Image: Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Peasant Dance, circa 1567. Public domain source.

When we last left off, the party's bard had been turned to stone by the petrifying gaze of a basilisk in the city's sewer. This bard has a unique ability though - the Main Brûlant. If they can "dance, riot, or music for an hour" they can cure serious illness. In an out of character chat, we decided that the Main Brûlant would only be effective curing a magical affliction if they could do it at a site of power, which for a bard could be a sufficiently wild rager. Such are the joys of GLoG!

This was a rad idea, but tricky as a concept for an open table RPG session in a system that mostly prioritizes combat (or avoiding combat) in its rules and procedure. It's an open-ended problem and one that could lead to lots of waffling at the table. To run it, I ended up presenting the entire session as a sort of modified skill challenge.

Skill Challenges

For those unfamiliar, skill challenges were a scene-based resolution mechanic - one of the cardinal systems of D&D 4th Edition. The GM presents the players with a scene and tells them to collectively make a certain number of successful checks before they get three failures. Players can contribute with any of the skills on there sheet, working together to resolve a scene cinematically. Fleeing the crumbling temple of a forgotten elder god? Maybe the ranger can use their tracking ability to retrace the party's steps or the fighter can use athletics to barge a path through the falling debris.

My understanding is that these mechanics were not well received in their day. I've never actually run or even read them in 4E. Instead I've received this idea through oral tradition and through their reimplementation in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition as "extended tests." My understanding through folks on discord (thanks Abyssin) is that others in the GLOGosphere have already done substantial work adapting these tools.

It's worth also briefly nodding at Blades in the Dark. I've never had a ton of success with BitD, but it has popularized a system of clocks. Each test in that game advances a clock, counting down towards successfully navigating a threat or unveiling a new disaster. John Harper's writing on adjudicating those may be a good resource, though again this feels like a reference I have absorbed through diffusion.

Starting the Challenge

So how do we blow up a skill challenge into an NSR procedure for an entire session? Essentially, start by setting a number of "successes" that the party needs to achieve before they have three "failures." On Discord, I literally give the players a meter using X's and 0's.

X X X 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 | Three success with seven left to go.

In a sense, this schematic replaces the dungeon map. The party needs to traverse the narrative, rather than physical space, but it grounds the action in taking concrete steps towards progressively filling the meter.

It's critical at this point that you show the players the barrel of the gun. From the outset of the skill challenge session, it should be clear in advance what will happen if they fail. Nothing never happens and danger is always on the horizon. This is a bedrock of letting the players make informed decisions in any game setting, but it'll also help propel the session towards crisis, one way or the other. In the case of our bard's party, we had the preexisting stakes of "agents of death" coming to carry the bard away. By the end of the session, either the party would heal his affliction or have a knew problem in rescuing him.

Because we are playing GLoG, our definition of success and failures expands to include all sorts of things that don't require a roll of the dice. For instance:

• committing specialized tools or resources
• pulling on faction connections
• using a particularly relevant class feature

Complex or multi-step actions might earn multiple successes on the tracker. Make sure to shift the limelight often to keep track of what each character is doing at any given time and to prevent one sub-thread from consuming the entire session.

Adding Complications

One issue of the skill challenge system is that they can be easy to brute force. If the party is chasing a pickpocket through the streets, what stops the party's acrobat from just making 10 checks in a row to overtake the unfortunate thief? Alternatively, how do you keep each player from simply saying "I run even harder" and rolling the dice?

The more game-y answer might be to simply not allow more than one success from the same avenue (as Colville suggests in the video linked above), but this can lead to the unfortunate early adventure game experience of just trying every permutation of words on their character sheet - "I have a rope. Does that do anything?"

Instead, I like to use encounters. Treat each pip on your success track as a room in a metaphorical dungeon and you can translate the time-keeping / encounter mechanic from your system of choice. I like to roll whenever the party spends a significant amount of time, whenever they achieve a big success, or whenever they fail and hit a wall.

For this purpose, I make a bespoke encounter table, rolling 1d6 + (Successes / 2) against it. For a session like this, I'd avoid repeating results and try to write encounters that add fuel to scene, rather than derailing it completely. For example, here was my encounter table for the Pummel Square Rager:

d10 Street Party Encounters

1. A flood of tourists. None speak common.
2. A freak thunderstorm kicks up. Urchins rush out to sell umbrellas.
3. Beat cops demand to check permits / solicit bribes. They insist on confiscating any alcohol.
4. Ascetic monks demand peace and quiet for temple service.
5. Rival martial arts schools want to use the square to practice, challenge all comers.
6. Bounty hunters seek a party member for past transgressions.
7. Overenthusiastic wizard opens portal to the "Elemental Plane of Champagne."
8. Warring giants crash party. Literally.
9. Music so lively, the dead get up to dance. A nearby funerary parlor is overrun.
10. Giant vultures attack, attempt to carry away the bard.

Note that last entry is also the threat I showed at the beginning of the session (and, in fiction, makes more sense given the backstory of that class). The wilder the party gets, the more wild a result is possible on the table.

Wrapping Up

I don't know that this is a particularly novel mechanical idea, but, in the spirit of the best NSR hacks, it may be a novel juxtaposition of old ones. I get the sense that most GMs have probably kludged together something along these lines at some point or another, but I really want to emphasize making the mechanics transparent to the player as a schema they can picture and traverse in lieu of a dungeon map.

I think this model is particularly appropriate for running sessions that don't center on combat or that have the PCs pursuing open-ended goals in a complex environment. If neither of those are true for you, a more traditional room-by-room narration may be better suited to your ends.

As ever, I'd be so curious to hear if you've tried something similar, if there is some other obvious precedent I'm missing, or if there are any changes you'd make to this proposed schema.