Less physical, more skill

[teulisch]

what skills do your players have? for that matter, what OCCs are they?

I advise requiring a mix of skills, so everyone can get involved a little. and do point out to them, they get xp per skill attempt according to the main rules book.

Give a situation where you dont want to be violent. someplace plesant, without any overt threats. Maybe a puzzle, something SDC that shooting it would destroy the item of value hidden in it.

Here is my sugesstion: hide a cache of info someplace that looks worth investigating. have it locked away, so you have to find a way to get it out without breaking it. then you have to decipher what the info means... and find the landmarks to the hidden place where the 'treasure' is. make it be worth some real money, but only if its undamaged! delicate rare pre-rifts books are great for this, with a high black-market value as well as the intrinsic worth of the printed word.

[asajosh]

does it have to be quick jam they need to get out of? Like trapped in a small gas filled room (a variety of technical skills could apply to escape here). Or can it be a long term thing? Like one campaign a long time ago, we had to convince a village to move due to incursions from Xiticix in the area. The NPC leader of the cillage decided to stay (failed charm/impress roll). The PCs then decided to stay and help the village better defend itself. This involved building fortifications, reinforcing buildings, building rudimentery medical and repair facilities. It was pretty involved and we (I was a player in this one) got into it. The towns folk named the windmill after my character!

[asajosh]

Creating an element of mystery is good to, players have a hard time hitting if they don't always have a direct threat to counter.

The campaign I'm picking back up here in a couple weeks the PCs are chasing what may be a vampire or some other undead nasty that runs a casino (try not to shake your head too hard on this one folks, I swear I wrote a pretty logical backstory to explain this, just cant get into it here). Well, they can't just march up to this office and start blasting: 1) no one in the party has vampire/undead hunting gear at this point (like crosses, wooden stakes, water guns, etc) and 2) The NPC they are investigating is a powerful buisiness man in this city and has the hotel/casino's large security force at his command 24 hours a day. He also has the town leaders convinced (through a variety of methods that I can't get into here) that he is a real stand up guy and solid citizen. Its really shaping up nicely.

So I guess I'm taking the long way to say, solve-a-mystery type campaigns can be fun and don't be afraid to put your PCs in a situation where a straight up fight is a losing proposition for them!

Oh, an aside about the campaign above: One of the PCs has cleverly gotten himself a job at the hotel/casino as a chef to quietly gather intel. Cooking skill FTW!

[KillWatch]

Clues dude, clues

anything that has nothing to do with face to face encounters

bombs will work as well.

Again we go back to the villain and how they operate,... Then we get clues from that. What did they leave behind? What did they use to commit the crime? Where did they get their gear? Did they have to hire some "discreat" help?

Don't spoon feed them

[asajosh]

In my group, one person likes to pick various languages proficiencies (probably a failing of real life, she is working on her third language if she could pick between russian, spanish or some dialect of chinese)

Smart girl. I've been trying to study Russian. And failing miserably.)

I also like to toss in situations with "ordinary" situations guys don't seem to think of (at least in my group). After they had been tossed out of a high end tavern, several of the players were wondering why.

"Uhh . . . maybe because you haven't bathed in three months and your clothes look awful? Try taking the sewing skill . . . go to a seamstress . . . rent a freaking robot . . . not to mention a BATH."

My players learn quickly to view my scenarios close to real life. Nothing is a "given." Although they only have to say it once. ("Okay, I bathe monthly and by a new suit every third month."

I admit it . . . I like to torture my players.

Its not torture, its a level of realism they will appreciate (mine do).

[Shorty Lickens]

The easy answer is to set them in a situation where they cant use violence (or much of it).
But HOW do you do that?

Have them set to assasinate a powerful leader, but they cant just storm in and blow they guy away. His own security or private army would waste them instantly. Instead they have to stalk and plan and plot and use subterfuge to find the appropriate moment when they can poison him and slip out undetected. The PC's might have to take out one or two guards or witnesses in the process, but for the most part this would be a skill-oriented adventure.

[DocS]

I'm dealing with some munchkins whom I know very well and over the years I've pacified to the point where they are almost roleplaying. They tend to still heavily favor physical skills over anything else, but at least their character concepts fully support their reasonings.

If they're making munchkin characters.... then they *want* combats. I'd be careful about making a common practice of designing adventures with the express purpose of making characters useless.

Doing the skill-adventure once or twice in the name of variety is one thing. Variety is good.

But doing it habitually because you don't like the character design... it's very very dangerous mojo.

On top of that, the Palladium skill system is among the worst out there. That in itself should make one pause about skill-based adventures. We're talking a system where if a character is *good* at something, they have an 80% skill. Can you really run a skill-based adventure where you are assured that the party will fail at one attempt out of every five?

Funny story. I was in a party and the GM had us use our Land-navigation skill to get from place to place. He was clear, go from point A to point B... you use land navigation and you roll the check. Simple, reasonable idea. All the characters had the skill, all the characters had bonuses to it, and all had IQ bonuses on top of it. *however* one look at our percentages told us that letting *one* guy navigate was innane (our percentages were in the 75-80% range if I remember right... quite high for Palladium skills, but think about it, how dependable are you if you can only navigate somewhere 80% of the time?). In the end, what we did was have all *Three* of us plot courses, and we went the way that any *two* of the three of us agreed to.

No the GM never realized the innanity of all this. But the Palladium skill system just begs for it. I don't have my books with me, so lemme just ask for some numbers. For each of the *following* examples, what is the skill percentage that you can expect of the party member who is the *BEST* at it?

Cryptography-
laser
Optic Systems
Radio:Basic
Radio: Scramblers
Surveillance systems
TV/Video
Electrical
Basic Electronics
Computer Repair:
Electrical Engineer:
Robot Electronics
Mechanical Engineer
Robot Mechanics

Of course, if one of the PC's is a robot, it's not a problem. Ironically, they are the only OCC that has first level skills at a level high enough to be dependable.