Minions, not just for minioning any more

Minions are awesome. I love minions. There is nothing better than slaughtering a handful of minions at a time and not even sweating it. Don't get me wrong, minions are a threat. They provide combat advantage, they aid in attacks. They serve a valuable purpose. However, how would you run a level appropriate fight with all minions? Here's a story of how I did it, entitled, Sewers are Bullshit.

The fight took place in the sewers of Sigil. The room was filled with armor, scraps of metal, weapons, torn papers, bits of cloth, coins, you name it. Essentially it was a vent room for the storm drain pipes of the city. This particular room had four large bore pipes that came into it, and two sets of four valves on either side of the room corresponding, you guessed it, to the pipes overhead.

The encounter started with the players entering on one side of the room and them seeing a lone, lowly imp spin all four of the valves and then turn invisible. As the room was filled with sludge and magical gunk from up above, the armor on the ground became animated with an unholy presence. The room was suddenly filled with Infernal Armor Animus (animated armor powered by devil souls)!

Here's the breakdown of the mechanics.

1) Each player has an option to stand in the same square or adjacent to a valve. They may spend a minor action to turn one or two valves either preemptively or as a held minor action that occurs simultaneously with the imp.

2) A standard action let them spin up to four valves. They were allowed to turn, move, turn if they spent their standard action to turn valves.

3) The imp did nothing but turn invisible and then turn valves while moving. The imp only required a minor action to turn all four valves. Turning invisible is a standard action.

4) For every valve turned by the imp, 1d6-1 minions spawned.

5) Anyone, including the minions, caught in the dumping sewage took one of the following random effects determined by a d6.

a) 1d8 points of poison-fire damage. (the magically imbue sludge is noxious and burning)

b) Bolstered! +1 to attack and damage rolls (the magical aura speeds your arm and mind) (until the end of the encounter or hit by Hinder)

c) Hindered! -1 to attack and damage rolls (the magical aura slows your arm and mind) (until the end of the encounter or hit by Bolster)

d) Vulnerable 5 fire (save ends) (the residue clinging to you smokes slightly and appears ready to burn at the slighting spark)

e) Vulnerable 5 poison (save ends) (a gooey film covers you, acting as a catalytic enhancer for poisons)

f) Resist 5 fire and poison (end of the encounter or until hit by a vulnerability)

6) Perception and Insight checks (DC against his stealth with invisibility penalties (each round accumulates a +1 to the next check until a success occurs by the players)) revealed the imp's position and gave the players a chance to counteract the pipes.

7) Each valve and series of valves turned different pipes. You can make this as easy or as complicated as you want. I made it middling difficulty, so the players had to watch a few rounds and learn what pipes did what.

8) The far door was magically sealed with a puzzle. Two players had the necessary text objects to solve the puzzle themselves, or aid the other party members. They got this information during the course of the game through text props and bad guy notes they intercepted.

9) If the players blocked a pipe, a cloud of the above random effects lingered in the area under the pipes as defined by the circle. No saves are required, just entering or leaving the area was enough to gain or lose the effects.

So that was the challenge. The players in question defeated 27 minions, several players were knocked unconscious, one player was knocked unconscious several times, and they eventually killed the imp. The look on their face when they realized the armors healed the imp when they died was priceless.

As one player said, "maybe we should have tried arcana or religion to learn more about those guys!". So true, skills are knowledge, and knowledge is power. Especially in a world of integrated fights and skill challenges.

That's the basic set up of the encounter I ran. All minions and one little imp lurker. They players had a great time, and loved the integrated skill challenge as part of the fight. Now, I have to think of more interesting fight scenarios.

Investigations? In MY 4th Edition?

I've played 4th edition starting the week it was released through current times, in which I play two or three separate campaigns. There was a brief gap there where I didn't play 4e, but that was because a few games dissolved and we waited for them to start back up again. That said, I probably played 4th for almost a year before running into my first skill challenge. This experience, though it was a strange skill challenge and used some strange DCs, operated a little oddly, and was very obviously the group's first attempt at something like this, it opened my eyes to the possibilities that could exist in a system that was built in order to support a concept like this one.

Maybe I should back up a little. I had an idea for a story that revolved around a modern fantasy setting where magic was common place and so was the variety of races. Their technology was lacking in some areas and superior in other areas as their magical prowess made necessary. The problem was, this was going to be a detective story. So, how do you track down killers and solve crimes in a fantasy setting where magic is common, people can turn invisible, alter memories and do innumerable horrible things? I didn't know until that first skill challenge. After that first skill challenge it was clear, scrap the story idea and run this as the central idea behind a campaign.

Without getting too much into it right now, I decided to revive the planescape setting, converting a lot of non-existent stuff to 4e and then reworking or adding a lot of the current planar setting to make the game make sense in the 4e cosmos. The players were to be the Custodians, a group of people taken from each of the factions and put together under the command of the city in order to investigate and solve crimes that demand special attention. One of the twists was that everyone picked their own faction. Players got missions for each major arc that they tried to successfully complete. At the end of the major arcs, players got a chance to guess one other player's mission.

This seems like it would create conflict, and perhaps it would have, if not for additional rules. First, the Custodians are supposed to be outside of the faction wars. So, if the Custodians are caught, player discovered in this case, performing a task for their faction, the faction isn't allowed to act on the mission results. To do so would be to invite punishment by the Lady of Pain. Successfully completing missions would never effect players either, as Custodians are protected by the Lady of Pain. To harm them would be to invite wrath upon your faction. Obviously, factionless groups, monsters, etc. have no issues hindering the players physically, and factions and mess with their minds just find. What does this mean for the players practically? Well, completing a mission grants bonus xp to the whole party. Discovering a mission grants bonus xp to the whole party. This creates an environment that is supposed to foster fun competition without it getting down and dirty like say, Paranoia.

So far it's been pretty good. People tend to forget their tasks, even with me giving them copies of their mission every session. No one has gotten upset or frustrated though, so it's not a total failure!

Back on topic here, I decided to set up an investigative system built around the skill challenges. I believe that skill challenges should be somewhat open ended and as long as you can describe what you are trying to do given the use of an appropriate skill, it should be allowed. This means a lot of work on my end. I spend a lot of time before each session coming up with ways that players might use skills, or at least how THOSE skills might be related to OTHER skills. If the skills are related I just up the DC on one of the skills and would give out the same information they would have got given a different skill use.

Skill challenges can ruin the flow of the game at times, especially if you have to state each time you are in a skill challenge and then dole out which skills are appropriate to use. What I do is use two differently colored poker chips. After describing the scene for the players, the first player to act becomes the first of each round. Once the player has acted there are three possible outcomes.

1) A yellow chip is added to the table, indicating success and that they are in a skill challenge.

2) A blue chip is added to the table, indicating failure and that they are in a skill challenge.

3) The player decided to aid a friend, in which case 1 and 2 are just delayed.

The biggest problem is creating the right conditions for failure and making sure that failure means something. I've opted for a pretty basic rules set for failure, following the idea that all information is valuable and there need to be many ways to get it. An investigation game is only as good as the information presented and getting stumped because they failed one challenged and missed crucial information just plain isn't fun. This means that there has to be penalties without stopping the actual game story. This list is what I have used so far.

1) Each scene has two failure limits. The first failure limit indicates that the difficulty of the encounter has decreased, lowering the party's overall XP reward. The second indicates that the scene ends and the group has to move on elsewhere for information.

2) The party receives incomplete information as the scene ends. This has almost always lead to a fight scene as the party was lead into the mastermind's devious trap. Usually the fight reward is the rest of the information or at least additional information that might lead to another skill challenge.

3) Punishment as it is recommended in the DMG. This actually isn't bad. Players lose healing surges, they become distracted lowering their initiative for the next fight, etc. These are all acceptable actions that show the consequences of failure without really stopping the investigation.

4) Missed information results in a harder encounter down the line as a result of the missed information, prior to the climax of the arc. This is always coupled with enough information during the encounter itself to reveal what was missed and how that might have been avoided.

5) Tangible rewards. A lot of scenes have specific items and treasure hidden about as rewards for doing well enough to spend actions just searching the premise. In this case, the punishment is not getting that stash of gold or potions, or even magic ritual or item. This is an easy one to use, and the players might never have a clue.

The key is that information is never the reward of the scene, just the speed at which it is gathered. This might mean adding extra encounters as the game story progresses, but that's just part of the fun an excitement running this type of game.

Give an investigation encounter a shot in a game. Who knows? The players might love it, and so might you, the person running the game.