So instead of doing a normal dungeon crawl for an upcoming session I was thinking of doing a skill challenge. Basically it goes like this.
They enter the dungeon and the skill challenge begins. They're searching for something.
After each skill challenge there is a combat encounter which drains resources/hp from the players. After 3 successes they face the "boss" of the dungeon. So the better the skill challenge goes for them the more resources they have for the final fight. More failures means less resources. I would probably cap the number of encounters at 5 or 6 so that they're not completely drained by the time they reach the final boss.
Just looking for options, good idea? bad idea? has anyone tried something like this before and how well did it work?
I think this is offloading a bit the dungeon design, and making it a bit too game-ish for my taste. Should a player wanting to use an Strength(Athletics) check just say that there's a collapse on the way that they want to clear ?
Also, there's the issue of what happens if they fail ? Do they just... go home ? What's the interpretation here ?
I think a skill challenge is more about presenting a situation and offering them an open way to deal with it, with limited control on their environment, but I don't think it would work very well for an entire dungeon though.
This seems like something you definitely want to talk about with your players before the game. If I understand correctly, they would have no control over how and in which order they explore the dungeon.
The good thing about this kind of skill challenge-based exploration is that it seems to be a much faster way to handle traversing through the dungeon and get to the meat of it, ie. the boss and the treasure it's guarding. It also eliminates the possibility that the group stops in a single part of the dungeon to argue about the meaning of some dungeon dressing or about how they should proceed. Some players who are very objective-driven may find this more appealing than a slow room-by-room crawl through a maze-like dungeon.
The bad thing about this is that, at least in my understanding, it eats away options from players about how to approach the dungeon. Yes, they can choose which skills to use to earn successes, but more creative use of spells, equipment and other resources are left out (or maybe players can use these resources to gain an advantage for the skill challenge, like using a spell to blast a hole in the wall to make a shortcut?). Players have no real way to evade encounters outside of rolling well on the skill challenge. In addition, the dungeon itself is also a lot more, well, boring when players cannot directly interact with it.
Did you mean that every time they make a check to try and earn a success for the skill challenge, a combat encounter happens? If so, does failing to earn a success mean that there are two combat encounters before the next skill challenge? When a combat encounter happens, is there a way for the group to surprise the enemy or vice versa?
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So instead of doing a normal dungeon crawl for an upcoming session I was thinking of doing a skill challenge. Basically it goes like this.
They enter the dungeon and the skill challenge begins. They're searching for something.
After each skill challenge there is a combat encounter which drains resources/hp from the players. After 3 successes they face the "boss" of the dungeon. So the better the skill challenge goes for them the more resources they have for the final fight. More failures means less resources. I would probably cap the number of encounters at 5 or 6 so that they're not completely drained by the time they reach the final boss.
Just looking for options, good idea? bad idea? has anyone tried something like this before and how well did it work?
I think this is offloading a bit the dungeon design, and making it a bit too game-ish for my taste. Should a player wanting to use an Strength(Athletics) check just say that there's a collapse on the way that they want to clear ?
Also, there's the issue of what happens if they fail ? Do they just... go home ? What's the interpretation here ?
I think a skill challenge is more about presenting a situation and offering them an open way to deal with it, with limited control on their environment, but I don't think it would work very well for an entire dungeon though.
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This seems like something you definitely want to talk about with your players before the game. If I understand correctly, they would have no control over how and in which order they explore the dungeon.
The good thing about this kind of skill challenge-based exploration is that it seems to be a much faster way to handle traversing through the dungeon and get to the meat of it, ie. the boss and the treasure it's guarding. It also eliminates the possibility that the group stops in a single part of the dungeon to argue about the meaning of some dungeon dressing or about how they should proceed. Some players who are very objective-driven may find this more appealing than a slow room-by-room crawl through a maze-like dungeon.
The bad thing about this is that, at least in my understanding, it eats away options from players about how to approach the dungeon. Yes, they can choose which skills to use to earn successes, but more creative use of spells, equipment and other resources are left out (or maybe players can use these resources to gain an advantage for the skill challenge, like using a spell to blast a hole in the wall to make a shortcut?). Players have no real way to evade encounters outside of rolling well on the skill challenge. In addition, the dungeon itself is also a lot more, well, boring when players cannot directly interact with it.
Did you mean that every time they make a check to try and earn a success for the skill challenge, a combat encounter happens? If so, does failing to earn a success mean that there are two combat encounters before the next skill challenge? When a combat encounter happens, is there a way for the group to surprise the enemy or vice versa?