@Phaezen
I absolutely agree about the DCs in the skill challenge. It was a 4 before 3, so the PCs were pretty much guaranteed victory. There should have been at least a couple of more difficult DCs thrown in.

@Sean Holland
The materials are available in PDF format if you’d like to run it as a one-off game. I don’t know if you could run it as a sanctioned event, but it might still be worth giving it a try. It is a good introductory adventure if you’re trying to get new players into D&D.

@Wanderer
I agree that my DM could have prepared more. I’ve since read the adventure (which I didn’t have access to when I wrote this article) and I see that the skill challenges could have (and perhaps should have) been run differently.

@Kensan_Oni
I got the sense that it was a “don’t kill the new players” too. It sounds like playing out the final battle as a skill challenge was an interesting way to do it. If I run this as a DM for another group in the future I’m going to make sure they realize this is an option. I’m glad to hear it worked well for some groups.

@TheKyle
Sounds like your group had a lot of fun and a lot of success by playing smart. You’re right that it really comes down to the DM and the willingness of the players to try more than hack and slash. I’m glad it worked so well for your group.

@Kameron
I really liked the tokens. They even had bloodied images on the flip side so keeping track of that was a breeze. It meant the DM didn’t have to lug nearly as much stuff around.

@Paul
Our group consisted of three hard-core gamers (myself included), one guy who had played a couple of times before (at other public events like this one) and one first-timer. The DM has been playing and DMing for years. The entire adventure took us about 3.5 hours. But that being said we didn’t seem to incorporate the skill challenges into the game as well as we could have. The more role-playing you try to include the longer the game will take. Unless of course you avoid combat all together by talking your way through it (which from the comments above seems like a realist approach).

It’s important not to rush if you’ve got new players. Make sure they understand what’s going on. If that means taking more time, I’d say slow down and take more time.

How long did the event run at your location?

I think it depends on the group, the DM and how willing people are to go outside of the material.

The DM made it really obvious that we could defeat the last encounter with a skill challenge, so we had everyone ignoring the little fight and being diplomatic with the guards and religious and arcane with the spirit to shuffle it off. That worked out pretty well. We feel sorry for the one group that got bogged down into a combat at the group.

In any case, I felt it was fun, and although I am not sure I would want to play it again, it wasn’t too bad.

Each encounter had provisions for scaling for the # of PCs in the party 4-6 as well as 3 difficulty levels 1, 2, 3-4.

And the whole point of the final encounter was to roleplay the skill challenge and avoid fighting the 3 Elite “monsters”
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However the skill challenges were too easy, with the DCs seeming to be on the way too low side (The eladrin mage pregen could not fail the arcana DCs.).

Definately looking forward to next years games days though.
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