Monday, November 8, 2010

Virtual (Re)Play: Skill Challenges in Dungeons & Dragons

I'm posting a link to Virtual Play 34 in the Internet Archive, since someone expressed interest in it. It gets mentioned in Narrative Control #39, and so I'm glad I was able to find it and put it up here.

Mel excerpts the game of D&D 4th edition I ran during Fall 2008 for the fellows down at the Compleat Strategist in Falls Church, VA, a few times. I had a lot of fun, and tested the principles for story-gaming D&D I would use in a mini-campaign at home the next summer. As Mel points out, here are the basic principles:

(1) Skill rolls by players add facts to the setting during fight scenes. This worked in a sort of fast-and-loose sort of way; I think some mechanism for letting other players "steal" the ability to answer the question from a player might be a fun idea.

(2) Everything happens during the tactical action (but that can include skill challenges). This was quite successful, and the ability to segue back and forth from pure fight scene to scene-setting skill challenge was pretty sweet.

3 comments:

  1. Cool - this was the Virtual Play episode that I first listened to, and it make me keen to listen to more.

    Are you planning on putting more of the back-episodes on the Internet Archive?

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  2. Hey Robert!

    Yes, I intend to put the handful of episodes that I have access to up there. I haven't been able to get to the ones that are on the podbus server; they may be gone forever at this point. But Mel may have them on an external hard drive in storage while he's overseas.

    I was just looking at the DOMT cards you made while I was hunting for this episode. They are very nice; have you gotten any play out of them?

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  3. Hiya Bill. Good stuff. I look forward to hearing more.
    -Don

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