First up, I'm only a player in 4e but I am a long time DM in other RPGs (D&D amongst them).
We finished up Siege of Bordrin's Watch last night. We did three skill challenges to simulate the actual siege - a tactical one, one in artillery and one in defence of the gates. We had to decide where to place ourselves and some troops. If we failed, we would lose a healing surge and if we ran out of healing surges we were considered 'killed in action'.
A few bad die rolls later (in fact I managed to make only 5 in the entire session: 1 x 5 and 2 x 1s) and three out of the 5 party members were dead (including my own).
Is this what skill challenges are for? It seems highly arbitrary to me.
Comments, anyone?
First up, I'm only a player in 4e but I am a long time DM in other RPGs (D&D amongst them).
We finished up Siege of Bordrin's Watch last night. We did three skill challenges to simulate the actual siege - a tactical one, one in artillery and one in defence of the gates. We had to decide where to place ourselves and some troops. If we failed, we would lose a healing surge and if we ran out of healing surges we were considered 'killed in action'.
A few bad die rolls later (in fact I managed to make only 5 in the entire session: 1 x 5 and 2 x 1s) and three out of the 5 party members were dead (including my own).
Is this what skill challenges are for? It seems highly arbitrary to me.
Comments, anyone?
Were you besieging or under siege?
Interesting but i'd say no that's not what they are there for. Its a potential for the skill challenge to be failed and in the example of the seige for the siege to be failed due to the failure of skill checks and indeed for players to be 'Out of action' but note skill challenges are not really supposed to be a kill option. The DM would normally put in a contingency if the skill challenge failed.
Once again in the example of the seige and the seige failing for the PC's they may wake up in cells with a number of their troops, stripped of hard earned equipment, injured but alive.
Depending on the enemy the next event would either be them being sold into slavery (orcs, goblins and some unscrupulous humans would do this) or randsomed to a local lord (if the PC's were recognised and of some value to the local people).
Of course some enemies would kill the PC's outright but probably keep the PC around to find out important information by torture (this of course would also give rise to an escape attempt).
Ultimately any game is dangerous but I'd have said a death scenario is only applicable in an Combat encounter where the PC's can( and probably will) keep an eye out for downed friends and bind them up). Likewise loyal troops would be likely to come to the PC's aid. I'm not trying to remove the death option but I personally would never see my players killed in the way you described.
First up, I'm only a player in 4e but I am a long time DM in other RPGs (D&D amongst them).
We finished up Siege of Bordrin's Watch last night. We did three skill challenges to simulate the actual siege - a tactical one, one in artillery and one in defence of the gates. We had to decide where to place ourselves and some troops. If we failed, we would lose a healing surge and if we ran out of healing surges we were considered 'killed in action'.
A few bad die rolls later (in fact I managed to make only 5 in the entire session: 1 x 5 and 2 x 1s) and three out of the 5 party members were dead (including my own).
Is this what skill challenges are for? It seems highly arbitrary to me.
Comments, anyone?
Interesting - I'm a player as well and running through the Scales of War campaign. So we hit the exact same skill challenge...at least technically. 'cause mine was nothing like yours. In ours we did things to help defend the keep but it mostly took place before the enemy forces even got to the City. Now with us we did not even realize we were in a skill challenge - we were just coming up with various ideas on how slow up an invading army if your a small band of heros. I think we trashed their siege artillery, and chased off all their horses and failed to wreck their supply train. There where also some things we did to improve the defenses. We only new we had been in a skill Skill Challenge when the DM narrated a close battle for the walls and then had...what's his face...the Lord Mayor, thanking us profusely in public because, without our help the walls, which had just barely held, might have bee breached or overrun or some such. So it looks as if our DMs handled this scene quite differently.
However one thing that really strike me as being worth thinking about here is that Borden's Watch and the other early Scales of War 4E AP adventures would have been submitted and gone through editing before 4E was actually released. The Skill Challenge system presented in the DMG1 had some significant flaws, its much improved by the errata and DMG2.
A third point - technically what your DM did was fine, you can use the skill challenge system for whatever and having it represent stages of a siege sounds OK but not great to me. Its a tad weak in that combat is something D&D is really good at so why not just play it out? In fact that is probably part of the problem here - Using the Skill Challenge system as a stand in for something that is otherwise handled very well by the rules has significant potential to feel 'off'.
If, instead we did a Skill Challenge where a Volcano has just blown sky high and the party is fleeing down the mountain side but they can't make any rolls and the DM is narrating "you trip, You fall, your beamed in the side of the head by an agitated monkey" etc. Then it starts to make sense that characters die here You were trying to outrun a Volcano and you failed really, really badly. Here using healing surges as a cost and killing when they run out does not necessarily strike me as a bad mechanic. This should be the type of scene the DM needs to save for special use as lethal Skill Challenges should be uncommon, and this one should have been heavily tilted in the PCs favour. Lost healing surges should actually do that tilting as the players usually have many of them to spend. Still, at some point, there has to be consequences for catastrophic failure when fleeing active volcano's or many other scenes for which a skill challenge might be used because the alternative is to drain all sense of tension from skill challenges in general and that is even worse then killing the odd character in them.
So I talked with my DM and h says there was no Skill Challenge here but that when he read the adventure he stopped and thought to himself - wow we really ought to have a skill challenge to represent the siege. He tells me that he never actually made the Skill Challenge but instead we just started doing stuff on our own initiative and he figured we deserved a chance to earn some XP and the scenes seemed really cool so he just rolled with it and did a Skill Challenge on the spot.
My bet is your DM read the adventure and came to the same conclusion so he made a Skill Challenge for the scene. I think there is nothing wrong with that take but if your going to allow lethal skill challenges - and I've argued that they have their place, then he probably should have put more thought into 'what if they blow it?' Essentially killing a player here is tough but a player dieing in the Siege of Bordin's Watch is narratively potentially pretty dramatic. If we are to tell a good story, especially in an AP I don't feel that we should be totally shying away from death as a consequence. However killing 3 players out of 5 was probably an error. The DM should likely have been tracking who is blowing the most rolls and been prepared to start narrating the scene so that two of the players are overrun but saved (dragged to safety or maybe still just barely alive when the Orcs are finally driven back and the bodies checked) while the player that failed the most rolls suffers the ultimate consequences and will have to make a new character.
Since making the original post our DM has admitted he never expected it to turn out the way it did. I suggested that the 'dead when healing surges are zero' should have been 'unconscious when healing surges are zero'. He has adopted this. It hasn't changed the end result any (the remaining two players managed to win the final skill challenge and thereby the siege), but it does mean we didn't die.
I know, I know, it's terrible to have to change things after the event but if it was an error what can you do? No-one should die just because they have a string of bad die rolls.
In our favour it was the last thing to happen in the session and nothing has happened since, so the effect of changing it so we didn't actually die isn't as drastic as it might first appear.
Thanks for the comments.
Since making the original post our DM has admitted he never expected it to turn out the way it did. I suggested that the 'dead when healing surges are zero' should have been 'unconscious when healing surges are zero'. He has adopted this. It hasn't changed the end result any (the remaining two players managed to win the final skill challenge and thereby the siege), but it does mean we didn't die.
I know, I know, it's terrible to have to change things after the event but if it was an error what can you do? No-one should die just because they have a string of bad die rolls.
In our favour it was the last thing to happen in the session and nothing has happened since, so the effect of changing it so we didn't actually die isn't as drastic as it might first appear.
Thanks for the comments.
Unfortunate to change the end result but I gotta say normally skill challenges arn't fatal, generally interesting, some debilitation(surge loss) or indeed some long term effect (family or close friends killed) but not usually cause for a PC to die purely on a failed skill challenge.
Captured and maybe some kit lost but not killed.