This week on Critical Hit, a Major Spoilers Real Play Podcast: I think we’ve played this video game before…
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Stephen Schleicher began his career writing for the Digital Media Online community of sites, including Digital Producer and Creative Mac covering all aspects of the digital content creation industry. He then moved on to consumer technology, and began the Coolness Roundup podcast. A writing fool, Stephen has freelanced for Sci-Fi Channel's Technology Blog, and Gizmodo. Still longing for the good ol' days, Stephen launched Major Spoilers in July 2006, because he is a glutton for punishment. You can follow him on Twitter @MajorSpoilers and tell him your darkest secrets...
1 Comment
A “skill challenge” is just an action scene where you use your budget for scene elements on challenges and an environment instead of enemies to fight. Maybe adopt a non-traditional time scale for the scene tracker as well. For ex, the climax of a political campaign could be a single action scene where each round represents a week of activity, with the PCs Overcoming to deal with various challenges as they arise. Some twists or challenges might produce an actual combat, producing a scene-within-a-scene with a more normal time scale. Eg, zoom in and play out the Mafia hit squad’s assault on your candidate like a normal fight, then pull out again and resume the rest of the week’s activity in the campaign round.
The core game already has all the tools you need to craft skill challenges. You just have to use some creativity to use them well.
And FFS, there are ten different Minor Twist options on page 28, plus all the ones baked into the PC Principles, plus the Environment, plus using some imagination and making your own on the fly – and still this GM does nothing but “reduce a power die by one size for a scene” over and over again. It’s boring as hell for the players and the listeners, and absolutely not how twists are meant to work. They’re supposed to make the game more interesting, not act purely as a mechanical punishment for the heroes.