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I ran Dungeon Delve 1 for two people on 11/14. Their characters were level 1, a shardmind dark pact warlock and a half-orc brawler fighter.

Given the unusual party size, I had planned, even before I knew what the characters would be, to keep the monsters roughly the same, but to give them goals other than killing the PCs. In the first encounter, a removed one of three kobold slingers and kept the minions mostly busy moving two prisoners and a McGuffin into a tunnel in the floor of the encounter. The slingers and two minions did all the fighting.

The monsters' goal was to move their prisoners and another item into their tunnels. They moved one prisoner in quickly; there was not meant to be a way to prevent this. The other prisoner and the item took more time, as I wanted the PCs to be ablle...

I ran three Living Forgotten Realms games this weekend, a first (and second, and third) for me. It was an interesting experience. My first two games went reasonably well, with players engaged in the story and having a reasonably challenging time with the combat. I'm no tactical genius myself, nor do I wish to be, so I generally rely on the monsters to have an interesting variety of powers to make life hard for the players.

In my third game, things took a turn, and I was taken to school. Everyone was pretty well optimized, and even with the "harder" batch of monsters they carved through them quite handily. One fellow had a brawling fighter. I'm fine with that in theory, even if the monsters can't escape (which these couldn't) because at least the monster can keep attacking the fighter. This

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This thread, community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758... got to list out a handful of my basic thoughts about skill challenges. I keep doing this, so I've decided to plunk them into a blog. It's not polished, but maybe I'll edit it later, or expand on certain points in later blogs. Enjoy.

Combat is not the opposite of roleplaying. Skill challenges (which many people equate with "roleplaying") are designed to fit right into combat, should you so choose. See Dungeon Delve 11-3 for an example. If they get into a fight in the city, add a skill challenge element to it, such as having to protect innocent by-standers, or having to negotiate during battle. Have failure complicate things and success simplify things.

Embrace the abstract: Don't worry about exact locations or timescales. Don't model

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A blog inspired by Greg Bilsland's post about dungeons: gregbilsland.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/my...

I hate drawing dungeons.

I don't have a head for layout, or what kinds of distances make sense. I stand little chance of being able to create a dynamic, realistic set of denizens. It's an exercise in futility and frustration. Furthermore, exploration and extermination aren't always the goals I have in mind when I imagine a dungeon. Therefore, I've been trying a new approach: skill challenge dungeons.

There's no map, just a general idea of the kinds of environments and hazards the PCs might encounter. To give the sense of exploration, there's an ongoing skill challenge that is meant to simulate navigating and exploring the structure. To give the sense of danger, there's a concurrent skill challenge

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I just ran through a skill challenge in a play-by-post game I'm DMing. I picked the primary skills with consideration as to what would make sense to the challenge and with any eye toward its simplicity (of design, not of the PCs accomplishing the challenge), rather than what skills the PCs were good at. I picked a Complexity of 3, which I thought reflected the lowercase-c-complexity of the actual situation, i.e. convincing three ghosts that they are ghosts and need to pass back through a shadow crossing into the Shadowfell. I used moderate DCs for their level. I discouraged the use of Take 10 and Aid Another for what I think were valid reasons, and imposed another -2 penalty on all checks due to another event taking place. They went ahead and used skills they weren't trained in.

And they

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@Level30yinzer mentioned on Twitter that her PCs regularly blow past even the Hard DCs she puts in front of them. That got me thinking.

I have the same situation with my PCs. I have actually made a point of not scouring their character sheets for their weak and strong skills but for just run-of-the-mill skill checks I think there's a good chance their bonuses were already above the DCs. Part of how I deal with this as a DM is simply not to mind it. They built their characters well, made choices on which races to take, and which skills to train, and so I'm happy for them to be good at what they're good at and for me to focus on just narrating how they handily accomplish what they put their efforts toward.

Still, at some point I might want there to be an actual chance that my PCs will fail

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