# [Santiago] Rewarding Creative Use of Skills



## malcolm_n (Jun 24, 2012)

Okay, let's pull away from a medieval mindset for a moment. Say we were given a list of skills for a futuristic campaign (a space opera, if you will). Unfortunately, at least one person in our group has access to any of these skills except Engineering or Technology (that guy just had to wear the red shirt...).

Acrobatics
Athletics
Bluff
Diplomacy
Endurance
Engineering (is actually Dungeoneering)
Heal
History
Insight
Intimidate
Nature
Perception
Religion
Stealth
Streetwise
Technology (called Tech in most cases; is actually Arcana)
Thievery

Now, we're thrown into some interesting situations as we adventure in which these skills come into play. Just now, our DM gives us one particular scenario and we need to figure out what to do.

The situation: we have two damaged ships in a desert, same make and model. One is missing the fuselage and the other has a damaged navigations system plus no thrusters for take off. Each ship has the pieces missing on the other and the the hand tools needed to do the job.
The fuselage is heavy and awkward and we'll have to remove the old one before installing it. On the other hand, the nav system is complicated and there are several places where thrusters will have to be installed so the ship doesn't list and fly improperly.

What would you do? Keep in mind that this will require a minimum of 4 successful checks before 2 failures. Failure means something was damaged beyond repair and we either need to try the other solution or wait for somebody to track our emergency beacon and rescue us (loses considerable time on a very time-sensitive mission).
[sblock=Spoiler no players: As a DM, would you allow your party to do this?]Before we do anything, we locate a user manual (*Streetwise or Insight* tells us that the ship is like a car back on earth, so it had to come with a user guide that includes junk we never thought we'd need to know. *Perception* finds it.). 

We decide to move the fuselage, we find the instructions for doing so and get some of our party to help disconnect the damaged one first (*Perception or Insight* with the aid of the book tells us what cables to unplug/detach. Of course, our priestly companion is as helpful as red shirt at this point, so he'll just keep our morale up by reciting gospel (*Religion*) or making sure we're not straining ourselves too hard (*Heal*). Considering our situation, this actually matters, so it's not just a little help he's providing.
To get it out without damaging something else, we can use *Athletics* to lift it's weight out of the top or *Acrobatics or Thievery* to thread it through the bottom.) Now that we've done that, we go do the same on the other ship with a bonus because now we've done it once already.

Moving the fuselage between ships is tricky without a lift of some sort, so we try to use *Athletics* (standard lift and carry) or *Endurance *(move a little, stop to breathe, move a little...) to lift and move the good fuselage over, but it isn't working so well now that we're getting tired from the heavy lifting in the desert heat. Then low and behold, our priest claims the voice of god told him something (R*eligion or History *because he actually had to do something like this once before) and runs into the ship. He comes back out with a tarp. Using *Nature*,he helps us put the good fuselage on the tarp and slide it across the sand to get it where we're going.

Then it's the same thing as taking it out, but in reverse. Total checks 11 (plus about 4 aid another), 10 successes, 1 failure. We've just earned XP for a pretty difficult challenge and our generous DM gives us full encounter XP instead considering our role play and the time we saved by not taking the easy way out with the beacon.[/sblock]


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