Aardvark's Fog of War Campaign (4E) (Inactive)

Game Master Troy Malovich

Definitely, if it speeds things up.

Agreed. I'd actually go a little further and support the GM making any roll that isn't initiated or impacted by my characters actions.

What all actions would everyone prefer rolled by the GM?

On a side note, just a heads up, not sure if I covered this, but I use passives to tell you something isn't quite right. It will not say exactly what it is unless you roll.

So a passive perception will tell you there is movement in the bushes, a check will tell it it is either a squirrel or a bandit. A passive insight will let you catch inflections or something doesn't add up, but a check will tell if they are lying/hiding something/not telling the 'whole' truth.

Sounds good to me, as well as a good interpretation of passive.

Note that some people might have powers associated with the rolls, though. Booj doesn't, but it's worth soliciting the information.

Yeah that sounds like a good list. In PFS saves are good for DM rolls too, but not so much in 4e from what I can work out...

Art,

In 4E, saves are nearly always on the player's turn, so there's not much to gain. But otherwise, yes.

Art,

In 4E, saves are nearly always on the player's turn, so there's not much to gain. But otherwise, yes.

Yeah, that's the way I had it figured.

All,

I will be traveling from Saturday afternoon (US Eastern) to Tuesday afternoon. I will probably be checking in at least once per day, but can't guarantee.

Please feel free to NPC in combat. I'll leave updates on used powers and remaining numbers and such before I go.

Thanks!

Okay, thank you for the head's up.

Sorry for the lull, I've been trying to figure out how I wanted to work this Skill challenge.

Here's what I decided, I will describe the situation and ask for your decision/reaction and what skill you will use. I will have 3 skills in mind, one will be the intended skill check (at easy DC), one secondary skill usable, and a tertiary skill usable. I will not divulge the intended skill, it will be interpreted by the situation as to which skill would overcome it.

The goal will be a point total based on the easy DC x the # of PC's (So the target total of a lvl 1 skill in a skill challenge will be 48, DC 8 x 6 players).

The result of the roll will add directly to the total (when the prime skill is used), the result minus the difference between a med and easy will add to the total (when the secondary skill is used), and the result minus the difference between a hard and easy when a tertiary is used.

In play it will look like this - Level 1 challenge, 6 PC's, Goal 48 pts
My description of situation, the path comes to a river crossing with a description
PC1 uses Athletics to swim (total 13)
PC2 uses Nature to know how to cross safely (total 17)
PC3 uses Perception to find a path (total 7)
PC4 uses Athletics to swim (total 4)
PC5 uses Endurance to deal with rushing water (total 10)
PC6 uses Athletics to swim (total 18)

Prime Ath (DC 8), so roll taken as is (so 35)
2nd Nature (DC 12), so the roll -4 (so 13)
3rd Perc (DC 19), so the roll -11 (so -4)
non-related Endu, so no point value applied

So the crossing would have been a success if the perception guy hadn't found a false path that made him fall in, or the endurance guy hadn't needed to be helped across by the swimmers when he didn't make any progress.

In this case the party ends up cold, wet, and tired, a good distance down the bank. I would probably say they each lose a surge from the ordeal.

Booj is correct in the non-appropriate skill being a penalty on a fumble. Their attempt, say in Booj's case of Acro, on a fumble could have gotten in the way, or scuffled what tracks there was.

Just as a crit was a 9 (auto-succeed an easy), a fumble would have been a -9 (auto-fail an easy). So even using a tertiary, you would have to either fumble or get a total of 2 to get a -9, and if you could get a total of 2 without fumbling then there must be any other skill among the three with a better chance.

The risk of being a hindrance by using something completely out of scope has the same chance of helping. But using even a tertiary has a decent chance of adding something.

For the 3 skills chosen, Booj has a +2 in each of them
Fumble Perc = -2, any other at the very least a +4
Fumble Nat = -6, any other at the very least 0
Fumble Insight = -13, any other at the very least -8

Okay, so fumbling a Tertiary has the potential to get lower, other than that a primary and secondary will almost always beat a non-related skill. But using that idea, choosing the third method then getting it wrong could make more sense than using something that has no bearing and getting it wrong.

Take our scenario, use Arcana instead of Insight. Fumble Insight, you give the group misleading information. "I would imagine that he would try to ride higher into the mountains for shelter." group says "Could be, we should take that into account".
Vice Fumble Arcana "I sense the forces of magical energy eddying towards his path" group says, "Yeah I don't know, can you really track by sensing magical energy?"

Ok, now I see better how the math works. My concern, though, about unrelated skills still applies in part -- as long as we're guessing what the related skills are. In this instance, the first was obvious and the second largely so. What the third one would be was much less clear, at least to me. So I chose one of my highest bonus skills.

The problem I have is that if I guess something might be that third skill and use it, but it turns out to be wrong, how good I am at it is completely irrelevant to success on the challenge.

Does that make sense?

Yes, I see what you are saying. The way I see it, if the skill is not relevant, then it will be the case that how good you makes no difference.

Using Diplomacy in an Athletics, Acrobatics, Endurance skill challenge, no matter how good you are, shouldn't have much effect. Except in the rare chance that your words either motivate/demoralize the participants (aka Crit/Fumble). Other than that diplomacy may not help you much in climbing a cliff or crossing a river.

As I've found trying a lot of them out, the tertiary is the real gamble. The first two are fairly obvious in intended skill, and have low penalties, the third is a little tougher to discern (out of 17 skills only so many overlap in some way), and has a higher penalty on a low roll.

So, the question I guess would be, how to make the tertiary less of a risk of penalty than the non-associated? Should the penalties to secondaries and tertiaries go no lower than 0? Or no less than 0 unless it's a fumble? That way, people will more often use the tertiary over the non-related.

I have another challenge following this first one, I would like to iron it out before I use it, but don't want to take too long in rules discussion before the game moves forward.

Maybe an assumption, but what would be the drawback in telling us what the three skills are? It's the guesswork that's causing the weirdness, it seems.

The technique first started with just the undefined skills, and the old # of successes. I tried doing it to give it more story, and remove the numbers so that it will sound less mechanical, and more narrative.

Sadly, to just say these skills at these DC's, goes against the whole reason I changed the way I handle them.

Just like I'm not a big fan of the old healing response "How hurt are you?" "I'm at 13 out of 64". When I prefer to hear, "I have a few decent cuts and am favoring my left side a bit too much."

I'm just trying to reduce the amount of numbers visible at the table.

Understood. Given your goals, then, I like this one:

Should the penalties to secondaries and tertiaries go no lower than 0 ... unless it's a fumble?

Sorry, this is long.

Ok... I'm having a hard time getting my head around this last "group" challenge. In the previous challenge, it was obvious to me that re-acquiring the trail worked well as a group challenge. Any one person can try and it only takes one success to benefit everyone (rules for skill challenges aside.) I found the trail, I show it to everyone, problem solved. In this case the dc was high enough to require a collaboration of effort from the party members.

In this latest group challenge, either a person succeeds in the crossing, or they don't and end up washed downstream. It makes sense that those who failed the challenge should lose a healing surge because they exhausted themselves trying to keep from drowning in the cold river. So, why then do those who did not get washed downstream lose a healing surge? If the rationale is that they had to march late into the night to regroup with the others, then it seems that a separate skill check, perhaps an endurance check should be required of them.

I'm not trying to whine about the loss of a healing surge. I recognize that the loss is largely inconsequential since we are likely bedding down for an extended rest. I'm just trying to figure out an abstract method for determining what constitutes a group skill challenge.

Thinking about it, I'm having a hard time defining it. Something like... If a task requires everyone to succeed, then it should NOT be a group challenge. If only one person, or portion of the group that is less than 100%, needs to succeed, then it should be a group challenge.

In the trail challenge, the signs were so obscure, it took the efforts of several people's findings to make sense of where the trail was. It didn't matter that Seljak was completely useless is helping find the trail. Once found, it's found.

In the river crossing, everyone had to make it to the other side. Seljak's failure did not prevent Yuriel or Roedd from making it to the other side. If anything, it presented them with the question of... Do we look for them now, or in the morning?

In my mind, this last challenge should have been an individual challenge, where failure means you don't make it across, and possibly end up downstream, cold, exhausted and minus a healing surge.

Here's how I see skill challenges

First, individual rolls to accomplish a single outcome, is not a skill challenge. The rogue using theivery to open a lock or disable a trap is not a group effort and more people trying to work on it really could just make it harder.

Second, it is not for one thing that can be summed up in one roll, or to quote the DMG pg 72 sidebar "It's not a skill challenge every time you call for a skill check. When an obstacle only takes one roll to resolve, it's not a challenge. One Diplomacy check to haggle with the merchant, one Athletics check to climb out of the pit trap, one Religion check to figure out whose sacred tome contains the parable - none of these constitutes a skill challenge."

Third, it is to consolidate what would normally be multiple checks of various types by most of the group to overcome something that the whole group needs to succeed at as a group.

So if I were to run the river crossing by multiple skill checks, individually, I might have each one of you roll a perception to find the best path, and an Acrobatics or Athletics check (or both) to cross the slippery rocks and or the flowing water. At a 90' crossing, moving at half speed for both those checks, it would be 6 checks for movement, and 1 more for the perception, plus maybe an additional based on the results of any one of those failing. So in looking at the possibility of 42 or more checks for the group to overcome the obstacle, I instead provide the 3 skills I would have used as options, and each player rolls one of them one time. This equates to the whole group using their talents together to make it through/past an obstacle/hazard.

Since the group can not advance as a group unless all participants succeed, then whether they get across individually or not, they will need to work as a team to get everyone across successfully.

Therefore, I use group checks to represent teamwork being used to accomplish something that the whole team needs to do, to ensure that as a team they are successful.

It's no different than being the healer. Yes you could survive and get by just healing yourself. If you add your powers to the group, then everyone has a better chance of surviving. You didn't have to share/use your success with them for you to succeed, but for the team to succeed you do.

I think I rambled at the end there.

I agree with the DMG sidebar, however that is written with the core system of skill challenges in mind. The core system agrees with what I stated above, in that a skill challenge requires collaborative success across the majority of several singular checks for several singular tasks. I'm not saying I like the core system. However, what you have done with the system in play, is reduce the skill challenge to one singular task in which everyone gets to roll vs a skill, vice many skill checks in which only one person rolls per check (understanding that no person can roll again until everyone in the group has gone at least). Is that even a sentence? ;(

The other issue I have (which may be entirely predicated on my ignorance of your GM'ing style) is that the core skill challenge, if successful, resulted in a net gain in xp for characters. I think in a side conversation you were not necessarily attributing an xp value for skill challenges, which leads me to ask... What purpose does the skill challenge mechanic serve?

If skill challenges have no xp value, then there is no reason to treat a river crossing as a skill challenge. Reason being, since two characters got washed downstream, the remaining party still has to go collect them up if they wish to continue on as a party. So group challenge or individual challenge, there is no game difference that I see.

Heads up, I will be unable to post from Fri afternoon to Sat evening (Eastern). I will back on Sat night to update all my posts.

Have a good trip or visit or weekend at home or whatever you are up to!

I was thinking about this before I left. I'm trying to put something into the story for you guys, but I'm having difficulty. I was wondering if you guys could give me a short term and maybe an overall goal for your characters?

Something other than "get the papers", or "follow orders". Some personal goals for what they want. This will allow me to try and throw in elements of it into the story to drive it on more than just what mission I sent you on.

Nice. I shall give it thought. Armand has always been hunting for a cause.

Thinking back to Yuriel's overall concept, he's a failed wannabe warlord (low CHA!). The things that drive him are glory, honor, fame, reputation. If given a choice between a long peaceful life and a short life that is immortalised in song, he'd be straight into the 'immortalised in song, please' camp.

I'll have a think about whether there are any more immediate or concrete goals that he might have.

Roedd is looking for justice. Someway in which to discredit, dishonor, and embarrass the Legios for enslaving him and his people.

Armand is reckless by default and that imp put ideas into his head. He's all set to go and challenge the ruling priests, preferably with a band of like-minded fruitloops in tow.

Fruitloop reporting, Boss!

Armand's grandiose plans have a ring of destiny about them that Yuriel could definitely get behind :)

Also Aardvark, to turn this question round the other way, are there any campaign themes or plot arcs that you want to explore? I would be happy to guide Yuriel in appropriate directions if that makes the game more fun for both of us.

Roedd is looking for justice. Someway in which to discredit, dishonor, and embarrass the Legios for enslaving him and his people.

Jacen is moved by plight of Roedd and his people and will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him on his quest for restitution.

"Let me learn your ways, brother."

Jacen only hinted at the existence of an esoteric order of mages and priests^ because he didn't want to reveal (while Levechem was present) that he was a member.

^For Aardvark DM but anyone may read it too. I can honestly say I'm not trying to stab any of you in the back

Jacen joined the order because the love of his life, Irielynn, was discovered to be a vestige pact warlock. Her family was forced to disown her and she fled Evo Pezar. Through his work with the order, he hopes to make the world a better place for Free casters such as Irielynn. Although their parting was less than amicable, Jacen hopes that one day their paths will cross again and maybe they can return to Evo Pezar together.

Okay so long term I have:

Yuriel - Fame
Armand - Take down the High Protectors or (Council of Eight)? High Protectors are the militant organization that hunts free casters. The Council of Eight accepts them, but they don't endorse them.
Roedd - Disgrace the Legio (or the whole Empire?) for enslaving your people.
Jacen - Help Roedd
Booj - Help Armand

Short term:
Jacen - Find his runaway wife?

For the long term goals, how do you intend on: finding fame, taking down the Legio (or Empire?), taking on the High Protectors (or Council of Eight?)

I think I will call the organization "Celeste's Chosen" or "Celeste's Children" or the reverse "Chosen/Children of Celeste". What do you think?

Jacen - Find his runaway wife?

Oh they weren't married yet, otherwise they would have eloped. He doesn't know that she didn't want him to have to choose between her and the church.

I think I will call the organization "Celeste's Chosen" or "Celeste's Children" or the reverse "Chosen/Children of Celeste". What do you think?

I think "Chosen" is stronger because it implies that Free mages weren't granted their powers in some kind of cosmic lottery but were pre-destined for great things. However people might confuse the group with the Chosen of [Deity] epic destiny if it can be chos—, picked.

Okay so long term I have:

Roedd - Disgrace the Legio (or the whole Empire?) for enslaving

This is both a short and long term goal, which is to say that Roedd is obsessing over it. With each passing day away from the Legio, his convictions grow.

To Roedd they are one and the same. His only real contact with the Empire has been the Legio.

Armand's long term goal is to crusade against the High Protectors as blasphemers. To this end, he would like to find a mentor to teach him new and amazing powers.

Long term? Not be kicked too hard before sleep tonight.

That's Booj's planning horizon.

The key question is how you guys intend to accomplish these large goals?

With the aid of Jacen, we will infiltrate the High Protectors and subvert them from within. At the same time, we shall use their power to destroy the Legio.

Realizing the futility of his endeavor, Roedd takes a reverse grip on his javelin, placing the tip just under his sternum, and violently thrusts it up into his heart.

DM:

Quick head's up. I'm off to GenCon on Saturday. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to post that I know of, but if I seem ridiculously slow for some reason, please feel free to DMPC Armand.

See you there!

Hey Aardvark, sorry for the lack of response. I seem to be having a bit of an inspiration lull, or writer's block or something.

Some brief thoughts, and they might spur an idea from someone else that will help me out of my rut :)

• When Yuriel left his island home he intended to join a mercenary company, work his way into command, and maybe return home with the mercenaries just in time to save everyone from some dimly imagined threat
  
• Life as a mercenary has not worked out like that. Yuriel has constantly been an outsider in each company, never made many friends, and has often been let go after a season or campaign ends
  
• Fame, nobility, a legend that endures through the ages is still the driving motivation of his life, but Yuriel has no idea how these things are gained and no 'next steps' planned
  
• He is enjoying working with Armand, Jacen, and Seljak, though he hopes they have a better idea about the quarry they are chasing than Yuriel himself does. Perhaps these three, and the slaves, could be the start of a group where he is not an outsider
  
• Yuriel would be attracted by rumours of powerful or legendary weapons, or of some glorious cause that he could set his name to, or some famous enemy he could overcome. Note the lack of practicality here
  

I'll keep thinking about specific short term goals for Yuriel, but would greatly appreciate any loaned inspiration from the group :)

Hey, all. Still here and trying to keep up, but just out of the hospital yesterday and pretty doped up (I'm fine, just have my happy pills). I'll write as I come up with time and energy together. Booj can just go with the flow for now.

Hey, all. Still here and trying to keep up, but just out of the hospital yesterday and pretty doped up (I'm fine, just have my happy pills). I'll write as I come up with time and energy together. Booj can just go with the flow for now.

Roger Waters did some of his best writing doped up. Take advantage of the chemistry and post. ;)

"Hello, hello... is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me, is there anyone at home?"

"C'mon now I hear you're feelin' down well I can ease your pain
Put you on your feet again
Relax we need some information first just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?"

Feel better soon Pat.

Are we on a break or something? We seemed to keep falling into a lull, posting-wise. Everybody posts, wait four/five days. Somebody posts, wait two days. While my attention span is that of a donkey chasing a carrot, it does have its limits.

I keep waiting to see if there will be more posts, and end up forgetting to reply when I don't get the '(1 new)' on the link. I can keep replying one on one with whoever speaks up, I just wasn't sure if anyone else had anything to say.

Understood on the 'new message' thing. Speaking for myself, though, when another PC has asked a direct question, I tend to wait for an answer before chiming in (whether the question is of a PC or NPC).

Generally speaking, I don't think it's necessary to follow a strict turn-based response system for anything but combat and skill challenges. I understand that you want to give people a chance to react, but if there is a 12-24 hr lull, assume everyone has said their peace or is waiting to see what you're going to do before adding to the mix.

So I had planned for my Spartacus moment to happen somewhere farther down the line, but irritations at work bled into my typing and I got on a roll. Reading a few posts back, I thinking I'm giving the appearance that Roedd is a little more than neurotic. Oh well, he is just this side of wild.

Armand's finding the whole thing entertaining. He's got no objection to slavery if the slaves are happy, but if they're not - another story.