The Challenge of Skill Challenges: Ruling Skill Challenges
by Mike Mearls
A DM needs time, practice, and practical experience to master skill challenges. A new rules mechanism takes even experienced DMs back to their first days behind the screen, learning new tricks on the fly.
Talk about this article here.
i have to say, i'm pretty sad that this is paid content in the dragon. skill challenges are part of the core rule books, they obviously got some love there, and this should really be free, as many people are struggling to get them right.
Honestly, I have to say I was disappointed that it's paid content because the article is, well...content-free. It doesn't tell us anything that's not in the DMG, basically, except listing the skills in various breakdowns. The important part of the article looks like it might be found in parts 3 and 4, and I wish this had just been released as a one-time "Skill Challenges" article.
I was interested in this one because I've had issues integrating skill challenges into my games, but this article series doesn't look like it's going to be very helpful.
(the content that is there is good, and helpful....it's just not enough).
But on Skill Challenges (SC), I still don´t like them because they don´t introduce a decision element on the player´s side.
Players in a SC decide only which skill to use on their participation, which is trivial.
The only fun thing I can fnid is to come up with an explanation on how you use a certain skill on a particular SC.
But some players are annoyed at it.
There's been enough angst over them that I agree more free content for all game community is warranted.
That said, having fun with them.
As the article advice indicates (using them for activities spanning hours, days), I'm resolving the overall success of a month-long military duty managing incoming refugeees at a border as a Skill Challenge - with tactical encounters interspersed that can give bonuses or change skills applicable in a particular table round of challenge.
The key advice I think, which the article doesn't speak to, is that for skill challenges not to be a boring and de-protagonizing "okay players, pick skills and roll", (A) Players must understand they can improvise skill uses, essentially they have permission to redesign the challenge; (B) Skill rolls and their outcomes must be narrated, this can be encouraged by heavy use of DM's Best Friend modifiers (just say you roll skill, that's sucky -2; give flavourful description of what you do that's +2 bonus). E.G., using Diplomacy a player used some of the "situation information" provided to state he was on that particular role manage refugees and potential conflicts with villagers over where refugees graze sheep, since sheep can graze in areas other animals can't a times to move sheep further afield. Okay that's fun, adds narration (moves some animals further away from village for DM to then stage something going on there...), +2. Players should be encouraged to be creative and permitted to author facts with the narration (last night it emerged that there's a local vintage of wine a particular bandit leader is very fond of, as Player narrated what his successful History skill check to recall useful background information meant).
I find Skill Challenges represent a way to game out non-combat activities that is more structured but can still involve lots of roleplaying and more "character-definition" activity that straight tactical combats.
The one thing that struck me as differing from DMG was that the article advises what works out to 7 relevant skills for a standard party while the DM is usually setting up about 5 relevant skills. I've been using, for a major challenge 3 key, 2 substitutes, and 3 "one time useables opened by something", and let a Player narrate in a different "substitute" when he was creative about how he could use Nature instead of Perception to locate refugees (instead of tracking, using Nature to identify natural paths of movement etc.)
Rob
This has been the only article so far I was disappointed with since I started my subscription but I am willing to read the rest of it before I decide one way or the other. I just hope I don't have to wait 5 or 6 months to get this whole article.
The DC debate is awful, I came up with my own. 10,15,20 without the skill check 5 thing. Easy goes up by 1.5 which is the half level in every roll a PC makes, I also use Easy instead of a static 10 to assist. Moderate goes up by 2 and Difficult goes up by 2.5 which aside from powers and crazy items keeps this DC above auto-success for a skill master. 10,15,20 - 11,17,23 - 13,19,25 - ... - 22,31,40 - 23,33,43.
I also added that failing to assist or aid results in a -2 just as success results in +2 because there was no tension to that roll and everyeone just made it because there wasn't a reason not to.
Examples of good skill challenges include the interrogation example right in the DMG. It was great roleplaying without characters getting Reservoir Dogs on the captives.
Every time they travel it's a skill challenge. Sometimes a long one measured in days or sometimes just trecking through the woods with a set of poor directions. I prep a random encounter - by random I mean it's not really part of the story for if they fail the challenge and then they are lost, which is another skill challenge.
Sfedi, you metioned skill challenges don't offer a decision element on the players side. I disagree.
First off, there's character creation. The player playing the rogue complained there weren't that many good heroic tier feats and later complained why the ranger had a better perception check or in 3rd terms detect for traps. He could take skill focus or even have put more points in wisdom. It doesn't address your issue exactly, but when you start using skill challenges regularly the characters built with them in mind will (and should) shine during them.
Second, and more on your point, there is always a decision element. Its just like combat only until you run skill challenges regularly, the players don't know how to choose. There are skill challenge powers that can be used. In skill challenges with limited amount of time or rounds before failure, action points used by the characters good at the skill challenge are a decision. Incorporate a skill challenge into a fight, and the players will have to make decisions about it.
I had a skill challenge when the party was tracking bad guys, one of the skills they could use a couple times was Athletics to climb and jump over and around stuff looking for clues. One of the characters used Fey Step to bamf up a cliff face and got a success just as if he had made the climb check. I had another skill challenge where the rogue was disabling a door mechanism so it would open but as he found out failing the first couple of doors, if he was unsuccessful there was a blast 3 attack on him. Now the wizard could make an arcana check on the magical door mechanism to help the rogues thievery, but did he want to stand there in the blast if the rogue rolled poorly?
Glad I haven't subsribed yet if this is a multi part article, but skill challenges are fun once the DM and PCs have run a couple (the first few were awful, I won't lie).
I have struggled with Skill Challenges myself and haven't used them that much in my games. Based on this article I actually think I may use them less and less, maybe once an adventure at the most (if that). I love 4E but this is one mechanic I am still not completely sold on. However, I endeavor as always to keep an open mind and continue reading this article series in hopes that I can get more out of Skill Challenges.
Seconded. I've been running D&D in various incarnations for 20+ years, and the skill challenge system has me positively flummoxed. The probabilities don't seem to work out (my group has about a 60% chance of never failing a single skill challenge in a 30-level career unless I play dirty), there don't seem to be nearly enough tactical variables (as opposed to combat, which can go a hundred different ways depending on how the PCs and monsters use their powers), and it just generally falls flat in terms of drama. It just seems like a really cool concept that just isn't adequately supported by the mechanics.
I was hoping this article would help me resolve these problems, but so far it hasn't told me anything I hadn't already figured out on my own. Some of the problems I've encountered include:
1) How do you make skill challenges fun when there's a 13-point variation in the skill bonus for PCs in the party? If you let the most skilled character make the check, that's not much fun for the less skilled characters. If you force the weakest link to decide how the challenge goes, that's not fun for anyone. My party of 6 characters has at least one character with a +9 or better base bonus in 11 of 17 skills, and there is also at least one character with a base bonus of +1 or less (as low as -3) in 15 of 17 skills. That means that what is ridiculously easy for some (DC 10 vs. +9 bonus) is difficult for others (DC 10 vs. -3 bonus), and what is reasonably challenging or some (DC 15 vs. +9 bonus) is nearly impossible for others (DC 15 vs. -3 penalty). The math just doesn't seem to work out as advertised.
2) On a related note, if you let pretty much any clever idea replace a recommended skill choice, how do you prevent every check from automatically succeeding? For example, if the untrained Palad-unce tries to use Arcana to solve some problem, he's unlikely to succeed, so why wouldn't he try to use a Charisma-based skill in which he has training (say Diplomacy) to find some expert to solve the problem for him, neatly turning his -1 penalty into a +9 bonus?
3) Can we get a little bit of tactical variation and guidance? Partly, I want to know whether, say, aid another counts as the character's action for that phase of the skill challenge. More importantly, though, there aren't many ways to make skill challenges tactically interesting, so (roleplaying aside) they tend too be boring. Can a character take a crazy risk and accept a substantial penalty in hopes of erasing a failure earlier in the skill challenge? Can someone who is skilled reduce her bonus to help an unskilled ally carry his weight? I would have liked to see some clever optional rules to give skill challenges more variation. If you just want us to leave the dice in the bag and roleplay the non-combat encounters, just say so rather than giving us a system that sucks the fun out of roleplaying encounters the way so many story-driven games manage to suck the fun out of combat encounters.
Maybe I'm just grumpy. I want to grok skill challenges, and I'm finding it extremely frustrating that I have failed utterly to figure out how to run them in a way that is fun, challenging, and flavorful. Perhaps my expectations for this article (and its inevitable sequels) are just plain too high. But I'm on the point of striking out on my own, here - brewing up my own mechanics to replace what I unfortunately feel is an inadequate attempt to model dramatic events that don't include combat.
I've been really looking forward to this article, and it just doesn't include anything that I haven't been able to suss out by looking at the rules in the DMG and the examples in various Dungeon adventures and extrapolating.
Yet in the DMG, many such checks are listed as Skill Challenges: for example, disarming a trap is called a "Skill Challenge," where basically Thievery is doing the work.
And most of the early DMG examples suggested using 2-3 primary abilities, rather than 5-7 (which is what this article seems to suggest).
Most of my experience with Skill Challenges is from a 3.5 game I'm in (where the DM liked the idea so has ported it over). In that situation, the "forcing it to fit" method is incredibly pronounced. If I have a skill that has a +10 or +15 (because I've put a bunch of ranks into it and have a high ability mod), then I'm going to definitely try and use that over something that isn't trained (would have a +0 or +2 in 3.5). The 10-15 point spread means that it doesn't matter if the difficulty goes up to Hard (assuming hard is 10 points more)--I still have a much better chance of actually helping.
This phenomenon might be less pronounced in 4e, but I still see it happening. If your character has a really good Intimidate check, you're going to approach all Skill Challenges looking at how you can use your Intimidation. This isn't necessarily a problem (the same way how if you're good at combat, you might try and use combat to solve your problems), but it means that the game becomes "what clever way can I think to make my good skill apply" rather than "what would I (or my character) do to solve the problem."
I've also had an issue with the number of checks in a Skill Challenge. a Complexity 4 challenge is going to have 10-12 checks or so (maybe as many as 15 if you have skills that don't actually count as successes or failures). That means in a group of 5, each person will get 2 rolls, and maybe half of them will get 3. There just isn't a whole lot of a chance for people to participate meaningfully before the challenge is over. I tried running a "chase" style challenge with a strong narrative (like suggested), but in the end the players had gone through the story with each person rolling a die twice. And rather than having it feel drawn out and epic, it was over in 20 minutes.
So what I really would want (and will probably do in the future) is to have complexity measure the number of complete ROUNDS through the initiative. So a complexity 5 challenge means each player may make something like 10-12 checks (or maybe 5 checks, having complexity BE the number of rounds). Success is measured based on the overall number of successes each round, or possibly across the whole challenge. This way every character gets to participate the same amount, and a complexity 5 Skill Challenge does in fact have the same "game" weight as a full-on fight.
Finally, I think a good piece of advice might be to make Skill Challenges a DM tracking tool only. So in order to measure success or failure of player actions, the DM can keep track of success and failures as in a Skill Challenge. But you don't tell the players that, just let go about their business (and of course adjusting the narrative based on whether they succeed or not).
I like the idea behind Skill Challenges, but I've found that running those types of encounters the same way as I did without Skill Challenges (just winging rolls and such) works better so far. I look forward to the next article.
3) Can we get a little bit of tactical variation and guidance? Partly, I want to know whether, say, aid another counts as the character's action for that phase of the skill challenge. More importantly, though, there aren't many ways to make skill challenges tactically interesting, so (roleplaying aside) they tend too be boring. Can a character take a crazy risk and accept a substantial penalty in hopes of erasing a failure earlier in the skill challenge? Can someone who is skilled reduce her bonus to help an unskilled ally carry his weight? I would have liked to see some clever optional rules to give skill challenges more variation. If you just want us to leave the dice in the bag and roleplay the non-combat encounters, just say so rather than giving us a system that sucks the fun out of roleplaying encounters the way so many story-driven games manage to suck the fun out of combat encounters.
This is my biggest problem with skill challenges. They're simply not interesting, at least the way ours have turned out (I run them the way they seem to advise in the DMG - with the errata). There's no tension - it's an extended series of skill checks, like any other game system, with about the same level of excitement.
What I hope for in the next article, at least, is an extensive, detailed example of how Mearls runs a skill challenge - as in, a transcript with annotations, effectively.
For my group's purposes, though, I've bagged skill challenges in favor of the more typical roleplay-and-occasional-skill-check approach.
I was interested in running skill challenges when I read the rules the first time but I haven't had that much luck in getting "buy-in" from the players. I was hoping that I was going to learn something in the article to either explain it differently (not really) or spice them up (nope). Maybe there'll be more in the future articles but by then I might have given up on using them (replacing them with occasional skill checks).
I would however be interested in Mr Mearls' adaptation/notes on the Slaver series though. That I think would be useful.
Sfedi, you metioned skill challenges don't offer a decision element on the players side. I disagree.
... there is always a decision element. Its just like combat only until you run skill challenges regularly, the players don't know how to choose. There are skill challenge powers that can be used. In skill challenges with limited amount of time or rounds before failure, action points used by the characters good at the skill challenge are a decision. Incorporate a skill challenge into a fight, and the players will have to make decisions about it.
But unlike combat, not every PC has something obvious to do. After one or two SC rounds, the PC's weak in the main skills are bored. So a regular dose of disarming traps or perception checks, while interesting to the Strikers (and possibly the Wizard), is gonna leave the others hoping it is over quickly. My point is that SC's are harder to design than combat, which 4e has balanced very well for all character rolls.
My point is that SC's are harder to design than combat, which 4e has balanced very well for all character rolls.
I totally agree.
I came up with a series of SC traps in what was a catacomb. 20 x 6 square room, 12 statues holding a candle with bronze plaque under them. Every round a wave of energy shot across one of the 6 rows attacking a various defense doing various energy damage and a condition like Dazed (same type of attack and damage per room) to everyone in that row. Moderate Thievery DC to disable part of trap behind bronze plaque which took a Moderate Strength check to take off (could also damage but took longer). Arcana and Religion checks at Easy DC to help Thievery, needed to be one square away from char making Thievery check. And lastly a Hard DC Perception check to notice that certain candles flickered when certain rows had the energy go through them.
Complexity 4 (10 successes before 3 failures... 12 statues since the trap would be over after 13 checks) and each row the wave of damage went through had two points under the statues that would disable that row which is what the Perception check was about. Oh, and they were trapped in the room.
Handled through initiative, it seemed like a rogue only SC and I was worried the Strength check to remove the plaques would in essence double the work the rogue needed to do. What really happened... eladrin wizard fey stepped through the wall of force that sealed them in the room (great roleplaying after the encounter); fighter and warlord went around knocking off the bronze plaques (not successful every time they tried, which was also funny when the burly fighter can't muster a strenght check); Ranger noticed the flickering candles and tried to coordinate which statues to work on first (the two rows along the walls where the rogue had to work); and the Rogue made quick work of the actual Theivery checks when he could get to an open statue that didn't have someone standing in front of it. There were also Second Winds, and Inspiring Words and Saving Throws to shake of whatever Condition the wave of energy had done to the characters.
This SC worked because it had different things for different character to do. I suggest looking at Primary Skills with different ability scores so everyone can contribute. Some of the social encounter examples are only for charisma, maybe make them Easy DCs so the trained characters are great at them but everyone can try (until they hit two failures). In what turned out to be a bad social encounter SC (too long) where the party was honored with a big party at the tavern, there was a group of dwarves arm wrestling. It turned out to be a great element, where an actual roll of the die - an Athletics check, had a real result the player had to roleplay. The roleplay actually had more to do with the encounter, a gracious loss verse an obnoxious win.
I think there will be a subset of skills... different post.
I would also suggest after some striker controller SCs, come up with a great leader defender SC. Combat encounter don't have to be totally even as long as they are even over the course of an adventure.
This article seems pretty close to an FAQ item. To quote: If you've tried to design and run a skill challenge and had a bumpy ride, you're not alone.... This column aims to share with the typical D&D gamer what we at Wizards have learned about skill challenges.
Now I'm fine with new monsters, items, play advice, optional rules, etc. all going up on the pay-to-read D&D Insider. But a rules clarification? That's a bit shady. Especially since they've admitted the as-printed skill challenges didn't work as intended and already released a sizable errata to fix it.
What if presenting a skill challenge began as presenting the goal: "Sneak into the castle at night and rescue the prisoner." Step 2 then becomes: the players are given X number of required checks and the players will be required to take turns making those checks (order flexible). They must explain the exact story ramifications of their use ahead of time: "Jacen will use streetwise to find out when the change of the wall guards is. Lao, Mongo and Lara will use athletics to swim the moat (Lao will be primary and the other two aid simultaneously). Mongo will use athletics to climb the wall and open the back gate (DM says 'ok, but extra check required: strength'). The three enter and Lara will use stealth to find the door, and thievery to open it. The three of them will go out when they see only one guard neaby to pass and Lao will use intimidate to get past him without a scene (DM says 'ok but the DC will be variable since it will be opposed').
That's a total of six checks. Here are the rules:
1) 4 successes must succeed or a predetermined fail condition occurs (group is captured with prisoner and now must escape) which the group is made aware of ahead of time.
2) No player can use a single skill more than once
3) Aiding is allowed unlimited, however, failed Aiding creates complications
4) Individual failures may or may not have minor consequences that make future checks harder or lead to combats, etc.
There are some problems here I can see, but I'm at work now and can't break it down completely. Sorry for the brevity. Someone pick it apart.
-- John M.
Could you elaborate some?
The real difference is that, rather than each player being put on the spot when his turn comes to act and, being limited to what has already come to pass before-hand and is unchangeable, the group plans freely together in a planning stage. Every roll is figured out then with modification by the DM. They are not in character here (I suppose they could roleplay the planning if they feel the urge) but simply coming up with a game plan that will meet the criteria which I am revising now and will post later.
When it comes time to execute, the plan is set and the players simply roleplay it and out and roll the dice. There is no stalling or deciding here; only rolls and narration/acting. If a particular portion of the rolls are executed successfully, they get the success rewards. Otherwise they get the failure rewards. There is a lot more that can take place in the middle, as well. I won't elaborate any more in this thread since I'm pretty OT as it is.
[Edit: I will add that I'm switching gears from being tactically minded for Skill Challenges to being strategically minded. Both can be fun, I think, and diversity is good.]
Cheers,
-- John M.
A little. I have a very lengthy post on the way, but I am afraid we're drifting OT (we aren't really discussing the article any more), so I will post it in homebrew, enWorld and maybe a blog somewhere I think I can get good critique.
If you post your brainstorm in homebrew, I'll meet you there. This is the mechanic I feel needs the most work, and I'm eager to find solutions to the problems we seem to be encountering with it.
I dont know about the article, as I am not subscribed.
But on Skill Challenges (SC), I still don´t like them because they don´t introduce a decision element on the player´s side.
Players in a SC decide only which skill to use on their participation, which is trivial.
Well this is not how they are supposed to work (at least as I understood it)
Basically a skill challenge works like this:
- DM tells the players the situation.
- Players tell the DM what they want to do
- The SC write up helps the DM to figure out which skill check is used to decide if the players succeed or fail (i.e. which skill and what DC) and what progress the players make if they succeed or how they mess up if they fail.
If the players do something which is not written down in the SC, the DM is on his own, as it has always been.
That's it.
You should really have a look on how skill challenges are written down in RPGA adventures. It helps a lot to understand how they are supposed to work.
But here's a few things:
1) To all the people pro or anti the paid content issue, I say to each your own. For me, $4.95 for everything they offer here is beyond worth it to me as a DM and I don't even use that much from Dungeon. The reviews & articles are great. And the mags would cost more on their own then the subscription did, and the tools are coming. If I am easily pleased & optimistic that's on me, but I say so far so good.
2) This article is helpful as will the next part be I am sure. Here's the issue with SC's...they feel rushed to print. I mean, first, the amount of failures gets errata'd. Then the DC's get errata'd. And both live on controversially on the boards everywhere anyway. Now they are saying to pick 5-7 skills instead of 2-3, and now they are offering very helpful tables to figure out how to balance a challenge for the party. This is clearly a work in progress. Right now, for me, it needs a lot of fixing and play testing. As such, I can only say it's very apparent in our crew that something needs to get done on two levels, mathematically & "the fun". I think this article and the next will go a long way. But this really should have been thought thru more before it went public.
3) In this vein, what we can really use is an entire monthly section with featured skill challenges the way they have Bazarre of the Bizarre or other features. There's a major push to make these sc's fun & relevant now, and that would go a long way. Instead of rules & tips, I think more examples we can steal from and see how effective they are in terms of stimulating fun and being appropriately challenging would go a long way.
4) I think next what I will do is a skill challenge without a skill challenge. Basically, make everyone be involved without rolling any dice. Make them go in turn. Let them know up front what they need to do and make them do it. They can RP it out without performing an actual challenge. It's the forced participation angle that makes this potentially great. Clearly, this really only works with social challenges though.
I want to see where this all goes. The SC's could be incredible. Right now, it's clear that WOTC is all over the place & scrambling. But hey, now with the internet they can respond so quickly that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I would also like the powers that be more actively involved on this string. Help out those here that are all screaming for better guidance please.
Some of the problems I've encountered include:
1) How do you make skill challenges fun when there's a 13-point variation in the skill bonus for PCs in the party?
The first thing, I think, is not making it obvious which skills are the right ones (and more importantly, the wrong ones) to use. You shouldn't make it impossible for the party to find out, but you shouldn't spoon-feed them the right skills either.
This particular merchant hates people he considers to be silver-tongued, and so Diplomacy is an auto-fail. If the characters do some research before tackling the skill challenge, or they try to get information with knowledge skills or perception/insight, they'll get some clues. Otherwise, they need to guess.
2) On a related note, if you let pretty much any clever idea replace a recommended skill choice, how do you prevent every check from automatically succeeding?
This is very tough. You want to reward good ideas and creativity, but you don't want to just rubber stamp everything they do so it's no challenge.
3) Can we get a little bit of tactical variation and guidance? Partly, I want to know whether, say, aid another counts as the character's action for that phase of the skill challenge. More importantly, though, there aren't many ways to make skill challenges tactically interesting, so (roleplaying aside) they tend too be boring.
I think skill challenges are hard work to create, and probably take longer than combats to build. The more practice a DM has setting up the possibilities, the more interesting the challenge will be. Here's an example of what I think I'd do for my own game. My goal is to have useful things for everyone to do, and also to encourage cooperation. I want the party to be all but guaranteed success if they approach the situation intelligently, and likely to have problems if they do not.
The party wants an audience with the local Duke, but as foreigners, they are not given access to the noble quarter of the city where he lives.
I need to figure out which skills I want to use based on my players. Look at each character's two best stats. Most players will train skills that are what they are especially good at. Let's say that I've concluded that Stealth, Streetwise, Athletics, Bluff, and Insight are the five skills I want to emphasize, because they represent skills that 1 character will be very good at, and another 1-2 will be okay because of a decent stat. I'll put in two "traps" as well, for skills that my party just uses over and over again: Intimidate, Perception. I set the difficulty of the challenge as 8 to succeed and 3 to fail.
Now I set the stage for the skill challenge. Here's what I tell them:
The noble quarter is surrounded by a stone wall, and the only opening is guarded by two men-at-arms.
Everything else, they must discover on their own. If they ask the right questions before they attempt to begin the skill challenge, they'll get some but not all of the rest of the information.
Here's what I know:
There are also more soldiers on patrol throughout the city. One of the patrol guards occasionally abandons his post to grab a quick ale in the local tavern. The people of the town have a long history of harsh punishments for miscreants and thugs, and nothing makes them angrier than someone trying to push them around. They also think every stranger is a potential thief, so too much attention will lead them to believe that they are being sized up. Once someone is past the wall, people assume that they belong there if they make a reasonable attempt to fit in. If the party manages to get to the Duke without his guards, he will forgive the intrusion because they have a compelling reason to see him.
Stealth will be hard difficulty unless the characters wait for the correct guard to abandon his post, at which point it becomes average difficulty.
Streetwise can be used once. It will be medium difficulty if used against the average person in town, hard if used on the guards, and low if used on the town drunk. It will provide a success and also will reveal the information about the guard who leaves his post.
It will be hard difficulty to climb the wall. Success will get one character to the other side. Once there, he can lower a rope for the others which will reduce the difficulty to easy for all future Athletics checks. Once a character is on the other side, Athletics will give a +2 bonus to another PC making an Athletics check but not count as a success.
Bluff will be hard difficulty against the guards, but easy difficulty for anyone who is on the inside of the wall.
Insight may will provide a +2 bonus to the next player's roll. It will be a medium difficulty check. Successes won't work toward the challenge, but they will reveal a piece of useful information appropriate to the character's description of how he's using the skill.
Intimidate is an automatic failure.
Perception is a hard difficulty roll that provides a success. However, it will be an automatic failure if the character doesn't try to hide that he's watching, or if the same character uses it twice in a row. Success will also reveal that people are very sensitive to being spied on in this town.
If the characters make an intelligent suggestion with a different skill, it will be a hard difficulty. Otherwise, it is an automatic failure. I may also provide an ad hoc bonus if two characters attempt to work in conjunction (one guy bluffs the guards to distract them while the other one climbs the wall, that's probably a +2 for the athletics check).
Hey all, just wanted to point out this link to a series of great articles on skill challenges. Talks about using skill challenges to enhance and encourage role playing and lists more than a few really good examples.
Thanks for the link! That's my site, and I'll say that I love skill challenges. I have some audio up, a little rant on what skill challenges mean for me and how I make them work.
I'll have not only more skill challenges, but hopefully some audio examples of a skill challenge in play shortly.
In the meantime, I'd love to chat about skill challenges either here or on my site with anyone. I'll be on later in the day.
Glad you like the challenges mikropone! The best is yet to come...
I'm having difficulty with every aspect of skill challenges except imagining what they SHOULD play like. Developing skill challenges isn't hard, but it never plays out well. So I include that as something I could be doing wrong.
Design, presentation and play are just not working out for me or my players. I want this to work. I think all my players do as well, but it just isn't succeeding for me. I really wish I could go to a Con and watch the WoTC guys run a bunch of skill challenges so that I could see how they do it and see how their players handle it.
Tufrat, that would be awesome. Hey, powers that be at WOTC, would you be able to post video of successfully run skill challenges. That would be really amazing and invaluable as a tool for DMs like me to utilize.
I echo this request.
I've run many skill challenges, and mechanically they worked - players accumulated successes and failures, and "won" or "lost" the challenge - but they have never been interesting at all. Five minutes of dice rolling and narration, and...that's it.
Somebody show me how it's actually done!
I'm working on that now.I have some audio up on my site talking about the design of skill challenges atm
here:
Designing Skill Challenges
I also found this article a little lacking, and will probably stick to the Obsidian system you can find on EnWorld's house rules forum. At least that has some things for players to do besides roll dice.
I don't know what Wizards are doing, but I'll try!
I have some audio up on my site talking about the design of skill challenges atm
here:
Designing Skill Challenges
I realize I'm replying to this well after it was posted, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for is information on design. There are a considerable number of examples of fascinating skill challenges out there, and I've designed several along their lines (as well as run several written by WotC).
The problem is that no matter how interesting they sound, they're always 5 minutes and 8 rolls, and even without using Aid Another, nobody ever fails.
I guess it's much more "how does one narrate this? How do you handle the fortune-at-the-end structure of the skill checks, or run one of these without what Wushu calls 'the principle of narrative truth?'"
At the hear of it all is the fact that "skill challenge" is something of a misnomer. Skill challenges are about actions, not skills. Your first job as a GM is to frame the challenge so players aren't just scanning over their character sheets for skills, but to be thinking of what skills they'll be using.
Action first, skill second.
There's more than this, but that is the first narrative concept that you have to get through.
I swear to holy powers that I'm not trying to force you on the site
, but near the end of my Utterli post "Skill Challenges are about actions...not skills..." I describe in clear detail an example of something. also, I'll post when I have an example of one in play in my weekly game, which seems to be mostly what you're looking for.
So far I've found that the closer I get to keeping at least the start of the skill challenge secret, and the longer I'm able to prevent PCs from realizing that their in a skill challenge, the better things go.
As for this article itself, I fall in the camp that this should have been in the DMG. The massive errata for Skill Challenges, and the need for this article simply show that WotC didn't adequately playtest skill challenges or spend enough effort on writing that section.
Bad decisions all around on this one.
Has there been a single good decision in the entire digital initialives so far? For the love of Bahamut, PLEASE give the monthly content publishing back over to some freakin' professionals.
Thank you, drive on through.
What they should have done was acquire a small video game company or at least a good web content company if they wanted to go digital. All the Insider plans seemed cool, but it's been an epic fail.
Maybe the first failure has you try to cross where it's too deep and you decide to find another way. A second sends the log you were going to shimmy across rolling down the river. A third causes one of your buddies to slip on some rocks halfway across and need to be rescued. Maybe a RAW Skill Challenge would have the DM say "Okay, you failed to cross the river because you had three failures", but there's really no good story reason that you should be beaten. So instead, maybe the challenge goes on. Soon enough your party is swept away by the current, and more and more failures find them dropping over waterfalls, maybe into orc-infested territory. They don't get hurt. They don't lose anything, but they're pushed onto a different and more difficult path. It's a ways off from the ranger's cabin the party was looking for on the other side of the river, but who knows? Maybe the ranger they were seeking has been kidnapped by the downriver orcs?
I like the idea but haven't given it a whirl myself yet. And while I was typing this up I thought that this method sort of reminds me of the 4e disease rules. That might be interesting when applied to Skill Challenges too.