The Mechanical Challenge - The DM announces that we are now in a skill challenge, tells us the primary skills available, as well as the complexity.  I find these to be particularly jarring, but when the bulk of the table says "I try to use diplomacy" and announces their score, I usually just roll with it, though I usually can't resist injecting some roleplay into my checks "I draw upon my vast knowledge of the lore regarding the underdark" which the DM says "Dungeoneering" to which I retort "I said 'Lore', so I was really thinking History".  The challenge is handled in rounds, and each player makes only one check per round.

The Hidden Challenge - This is when the DM never even hints that you are in a skill challenge.  Often times when this sort of thing happens, I end up not participating as much because I am unaware of it being a challenge.  It's usually not until 2-3 rounds have passed before I realize it.

The Roleplay Challenge - The DM might give everyone a group check from the challenge and then announce that it's a skill challenge.  Then when a player says "I want to use Athletics in this challenge, the DM asks the player "How?".  This encourages the player to think about roleplaying a bit (hey, this works with powers too: What does that Sly Flourish look like?)  This is my favorite way to got through skill challenges, it just feels like D&D to me.

What I dislike is when a skill challenge is written in a way that you end up getting painted into a corner with skills.  Last night, in the D&D Encounters session 3, our party used Arcana twice and could do no more, in fact we ended with just two more successes needed and the only skills open to us were thievery and acrobatics, which nobody had trained.  Result: we failed the challenge and took some damage plus no short rest.  It wasn't till later that night it occured to me that perhaps I could have used a power to repair the broken statue to parhaps gain a bonus on the check for someone else.  But when asking if I could use another skill, the answer was "no".  I felt incredibly boxed in at that point, and we failed the challenge because we lacked a diverse set of skills.

Because I was having trouble hearing (ear infection perhaps), I elected to not run my Encounter last night, finding seats for my players at other tables.  So I don't have a report about how it went for me as a DM.  I wish I had been able to run this, as I mention above, it's my favorite part of 4E.

Hopefully my hearing will return in time for Saturday, it's our monthly Meetup! at Game Empire Pasadena!  I am running a table for new players, and being a bit inspired by a post by Piratecat over at ENWorld regarding his experience teaching new players at PAX East.  I am going to have a lot of fun.  We get at least one new player per week thanks to the Robot Chicken videos... Wizards needs to do more of that sort of thing!

My adventuring company, "No Drow Allowed" totally manhandled the encounter last night.  I think it's because of our experience playing together in other Living Forgotten Realms games before that really helped with this cohesion.  The defenders did their role in locking down the bad guys, the minions were handled easily (though nobody got a hat trick) and the bad guys rolled poor initiatives, making our getting into positions that much easier.  It could have totally gone the other way had the guards gone first. 

I forgot my camera, but took this cell phone pic of our DM, Gavin.  I really appreciate those who take the time to run these sorts of games, it really goes a long ways towards making sure our hobby continues to grow.  Thanks Gavin!

Then it was time for my running a table (which might also be my last time running a table due to time contraints).  My guards won the initiative, and lazily fired crossbows at the squishy looking targets before unleashing the scorpion to act as a front line defender.  The table felt that the scorpion was the largest threat at the table, and in fact, that was the *only* nature check made the entire encounter.  Had they done some more looking around they would have realized that the scorpion was the least of their worries.  I had the doppel hiding with the minions, and since someone may have read the adventure ahead of time, I rearranged which one it was.  I had the doppel delay and go on the minions initiative, and act just like a minion would until he could get into a good position to flank he would aid another to help another minion out.

It is worth mentioning here that the monk does some astounding damage when he gets to hit something before anyone else. He took the scorpion out single handedly, with 8 points of damage to spare.  I need to look into making something like that to play, it looks like a lot of fun.  The guards, with a look of horror on their faces, turned their anger against the monk.

The guards would work in tandem, both shifting back, then the first one tripping, the second one attacking the same target.  So it required an expenditure of an action point to get to them.  I dropped the monk to negatives 3 times, and the fighter 2 times.  I just couldn't get the kill shot in.  The doppelganger really surprised them when he finally got a flank and attacked a bloodied party member.... dropping him too.

We got a tweet that said anyone who rolled a natural 1 was dazed until their next turn.  It happened at to the fighter once... while there were the two guards on him.  Sadly offering no flanking bonus for the monk... but turns out he didn't need it.

Overall, a very good fight.  A very tough fight for first levels, I did more than 50 damage to both the fighter and the monk.  Not sure I would change anything at all with it.  The encounter did need to have the intro to the next encounter written into it.  I went ahead and read the next encounter intro so that they would have an idea of what was coming up.

This might be my last time DMing at that particular time, because of personal time conflicts.  I'll continue to play, and I'll miss almost killing characters, but perhaps something will work out and I can continue to run.  I just wish we didn't have a Wednesday night restriction... I have had several people ask me about if we could run it on a different night.  According to the documents I have, the answer to that was no.  Perhaps Wizards will relax that restriction with season 2.

There are spoilers in this post for the WWGD:PHB3 adventure, be advised.

I purposefully tried to be as descriptive as I could about the environment when running this adventure, because we don't have much story investment going on prior to the action.  So I tell the tale of how the group met at a party the night before, and that they are to be going to a meeting tomorrow to discuss payment for seeking out some lost citizens (and a couple other would be rescuers), with much merriment, drink and food... that was the last they recall.  Now, they are uncomfortable, and unsure why exactly at first, and they could hear something just out of sight, a sound of slurping and crunching.  And so we open into the first of progressively wierder encounters that make up the Players Handbook 3 Worldwide Gameday events.  I did some minor changes, like I used a Huge Carrion Crawler for the Grick Alpha because it scared the players and looked really cool at the table.

Things I really liked about this adventure:

1. The flavor of the adventure was really well done.  Odd and creepy, like playing through the movie Phantasm or something.  That things got wierder with each encounter was really nice for building suspense.
2. The opportunity to try to negotiate with a dragon.  This was a lot of fun to run, and the pressure was really on to not upset her.
3. The skill challenge to walk through the portal, with the random challenge was a novel way to run that.  I am totally stealing this for my games.
4. Interesting terrain in locations.  I was asked in both my games "Hey, is that water?" to which I would reply, what's your Dungeoneering check?  The would roll some absurdly low number, and I would tell them it was water.  The dead bodies everywhere was a nice touch too.
5. The adventure and map were well done, good quality items.

Things I'd like to see fixed in future adventures like this:

1. Don't name the pregens similar sounding names.  Caewin and Kalen sound very close in a noisy game store
2. Editing errors... they always seem to happen in there.
3. Pogs... bring back the minis, they were much more fun to run.  I brought my own minis to run the games, but having a token with "Monster 1" kinda sucks.  Plus being able to give a thank you to players by handing them a bit of plastic is nice.
4. Get the cards from encounters out sooner.  I didn't get those cards till the gameday itself, so we turned them into "Do something cool" cards.  If the players did something really outside the box, they earned a card that let them crit on a 19 or 20 for the rest of the game.
5. Include a lore sheet for the bad guys.  I photocopied pages from my MM and brought them along so I could tell people lore about the monsters if they wanted to know.  Since nobody had dungeoneering it was tough going to understand what they were fighting... so I threw a lot of lovecraftian type horror descriptions at them.

Overall, we had seven tables run and a number of players who had not played since high school AD&D days.  Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I netted some more players for the monthly meetup, Game Empire Pasadena earned a few new customers, and 4E A few more fans!

Thank you to Erik Scott di Bie for a well crafted adventure, and to Wizards for putting these events together.  I really look forward to them, even though running the same adventure back to back can be a challenge sometimes the win for all sides makes it worthwhile.

Simplified Stat Blocks:

• Only include what is needed for combat.  This means dumping skills, spells, feats, magic items, mundane items, etc that won't be used in combat
• Use 4E style recharge mechanics.  Instead of something recharging in 2d4 rounds, it will recharge on a 6 (as an example... I need to work out an odds chart to figure this out more but).  The idea is you don't have to remember if it recharged or not, only that it had been used
• Break down objects into the following categories: Senses, Offense, Defense, Spells, and Statistics
• Make everything uniform across all stat blocks, and color code the Offense and Defense areas for easy reference during play
• Simplify the attack block by using icons from 4E
• Adding check boxes for spells, magic items and powers that have been consumed

That stat block for the Hell Hound is something that I could work from in the heat of a game and not have to reference a single book. 

Going beyond the stat blocks and thinking about the adventure itself, there are several areas where I think a Skill Challenge would be an excellent addition to the campaign.  The cost for failure could be something as simple as it takes an extra day to do something (this is a big deal in Red Hand of Doom).   Example might be trying to find Vraath Keep, or negotiations with the Tiri Kitor, or the forest giant.  Traps and hazards abound in this adventure too, it will be fun to rework those into a more 4E style of play (thinking of the Ghost Lords Den here).

The conversion is slow going, I have done the first two encounters only, but time is on my side for now.

(Here is a more advanced stat block to see what a spell caster will look like)

Let me start by saying that I was very pleased with how my Shardmind Psion character handled in combat last night.  Having never played a controller before, I really enjoyed the ability to... well, how do I say this without spoiling it for others, ah yes, I enjoyed pushing and pulling creatures when there is architectual features involved.  Great fun!  My table was well balanced, and we were all very experienced with 4E... so our DM threw a harder encounter at us.  Fate would have it that his dice were cold and ours hot, so the situation was well handled.

At the onset of our game, we had two bits of business to resolve.  First, I needed a character name, since I decided that mine was unpronouncable.  The party picked "Skippy" as his nickname.  I frowned and explained that I was looking for something more in the flavor of the Forgotten Realms.  "Oh, well, throw some extra Zs and Ys into it" was the response.  Thus was born the nickname "Zzkyppy".  The other bit of business was to form an adventuring company.  The other running in our timeslot was 90% drow.  This was upsetting to our rag-tag, non-drow party, so "No Drow Allowed" was our decided name and policy, all rolled into one.

Without going into too many spoilers, I'll just say that the architecture benefitted the party far more than the bad guys.  The controllers effectivly moved the range attackers around, the defender stood his ground, and the strikers cleaned up.  Overall, a fairly enjoyable encounter.  My big gripe is it would have been better to have more time for the DMs to prep for the adventure.  I dislike the pogs.  I understand there is a cost to them, but honestly, I think minis drive sales to minis, and they help a bit to draw people into the encounters.  Thankfully I have a huge collection at home and can fill in when I am DMing.

 Now, when it was my turn to DM, later that night, I had a smaller table.  My game was thrown together at the last minute, so I only had 4 players, and the party was slightly unbalanced in terms of roles, so I decided to keep one of the combatants out of it until I saw how things went.  Well, they handled the adventure in almost the same way as the table I played at, with a couple twists.  First, since they didn't have a defender, a monk was sent out onto the bridge to lock it down.  After much peppering and trying to get him off, I finally dropped him to -4 hitpoints.  By this time however, I only had two bad guys left, one unharmed, and the other with a single hitpoint.  This is where the moment of terror hit the players, I announced that the bloodied guy was going to move to the fallen monk and attempt to crush his skull in (or push him off the bridge, I hadn't really decided which yet), because the monk had done so much injury to him.  Well, the look on the players faces was one of shock "You're going to coup de grace me!?" he exclaimed.  It was delightful.  However, I had to move him across that bridge... which required an athletics check... which he failed miserably.  The cheers from the table made that really fun to see.  It was fully what I expected to happen, the odds of the badguy pulling it off were slim and it added a lot of excitement to the conclusion of the encounter.

Afterwards, the player of the monk told me that he really liked the drama at the end, and that he was glad I didn't hold back any punches... even if he did refer to me as a "evil GM"

Overall, great success for the kickoff of D&D Encounters Season 1.  We had 6 tables run, with something like 30 players and 6 DMs.  I hope I can DM more adventures, but I may have scheduling problems for the ability to continue to run... we shall see... many negotiations in personal life need to happen first.  Certainly I will continue to play, it's only 90 minutes of time, something I can easily squeeze in.

Next up, PHB3 gameday on Saturday... all day!  I am going to be exhausted as I am DMing 3 tables that day.  Perhaps I can get someone to DM the third timeslot for me, we shall see, but so far we have 8 tables ready to go.  The adventure looks pretty good, same guy who wrote the D&D Encounter adventure too.  Signup information can be found on our Pasadena D&D Meetup Messageboard.  Special thanks to Game Empire Pasadena, and the Boardgame group for allowing us to borrow some tables for these events.