Shadow of the Colossus D&D campaign?

[Altorin]

Get as many ranks in climb as possible!


I'll be honest, I don't know how 4e works with skills... so yeah.

But it does seem like an interesting feat, as long as you can get your crew to work together and use a little teamwork.

in 4e, skills are either trained or untrained. trained skills give you access to certain specialized uses of the skill (such as disabling magical traps) and give you a +5 bonus to the skill. You start with a number of trained skills determined by your class and can use feats to increase the number of trained skills you have. On top of that, you get a passive bonus of half your level to all of your rolls, including skill rolls. There also isn't a "climb" skill. That would probably fall under the Athletics (or perhaps acrobatics in specialized cases) skills.

in other words, the most annoying thing about making a character in 3e, the skills, is almost completely removed.. you pick 3-5 skills that are your "trained skills" and they get a static +5 bonus. So much simpler and much easier to teach to a new player

 

[gamer_parent]

I can see this working, let's try to brainstorm here.

If you were to make the boss large enough, and the weak point at a hard enough to reach spot, it can work. Let's not forget that all of this are essentially very elaborate grappling checks. Except due to the size difference in scale, instead of grappling, you can substitute with other skill rolls.

give the boss enough hit points or damage reduction so that you can't just barrel over them with raw damage (or at least make it difficult).

The weak point, by the way, should restricted to just location, instead of say, methodology. (Or else you end up in a situation where your players must figure out the exact steps to take, and at times that will seem highly illogical) Various skill challenges track will be present to "clear" the protection that goes around the weak spot.

Of course, there's also just the fact that because it's D&D, people might not want to take down the monster the videogame way. So you still need to block out the full stats in case they decide that instead of trying to stab the weak spot, they want to go for an alternative approach.

You can also try multi-part boss battles.

Incidentally, all of this is incredibly easy to do with the Fate system.

 

[Flying-Emu]

*snip

Psh, they'd have to be invulnerable unless you strike the sweet spot, otherwise any decent DnD player will find a way to bring them down using nothing but some chalk, a ten-foot pole, and a whole lot of rope.

Maybe some grapples or pitons too.

 

[gamer_parent]

or if we're playing 3.5E, use one of the 7 million ways to break the system to make this supposedly epic fight into a speed bump.

 

[archf13nd]

It can work. Especially if your dry on campaign ideas. A story based around exploration and fighting creatures is a pretty good direction to go.