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So, I've been thinking a lot lately about using a hex map for 4e instead of a grid. I think it would work really well. Bursts and blasts would appear round, instead of squares. All the silly 'banana charges' would make more sense. Plus, hex maps are way better for figuring out ranges than grid maps. The only drawback I can see right now is that I like to make my maps in excel. Does anyone know of a good, free program which will draw dungeon maps in hexes? Also, can anyone else think of any major drawbacks to playing with hexes rather than grids?

I suppose if worse came to worse, I could draw them maps freehand, scan them in, then overlay the hexes over them. That seems like a lot of work.

Hey everyone, I'm looking for some feedback on this skill challenge I wrote. I think it's OK, but it's looking a little flat to me. I'd like some suggestions on how to spice it up a bit, and possibly expand the skill list.

Safe Path to Xandrar

The party is trapped behind enemy lines, and must move through territory patrolled by enemy units to reach a friendly city.

Complexity: 6 successes before 3 failures
Primary Skills: Perception, Nature, Stealth
Secondary Skills: Insight, Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate

Perception: (DC: hard)
Success: The character spots a landmark, allowing the group to move forward.
Failure: The character spots what he believes to be a landmark, and the group moves in the wrong direction. Make a group Stealth check to avoid being spotted by an enemy unit.
Assists: Yes

Nature: (DC: hard (if the party has the map of the area from the enemy hideout*, reduce DC to normal))
Success: The character finds a path or shortcut that leads closer to the city.
Failure: The party wanders aimlessly in the woods, wasting valuable time. Make a group Stealth check to avoid being spotted by an enemy unit.
Assists: Yes

Stealth: (DC: normal)
An enemy unit may have spotted the party!
Note: this skill can only be triggered by a failed Perception or Nature check.
Success: The party is able to sneak by the enemy unit, avoiding combat. (Alternately, aggressive parties may choose to ambush the enemy unit, in this case, the enemy unit is wiped out with no damage dealt to the party)
Failure: The enemy unit encounters the party. A failure on this check does not count towards the number of failures on the skill challenge, however, move to the "enemy unit" sub-challenge. (Note, if the party tried to ambush the enemy, move directly to a Failure on the Enemy Patrol Sub-challenge)

Enemy Patrol Sub-Challenge
The party can bypass the enemy unit by using social skills: Bluff, Intimidate, or Diplomacy. Each enemy unit has one Normal DC social defense and two hard DC social defenses (determine the Normal DC skill randomly each time a unit is encountered) An Insight check (normal) will allow the party to determine which defense is weakest.
Apply the following modifiers to any checks made in this sub-challenge:
+5 Good Roleplaying
-5 Poor/No Roleplaying
-5 Party is wearing uniforms of their home country's military
+5 The party offers bribes of at least 100gp.

Success: The party avoids the enemy unit without bloodshed, and does not suffer a failure towards the skill challenge
Failure: The party dispatches the enemy unit in a noisy melee. The party suffers a failure towards the skill challenge. In addition, each party member loses one healing surge, and each party member must roll a d6 for each of their Daily Powers. On a roll of a 1, that power is expended. for the day.

*This is an item the party may find previously in the campaign.

I'm curious if anyone would be interested in reviewing a 4e adventure I wrote up for my current campaign. It consists of 9 encounters, and is written for a party of level 5 characters. It's about 17 pages right now, probably it'll be more like 18 or 19 pages by the time I'm done with it.

I'm looking for some critical feedback on this, as I'm trying to polish up my writing skills right now. I'd really appreciate it if people could give me specific pointers on how to improve my adventure design and writing.

Welcome, my friends, to Skill Challenge Theater. I'm starting this thread because Runnetib suggested that I post a narrative of a skill challenge as an example of how to run one. Instead, I upped the ante a bit. I'm going to run a skill challenge in this thread, and other forumites will play the roles of the characters, just as if we were actually playing a game of D&D. This will hopefully be a learning experience for all of us.

The skill challenge presented in this theater is going to be as follows. Our heroes, a bold human fighter, a swarthy human rogue, a plucky eladrin wizard, and a doughty dwarven cleric, are investigating a series of murders in their home city. In each case, the corpse has been mutilated after death - the eyes have been gouged out. Without any leads, the party has decided to head to Mack's Inn. Mack, the proprieter, is a sometimes informant and the party believes he might have some information that could help them. However, upon crossing the city to Mack's, the party arrives to find the building in flames!

I'll post more description in a bit. For now, I'm looking for volunteers to play the parts of our heroes. I think Runnetib and jcarleski would like to play, so that leaves two open slots. Post here if you're interested in playing, and which hero you'd like to play as. I'll write up a 5th hero if there is enough interest.

There's a section in the DMG2 that suggests that skill challenges should be proactive. That is, the players shouldn't be just reacting to the challenge as it's presented to them or flatly rolling skills, but rather engaging in the skill challenge and trying to think up creative uses for their skills to attack the situation. I think the example that's given is a chase scene where the party is trying to escape some guards. The players can be proactive by knocking over barrels or causing disturbances that trip up the guards, rather than just repeatedly rolling Athletics checks to try to outrun them.

I've been thinking about this a lot, because it sounds like this might be the key to engaging players and creating really fun challenges. My question is: how do you do it? I'll give an example: I'm writing a skill challenge right now that involves climbing up a cliff to reach the back entrance to the lair of some bandits. Now, it seems to me that a cliff is something that the party will have to react to, no matter what. It's big, it's in their way, and the only way around it is to climb up (or use Nature checks to find safe paths.) So, how do you go about making a challenge like this one something that the players can attack?

The DMG says that an NPC gets only one healing surge. If I want to have an NPC that can fight alongside the party in multiple battles, one surge is not going to cut it. The NPC will be out of HP by the end of battle 2. Has anyone else run into this problem? If so, how did you handle it? I'm considering giving the NPC one surge per battle, and having him heal fully between battles. Another possibility is just to give him the number of surges that he'd have if he was a full PC. Not sure which would be better. The former requires less bookkeeping, while the latter seems more fair.

I want to check with the judges before I post anything here. Is it OK for us to talk about villain concepts we came up with that we didn't enter into the competition?

I submitted my entry for round 2, but I did not receive a confirmation screen. Would one of the judges please confirm that my entry was received?

Cermyk the Widower
Male human vampire sorcerer 8
Description:
It is said that the most savage nightmares spring from the mind of a child, and in the Barony of Elbe they know this to be true. Here, high in the mountains, is Silver House, the twisted dwelling of one of the most depraved creatures to walk the land. Here, all folk lock and bar the doors each night. Here, young maids are seldom let out of sight for long. For this is the home of Cermyk the Widower.

Terrible tales concern Silver House and its infamous master. At a young age Cermyk showed a powerful aptitude for dark magic, which his family indulged, drawing tutors from sundered lands, men with black lips and ashen skin. Cermyk surpassed them all, gaining in knowledge and power as he sent each mentor away.

Then came the Night of Blood, when the moon was swallowed whole and the sky was lit with ruddy glow. The commoners huddled in their houses as witch-lights danced near Silver House. They covered their ears as fitful screams sounded from the blood-lit heights. At dawn, the baron’s men who tremblingly ascended to Silver House found only the dead. When they pieced together the bodies, only Cermyk was unaccounted for.

It was on the next Night of Blood, a decade later, that maidens began to disappear before their wedding day. Some ran away on their own, escaping harsh parents or unwanted grooms. Others were snatched from their bedrooms, spirited out through windows. One after another, taken to Silver House. Here, they wed Cermyk in terrible pageantry, his boy-face predatory with ashen skin and black lips. Yet no bride can slake the hungry lust within him. Lust for love, for power, for childhood wasted and adulthood never to come. And when their shrill screams wetly cease and he has taken his fill of them, Silver House is cold and lonely and silent until Cermyk the Widower takes another bride.

Motivations/Goals:
Cermyk’s motivations are those of insane child, full of want and empty of remorse. If left unchecked, he will continue his predations of the people of Elbe. His goals come and go with the capricious flight of a child’s fancy. Often he will stray far afield, seeking the perfect wedding gift, only to return empty handed, or more often, with gifts for himself, elfskin-bound tomes, the cherubic head of an infant preserved in strong wine, or similar bauble which caught his fancy.

Adventure Hooks:
Arriving in one of the local villages as evening falls, the party finds the innkeeper and his wife distraught. Their daughter has not returned home and they fear that she has become Cermyk’s newest betrothed. Can the party reach Silver House in time to disrupt the wedding?

The party is on the trail of an ancient tome and its last owner remembers selling it to an ashen faced young boy over a decade ago. Does the group dare the catacombs beneath Silver House to recover the tome?

Yesterday:
At work, came up with three good villian concepts.
After dinner, sat down to do brief writeups of all three.
Picked the one I liked the best.
Wrote up an entry.
Realized my entry was over 750 words and violated the Inappropriate Content rules.
Started over.
650 words - *sigh*
Edited down to 500 words.

Tonight:
Review and Submit.

The rules say:

You must use this format:
Name
gender race class level
Description: text goes here
Motivations/Goals: text goes here
Schemes/Plots/Adventure Hooks: text goes here

Do the words with slashes (ex. motivations/goals) indicate to use either the word 'motivations' or 'goals' to head that section or should it be exactly as written: 'motivations/goals'?

Here's a few house rules I'm thinking of tossing around for my next campaign. Feel free to comment, or toss out your own rules for review!

1. Going Gridless - that's right, no battle mat. Instead, I'll just convert everything from 1 square to 1 inch and play on an open table, wargames style. Bring your own tape measure! I think this idea is made of win.

2. Players do not keep track of their own HP - the DM tracks the HP of all the characters. Players know when they are at full, and when they are bloodied, and that's it. Cuts down on metagaming (hopefully.)

Ancestral Reliquary
Aura: Minor Necromancy
CL: 3
Slot: Necklace
Price: 1,000 gp
Weight: 1 lb.
Description: This device, prized by sorcerers, is fashioned into a piece of jewelry, typically a golden sunburst amulet hung from a necklace of heavy chain. It contains a small fragment of a corpse, such as a fingernail or a single drop of blood, suspended within a tiny phial of greenish liquid. When worn, the Reliquary provides a bonus to a wearer who shares the bloodline of the corpse contained within, granting a +2 bonus to the caster level of all bonus spells granted by the bloodline ability. Different versions of this item exist for each sorcerer bloodline.
Construction:
Requirements: Craft Wondrous Item, Gentle Repose
Cost: 500 gp

One problem I've had with 4e is the following: it seems like in every battle there's one or two monsters who get left to the end, and they just won't die. It turns into a bit of a tedious slog: the party defender already has the critter locked down, the strikers keep attacking, the leader makes sure that the defender says healed, and they just have to wear the creature's HP to zero. This isn't a big problem, but it is an annoyance, and it seems to happen very often (last session, it happened in three of the four battles we ran.) I'm starting to think that the "last creature" should just surrender or run away, or if it's a creature that wouldn't do that, I could just have a "cut scene" where the party beats the thing to death. I'm wondering, is this just an aspect of 4e, or is it bad encounter design on my part? Has anyone else experienced this? If so, what did you do to solve it?

I'm considering switching my game to an XP-less system of D&D. Under these rules, players will gain levels by completing certain story-appropriate goals, thus rewarding my players for staying on task. I've set the following level benchmarks after reading through the campaign. I'm wondering if they look about right to you out there.

Level - Goal
1- Start of the Campaign
2 – Completing the Vanderboren Vault
3 – Defeating the Lotus Dragons
4 – Completing Kraken’s Cove
5- Completing Vanderboren Manor
6 – Completing Tamoachan
7 – Defeating the Mother of All
8 – Completing Dark Moutain Pass
9 – Completing Fogmire
10 – Some point before the battle of Farshore (open-style adventure)
11 – Defeating Vanthus
12 – Completing “The Killing Field”
13 – Completing Golismortha
14 – About halfway through Taboo temple (large dungeon)
15 – Defeating Khala
16 – Discovering the Crimson Fleet Base
17 – Defeating Cold Captain Wyther
18 – Defeating Vanthus
19 – During Wells of Darkness
20 – During Enemies of my Enemy
21 – Just Before Entering Wat Dagon

There's a lot of guys in the last few adventures who throw down with vile damage. The party I'm DMing for consists largly of CN characters, with a few leaning strongly towards evil. How are they supposed to heal the vile damage? They won't be able to cast Hallow, and it's doubtful that anyone capable of casting it will want to associate with them.