The Alexandrian

Posts tagged ‘random gm tips’

Jackie Chan - Fight Scene

Something that I’ve often said is that the supposed divide between “roleplaying” and “combat” (with the latter sometimes being labeled as “rollplaying”) is an imaginary one. Combat is roleplaying: It’s filled with high-stakes, life-or-death decision-making, and that’s the perfect crucible for exploring, revealing, and developing characters.

What IS frequently missing from our combat scenes in a roleplaying game, however, is talking.

Which is a shame, because if we think about some of the all-time classic fight scenes, they can be as much about the dialogue as the fisticuffs or gun-kata.

It’s not every fight, of course, but it’s a lot of them.

There are a number of reasons why it’s so rare to find interactions like this at our gaming tables.

First, we’re often playing in large groups with lots of characters. Even in other mediums, this complexity tends to cut down on the amount of dialogue, because there’s already a lot of different narrative elements that are being juggled.

Second, there are obviously also a lot of mechanical elements that you’re juggling in a typical RPG during a combat scene.

On top of that, you’re often trying to juggle those elements as quickly as possible; to resolve actions fast, keep the pace high, and get around the table quickly so that the players stay engaged with the game. In fact, I’ve given lots of advice aimed specifically at speeding things up in combat.

That being the case, it’s easy to fall into a smooth rhythm of resolving mechanics, evocatively describing those resolutions, and rapidly passing the ball to the next action declaration while literally not leaving room to get a word in edgewise.

The solution is to co-opt the mechanics: When you’re writing down the initiative list for the fight, simply include Dialogue on one of the initiative counts.

You might list it at the same initiative count in each fight (e.g. first in the round, last in the round, 10, etc.), but when I’ve experimented with this technique I’ve found actually rolling an initiative for Dialogue to be effective because it mixes up the pacing and placement of the initial interaction. (Your mileage may vary.)

All that you need to do now is honor the dialogue prompt: When you hit Dialogue in the initiative count, resist any temptation to skip over it. Take the moment to select one or more of your NPCs and have them say something.

  • Taunt a PC.
  • Debate the righteousness of their actions.
  • Offer a bribe to get the PCs to help them.
  • Trick the PCs with an offer of surrender.
  • Try to sway one of the PCs’ allies to join their cause.
  • Reveal that they’ve been a traitor the entire time.
  • Curse the effectiveness of the PCs.
  • Vow vengeance.

The possibilities are, of course, limitless.

You’ll often discover that just having the NPCs verbally engage with the PCs will draw the players out and get them to respond in the moment. If not, you can specifically prompt the players. And, in fact, I recommend prompting a specific player. For example, you might have your villain say something like, “You don’t think I know where you live?! When I’m finished with, I’ll make sure Robert rues the day he fell in love with you!” And then ask the player, “How does Clarissa respond to that?”

Clarissa’s response might be to stab him rather than talk with him, and that’s just fine. As such, it can be useful to look at the PC positioned immediately after the Dialogue prompt and target them. (Similarly, if you’re struggling to improvise dialogue, you might take inspiration from NPCs who are immediately before or after the Dialogue prompt.)

A FEW OPTIONS

In larger fights, you might want to roll up multiple Dialogue initiatives. Don’t overdo it, though. One is often enough, and if you put in too many you’ll likely find the temptation to skip them start to grow (which defeats the entire point).

On the flip side, the presence of a Dialogue prompt on your initiative counter should not prevent you from open repartee. In other words, the Dialogue prompt doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to talk during other points in the fight. On the contrary! The whole point of the prompt is to get loosened up. You’ll often find that as you get into the habit and rhythm of combat dialogue, the repartee will break free and start popping up all over the place.

When you hit a Dialogue prompt, don’t forget to consider dialogue from characters not directly involved in the fight. Bystanders, hostages, familiars, etc. It’s a great way of reminding the players about the wider environment in which the fight is taking place (and possibly the stakes they’re fighting for).

If you’re struggling, you might consider jotting down a villain’s catchphrase or a random table of one-liners. Again, these should not be limiters; they’re creative spurs to help kickstart dialogue interactions during the fight.

On a similar note, if a PC takes out a bad guy and the next initiative count is the Dialogue prompt, you might take that as a hint to prompt the player to provide a closing remark. (Think about the type of stuff James Bond or Arnold Schwarznegger quip. Or go for more sinister filler if that’s more appropriate for your campaign.) You can do something similar for villains who knock out a PC or kill one of their allies.

In addition to Dialogue prompts, I’ve also talked about a similar technique using Feng Shui’s shot clock to prompt environmental effects. You can read more about that in Feng Shui: Filling the Shot.

Andrew Stanton is the superstar creator of WALL-E, John Carter, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and many more. In 2012 he gave the above TED talk collecting all the lessons he’s learned about storytelling.

A good story, says Stanton, makes a promise. That promise might be as simple as, “Once upon a time…,” but the crucial thing is that the audience believes that this will be a story worth hearing. The promise, therefore, invites the audience to engage with the story. It’s like a foot in the door. It’s incredibly important because, without that initial engagement (and the trust that comes with it), the storyteller has nothing to build on or with.

The nature of the promise also means that “stories are inevitable if they’re good, but they’re not predictable.” A statement which, I think, can be interpreted in many ways: That we may know where a story is going, but not the path which is taken. Or that we may know the direction of Fate, but not necessarily the specific form it will take. Or that when we look back at the story, it seems as if everything is perfectly aligned and could have gone no other way than it did, but we could not have foreseen it.

In other words, the story must faithfully keep its promise, but it should still surprise and delight the audience.

(For more on how you can achieve this effect in an RPG, check out Random GM Tip: Three Point Plotting.)

The promise also creates a window of opportunity for the storyteller, and they have to capitalize on that by making the audience care about the story.

There are many ways a storyteller can do this — character, theme, craft, etc. — but one particular lesson he talked about leapt out to me as a Game Master:

THE UNIFYING THEORY OF 2+2

The absolute best way to get the audience to care about the story is to get them involved with the story; to get them actively thinking about the story. And the best way to do that is to make them work for the story.

In other words, don’t show your audience FOUR. Show them 2 + 2 and make them do the math.

Note that 2 + 2 isn’t difficult. The point isn’t necessarily to challenge the audience. (Although it can be: There’s a reason why the mystery genre is popular. A properly placed insoluble problem can actually be even more effective, which his why everyone remembers the end of Inception.)

The point is that even the simplest act of connecting the dots engages the audience. It makes them, on a primal level, a part of the story. They are thinking about the story and they have opinions about it. Once you’re part of something, you care about it. As Stanton says, “A well-organized absence of information pulls us in.” We have a desperate need to complete an unfinished sentence.

Take Citizen Kane, for example. (Spoilers ahoy!) Imagine how much less effective would that movie be if, at the end of the movie, Orson Welles had Joseph Cotton’s character say, “Rosebud was his childhood sled. Despite the poverty and the hardship of his youth, he must have always missed the simple, uncomplicated joys of his youth and the unconditional love of his mother.” The beauty of Citizen Kane as a movie is, in fact, the immense artistry Welles employs so that, rather than spoonfeeding that moral to the audience, he has prepared the audience so that all the nuance and emotional complexity of that idea becomes as simple as 2+2 when he shows them the image of the sled.

(I’ll note that this can actually create paradoxes in storytelling, where sometimes the more effort you spend explicitly and plainly explaining something to the audience can actually result in the audience understanding it less, because the lack of engagement causes them to mentally skim past it.)

And it’s a “unifying theory” because it can apply to almost everything in a film: Characters, plot points, exposition, etc.

The trick, of course, is that the audience wants to work for their meal, but they usually don’t want to know that they’re doing that. So it’s also the storyteller’s job to hide the audience’s work from the audience.

To use our Citizen Kane example again, when you see the sled at the end of the movie, you don’t consciously think, “Oh! A tricky problem! Let me think this through!” Ideally, the storyteller has set you up so that you simply see 2+2 and reflexively think, “Four.”

(Again, there are exceptions, like the central conundrum of most mystery stories.)

IN YOUR GAME

Stanton, of course, is talking about animation and filmmaking, and we know that we can’t just take the same storytelling techniques that we see on screen and use them in our RPG games. RPGs are a different medium; one in which the players have an unprecedented freedom and for which plots should not be prepped.

But the Unifying Theory of 2+2 still works!

All you need to do is give your players the equation and then left them take the final step.

In fact, the interactivity of a roleplaying game can actually enhance the technique because the players can actively investigate. In a film, the audience has to passively receive the equation, but in an RPG, the players can go looking for the twos. Or maybe they have the twos, and they need to experiment to figure out the correct mathematical operator.

(I think I’ve broken the metaphor.)

Matryoshka techniques like matryoshka searches and matryoshka hexes are built around this idea that “completing the equation” will mean taking action as a character, and that doing so can give the player both ownership and control over the answer we find.

For other techniques you can use to help make your players care about your campaign, check out Random GM Tips: Getting Your Players to Care.

Epilogue

Let’s say that you want to skip over a large chunk of time in your campaign.

Actually, let’s back up for a moment. It’s possible that the idea of skipping time has never occurred to you. Much like dungeon scenarios can condition us to resolve everything one action at a time (much to the detriment of sequences run outside of the dungeon), so, too, can other scenario structures and situations trap us in a pattern of resolving every single day as if they were all of equal importance and focus.

When combined with the XP systems in D&D, for example, this can easily create a hyper-compressed narrative where the PCs are getting out-wrassled by giant rats one day and slaying Zeus a couple weeks later. But even without those kinds of advancement mechanics, getting stuck in a cycle where every day is jam-packed with adventure can be very limiting in the kinds of adventures you run and the scope that your campaigns are capable of.

(Conversely, some campaign structures and concepts can make it completely appropriate to remain laser-focused on the problem at hand. That’s just fine. I’m just pointing out that there are other options.)

It should also be noted that players are often motivated, for any number of reasons (including their own rote habits), to fill every day to the brim with stuff they want to do. So if you want to decompress the campaign a bit, you may need to push back against that impulse and/or incentivize taking realistic breaks from the breakneck action.

For example:

  • Leveling up in D&D might require more than just XP. You could introduce a rule that in order to gain a level, PCs must spend a period of time training. (This period could be set to almost anything and you could justify it: A fortnight. One week times the character’s new level. A cycle of the moon. One full season. A year and a day. Whatever.)
  • Mysterious dames with suspiciously missing husbands don’t show up on the doorstep of the detective agency every single day. Once the PCs wrap up their current case, there’ll be a fallow period of humdrum work until the next exciting adventure lands on their doorstep.
  • The vampires are hunting them and the only way to get the Heat off them is to lay low for a while… maybe a long while.
  • Yes, they’re adventure archaeologists: But now that the Spear of Destiny has vanished into vaults beneath the British Museum, there’s a lot of research to be done before they can identify their next expedition. And you can’t rush research!
  • In Ars Magica, the projects and research performed by the wizards take one or more seasons to complete. The cycle of play, therefore, is broken down into season-long turns, and the wizards can generally only undertake a single adventure during each season as well.

On the flip side, it’s quite possible that the players will, without any kind of structure or prompting, want some downtime for their characters for any number of reasons.

Which ultimately brings us back to: Let’s say that you want to skip over a large chunk of time in your campaign…

SKIPPING TIME

First, determine how much time is passing before the next scenario is triggered (or whatever will signal the end of the skipped time). The amount of time may be obvious given the reason you’re skipping time in the first place, or it might just be an arbitrary decision on your part. (Or maybe you randomly determine it; e.g., 1d6 months.)

Regardless, frame things up by simple stating the period of elapsed time: “Three months pass.”

Next, go around the table and ask each player what their character did during that time. When it gets to your turn, as the GM, you inject event(s) that you want them to react to and/or develop the actions they’ve described.

In practice, the players will build off each other’s actions and the events you provide, weaving an interconnected narrative. You may also find it useful to:

  • Play out short roleplaying vignettes.
  • Use simple skill checks or similar mechanics to determine specific outcomes.
  • Allow the PCs to use other mechanics (like downtime, research, or project mechanics) to advance their interests (or set things up for the next adventure).

But this isn’t strictly necessary. In any case, you want to make sure you don’t get too bogged down. You’re looking for a relatively high level of abstraction possibly coupled to a highlight reel. Don’t get sucked back into day-to-day logistics.

You can do just one pass around the table, but I find it’s often better to split the time up into three chunks. (Or, if you’ve got a certain number of events for them to respond to, an equal number of chunks.) Each additional pass gives the players more opportunities to weave their stories together and develop their own characters.

Your first instinct might be to have all the chunks be of the same length (e.g., we’re skipping three months and we’re doing three passes, so each pass will be one month long), but I often find it more effective to make each chunk progressively longer:

  • “One week has passed. What has Charlotte been doing?” (go around the table)
  • “Another month has passed. Where are you now?”
  • “Now it’s July. What did you spend the last two months doing?”

The advantage of this progressive sequencing is that it allows the players to be fairly precise in their immediate reaction and follow-up to the dramatic events of the most recent scenario, and then slowly transitions them to thinking in the longer term.

You may or may not want to frame the final pass along the lines of, “In December, you all meet again in London. Tell me how you get there and where you meet.” (In other words, prompt the players to pull it all together and position them for the next scenario.)

EPILOGUES

The Eternal Lies campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller uses a similar technique to provide a satisfying epilogue to the campaign.

If you’re wrapping up a dedicated campaign, it’s likely something that you’ve spent weeks, months, or even years playing these characters. A big, satisfying conclusion to the campaign is great (and a topic for another time), but even after the conclusion, you want to give space for loose threads to be wrapped up and for the players to say goodbye to their beloved characters.

There are many ways to handle this, but one powerful and flexible method is to cue up a time skip… just without returning to game play on the other side.

  • Where are you one week after the campaign ended?
  • One month after the campaign ended?
  • One year after the campaign ended?

The exact periods of time you choose for each pass will depend on any number of factors — the characters, the nature of the campaign, whether you’re planning to run another campaign in the same setting, how big the fallout from the campaign’s conclusion is likely to be, etc.

This technique can be particularly cool in historical campaigns, because you can relate the time skips to the passage of real world events. For example, if you were running a Fall of Delta Green campaign in the ‘60s, you could skip forward all the way to 2023 and discover where the characters would be today.

In some cases, you might want to drive all the way forward to the characters’ deaths. But that usually won’t be the case: To live is an awfully big adventure, and there are many forms of closure far more satisfying than the Grim Reaper’s icy grip.

ADVANCED EPILOGUES

As you’re prepping to run your epilogue (whether using the skipped time method or not), you should look back at the totality of the campaign and think about:

Unfinished Threads. It would be great if every single loose thread in a campaign was neatly tied off, but that’s usually not what happens. Real life can be messy, and so can the lives of our characters. Particularly in the big drive to the campaign finale, it’s likely stuff will get left unresolved.

For example, in my Dragon Heist campaign, one of the characters had a driving motivation to figure out what had happened to her mother. For one reason and another, however, it had never been prioritized during the campaign. (Neither by me, her player, nor the character herself.) This made it a perfect target for the epilogue.

Themes. What were the major themes of the campaign? These may have been planned. They may have emerged through play. (Quite probably both.) Either way, try to pull these themes into the epilogue. In some cases, themes may even have a resolution.

Characters. What members of the supporting cast were particularly memorable or important? Make sure to pull these characters into the epilogue and give them a sense of closure, too.

This will likely include mostly allies, but it’s not unusual for an enemy or two to still be hanging about. What happens to them? What’s their legacy?

Rewards & Consequences. The PCs fought hard to achieve things. (Or maybe they strived and failed.) Along the way, there were probably prices that had to be paid. Cementing those costs and payoffs and consequences in the epilogue is a way to invest the events of the campaign with even greater meaning.

It’s one thing to save a village. It’s another to see all the children growing up who would never have lived if you hadn’t.

Girl Screaming in Lateral - Garrincha

A roleplaying game, at its heart, lies at an interstice between game and conversation: In a conversation, we informally take turns sharing information. In a game, we formally take turns using the mechanics of the game. Roleplaying games dance freely between these two turn-taking dynamics, and in that dance the GM and the players are partners.

One of the ways I find this analogy useful is thinking in terms of action and reaction: The GM takes an action, and the players react to it on their turn. But then, of course, the GM takes their turn and, playing the world, reacts to what the PCs have done.

Often this conversational handoff is unprompted: The GM talks, the players talk, the GM talks again, and so on in a seamless back-and-forth.

In some cases, however, this will be prompted. Probably the most typical example is the GM, after presenting events in the world, saying something like, “So what are y’all doing?”

There can be a lot of different reasons for using a specific prompt, but it usually boils down to clarity in the handoff (“I’m done talking, so now it’s your turn,” in a fashion somewhat akin to saying “I’m done” at the end of your turn in a board game) or an effort to refocus the table (“let’s stop talking about which flavor of Cheetos is the best and get back to fighting the bilious zombies”). It’s kind of like saying “over” when you’re using a walkie-talkie.

Open prompts like this are almost always the purview of the GM, but more specific prompts from the players aren’t exactly uncommon. For example, while roleplaying their PCs chatting about recent events around the campfire, one of the players might turn to the GM and ask, “Do I know anything about King Roderick?”

GMs can also use a targeted prompt. Instead of prompting the table as a whole, the GM instead prompts a specific player: “What is Emily doing?”

Targeted prompts will formally arise from initiative counts or similar priority mechanics. (“Emily, it’s your turn.”) Even without formal mechanics, however, they can also commonly occur as a process of elimination: Everyone else has declared their action, and so, “While that’s happening, what is Emily doing?”

A specialized technique is the inner monologue prompt. This is a targeted prompt in which the GM asks a player to share and describe the inner life of their character.

  • “Emily, how does the music in the tavern make you feel?”
  • “What does Alfarr think of the minister’s proposal?”
  • “Roscrucia, is this is the first dragon you’ve seen since the death of your parents? How does that make you feel?”

This technique doesn’t work well for all players and, personally, I only find it appropriate for certain campaigns. But when it does work, it can have amazing results!

If we were all Hollywood screenwriters we would have both the time and the talent to expertly reveal our characters’ inner lives through expertly crafted dialogue. But we aren’t and we don’t, so the best way to bring those character dynamics into the light may be to just cut directly to the point. It can also be a way of crystallizing and making strong emotional choices that might otherwise remain undefined and unrealized.

As noted, for some players this technique will be disruptive to their creative process and their relationship to their character. That should be respected. But one reaction that can be useful to push through is a feeling that this is “fake” or “artificial.” This is true, but, frankly, if it was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for us.

We do not, of course, have to whip out a soliloquy in blank verse. But the basic function of laying bare the character’s thoughts for the audience remains dramatically valid and emotionally powerful.

In this case, of course, the audience is our fellow players.

Thanks to Seven Wonders Productions on my Youtube channel for suggesting this topic.

Crowd Stampede - Simply Amazing

Tomas: Okay, I’m going to search the room.

GM: Give me a Search check.

Tomas: (rolls dice) Aw, shoot. I rolled a 4, which only gives me an 8 on the check.

GM: You spend a couple minutes tossing the room, but you don’t find anything.

Maria: Oh! I want to check, too!

Steve: Me, too!

Samantha: I got a 17!

This is dogpiling the check. It’s not always a bad thing, but when it crops up during play it often just feels… wrong somehow. Are the players pulling a fast one? I mean, it just makes sense that Maria and Steve and Samantha could help search the room. So why can it be so frustrating when this happens?

There are actually three different problems here, and it’s probably useful to split them apart and look at each one separately.

First, there’s a metagaming issue. If Tomas rolled a 30 on their Search check and the GM says “you didn’t find anything,” Maria (and Steve and Samantha) don’t pipe up to say, “I’ll try, too!” It’s only when the thief muffs his roll and fails to find something that the rest of the party uses that metagame knowledge to have someone else make the check.

If this is your concern, you can address it by simply making these types of checks secretly: Since the players don’t know the check result, they can’t metagame it.

This won’t necessarily stop the dogpiling, though. The uncertainty about how well Tomas did can actually motivate the players to always dogpile the check. Other types of action checks may also make it more immediately obvious if Tomas failed or succeeded (e.g., he either picked the lock and can open the door or he didn’t) and have the other PCs queuing up to try, which isn’t metagaming but still dogpiling.

Which leads us to the second problem, which is a pacing issue. Is it really interesting to have everyone sit there sequentially rolling the check? What a huge drag! Let’s wrap it up and move it along! (This is particularly true if there really isn’t anything for them to find in the room and Tomas’ check result is irrelevant.)

You can often bypass this issue by calling for all of the PCs to make a check at the same time.

GM: You’re ushered into a grand ballroom. On the wall hangs a huge, heraldic banner of a red stag rearing on a checkered field of blue and white.

Samantha: Do I recognize the heraldry?

GM: Everyone give me an Intelligence (History) check.

In fact, you should often be anticipating this type of check: All of the characters can see the heraldic banner and they either recognize it or they don’t; it’s not something requiring active study, so you should be immediately asking everyone to make the check. (We call these reactive checks.)

Even if it’s a non-reactive check (like searching a room) and the player is the one proposing the action, you can still try to get ahead of the dogpile: “Is anyone helping Tomas search the room?”

But the third problem is a balance issue.

Let’s say that a particular check has a 70% chance of success for the first character, but a 50% chance of success for the other four PCs. This probably falls into the range of checks that’s both interesting and relevant to resolve. But if the check is dogpiled (with all of the PCs rolling and only one needing to succeed), that 70% chance of success suddenly becomes a 96% chance of success, at which point you have to ask yourself why you’re even rolling the check in the first place.

Compound probability adds up quick, and this is particularly true in systems where the range of the die roll is larger than the skill bonuses: The shift in the average die result over multiple rolls rapidly makes skill almost completely irrelevant. (For example, a DC 15 check where most skill bonuses are +1 to +5 and you’re rolling a d20. The successful check is more likely to come from whichever player rolls the highest number on the d20 than it is to come from the PC with the highest skill rating.)

DOGPILING vs. GROUP ACTIONS

Dogpiling a failed check isn’t the same thing as a group action (where multiple characters are working together). Many games already include effective mechanics for resolving group actions. In D&D 5th Edition, for example, you have group checks (everyone rolls and the group succeeds if at least half the checks are successful) and the Help action (the character with the best check modifier makes the check with advantage if there are other characters helping them).

For more on resolving group actions in any system, check out Part 14 of The Art of Rulings.

FAILURE MUST BE MEANINGFUL

Somewhat ironically, the solution to dogpiling largely goes back to the first principles for framing a check: If you’re rolling the dice, then failure should be interesting, meaningful, or both.

So whenever a PC makes a check, there should be a penalty or consequence for failure.

But yet another reason that dogpiling can feel frustrating is that it can trivially bypass what initially seemed like a meaningful consequence. For example, failing to pick a lock on a door is meaningful because it means the PCs need to find another way to get through the door.

Of course, this also reveals that dogpiling is, in many ways, indistinguishable from one PC repeatedly rerolling the same check.

We could start by reviewing the three techniques described in Failure for the Beginning GM:

No Retries. This obviously solves the dogpiling problem by definition. Whoever made the initial check represented the group’s best effort, and no subsequent checks will change that outcome — e.g., we have established that this door cannot pick and you’ll have to find a different way of getting in.

If your group is used to using narrative resolution, this may be all that you need. But frequently it will just leave people scratching their heads, “Why can’t Samantha search the room after Tomas or at the same time as Tomas?”

A technique I’ve been experimenting with in D&D to “soften” the concept of No Retries is a gradated group check. Basically, it interprets the dogpile as a retroactive group check. The group check requires half of the people attempting the check to succeed, so the second character to make the check has a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But if the second character also fails the check, now they’ve dug a hole and it would take two more successful checks for the group to work their way back to success.

The effective application of this technique can be a little limited, but I’ve found it can be a great mental model for social scenes: Tomas has clearly screwed up the negotiations with the vizier. Can Samantha step in and smooth things over? If not, then it will be quite difficult to salvage the situation.

Failing Forward. This preempts the problem because the first character to attempt the check can’t fail, they can only suffer a consequence — Tomas finds the hidden jewel, but triggers a trap; he picks the lock, but his lockpicks break; etc. Since the initial attempt didn’t fail, there’s never a reason for the other PCs to dogpile.

Progress Clock. When all else fails, start or tap a failure clock. The flexibility of this option is great, making it easy to default to when all else fails.

To sum up: Once the dogpile starts, you’ve just got to start looking for additional consequences. Not in a punitive way, just in a, “Okay, you’re spending a lot of time on this lock… what does that mean in the context of the wider world?” way.

DO YOU DARE TO DOGPILE?

With that being said, you also don’t want to discourage the second-best skill rating in the group from flaunting their stuff occasionally. So you may also want to think about how each additional success on a check could provide a benefit:

  • A gather information check where each successful check gives a different piece of information, but a failure results in the bad guys becoming aware that the PCs are asking questions.
  • A check to craft a magic item where each successful check adds a unique feature to the item, but each failure results in a curse.

This may require a more complicated framing of the check, but it carries the benefits of extra successes needing to be weighed against the increased risk of failure for each additional participant and forcing the group to make a strategic decision.

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