Here’s a youtube video talking about using them in-depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvOeqDpkBm8
They can be really fun ways to allow players a bit of control over their expression of how they’re cool. I personally find they work better at an infrequent interval. If I use them every session, they start to lose their magic. Once every few sessions they can be a fantastic dramatic device.
Here’s an example. I ran the X1 Isle of Dread module for my 5e group. At one point some villagers wanted the party to take out a green dragon that had been terrorizing the nicer parts of the Isle. Two party members thought that it would be smarter to attack the dragon in the wild rather than attacking it in its lair. They wanted to lay an ambush. Even though they were right, this wasn’t what I had prepped.
I told them we were going to do a skill challenge to see if they were going to be successful. Half of my players had played 4e so they knew what I meant. I explained that they had described to me what they wanted to do. To do that, they needed to get five successes on skill rolls before failing three skill rolls. If they were successful, they could determine the ground on which they confronted the dragon. If they failed, they’d either have to go to the dragon’s lair or attack its lizardfolk allies.
But what did that mean? They would tell me what they wanted to do in order to bring about their stated goal. I told them they couldn’t repeat or reroll any specific skills, though other players could potentially Help them to give the skill checker advantage on the roll. If they wanted to scout the area to see where the dragon usually hunted, I told them to make a Nature or perception roll. Depending on the difficulty of what they wanted to do, I would assign a DC, and they’d meet it, beat it, or fail the check.
After the first few obvious rolls (Nature, Perception, Stealth) the players really had to get creative to find a use for a Skill they hadn’t rolled on yet. I think they wound up using Intimidate on a random lizardfolk hunter/gatherer for information, possibly an Arcana check… I’d have to check my notes. Anyway, they wound up passing the skill challenge (edit: I think they had failed two checks, so they were getting nervous), and were able to bait the dragon in a certain glade, mined with explosive runes, using their familiar as bait. It went well for them. I had fun, too.
Does anyone have a favorite play-by-post (PbP) site for D&D? I’ve looked at myth-weavers, RPG Crossing, RPOL, RPG Geek. I’ve read good things about Gamers Plane, but I have been unable to access it. Sorta leaning toward RPG Crossing because it has some nice newb features.
I’ll second @Djscman in noting that creativity is key, on both ends of the table, to be honest.
I actually kinda take Fate Core’s advice here more than 4E’s these days. . . at least in part because it’s been a good long while since I read those books (so, to your question, @YakAttack, no idea how I hang onto so much of it).
So, in that vein, I like to let non-combat portions of my games feature a similar sort of pacing and drama as combat, but obviously a lot of RPGs don’t give you nearly as many specific and fiddly tools to do that as they do in their fighting rules. Combat in D&D is a well-oiled machine with all sorts of dramatic moments and carefully honed lulls and choices to make at every step along the way. Obviously you’re not going to quite get to that level with a Skill Challenge, but it can be a little more interesting than pass/fail rolling!
I like to have required moments of success, like @Djscman, though I’m often not as strict about different skill usage so long as they’re using them in creative ways, which I think you can go either way on. The main point is to be forcing them to think of novel, cooperative means of tackling complicated problems.
I often don’t run with an explicit failure threshold; rather, failures or ties along the way might make subsequent steps more difficult, or introduce a mounting complication to the overall solution in the final product. In that same vein, extraordinary successes/crits might result in a decrease of difficulty for the next person in line or give some other carryover bonus anyone can use.
In some cases, the Challenge might be more of what Fate calls a Contest, as another side vies for position without actively trying to attack the party (this is especially applicable in, e.g., races), so along the way, they might be making their own rolls, either against the same challenges or a unique set. Sometimes the two sides can even interfere with each other, sabotaging the other’s success.
I tend to think of my difficulties into discrete buckets and then map the numbers to whatever system I’m using. I might “reward” a particularly creative/clever choice by dropping the difficulty, whereas when someone leverages their best skill in a really edge-casey/questionable way, I might let it through, but with a marginally tougher difficulty.
So, to put all that together into an example:
I am currently running the finale of a big “space race” in a scifi game I run, and I’ve broken it down into discrete legs; each leg is tracked as a skill challenge, representing a series of daring maneuvers and dangers the party has to navigate past. Basically, I track how much each discrete danger gets overcome by (that is, their success vs. my difficulty number) as their “score.” Since they’re racing against 9 other crews, I’m not really rolling for every enemy ship; I just kinda fake a number based on how well that particular enemy might do in the challenge in question, though the players can sabotage enemies’ scores by fucking with them mid-race.
So, for instance, in the first leg, the ships are all launched from the undersurface of an enormous interstellar woodland called the Star Forest of Eternity and must navigate through the grasping vines of the Unending Hedge beneath it, dodging the ship past graspers, navigating the maze, and choosing to either help or hinder opposing ships they come across. During this, the players at various points rolled Scanners to find weak points in the hedge to blast through, Piloting to evade the grasping tendrils, Ranged Weapons to blow apart chunks of the Maze, “Direct” Weapons (ship-arms! Outlaw Star style) to grapple with vines that have already latched on, Engineering to overcharge the shields to burn off extra plant matter, plus social Skills like Rapport, Deceive, and Provoke to engage with a set of other vessels that were engaged in an outright melee mid-maze.
For my part, prep there involved statting out the very basics and improving based off of player choice. Since it was the very first area of challenge, I didn’t want it to be especially tough, so the average difficulty that they ran into there was about a 3 for the simple stuff and a 5 for the big “threshold” rolls (in a system where you roll -4 - 4 on the dice and Skills add 1 - 4 more. In the system I used, players can Create Advantages to give boosts to future rolls, so my Challenges are designed with the idea that they’ll roll a couple of Advantages first, then roll to Overcome or Attack each stage of the problem eventually using their teammates’ Advantages to aid their rolls). So, I knew I wanted to have grasping vines, a maze, and enemy ships fighting in the way out. I sorta let them come up with the Skills they wanted to use to tackle those challenges and adapted as need be.
So along the way, they had a couple of failures, which resulted in some of the grasper vines latching on (hence the need to burn/rip them off before proceeding) in particular; they also initially made the firefight in the center of the hedge nastier, making it harder terrain to traverse later. So, I mean, either way, they were eventually getting out, but it was costing them valuable time (score points).
Sorry if this is a big rambling answer; I wrote it with several hour-long breaks throughout a very busy day!
I also try to use mounting complications over a specific failure condition (unless the situation calls for that). I think it’s best to have some complications or ways of upping tension written down before-hand if you are planning out the session. I don’t usually use them in the order that I write them, and often use some variation on them that fits better with what players failed to do, but I find having thought out some ideas of ratcheting tensions or failure states can help a lot.
There’s a good example of these in this One Page Adventure collection: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/8j4geh/one_page_adventures_22_adventures_for_most/
About half of those are short dungeons, but the other half are skill challenges, with some suggested interesting ways to express progress and setbacks during the skill challenge. I like the way they’re written with little notes rather than explicitly detailing how it proceeds. It allows a lot of room for improv with enough direction to make it easy to do so. When I’ve written one for a homebrewed session it’ll look similar but way more short-hand, note-oriented.
Awesome, thanks for the replies everyone.
My players are going to be in a “confrontation” with the vestiges of a long dead god, something I want to be meaningful and have actual consequences. It will temporarily take their minds to a pseudo-reality or plane where actions within will have significant impacts on local reality, but where mistakes and poor execution can be harmful/deadly.
I’m so glad I read this thread today, now I can write material…
The other thing to keep in mind is if the FLGS has enforced time limits. Pretty much all of my AL stuff is at Cons, and you only have the 4-hour slot to start, finish, and take care of paperwork. Which is why I recommend playing a few first. If the FLGS doesn’t care if you run 15-30 min over, it’s not as big a deal.
Rolegate is relatively new but really, really nice for asynchronous RPG’s. Slick UI and features, and great on mobile. They’ve got a pretty active Discord for finding players/games.
Thanks for the suggestion. Role Gate looks promising. Thanks.
So my game that I DM has had some spotty scheduling over the last year or so. Two of my six players are married to each other. They had a kid. Then I had a kid. Then the pandemic hit. Then they had another kid. This upcoming November will mark a year since our last session, and man, the time flies. I finally said “okay, we’re playing on Black Friday, remotely, so let’s get ready for it.” Which means I have to also prepare for it. (We’re probably going to do Roll20 and talk over Google Chat or Discourse. Discord? The video chat thing. Though the integrated video chat in Roll20 is also getting a lot better.)
The last three or four sessions were set in a climatic siege of a town. We’re playing the old Red Hand Of Doom module from 3e grafted into our 5e Greek-themed campaign. I can’t wait to finally finish the battle. That won’t finish the module, but after the battle, there’s only one dungeon crawl left.
I’m looking for advice from some of y’all on how I can improve the last setpiece encounter in this battle.
The last guy is a big brawler guy, the evil general of the evil army. 5e isn’t great for solo strongmen, because the party can surround him and shut him down with their improved action economy. I want to spice up the encounter in a few ways without necessarily giving the villain henchmen, unless it’s a last resort.
Here are a few of my ideas.
first, the environment. The setting is in the middle of a public square in front of a temple complex. It’s the middle of the night and it’s been raining. The way the section of the module is structured, the party has fought their way through key parts of this massive siege battle. Now, because of blah blah blah enemy action and counter actions, the general of a massive massive horde wants to fight the party. The ultimate fate of the battle is determined by secret victory points the characters earned during the course of the module, but if the party kills this guy, that will earn them a ton of VP. The two sides of the battle are going to be nearly exhausted, so the rank-and-file of both sides are content to watch how the most powerful people duke it out. They are fine with pausing in the general fighting and creating a space for this encounter. Though if reinforcements do come from either side, that would be easy enough for them to appear. I’m thinking the “battlemap” could slowly shrink as more combatants start crowding to get a better view. (Like the shrinking ritual combat space in the Black Panther movie.) Maybe the evil soldiers could get some kind of automatic hit and damage if a PC moves through an adjacent area. The terrain won’t be too unusual then, though I suppose it doesn’t have to be flat. Maybe there could be a platform or steps or statues as the temple complex rolls down into the agora.
For the most part, I’ve been swapping out the original monsters in the 3e module with suitable replacements from the 5e books. But for a really scary villain, I don’t mind spending more effort in prepping it. This guy is the leader of a vast horde of troops (though he is not the BBEG of the module). He’s a hobgoblin, too, so I may need to add a hobbo trait. I’m thinking that the base statblock I want for General Bad Guy is the warlord:
Medium humanoid (any race), any alignment
Armor Class 18 (plate)
Hit Points 229 (27d8+108)
Speed 30 ft.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 (+5) | 16 (+3) | 18 (+4) | 12 (+1) | 12 (+1) | 18 (+4) |
Saving Throws Str +9, Dex +7, Con +8
Skills Athletics +9, Intimidation +8, Perception +5, Persuasion +8
Languages any two languages
Challenge 12 (8,400 XP) (though we use milestones here, we don’t track XP)
Indomitable (3/Day). The warlord can reroll a saving throw it fails. It must use the new roll.
Survivor. The warlord regains 10 hit points at the start of its turn if it has at least 1 hit point but fewer hit points than half its hit point maximum.
_______________ Actions ____________
Multiattack. The warlord makes two weapon attacks.
Greatsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 12 (2d6+5) slashing damage.
Shortbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, range 80/320 it, one target. Hit: 6 (1d6+3) piercing damage.
Legendary Actions
The warlord can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time and only at the end of another creature’s turn. The warlord regains spent legendary actions at the start of its turn.
Weapon Attack. The warlord makes a weapon attack.
Command Ally. The warlord targets one ally it can see within 30 feet of it. if the target can see and hear the warlord, the target can make one weapon attack as a reaction and gains advantage on the attack roll.
Frighten Foe (Costs 2 Actions). The warlord targets one enemy it can see within 30 feet of it. If the target can see and hear it, the target must succeed on a DC 16 Wisdom saving throw or be frightened until the end of warlord’s next turn.
BUT I also want to change it up a little to make him even more interesting and hopefully able to survive more than three rounds with the PCs.
First, I want to give him two pools of Hit Points. I want to max out his HP at 324. Half of that is 162. (This might change because the players had already gone through four encounters and have burned a few of their resources already.) When he hits that halfway point, I want to give him what, in 4th edition terms, would be a bloodied status. That would change his abilities. To wit:
In his topmost pool/half of HP, he is a slow-moving heavily armored machine. He has a long spear (greatspear but used one-handed), platemail and a shield. His AC would be 20 instead of 18. He will also be a magnet (so to speak) for the heat metal spell, which at least a few of the PCs still have access to. So I don’t think it will take too long for them to burn down through that first pool of HP.
In his lower half of HP, he discards his plate armor, shield and spear. His AC drops dramatically from 20 down to 13 (no armor + his +3 Dex modifier), but he has new abilities to bring to bear. He starts wielding a magic whip (more on that later). He might get a little faster, maybe to 35 or 40 feet per round? I’d give him different legendary actions at this point, too.
Those legendary actions: As stated above, even though one of them explicitly lets him order around minions, I’d prefer to have him get through the fight without using any help. One of them would let him take a move action without triggering opportunity attacks. I suppose that could be available in both his pre-bloodied and bloodied stages.
His weapons and attacks: the statblock above mentions a shortbow and greatsword. There’s no room here for ranged weapons. As I said above, I want him to start out in plate armor (imagine a Corinthian type helmet), a really big spear he can use one-handed, and a shield (imagine something big and round, like the kind of shield Sir Mix-A-Lot prefers). I’m not sure if these should be magical also, or if that would be just too potent. But I figure that if anyone is decked out with magical loot, it would be him.
His backup, second-stage weapon would be magical. The original module mentioned something that some of the Tiamat-worshiping monsters use called a dragonchain. I haven’t been able to shoehorn that into the adventure yet. This guy is a super-devout Tiamat worshiper, and I’d like him to have something like that. In my conception of it, it’s like a cat-o’-nine-tails, except in keeping with the Tiamat theme, it has five heads. Each head might cause a particular kind of thematic damage (cold, poison, acid, fire, and lightning, just like the five differently-colored heads of a chromatic dragon). I’m also thinking of the magic item Tentacle Rod which looks like this:
Tentacle Rod
Rod, rare (requires attunement)Made by the drow, this rod is a magic weapon that ends in three rubbery tentacles. While holding the rod, you can use an action to direct each tentacle to attack a creature you can see within 15 feet of you. Each tentacle makes a melee attack roll with a +9 bonus. On a hit, the tentacle deals 1d6 bludgeoning damage. If you hit a target with all three tentacles, it must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. On a failure, the creature’s speed is halved, it has disadvantage on Dexterity saving throws, and it can’t use reactions for 1 minute. Moreover, on each of its turns, it can take either an action or a bonus action, but not both. At the end of each of its turns, it can repeat the saving throw, ending the effect on itself on a success.
My math is a little too weak to see what five chains/tentacles would do to balance, especially combined with the “If you hit a target with three chains it might be really messed up for a while” capability. What do you folks, especially those of you with homebrew and mathematics experience, think about that? Would I still require three hits to activate that condition or not?
Cold Breath (Recharge 5–6). The dragon exhales an icy blast in a 60-foot cone. Each creature in that area must make a DC 19 Constitution saving throw, taking 54 (12d8) cold damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
I don’t think I could justify this guy stabbing with his spear for 60’ but I could for 15’ or maybe even 20’, and it would deal piercing damage instead of cold damage. I suppose the PCs would use a Dex save instead of a Con save to jump out of the way of an expertly aimed barrage of speartips coming at their faces. The damage output also seems a little high here. Maybe I could base it on a Young White Dragon’s breath attack instead.
If the characters die and/or flee, they’d have to rely on their existing VP totals to see if the demoralized defenders could push off the remainder of the horde’s onslaught.
If they kill the general, then a sinister Phase Two would be activated, and, to the defenders’ surprise, many of the attackers would start killing themselves for reasons explained later.
If you made it through this wall of text, I really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it.
Love what you’re working with so far, @Djscman. I started out wanting to link you to a video I thought might help, but reading through, it looks like you’re incorporating a lot of it already, but I’m gonna drop it in here just in case.
(his video on stealing mechanics from 4E covers some similar territory, though I think the vision presented in the AOM video above is more refined)
Upfront, I’ll say that it would be a little helpful to know the party’s level and if they’re especially min-maxed or particularly badly optimized (otherwise, I assume middle ground). Some of your balance questions are easier to know if I know approximately the kind of AC, saves, to-hit, damage, and HP your folks are working with.
I think you can really go all-out with this. The ground is pitted and slick with blood and rain co-mingling with mud seeping from beneath the cracked, shattered paving stones. Toss out difficult terrain here and there. Throw in a broken tower, slumping through a third of the combat area. Play with elevation as parts of the ground have been thrust upward by epic spellwork and/or siege weaponry. If it’s just a big square rung by foes, the risks of the party surrounding-and-hacking grow substantially. If you’re running a fairly over-the-top campaign, having this general strutting around this gloried arena like some kind of fucking championship wrestler, calling to the assembled crowds and amping up his own battle rage through their responses, all the better. Maybe he can use one of those Legendary Actions to have the crowd “cast” Vicious Mockery on a foe who misses him ;-)
I think you’re off to a solid start. Legendary Actions are gonna be an absolute necessity, especially if the onlookers aren’t taking part in a general sense. I’m a little iffier on the “Bloodied” variant dumping all his AC – however cool that might look, I suspect it just means he’ll go down in a frenzy of easy hits – but the idea of switching combat styles and introducing a cool new magic weapon seems good to me. Do some back-of-the-envelope math, if you’re feeling up to it, based on likely damage/round your party can put out. If your rogue’s Sneak Attacking, your casters are nova-ing their spell slots, and your frontline is dumping all their dailies, vs. chance-to-hit and chance-to-save, what amount of HP for the boss gets you a couple of rounds in each form? Cuz anything less than three to four rounds total and he’s probably gonna look like a chump, but on the other hand, if it drags out to six or seven, and he’s dropping a 50-damage AoE every turn or two, that’s likely to grind even the sturdiest of parties to dust.
Giving him extra movement abilities – especially non-provoking ones – is great, along with extra chances to save, abilities that can temporarily incapacitate a single foe, etc., so I think all your thinking along those lines sounds great. On the flipside, make sure that he doesn’t just completely negate any one particular character for the duration of the combat – everyone wants to have a cool moment wailing on this dude in front of his army, so if he’s just, say, immune to Sneak Attacks and Crits, then your Sneak Attacking Rogue with a magic dagger that crits on an 18 is gonna be real sad, hah.
Matt Colville videos make me smile.
Since you mentioned greek themed, here’s something to look at if you need another campaign.
https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-of-The-Dragonlords-RPG/dp/191274340X
My group has been playing through this and has been enjoying it.
Funnily enough, I think I would absolutely hate to play in one of this games, and find his well-honed habit of running many, many parties, over the course of decades, through basically the same sequence of custom-connected oldschool modules with a weird political meta-plot tying them together to be an absolutely bizarre way of running D&D.
But the man has some pretty decent advice sprinkled around the opinions that immediately raise my gamer-hackles, hah.
That Greek-themed adventure looks pretty exciting. I couple members of my group are really into classics and Greek mythology. Does the adventure draw directly on the Iliad or Odyssey, or more on mythology?
Interestingly, the book is by Modiphius – aren’t they the folks who make Star Trek Adventures? I like STA, but I don’t love the quality of Modiphius’s books for that game – the illustrations are uneven at best. It sounds like the art and physical quality of this Greek adventure are high, though.
Also, I suppose Modiphius paid to use the 5th edition license?
5th Ed is under a fairly permissive license (perhaps not quite as broad as 3/3.5 – they learned their lesson from Pathfinder – nor as narrow as 4E, which came with lessons of its own). Just about anyone can freely publish their own 5E compatible content under the Open Gaming License using anything from the SRD, while abiding by a bunch of very specific rules in the OGL, like not specifically saying you’re compatible or mentioning D&D by name, not using official D&D logos, settings, or a particular subset of gods and monsters, and not designing your product to look too much like WotC’s own. You can also, separately, publish content using those verboten elements (plus the SRD stuff!) via the DM’s Guild official platform, but then you only get a 50% cut of sales and can ONLY sell through that.
Note how carefully Mophidius dance around exactly what system their product is compatible with :-)
Note that it IS possible to get a full official license to write for the system; it’s just rare. Baldman Games are the officially approved producer for all the Adventurer’s League content nowadays (and run it as relatively official events at cons that WotC doesn’t attend, like GenCon).
Yeah! I wound up kickstartering (sic) Odyssey of the Dragonlords and also picked up the new WotC sourcebook Mystic Odysseys of Theros. I also found this used splatbook in a bookstore four or five years ago when we started the campaign…
There’s lots of good stuff to mine from all of those. Even if I don’t run Odyssey of the Dragonlords anytime soon, I definitely want to lift some of the challenges, monsters, parts of locations, and maybe those epic destiny things. I’m glad your group is having a good time with it. Are you DMing or a PC?
It’s a fictional Bronze Age world with only three or four cities. It’s designed as an adventure path for a team of heroes to take on some returning Titans. It’s an epic story but by no means an adaptation of actual epics. It was written by some former BioWare writers, and, reading (but not yet playing) through it, it really feels like a KoTOR type of game where the party goes here to X adventure site, and after solving quests and leveling up goes to Y adventure site, and so on until the final boss level.
Mophidius is just the publisher in this case.
My favorite bits of 2nd edition were the supplemental rules like the Thieves Book (that had the Bounty Hunter; one of my favorite sub-classes).
I am disappointed they didn’t do much of that with 5e.
Oh my God, that is a terrific idea. Maybe it can be a lair action or just an environmental thing if any player rolls a 1 on a d20. Thanks for looking this over.
I don’t have any numbers on my party at this point, so I guess it would behoove me to have them load their characters into Roll20 ASAP. But they’re 8th level. I tend to coddle them; while many of them have been knocked down to 0, none of them have died, and in fact, some of them are unscathed.
The MOST optimized PCs are a barbarian played by a guy who definitely knows how to play and a paladin who has an AC above 20. Also in the group are a bard with wingéd sandals, a spellcasting-focused druid, a wild magic sorcerer, and a cleric. They have a staff of healing on them, but through this module have not needed to use it yet. They have mostly been burning through their spell slots in the three previous encounters in the battle, but the barbarian has been husbanding his Rages. Before the big fight with the General, they’ll have one more encounter with an evil Batman and his Robins (it makes more sense in the game) which will whittle them down but probably won’t kill anyone.
They may also be affected by the fallout of a blown rule calling on our last session. The barbarian convinced the bard to cast a polymorph spell on him and chose the form of a young brass dragon. The party then proceeded to wreak havok in the first two encounters. To my chagrin, I reviewed the polymorph spell a little more closely after the session and found that polymorph can only turn a target into a beast and not something as badass as a dragon. We worked out the following. We have a lot of fun watching the wild magic sorcerer sweat when he casts a spell and then has to roll on the Wild Magic table. Therefore, as “punishment” for stretching a spell well beyond its intended limits and the resulting chaotic surges of mystical energy, blah blah blah, the bard and the barbarian will both have to roll on the Wild Magic table. Maybe they’ll both wind up with feathered beards, maybe they’ll both set off point blank fireballs, maybe something nice will happen to them both.
