Community

The first and most important thing to do in a skill challenge is figure out what it means if they fail. Success is usually obvious, but you can't assume they'll succeed, and the game needs to proceed in an interesting way even if they fail. When dealing with a challenge in which it seems as though failure should mean death (such as gladatorial games), it can be hard to think of a good failure scenario.

My advice would be that you take death off the table. Decide that they will survive, but being that this is a gladatorial setting how they survive is important. They must be entertaining about it. If they fail, the audience will lose interest in them and they will lose patrons, or privileges, or have to fight in more horrific scenarios.

So, consider dual challenges. One challenge is the physical or mental side of the combat they're in. The other side is the entertainment side. They need to act tough (Intimidate), appear to take risks (Bluff), or actually take them (a Hard physical check that counts for a success in both challenges), and respond properly to the audience (Diplomacy). If they don't take part in this challenge, the part that actually pertains to the combat is more complicated (i.e. requires more successes), because they need to be more technically impressive. If they fail the physical side, they still survived, but are strained from the effort and will take a -2 to all non-entertainment checks in the next challenge. Or something.

As for choosing the complexity, the success/failure ratio required to win, just go with your gut and start small. If you have the two concurrent challenges, make the combat side Complexity 2 (6 successes before 3 failures) and the entertainment side Complexity 1 (4 successes before 3 failures). If they succeed on the entertainment side, they reduce the complexity of the combat side by 1 (effectively giving them 2 successes).

Once you have that, it might still be puzzling how to run it. It can be tricky to run non-combat encounters, even without a skill challenge system, but do your best. Narration and description becomes important. Remember that not everything they want to do will require a roll, and not every roll they make has to give them a success or failure (or bonus or penalty). Most importantly, it's okay if they fail.

Good luck.

Apr 16, 2011 -- 8:09PM, Morgothrond wrote:

Actually, i havent considered the entertainment part, and it is awesome, because in fact ther eis a factor of winning and losing the crowd over.

the ideas are very good, and I was wondering about the difficulties, so your tips are very good.

 

As for the death factor, i really didn't want them to die, but they will definitely have a tougher time later in the campaign (or not) depending on the results of the arena.

Thanks!

ill run the adventure tomorrow night.

How'd this end up going?