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.