What follows are different types of approaches to descriptive text, starting with the erroneous text and building on that to a point where the DM has reflected on how the descriptive text can be manipulated to provide additional challenges to the players.

Erroneous Text:

“The cave is filled with a large pool of water with tunnel entrances twenty feet off the floor circling the cave. Water cascades out of these tunnels like miniature waterfalls. There is not so much water that an adventurous person could not explore those tunnels.”

Actual encounter: When an adventurer disturbs any part of the cave wall, a spider-swarm appears in that spot and immediately attacks any creature within reach. Nothing in the text suggests such a thing will happen voiding the possibility of the player inferring any proper course of action. Some players will not care: some players will be perturbed.

Dead Give-Away Text:

“The cave is filled with a large pool of water with tunnel entrances twenty feet off the floor circling the cave. Water cascades out of these tunnels like miniature waterfalls. There is not so much water that an adventurous person could not explore those tunnels after climbing the walls adorned with web-covered bodies.”

An inspection of the bodies reveals the individuals look as if they had just begun to climb the walls when they were suddenly traumatized, webbed and desiccated. The resulting proper course of action is to reach the tunnels by some means other than climbing the walls or, if necessary, disturb the wall while having readied actions and climb the wall safely afterwards.

Blending Text:

“Past the light shielding of cobwebs, the cave is filled with a large pool of water with tunnel entrances twenty feet off the floor circling the cave. The pool of water has a black sheen from all the tiny water spiders swimming on its surface. Water cascades out of the tunnels like miniature waterfalls. The cave ceiling is thick with cobwebs and the careful attention of medium-size spiders watching everything that happens below. They seem to be waiting patiently. There is not so much cascading water that an adventurous person could not explore those tunnels after climbing the walls. The walls that are adorned with the web covered and desiccated bodies of past adventurers and even a few medium-sized spiders.”

The players might want to inspect the bodies on the wall, more likely they will want to avoid this room altogether, because the threat seems recognizable but not necessarily from what direction. Is it the tiny spiders swimming on the pool or the medium-size spiders on the ceiling? What is up with the desiccated medium-size spiders on the wall? Has anyone encountered cannibal spiders before? Does that suggest the tiny spiders are the greater threat? Why are the dead only visible on the walls? Do the medium-size spiders attack adventurers and the tiny-size spiders attack other spiders? Can we use that to our advantage? Should we just kill everything? Who knows how to communicate with spiders? How large is the cave; how many fireballs will it take to cover it?

The idea behind blending text is to suggest so many questions that the vital question to ask is lost in a wealth of information. Blending text means to irritate the players to such a degree they do not think things through entirely, make an assumption and then make a mistake. For example, after becoming frustrated, the adventurers use area effect spells killing the tiny- and medium-sized spiders, which are not a threat, not worth any experience and are only part of the descriptive text. The adventurers then proceed as if the threat no longer exists, disturbing the walls and triggering the swarm of spiders.

Blending text also means to minimize perturbing a player after the fact. Once the surprise happens, it should be immediately recognizable to the player that the DM did provide the vital information. Even so, some players will still be perturbed and upset that the DM “concocted” a situation that no person would have figured out. The player might also be perturbed that although they might not have figured it out, their 20 wisdom or 20 intelligent or +15 dungeoneering or +15 nature adventurer should have had some means of influencing the initial assessment.

Directed Text

“Past the light shielding of cobwebs, the cave is filled with a large pool of water with tunnel entrances twenty feet off the floor circling the cave. The pool of water has a black sheen in the center, away from the walls, from all the tiny water spiders swimming on its surface. Water cascades out of the tunnels like miniature waterfalls. The cave ceiling, directly above and only above the black sheen, is thick with cobwebs and the careful attention of medium-size spiders watching everything that happens below. They seem to be waiting patiently. There is not so much cascading water that an adventurous person could not explore those tunnels after climbing the walls. The walls that are adorned with the web covered and desiccated bodies of past adventurers and even a few medium-sized spiders.”

Directed text is nothing more than blending text with a couple of additional hints for the naturally talented and/or knowledgeable adventurer. One suggestion is to have both the blended text and the directed text prepared. Share the blended text first. When a player makes an appropriate skill check and/or suggests his naturally talented adventurer might have additional information share the directed text. The two texts are almost identical and many players will think the DM is only again sharing the blended text and will stop paying attention. More than likely, someone in the group will pick-up on the minor differences between the two texts.

Directed text is about the follow through. Personally, I am always disappointed with myself for creating a situation that presses players into needing to have additional information and when they make their appropriate checks I have nothing prepared and end up giving everything away. Saying something like, "All the spiders are staying away from the walls."

Now this is exactly the same information that is delivered by the directed text but the two styles are completely different. In one, the players get it thrown right in their faces. "Ah this is important, this is key." In the other, the players have to think things through just a little bit more. In one, the challenge is over. In the other, the challenge has a potential of continuing.

Concluding

Now, if your players are not particularly adept at focusing on keywords in the descriptive text, then none of this matters. It only means to allow the DM to provide new challenges to players who might otherwise become bored with the adventure, always knowing exactly what to do after hearing the descriptive texts. Of course, if your players only enjoy the game because they know exactly what to do, then you had better just avoid this altogether. Even if that is the case, you at least will have learned something about your players.

The first thing you will have to decide is the use of at-will powers. Characters have more than one at-will power and since each power has an unlimited capacity in the number of times it can be used, players will min-max one at-will power and disregard the rest. Further, players will eventually drift toward the Essential character builds because those builds already simplify the combat and begin the min-max approach to the at-will powers. None of this should necessarily be a concern if the DM is already considering using this skills challenge approach in order to emphasize the cinematic storytelling over the tactical maneuvering in combat.

If for some reason, you as DM do not want the characters to focus on just one of their at-will powers you will have to devise a house rule. For example, all at-will powers of the same type (melee or range) a player must utilize before that player can utilize again any at-will power of that same type, which the player has already utilized more than any other at-will power of that same type. Players, however, will simply minimize the number of at-will powers of a single type altogether. Fred (first level) only has a basic melee at-will power, which is at +10. The players are simply following the course already set: simple combat in exchange for cinematic storytelling.

As a side note: one can look at the current 4E combat system as an attempt to create a formulaic approach to cinematic storytelling in the tactics of the characters. The formula spells out the cinematography in the individual power descriptions, although much more limited, and can be at times ignored by both the players and the DM, depending upon their preference. The skills challenge approach puts the burden of cinematography back on the shoulders of the DM, which will not be to everyone’s liking. However, a DM who likes to tell stories and players not comfortable describing their character’s actions might find the skill challenge approach more to their liking.

Assuming the players simplify their character builds and drift toward the Essentials, the problem of magic missile will become apparent. It is an automatic success and an at-will power, a veritable machine-gun in a sword fight. The higher percentage of the party members who can cast magic missile makes the party that much more unstoppable. A party of one who happens to be a magic-missile throwing character will automatically defeat every skill challenge.

In order to avoid that scenario we suggest the DM limit magic missile and any other like power to counting as a success but only in regards of having the advantage characteristic of removing a failure, counting as one of the available advantages in the skill challenge. Magic missile does not count as a success for the overall number of required successes: a player can only utilize magic missile if the skill challenge grants at least one advantage: and, magic missile takes up one of the slots available for advantages. Magic missile still retains its usefulness but does not overpower the skills challenge approach.

Establishing the target DC is simple and does not deviate from how a DM establishes the target DC of a normal skill challenge (as written in the Rules Compendium).

Example: You have four first-level characters in the party. Turn to page 285 and multiply the number of characters by the number cross-referenced by their level in the column “XP per character”. That number is 100. 100 x 4 = 400. "400" is the XP limit on a standard encounter for four first-level characters. Turn to page 294. Starting from the top left corner in row 1 of the “Level” column go across and then down until you reach the first appearance of 400. “400” appears in the first row under the column “Complexity 4”. The first row tells you the level of the skill challenge and the column where you found the number tells you the complexity of the skill challenge (Level 1: Complexity 4). Turn to page 159. Find the complexity on the table to determine the total number of successes required, the breakdown of successes between moderate and hard, and the number of slots available for advantages (10 successes, 4 advantages, 7 moderate and 3 hard). Turn to page 126. Find the level of the skill challenge and determine the target DC for both the moderate success and hard success (moderate DC 12, hard DC 19). You now have all the necessary information to run a standard encounter combat. The party needs ten successes before three failures. The party needs seven successes at DC 12 and three successes at DC 19. The party has slots for four advantages. You can find a list of sample advantages on page 160. (Make what you will of the advantage talking about an easy success: we have no opinion on it.)

For easier encounters follow the same procedure but assume the characters are one or two levels lower. For harder encounters follow the same procedure but assume the characters are two to four levels higher. Personally, we suggest one level lower for easier encounters and two levels higher for harder encounters.

We had the character builder create a half-orc slayer at 30^th level to compare the bonus to hit to the moderate and hard DC target numbers at thirtieth level. The character had a +38 to hit against a moderate DC 32 and hard DC 42. An elf illusionist at thirtieth level had a +27 to hit. It seems plausible that the skills challenge approach will work through all the levels. Considering your personal preference and that of your players, you might want to put an automatic level adjustment (up or down) on the characters for the purposes of encounter designs. Presumably, your adventures are not all combat and skill challenges actually requiring the use of skills will be necessary. Otherwise, expect a party of slayers who know nothing outside of swinging the sword.

Both the slayer and illusionist had +6 items boosting their attacks that would otherwise be +32 for the slayer and +21 for the illusionist. If every character in the party is +32, then you might want to do a level adjustment upwards. If every character in the party is +21, then you might want to do a level adjustment downwards. (Note: A single level adjustment will not alter, up or down, the target DC by more than a point. Our preference is to have a difference of eight between the attack bonus and the target DC. A target DC 32 needs an average attack bonus between the party members of +24. The slayer and illusionist with their items have an average of +32 eight points higher than 24. We would simply adjust the respective moderate and hard DC target numbers by those eight points to a DC 40 moderate and DC 50 hard. Problem solved for our preference.)

Without hit points, how do you determine if a character dies? We suggest whenever a player rolls a “1” on a d20 the player immediately rolls again. If the second roll is not at least a moderate success, then the character is unconscious for the encounter but another player can bring back the unconscious character through healing. If the character is unconscious, then the controlling player immediately makes a third roll and if the third roll fails to make an easy success the character is unconscious and dying. The character cannot be healed until the character has failed at least two death saving throws or has stabilized by succeeding at a death saving throw. Lastly, it is always the discretion of the DM to coup de grace an unconscious character.

The benefit of the skills challenge approach is that you are free to use your imagination and there is nothing for the DM to track other than what the players roll and the description of the encounter. Monsters do not roll to hit. Monsters do not do damage. Monsters can do whatever they wish. Pick up a character and throw the character across the room into the wall. Let the monsters break the characters’ bones, gash their flesh, burn and mutilate them. There is nothing preventing you from describing a combat with hordes of undead and/or with an ancient red dragon against your first level characters. Describe as many grizzly deaths and kills as you like because you can just keep pouring in more monsters until the party succeeds at the combat skill challenge. The characters can take the abuse no matter how badly you describe it.

One final thought, since the number of total required successes is never more than 12 and you can never have more than three failures, the more characters in the party the quicker the combat will be over, either through accumulated successes or failures. The party size does increase the target DC for successes. A party of twelve characters might not even allow every person to participate in the combat. If this problem occurs, then you might have to resort to a house rule such as increasing the number of total required successes and/or increase the limit of acceptable failures.

The particular line to focus on comes from the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game by Monte Cook and John Tynes on page 203. "Once you truly understand that humanity is a dead end, the only way out is to stop being human".

In D&D, adventurers take on more and more difficult tasks and in doing so increase their own powers, skills, etc. There is an affirmation in the D&D game that the adventurers can make a difference, can change the world, can destroy evil if they choose to do so. Cthulhu has similarities in that investigators take on more difficult challenges and can gain more knowledge and/or powers. The difference between the games lies in that investigators are suppose to become more aware of their own insignificance to the broader scope. Investigators, unlike adventurers, do not grow proportionally to the broader scope of things happening around them.

Yes, the adventurer and the investigator might have to defeat their equivalent 20th level monsters, but the significance of their particular monsters are entirely different. For the adventurer, the 20th level monster is the heart of the adventurer's difficulties. For the investigator, the 20th level monster is less significant to them than was the 1st level monster when they knew nothing about the Mythos.

A potential problem with Cthulhu is finding an appropriate means of relaying that insignificance to the players. When you set equivalent level D&D and Cthulhu adventures beside each other, there is a strong chance they will look essentially the same: level-equivalent monsters, mystery, betrayals, spells, skills, NPC interactions, etc. The similarity is even more so if the D&D adventure has a theme of horror and the aberrant.

The conclusion I made is that to effectively relay such insignificance, the Cthulhu adventure has to be designed to influence the player's  mind-set over the story of his or her investigator. One benefit, of course, is that designing adventures that way automatically puts the investigator-characters at a lower level of significance than the adventurer-characters of D&D. I'm not going to mention any drawbacks.

My first attempt at applying this game theory is to systematically destroy everything about the investigator, starting at the fringes and working inward, starting from 1st level to 20th level. 1. Expectations 2. Physics/Mathematics 3. Fellow human beings 4. Natural Sciences 5. Friends 6. History of Civilization 7. Family members 8. Government 9. Loved Ones 10. Courts/Police 11. Senses 12. Religion 13. Logic 14. Family (as institution) 15. Emotions 16. History of Family 17. Fatih/Beliefs 18. History of Investigator 19. Willpower 20. Profession

Each level has its own theme of destruction starting with destroying expectations until a final culmination of the whole concept of being an investigator is destroyed. Further, as each concept is destroyed it never comes back in later adventures and therefore cannot be relied upon or utilized [implementation entirely dependent on the talent of the GM], forcing the player to adjust his or her mind-set about how to accomplish the task at hand. By 20th level, assuming investigators live that long and players can adapt to such a degree, there is nothing left of what a player would normally utilize in directing his or her character through an adventure.

Presuming the theory is correct and the implementation works. What should result is that players who have progressed through multiple levels with their investigators handle the new adventure differently from a player who is just joining the group. The new player, uncorrupted by the earlier adventures, ought to be puzzled by the more experienced player's unwillingness to do certain things, even though there has been every indication that is what ought to be done. The experienced players will try to explain the situation by saying such things as "you don't know our GM well enough". The truth of the matter, however, is that an entire group of new players could probably finish the adventure doing everything the wrong way and it's not so much the GM being different as the experienced player's mind-set has changed when playing Cthulhu. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a level limit associated with each player that was well below 20th level.

Once you truly understand that investigating is a dead end, the only way out is to stop investigating.

It's a meta-game approach because when you lay the Cthulhu adventure next to the D&D adventure the similarities still exist. It's only when you look between the lines of the Cthulhu adventure, like the examination period of a Cthulhu artifact, that the forbidden knowledge is revealed.

When making Call of Cthulhu characters two tabs became important: details and powers. (Link to photo to be inserted later.) The tab labeled 'other' was a possibility but we prefered the 'power' tab because it allowed for categorization and pull down menus. One power we called 'skills' and then we went on and listed every skill for the character with the appropriate modifier to the die roll under that power. We also created the powers: .38 caliber, knife, and sanity. In the empty descriptive space of sanity we wrote the maximum and current sanity levels of the character with the assumption that the player could then easily edit and rewrite the curent sanity as necessary, but all the data on sanity could be found in one location.

In the 'details' tab we listed feats, equipment, defense/offense options, etc. In short everything that required a die roll was put in the 'powers' and everthing else was put in the 'details'. Since we're using the WotC d20 system Call of Cthulhu, we were able to utilize the spaces for saving throws, AC, etc. Games that are entirely different from D&D however can simply and effectively stick to the 'details' and 'power' tabs. The only kink we discovered is that when making a character you must choose a token and there is not a generic non-descriptive token for characters as there are for the monsters. So, at some point our Professor of Archaelogy might be represented by a Wild Elf Druid, but I've seen bottle caps, erasers, goblins, and a variety of other tokens do the same thing in a bind.

This experiment did throw one of our players into a worried-state. Brief note on that player; he's our best DM who is a storyteller and roleplayer rather than a tactical minded power player. As such, he doesn't DM D&D but always gives a shot at playing it so long as enough time has elapsed and a significant change has taken place that might improve the experience. The VT currently is our latest argument that a significant change has taken place (it helps that he doesn't have to drive 2 hours to try this time) and we haven't had a full blown attempt at playing the game in a couple months. The speed of character creation with the online Character Builder also helps, he's made seven characters in the past two days. Mostly, we think this is from the additional options available for character building online then we had in our gaming library.

Having said that, the idea of playing Cthulhu with the D&D virtual table gave him pause to worry. He understands D&D is more of a tactical game than Cthulhu and was willing to try D&D with the VT because of that consideration. Hence, why would you play Cthulhu, which is not a tactical game, on the VT? Our thinking was the VT provides an opportunity to game around a table without the normally large requirements of time associated with gaming. Past approach: 1 day alloted every month to play multiple games to make the necessary long travel times worth the effort. Suggested approach: 4 hours alloted every other week to play one RPG with face-to-face meetings reserved for games requiring cards  and/or specialized pieces. Some board games, like chess, could be played on the VT with a little ingenuity.

To that end, an argument was made to belay his worries about how Cthulhu would be approached, Unfortunately, in an effort to minimize suspicions about unnecessary mapping and tactical play in Cthulhu the argument focused on the use of 4E skill challenges in structuring the beginning, middle, and end of a Cthulhu adventure. The mention of D&D skill challenges, however, was a horrible mistake and though the argument might have minimized his tactical concerns, the argument raised other concerns.

His response to us having mentioned skill challenges and Cthulhu in the same sentence: "SPLUT! My brain just exploded."

Part of the reason is that the player's invest a lot of time and emotion into their characters, while the DM is methodically efficient at being brutally vicious. One 'guideline' the DM likes to ignore is the level appropriateness of monsters for the total party level. In fact, a couple months ago, he wrote a blog citing an encounter (he and only he ran through with his own 1st level characters) where a low level party was without the use of any automatic hit spell capable of getting a slightly better than 50-50 chance of defeating a 19th level minion.

When the idea of letting the players in on the secret first appeared, the DM merely smiled knowing there was no way it was going to happen. So, we had to come up with an argument that our particular DM would accept.

"You see, role-playing is about telling a story of heroes. It's the same concept of telling stories about heroes that you see in the movies. The heroes are given impossible odds of winning against villains that appear on the surface to be infinitely more capable than the heroes themselves. For us, we provide the heroes and you provide the villains, which you are quite good at we admit. The only difference between the movies and your sessions are that in the movies the heroes almost always win, while in your sessions the heroes almost always die."

"And your point being?" asked the DM, smiling.

"It's not that we don't enjoy the personal challenge of finding ways to beat you. It's because we are missing an entire different level of the game, a level higher than the mere mechanics, higher even than the role-playing and character development. We're missing the essence. When it comes to movies, everyone knows the hero is 99% likely to win. People don't watch movies to see if the hero is going to win and they don't watch movies to see how the character develops. All that is important but not as important as..."

And then we were stuck for an answer. We didn't really know why we went to the movies other than to momentarily escape from our own realities and that argument wasn't going to fly with the DM if we wanted him to open his secret files. We needed an answer and quick.

"People watch movies to see the losers (the obviously inferior heroes to the villain mastermind) win. We don't want heroes that are obvious heroes, because we want heroes that remind us of ourselves to give us the emotional courage to go on with our own lives against our own difficulties knowing that we too can succeed. It's not that you as DM aren't doing what your suppose to be doing. We need villains that are superior to the heroes, otherwise our heroes won't be losers. And it's not that we aren't doing what we're suppose to be doing, we send our inferior characters into the battle against all odds of winning. It's just that, the point is the heroes need to win."

"Do you want me to fudge my rolls?"

"No, of course not. Where's the fun in that. We want the script so that we make the right decisions when the time comes. When one of our characters die, we want you to yell cut, just as if you were shooting a scene. And then we go back and take another take. We know the script so we stay on script. We act out the scenes and we let the dice fall where they may. We might have to have mutliple takes on some of the combat scenes, but it's all there. Further we still have our own character development. What do you think?"

"You want to role-play actors making a movie that follows a script of a D&D adventure and you want me to hand over 'the script' to you prior to the session."

"Yeah, that's right. Except everything in the game has to be directly stated in the script, things can't be implied. There can't be any surprises."

"What about mysteries, character twists, betrayals by npcs?"

"D&D isn't a game about mysteries, besides everything is a skill challenge. Just because we know where the hidden treasure is doesn't mean we necessarily get to it without first succeeding at a skill challenge. As far as that other stuff, just don't write anything out that isn't necessary for the adventure at hand. Besides there has always been a degree of metaplaying in every session."

"Well, I don't know, but if you want to try it. I guess that's what we'll do."

"Really?"

"Yeah, sure. Besides, I have some ideas for rules about a role-playing game about movie actors. There's a whole bunch of possibilities and challenges the actors would have to overcome to keep their careers on track. Oh... don't worry about your D&D characters though, you'll just have to replace the actor who doesn't get the part with some other actor. The D&D character is safe, unless of course the producers downgrade him to a supporting role and can't afford to hire the actor necessary to play him. You know how it goes."

The DM sat there smiling at me. I'm actually not sure whether we (as players) came out on top or not.