I've been distracted from my Lord of the Rings miniatures by Dungeons & Dragons. This is probably good, because the LOTR stuff was starting to feel like an obligation, like work. Adventure writing for 4E has been a slow and clumsy process. It started with rubbing the serial numbers off a dungeon delve and after a month my head is full of campaign ideas. As soon as I could introduce NPC's, my imagination came alive. We now have story continuity and background. I've got enough content for a full level of adventuring, but I don't want to stop. I know where this train is going.
Lately I've been reading about skill challenges, after discovering that I've been doing them completely wrong. They seem devilishly complex to create and very challenging to administer, a sort of skill combat with just as many options for every player as a normal encounter. These should be very appealing to story gamers, as they're highly collaborative. I'm in the process of reading the many articles and errata about them. Perhaps it's their complexity that caught my attention.
