This is a short encounter I used as an introduction to skill challenges for one of my groups. The intention was to introduce the concept of skill challenges and make the players start thinking about their skills.
My wife plays in our regular 4ed game. I’ve been talking to her about old-school games. I ran a one-shot game of basic D&D with her and a couple other friends and she liked it. Recently she has been talking about wanting to experience some more old-school gaming. A statement like that just gets under my GMing skin and causes all sorts of itchy, twitchy reactions and urges. Problem is, we don’t really have time to dedicate to hauling a bunch of other folks over for another night of gaming during the week.
Coming up very shortly is the one-year anniversary of the 4ed campaign I am GMing. I am a big supporter of player feedback for my games. I feel it is the only way to make sure players are having fun, and is one of the few methods conducive to self-improvement. Occasionally I will send out an e-mail asking my players what they think about the game. For the one-year marker, I thought I should do something a bit more specific. Below are the four questions I asked my group (feel free to take them for your own group.) Not only did I ask every player to try to answer every question, I asked them to be brutally honest.
When you take an extended rest in 4ed you regain all of your healing surges and all of your hit points. The utility in this design choice is that you can have bold adventurers that take heroic risks and not have to worry about slowing down play. The drawback to this design is that it removes hit points as a resource you have to manage over any extended period of time. Depending on your campaign and play style, this can be a good thing. I’m not here to debate its merits. I am here to provide an alternative.
One of the big complaints leveled at 4ed is that class powers have a tendency to blind players towards any other sort of combat interaction. After a significant time running the game, I have to agree. It is not that the system does not support thinking outside of the power set. I think part of it has to do with having tangible powers that essentially work as prompts for what sort of interaction a player can provide. I also think a part of it is the fact that powers lay out a specific mechanical means where what is required of an action and the outcome are both well defined. In other words, powers are “safe” because you have a pretty good idea of what you have to roll to hit, and know exactly what will happened if you succeed.
Games can be instructional. Game can be emotional. Games can be important.
I love zombies. The amount of zombie movies I’ve seen is absurd. I also love gaming with zombies. The survival horror aspect is something that is the most basic of plots, but somehow remains one the most compelling. I’ve ran quite a few zombie scenarios in RPGs. I own (and have actively used) All Flesh Must Be Eaten. One-shots are always tons of fun, but I’ve tried to run a zombie apocalypse campaign, and I’ve run into a big hitch: after you are done whacking zombies for a couple sessions, how do you keep story momentum? I could run another, “we need to loot canned food from the zombie-infested store,” but that quickly approaches ad-nauseum.
Why not make skill challenges more like combat? (This comes riding directly on the back of my Dual of Wits idea–read part 1 and part 2.) By this, I mean treating the challenge like a monster. I will build a skill challenge as an example. The challenge is for the party to get over a mountain in time to warn the village on the other side of the evil army marching their way. Total success means they get over the mountain in time to warn the village. Failure means that the evil army has descended on the village. The party is composed of 5 characters at level 4.
