Non-combat encounter dos don'ts and bragging rights

[Half-orc Bard]

I'm Going to start DMing my friends. Combat runs smoothly in my group of friends but we never do non-combat encounters ie traps roleplaying puzzles ect. And I think they are an important part of the game, So I was wondering what I should do and what I shouldn't do with Non combat encounters, and any great Non-combat encounters you have done:smallsmile:

[Mindartis]

This one I haven't done myself, but my DM came up with it. In this NCE, we had to negotiate for drugs on behalf of a Halfling merchant. The Drug Lord? A 7 foot tall Tiefling, with straight horns intsead of the normal curved ones. It was a skill challenge, and it didn't plan out the way he wanted, (Because our Deva PC kept trying to intimidate him, really stupid.) Our Dragonborn ended up rolling a natural 20 and used his dragon breath (Acid) on the desk. We ended up cheating him out of 2000 gp, and when we walked out, the Tieflings minions chased us out of the city and back down the sewars which we originally emerged from.

[Bearpunch]

The Drug Lord? A 7 foot tall Tiefling, with straight horns intsead of the normal curved ones.

He had curved, straight is normal. :P

Another encounter I recently had my party go through was an encounter with an undead paladin. It was mostly exposition, but they had the choice to "kill" him, or leave him to his fate. Moral decisions can lead toa lot of good in-fighting and RPing, so don't be afraid to turn your PCs on their heads.

[Yourshallowpal]

Hey Half-Orc-

I recently posted a very similar thread, which you could mine for some ideas-

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=213359

Do/Don'ts-

- The big one is being careful not to make plot advancement wholly dependent on succeeding on a check.

Ex:
Don't: The party finds the name of an ancient evil on a rock. They visit the library, and have a skill challenge to find everything they can on the name.

- They fail horribly.
- Now you must choose letting them get a mulligan, ad-lib a new source of info, or just tell them anyways.

Do: The party finds the name of an ancient evil on a rock. They visit the library, and have a skill challenge to find everything they can on the name.

- Even if they fail the check, they at least find a single instance of the name next a forest, which contains their next dungeon. (Second skill check to search the woods/avoid random encounters while searching.)
- If they beat the check, they find out where in the forest to look (skipping the skill challenge to find it.)
- If they beat the check by a wider margin, they learn a bit about the villain's plans, favored minions, etc.
- If they beat the challenge without a single failure, they learn the evil's sacred number is "17," and his color is "purple." (So later, when they roll perception on an oddly helpful crone, they might notice her "purple eyes, and necklace of 17 beads.")

[incandescent]

I ran a horror one shot ages ago and wanted to avoid combat in the "intro sequence", i'll tell what i remember. Incoming wall of text.

The party was dropped off at a town that had been burned to the ground and was surrounded by an unnatural fog (i took a lot of inspiration from silent hill). after snooping around and being very stealthy. They spot a red figure running past one of the burnt out husks and toward the only building standing in the town. This was a school house. I really played up the descriptions when they went to investigate. Everyone trained in nature noticed that no moss or other plant life was growing on the flame licked structure, all the highly perceptive people noticed that it looked like the building had been boarded up from the outside, all the dungeoneering people noticed that the building should not be standing at all, but some how is (i find it's good to think of random info to give people trained in random skills to make those choices seem worthy).

I was setting up an eerie mood as everyone walked inside and then cranked it up. To draw them in, a lantern on the edge of the teachers desk at the back of the room came on by itself, beckoning them to investigate. After every one was in, the door slammed shut and locked (they saw the red blur walk back and lock it). A turn goes by as i let them sit and think. Then they hear a thousand little scrapes and scratches as children handprints appear on all the desks in the school house. The radius of the light begins to recede by 5 ft per round. They panic searching for a way to make it stop. the lantern is akin to an immovable rod and the desk itself is very heavy. As the light dims, the pupil's desks are revealed to be occupied by fleshy abominations that are twisted and malformed, their flesh still swirling around in some foul darkness fighting against the light. At some point in all this chaos, a chalk silhouette appears on the board and a crappy rhyme i made up pieces in "naughty children that stop instruction need a lesson in discipline".

There is an ashen channel in the room where it looks like a ring of fire stood (they noticed this when they came in but thought it was due to the fire). Someone finally decides to check the unnaturally heavy drawer and find's the teacher's diary and a gavel which is unbelievably heavy. They ignore the gavel and the diary starts flipping though paged by itself. In typical Pc fashion, they close the book and shoot the cover. the arrow goes in the book and the tip comes out of the chalk silhouette bleeding. so they try to cut down the silhouette with an axe. it bleeds more. The blood drains into the channel and sparks a great fire around the room, which comes just in time as the light goes out. with a quick intelligence check t speed read the important bits of the diary, they find out that the children of the town had become more agressive before [insert silent hill-esque catastrophe here] and required the teacher to wear the gavel out. so the strongest cahracter hefts the gavel and hammers it on a wooden circle on the desk that starts to glow. The creatures are rebuked by this and several hammers later are banished.

However, a strange blue light filters back into the room from the cracks in the windows and the fire dies on its own and the place looks different. all the dirt and ashen debris are gone. draped over the black board where the silhouette was is the corpse of a red dragonborn female who has been stripped naked, crucified, and cut open from neck to hips. her dessicated form winces as her insides flare to life for an instant and her uterus peels away, giving birth to a glowing red egg that rests on her hip bones (in the diary they find that she was pregnant and wondering how she was going to break the news to her husband as they were already living off of scraps).

If i were going to continue the story, the egg would have later been given to the monstrous part of her soul to soothe it so it wouldn't atack the party. There were a lot of interesting ideas i didn't get to explore, such as a far realms cult damnign the town, which tore everyon;es souls into 3 different pieces: the wandering vestige, the indestructible corpse, and the far realm tainted portion.