|
Post by sparkusclark on Jan 15, 2017 9:00:25 GMT
Looking to reward my players for going around and spreading rumors (good and bad) about the town mayor (Harbin Wester). The DMG recomended a DC15 daily skill challange, but not a general idea of how much xp a DC of that level would be.
any ideas or advice?
|
|
|
Post by dmdeejay on Jan 15, 2017 16:36:30 GMT
Awesome question! I would base it off of the DMG page 261 where it discusses awarding XP for Noncombat Challenges. In summary, treat it like a combat encounter in finding the difficulty and what is to be gained or lost. Based on that, compare t to a monster of approximate difficulty and award experience that would be equivalent.
For example: if you have 4 players who are level 5 and you want the difficulty to be moderate (15), The end result would be around 1,800 XP (CR 5). I could argue that just passing the checks would not be enough though and it would require multiple checks at different locations or something to justify the outcome. Battles aren't one with a single roll of the die, thus having rumors take hold should not be as well.
If you do provide a coulee different locations to attempt the rumor mill, I recommend setting different CR's per NPC. Just to keep things interesting. .
Hope that helps
|
|
grinningdwarf
Commoner
Posts: 20
Favorite D&D Class: Fighter
Favorite D&D Race: Dwarf
|
Post by grinningdwarf on Jan 16, 2017 17:55:44 GMT
These are some of the reasons that I am going to try milestone XP in my next campaign. I really want to steer players away from the "How many xp for the merchant?" mind set. I'm hoping that if they don't have to kill things for xp to level up, they will work on finding more creative problem solving solutions,like your players with the rumors, sparkusclark, but without the added bookkeeping of figuring out how many xp to give out for the alternative solutions.
|
|
|
Post by dmgenisisect on Jan 17, 2017 4:41:09 GMT
Honestly stealing skill some of the skill challenge rules out of 4e might be a good idea, it was after all one of the better parts (in my opinion) of the 4e system (when implemented correctly, ie. by not telling the players that they are actually in a skill challenge / heavily basing the whole thing on narration). I'm not really sure what level your running, but at early levels DC 15 checks are a moderate difficulty check (using the language of 4e), so you should require 3 successes before the get three failures in the 'skill challenge', which in reality will be you having them play out scenes where they have the opportunity to spread a rumor. If they fail the skill challenge (by failing three times) the duke finds out that the party is trying to drag his name through the muck, if they pass three times first award them xp equal to a medium difficulty encounter of their level and the spreading of rumors was successful. There's a whole bunch of home-brewed conversions of the 4e skill challenge system to 5e if your interested, on the quick search I did this one was pretty good. But really I agree with grinning dwarf here; milestone XP is my preferred method of leveling a party, just keeps the books a bit more neat in my oppinion and doesn't detract from the story by having the party level at a strange time.
|
|
|
Post by DM Exitium on Feb 21, 2017 18:42:51 GMT
Honestly stealing skill some of the skill challenge rules out of 4e might be a good idea, it was after all one of the better parts (in my opinion) of the 4e system (when implemented correctly, ie. by not telling the players that they are actually in a skill challenge / heavily basing the whole thing on narration). TL;DR - Unrelated to OP, sorry! But Skill Challenges are great! I just did this on Saturday for my players. Since it was the first time something like this was happening and I was trying it, I out-of-game warned them that this is how this next section of activities is going to go, to heavily narrate A LOT of material that they were about to power through. Skill Challenge: Raiding the Death Tyrant's Keep (as they did not want a dungeon crawl, I ran the dungeon like so) Successes needed: 30 (15 to get down to the Death Tyrant's lair, another 15 to escape the collapsing castle and dungeon after defeating the death tyrant) Suggested skills to use were, Survival, Nature, Insight and Perception to get them down and out again, but the PC's could use any skill they were proficient in not limited to these suggested 4. The paladin came up with a very cool response, where he wanted to use Persuasion on a mob of zombies to convince them to die. I narrated that he pulled out his holy symbol, charging through the room asking the power of Gond to put these restless dead back to their eternal slumber. It was an epic success, and the group loved it! What would happen when the group accumulated 3 failures? 1) They would run into a mob of stronger enemies; roll initiative 2) A Death Tyrant lair trap would go off, potentially causing one of its Eye Beam effects to mess up the group and slow them down. 3) The cliche "a rock falls and you take X damage" and I managed to avoid using this one. However, they succeeded more than failed and I only had to drop 2-3 eye beams on them and only 2 smaller combat encounters. They absolutely loved it! Now that they know what a skill challenge is, I'm going to do like dmgenisisect said and not give them a blunt heads up about the challenge as they should be aware they are in one now that they went through that one.
|
|
drdoost
Squire
Posts: 33
Favorite D&D Class: Bard
Favorite D&D Race: Aasimar
|
Post by drdoost on Mar 12, 2017 17:53:18 GMT
Awesome question! I would base it off of the DMG page 261 where it discusses awarding XP for Noncombat Challenges. In summary, treat it like a combat encounter in finding the difficulty and what is to be gained or lost. Based on that, compare t to a monster of approximate difficulty and award experience that would be equivalent. For example: if you have 4 players who are level 5 and you want the difficulty to be moderate (15), The end result would be around 1,800 XP (CR 5). I could argue that just passing the checks would not be enough though and it would require multiple checks at different locations or something to justify the outcome. Battles aren't one with a single roll of the die, thus having rumors take hold should not be as well. If you do provide a coulee different locations to attempt the rumor mill, I recommend setting different CR's per NPC. Just to keep things interesting. . Hope that helps I like these ideas. I think if it was an "over time" skill challenge, I might give them what experience they achieved each day. For instance, lets use dmdeejay's example. If you were to just kill the mayor and get 1,800 XP, I would take 1/20th of that and award it if they succeed (or 1/(however many days it should take)). That way they get a little bit, and personally I would probably throw some bonus XP their way if they were able to avoid combat the whole time.
|
|
|
Post by lasersniper on Mar 30, 2017 1:21:29 GMT
I personally love the conception of skills challenges. I recently found a new post about them and plan to steal a few more elements for my personal homebrew rules on them. I especially like the idea this article suggests about using certain spell level to get "auto successes" if the spell makes sense. (EDIT) Completely have been losing my head these last few days but was scrolling through the DMBanter Discord and realized it was dmgenisisect who and found it and posted it there first. All props to him. ARTICLE HERE
|
|
|
Post by dmgenisisect on Mar 30, 2017 7:36:43 GMT
I'm not a huge fan of the whole spell slot to get free win. It kind of invalidates spells that emphasise skill use if you can 'replicate' that effect for free by spending a spell slot with out knowing such spells.
|
|
|
Post by lasersniper on Mar 31, 2017 22:05:09 GMT
I'm not a huge fan of the whole spell slot to get free win. It kind of invalidates spells that emphasise skill use if you can 'replicate' that effect for free by spending a spell slot with out knowing such spells. My main group has a bit of a problem roleplaying when it starts to deviate to far from the "as stated" rules. So for things like this, It gives them a little spring board to think of different ideas and out of the box a little. Almost tricking them to try and be creative.
|
|