I'm currently designing an encounter for my players in the Eberron campaign, wanted to see if anyone had some other thoughts or suggestions. It takes place in the local magic item market. A gang of robbers is led by a guy with the ability to control living spells; he's pulled together a few nonlethal ones (like Invisibility, Grease, Tasha's Hideous Laughter etc) and is using them to sow chaos and panic in the marketplace. Then, his thieves hit the businesses to pick up everything they can while everyone's distracted. The Watch, as usual, is useless. (They're currently trying to cope with an outbreak of Invisibility afflicting their pants.)

I want to structure the encounter so that the party has six rounds in which to act. After that, the crooks are outta there. Over those rounds, they want to rack up at least six 'successes'. These are my ideas for successes:

1. Kill a living spell.
2. Protect a particular business, this being the main target for the thieves.
3. Catch one of the thieves.
4. Make four successful skill checks (this last one's influenced by the 4E Skill Challenge deal).

The skill checks can be directed to three goals: work out what's going on, protect the businesses, crowd control.

What's going on: Spot's useful, some Knowledge skills will help, maybe Survival too for predicting the mob's behaviour.

Securing businesses: Disable Device or Use Rope to lock them up, Intimidate to keep people away, maybe Disguise to make it look like it's more secure than it is.

Crowd Control: two reasons for this. First, fighting through a mob of panicked people makes things easier for the thieves and harder for the PCs. Second, there's a real risk of people getting trampled or pushed off a bridge. Useful skills: Diplomacy to help calm things down; Intimidate or Bluff might accomplish the same thing, but a failure here will set the PCs back; Attack rolls and Strength checks might save people from falling or getting trampled.

Anyway, I'd like to flesh it out a bit further. Does anyone else have some ideas of what might constitute a success? Or some skill uses that could help them out?

Tumble checks to get out of the way of the fleeing crowd

Detect magic to figure out what spells are in use

Grapple for catching thieves

Wild boar, I think.

Yes, it was a wild boar. My mistake.

You should never feel obliged to apologise for warthogs.

To them might sometimes be a good idea. From a safe distance.

"I think I might have set a record playing some Oblivion."

On my friend's game, it once glitched up so that the final boss of the Mages Guild (super-powerful necromancer) couldn't be hurt. After some initial fighting to realize this, he decided to run to a city and see if the guards could damage him, so he started just west of Bruma and ran to Chorrol. By the time he got there, there were 2 bears, 3 mountain lions, a couple bandits, some timber wolves, a minotaur lord, and the King of Worms.

No scamps, trolls, or boars because this was all up in the mountains.

The guards got slaughtered, and they never did hurt the necromancer; the only injury he took was fall damage on the way down the mountains.

PS: Not sure how to do the indentation-quotes that seem to be standard here, so i just put it in standard quotes.

2 bears, 3 mountain lions, a couple bandits, some timber wolves, a minotaur lord, and the King of Worms.

Hee! Nothing like a good cross-Tamriel chase scene. I'm usually more inclined to go invisible than run for it, but the hub has been known to play something he refers to as "Grand Theft Horse".

And you can do the quote thing by putting a > at the beginning of a new line and then typing your text.

Does the King of Worms have a Diet of Worms?

Does the King of Worms have a Diet of Worms?

No, but he created Lutherans.

PS: Not sure how to do the indentation-quotes that seem to be standard here, so i just put it in standard quotes.

Just put a '>' before the quoted line.

I need to get me an invisibility spell, my stealthy character, I believe, finally has enough skill to use one.

"Grand Theft Horse".

With my modded out version of Oblivion, there is less leveling of the world with the character. So with my high level character being level 10, I've had to do a fair amount of running away as I get in over my head in areas that don't level down to my character.