with a penalty for failing the whole challenge is actually pretty easy ("That thing you wanted, you don't get it."). Making each skill check hold different weight in the challenge is pretty important. It makes failure carry a consequence beyond being one step closer to failing the encounter.

I've been trying to come up with a list of penalties for failure that I can throw into a challenge as I'm writing them. Below, you'll find what I have so far.

From the DMG2

The first set of penalties I want to look at are the ones covered in the published material already. The second Dungeon Master's Guide goes into pretty deep detail on skill challenges and how they can fuck with your players, which is nice. On page 87, they talk about "stages of failure," which is something that I think should be in every skill challenge forever. They suggest the following as ways to penalize players during a skill challenge:

Lose a Healing Surge: This is pretty intense. This is what made me fall in love with Skill Challenges during D&D Encounters. I mean, I'd used them, but I didn't make them nearly as important as I have in recent adventures. The basic idea is that, if a character fails the skill check he or she is attempting, he or she takes damage. That damage is healed with a Healing Surge, so we're just going to do damage directly to the Healing Surges.

Spend Time or Money: So you failed at a thing you were trying to do. You went down the wrong path, talked to the wrong bookie, took an hour examining runes that had nothing to do with what you thought they did, or just hit up the wrong sheriff for information. Now you're going to need to backtrack, maybe grease some palms, and get back on track.

You Broke the Skill: For the rest of the encounter, no one can try to use that skill. You broke the last beaker in the lab, used the last of the gauze, none of the drug dealers will talk to your crew anymore because they think you're a bunch of snitches, whatever.

Take a Status Ailment: This is usually for in-combat skill challenges; you're dazed or immobilized or stunned or helpless or blinded or something. You fucked up, and the thing you fucked up fucked you up even more.

Take a Penalty: You screwed up, and the fact that you screwed up makes the next attempt at the skill even harder. You pissed off the mayor and now you're going to have to convince him to like you again, you sprained your ankle on that last somersault, you pulled a muscle in your arm and still have to lift this thing, your attempt at stitching your buddy up made him bleed more, etc.

My Own Additions

Now, these are pretty solid, but I like a little more variety in the ways I fuck with my players. So I'm going add to this list the following:

Extra Failure: When you fail at this skill check, it counts as two failures against the skill challenge. This effectively cuts the number of possible failures in half, assuming they try (and fail) this skill multiple times. I usually use this on a "limit 1 success" secondary skill, but it's still scary when you lose an extra failure.

Time-Delayed Failure: Failing doesn't actually count against the skill challenge, but the next time you fail a skill check, you accrue an extra failure. If you don't fail again, there's no downside. If you do, it becomes extra-devastating. Again, I usually put this one on secondary skills that normally don't count against the skill challenge when you fail.

Everyone Takes a Pentalty: Rather than just fuck things up for yourself, your failure at this skill check fucks with everyone. Nothing makes people hate you faster. ^_^ This one I usually reserve for primary skills that you can succeed on a few times, with a pretty low DC. It gets frustrating if it's used too much, but it's fun to watch players squirm when they give all of their friends a -2 on their next skill check.

Defense Penalty: For the rest of the day, you take a -1 challenge penalty to your AC, Fortitude, Reflex and/or Will. Failing this skill weakens you, slows your reactions down, frustrates you, and makes you more vulnerable to attack. This lasts until your next Extended Rest.

Speed Penalty: Until the end of the day, you take a -1 challenge penalty to your speed. You have honey on your shoes. You're moping. You're lost in thought or caught in a crisis of faith, and you're just not moving as quickly as you normally do.

Initiative Penalty: As above, except that instead of hindering your mobility, you're just not reacting as quickly to danger as you usually do.

Lose a Daily Power: Daily powers are massive feats of awesome. Sometimes, when you screw something up, it shakes you to your core. Your awesome isn't there, you just can't call on it to get the job done. If you fail this skill check, lose one of your daily powers as though you've used it (and hit with it, in the case of Reliable daily powers).

Lose an Action Point: Like most of the resource-deprivation penalties I've listed here (and that's pretty much the theme of these penalties; you're losing access to a thing you're usually able to rely on), this one steals something from you for failing. In this case, it's an Action Point. If you do not have any Action Points to steal, it will take a Healing Surge instead. I feel like this one should almost always be attached to Arcana for some reason.

Attack Penalty: For the remainder of the day, you take a -1 penalty to hit. This is devastating, people. Don't over-use it. Probably related most often to Acrobatics or Athletics. You've hurt yourself trying to do that cool parkour thing you saw that guy do the other day, and you just aren't as good at hitting people as you could be.

Grant Combat Advantage: For the rest of the day, you grant combat advantage. To everyone. I have a feeling that this one should be attached to Stealth and Streetwise. You've failed to be sneaky, and now the sneaky people are taking advantage of that for the rest of the day.

The Airship Skill Challenge

So I'm a huge fan of skill challenges right now. I hadn't had much of a chance to use them previous to the D&D Encounters mini-campaign, and having seen them work there, I'm pretty much all about them now. I want to use them for everything. In my Eberron campaign, I'm the captain of the Mourning Glory, a fantastic little airship. The DM hasn't really focused on this aspect of my character at all, which is a bloody shame, because I think airships are one of the best things about the Eberron setting. So I wrote up a huge note to my DM about the kick-ass things that could possibly happen between Breland and Karnath on an airship, which I will share with you here:

We're going to be travelling back to Karnath, I assume, in the course of the next couple of sessions. After all, we have a king to kill. Getting to Karnath by airship seems like it would be pretty easy, but having easy things in a session of D&D is never as much fun as having HARD things to fight against while playing. So I figured I'd offer some suggestions for making the whole airship thing a little more crazy.

There are two "safe" passages to Karnath from Sharn. Both go around the Mournland, because the Mournland is fucking terrifying. The first is to fly over Thrane and through Aundair, the second is to fly through Darguun, over Valenar, stop to restock in the Talenta plains and move up through the south-east. Another option is to swing _around_ Darguun, over Zilargo, out in to the sea, up through Valenar and then through the Talenta plains. Each of these routes has it's own dangers, dangers that Aeral knows about. They also probably house things Aeral has never seen before, which is also for the good.

For the sake of ease, I'll be calling these Route 1, Route 2 and Detour.

Going through Thrane is not something Aeral is going to be thrilled about. As a paladin of the Sovereign Host, the Silver Flame and its followers make him pretty uncomfortable. The biggest bonus to travel through Thrane is that the Houses don't have much sway there, meaning they have a pretty piss-poor air force. We'd be unlikely to run into any of the Silver Flame's groupies, and the worst we'd run into would be rejects from the Eldeen Reaches flying over.

Aundair is exactly the opposite. House Lyrandar keeps their headquarters on a small island just north of the country, there are flying islands everywhere, and air traffic is a daily occurance. It's impossible to get through Aundair without notice, and given that we came through the airborne nation right before King Boranel's children reappeared in Breland, and given that I'm now Sir Aeral d'Lyrandar, Knight of Breland, I have to assume Esravash knows what's going on. It would be a safe bet, says my 14 Wisdom, that _everyone_ knows, and that we are currently a target for the entire nation of Karnath and her allies.

The threats in Aundair run the gamut from air pirates to flying whales to dragons to anything else that would enjoy the nation-wide manifest zone. Aundair also knows about these threats and is armed to the teeth with the most impressive air force in the world. There are balistae on every floating island, a well-established port-authority, an airborne "coast guard," the whole nine yards. One does not fly into Aundair in secret, and it would be silly to think we could get through there unscathed.

Route 2 has us flying over Darguun. Mountains are tough to navigate by air, and flying over them would be terribly uncomfortable in a non-pressurized, non-climate controlled airship. Even flying _through_ the mountains is going to be cold and uncomfortable most of the time, and the Goblin empire here knows the terrain far better than Aeral does. They aren't friendly and they know how to take down an airship if they want to. Balistae, catapults, nets, arrow launchers, bows and arrows with rope attached for boarding; these guys are fucking terrifying. Add to that spiked-chain-weilding psychos, and we have ourselves a rough day.

Valenar houses the second-largest Lyrandar population in the world, having been granted large parcels of land for raincalling services and agricultural assistance. This means crazy Arab-themed elves on airships, air pirates, flying carpets, flying monkeys and all sorts of crazy air traffic. Also, religious tension between the Keepers of the Past, my own Sovereign Host worship and Tyson's worship of the Blood of Vol could be interesting.

The biggest thing to worry about in the Talenta Plains is dinosaurs. And pterodactyl-riding halflings of doom. And boomerangs. And halfling barbarians, and the fact that halflings have the Mark of Healing, making them damned near impossible to kill. Also, flying jelly swarms, dust storms, giant bats, giant birds, huge prehistoric insects and whatever other untamed goodness you can think up.

The Detour is a lot like going through Darguun, but with more civilized antagonists. The gnomes of Zilargo make for the crazy, and I'm sure it would be more fun for you to come up with how they'd fuck with our world than for me to offer suggestions. ^_^

Hope this helps a bit. I know running a campaign with a form of travel that circumvents land-based encounters can be a huge pain in the ass.

He didn't use any of it, which is totally justified because he is the DM and there are things he wants to focus on that are not, necessarilly, flying. Looking at the above, though, I'm thinking "Well shit. Let's make this a Skill Challenge."

So flying. There are a few things that go into flying a giant fucking airship. Most of those things are the same things that go into sailing an old sailing ship. This skill challenge assumes that your characters are 7th - 9th level and in a position of authority over the crew.

The airship slides into the air with a low whoosh of flame, climbing steadilly in altitude as the crew scrambles to finish last-minute preparations. As the docking tower shrinks against the horizon, the ship reaches a cruising altitude hundreds of feet above the ground. The journey is under way.

Flying an Airship
Level: 7
Complexity: 5 (12 successes before 6 failures)
Primary Skills: Athletics, Diplomacy, Endurance, Intimidate, Perception
Secondary Skills: Acrobatics, Nature, Thievery

Athletics DC 19 (limit 4 successes)You haul on riggings and set booms, ensuring the airship stays well on course. Failure on this check counts against the skill challenge, and the lead player suffers damage equal to twice his or her level as the booms crash into, or the rigging lashes out at, him or her.

Diplomacy DC 19 (limit 3 successes)You speak to various members of the crew, building synergy and helping them work together as a cohesive unit. Failure on this check counts against the skill challenge, and each member of the party suffers a -2 penalty to their next roll.

Endurance DC 17 (limit 2 successes) The rigors of daily life upon an airship wear at you, but you find reserves of strength and willpower that help you suffer through. Failure on this check counts against the skill challenge, and the lead character loses a number of healing surges equal to half his or her level. If healing surges are reduced to zero, that character takes damage equal to three times his or her level as well.

Intimidate DC 17 (limit 4 successes)You push the crew beyond their normal limits, barking orders and throwing your weight around. Though you may have earned the crew's ire, you also have their respect. Failure on this check counts against the skill challenge, and the lead character takes damage equal twice his or her level and loses healing surges equal to half his or her level. All other characters involved in the skill challenge take a -3 penalty on their next roll, as the crew is resistant to help them.

Perception DC 23 (limit 2 successes) In the distance, you see a landmark you instantly recognize, and notice that your course is a few degrees off. With a whispered word to the captain, you set the course aright. Failure on this check does not count against the skill challenge.

Acrobatics DC 23 (limit 1 success)You scamper up the riggings like a monkey, fixing a block that's come loose, saving hours of work. Success at this check grants a +2 bonus to the adventurer's next skill check. Fialure means the participants each lose one healing surge.

Nature DC 23 (limit 1 success)The country slips underneath you, and your intimate knowledge of the lands below help you avoid a next of gryphons. A few hours of detour save the lives of half the crew. Success on this check grants a +2 bonus to each of the participant's next skill check. Failure means that each participant loses one healing surge.

Thievery DC 23 (limit 1 success)Your knowledge of ropes and knots comes in handy onboard the ship, as new rigging is needed to replace the old, shabby ropes above. Success on this check grants you a +2 bonus to your next Diplomacy, Athletics or Endurance check. Failure means you lose a healing surge.

Development
No matter whether the players succeed or fail, they will eventually reach their destination. However, failure carries with it a terrible price.

Success:After the adventurers have twelve successes, they reach their destination unmolested, and well ahead of schedule.
Failure: If the adventurers fail the skill challenge, they run afoul one of the world's many flying terrors. In this case, a huge swarm of flying jellyfish! They have no chance for a short rest before the encounter begins.

Flying Jellyfish Swarm
Level 9 Skirmisher (400xp)
Gargantuan natural beast (swarm)
Senses: Perception +12, low-light vision
Swarm Attack aura 5; the Flying Jellyfish Swarm makes a basic attack as a free action against each enemy that begins its turn in the aura.
HP96; Bloodied 48
AC 22; Fortitude 20; Reflex 17; Will 21
Resist half damage from melee and ranged attacks; Vulnerable 5 against close and area attacks.
Speed 0; Fly 12 (hover) overland flight 15
Swarm of Tentacles (standard; at will; melee)
+14 vs. Ref; 1d6+7 damage and the target is immobilized.
Alignment Unaligned
Languages -
Str 9, Dex 24, Wis 17, Con 16, Int 8, Cha 10
Equipment None