These Tools are designed to be used as part of your skill challenge. You can use every chapter or just some of them. Most of those tools are just guidelines on how to run a skill challenge. Only a tiny amount of houserules or rule 0 is needed.
Your Tools
- Primary Skills and Basics
Suggestions on how to handle those (no rule changes) - Complexity
Suggestions when to choose which complexity (no rule changes) - Difficulty Class
Suggestions which DC's to apply (tiny rule changes) - Criticals and Heroic DC
Houserules to handle high skill modifiers - Action Points
Houserule to allow Action Points in a Skill Challenge - Compexity and Conditions
Core Tools, make your skill challenge challenging, involve players and encourage the use of multiple skills. - How to build a skill challenge
Suggestions which conditions you want to use for your need. - Time Challenges
A suggestion how to make the skill challenge a pure race against the time, using only the given conditions.
Preamble
Now, why am I writing this? There are several problems with skill challenges, some of those are confirmed to be problems by the designers, some already have been erratad. A lot remain.
Given the concept for skill challenges it's mainly up to the DM to design a skill challenge worth an encounter. The skill challenge was errataed, but mainly by deleting whole paragraphs without replacing them. What's left is basicly a 'roll skill check' and succeed often enough before 3 failures. Some examples on how to spice it up are given, but I'm missing a guideline how many obstacles are appropriate or how to involve several players instead of just the one with the best skill doing the same check all over.
The chance of success is consider to be a problem as well. With any skill check the difficulty is jumping around if a player levels up. Either the checks gets harder or a lot easier. The chance to complete a skill challenge could get ridicilously low .. below 2%. Skill challenges of high complexity were harder then those of low complexity, but the other way round was possible as well.
These are some guidelines i would propose for skill challenges. Mostly they do not change any given rule, as the whole design of the skill challenge is up to the DM anyway.
What is a skill Challenge?
The answer isn't easy. In this case a skill challenge is a part of an adventure that requires skill to complete, and equals an encounter in difficulty, impact and playtime. A skill challenge for a single player is fair game, but keep in mind that's the same as a fight for a single player of the party (aka duell), and may be boring for the bystanders.
The skill challenge should not replace roleplaying, it is intended to offer a framework.
Primary Skills and Basics
Choose 3 primary skills for the skill challenge, these will always have a moderate DC. The players will be informed or hinted at what the primary skills are. Usually a primary skill will always score a failure or a success.
To choose your primary skills first think about what makes the most sense. Only then think about if you could fit at least one skill from the str,dex,con group and one from the wis,int,cha group into your primary skills.
Secondary Skills
All skills which are not listed as primary skills are secondary skills. Usually a secondary skill has a hard DC and can score a success only once during a skill challenge. The player has to come up with a way the skill contributes to the challenge.
Time and rounds
A skill challenge will be measured in rounds if necessary. The duration of a round depends on the nature of a skill challenge and the Actions taken by the players. A round kann have a duration of a combat round or several weeks.
During each round, each player may make exactly one skill check on his turn, which contributes to the skill challenge. No order/initiative is given for the players and a player may freely skip a round.
Complexity
Choose the Complexity of the skill challenge. The skill challenges get considerably tougher with higher complexity. The complexity should equal roughly the appropriate number of players involved in the skill challenge. If your skill challenge should keep 4 players busy, choose a complexity of 4.
If you want to use the tools from the chapter about conditions, you're allowed to include more conditions with higher complexity.
Table used for complexity:
Complexity....Successes....Failures
1......................4......................3
2......................6......................3
3......................8......................3
4.....................10.....................3
5.....................12.....................3
(This is the table from Dungeon Master's Guide, after Errata.)
Difficulty Class
Below is given a the table of the Difficulty Class by level, taken from the errata. To fix a further problem with the DC's, the difficulty of some levels is increased.
Level....DC Easy....DC Moderate....DC Hard
1st-3rd.......5...............10..................15
4th-5th.......7...............12..................17
6th-9th.......8...............14..................19
10th-11th...10...............16..................21
12th-15th...11...............18..................23
16th-17th...13...............20..................25
18th-21th...14...............22..................27
22th-23th...16...............24..................29
24th-27th...17...............26..................31
28th-29th...19...............28..................33
30th-33th...20...............30..................35
34th-35th...22...............32..................37
(DC's from the errata; Level 30+ added)
These values seem too easy at first, and easy they are. Just keep in mind that a level appropriate skill check of moderate difficulty means a 50% chance of success for a untrained being with average abilitys. You can increase the level of a skill check or a skill challenge if you want a thouger check. After all, not every task a level 1 character considers doing is a level 1 task.
I recommend to increase the DC a few levels by using the DC's one or two rows deeper on the table for skill challenges (and even skill checks), without raising the level of the skill challenge itself.
Criticals
Rolling a 1 is always a failed check and a a faiure.
Rolling a 20 allows you to add a +2 bonus to your roll.
Epic DC
Players with exceptional skills can score a epic success on a skill check in a skill challenge. A epic success usually awards an additional success. You'll want to use this houserule if the players have exceptional stats and skill checks are getting boring. The following table includes the epic DC for various levels.
Level....DC Epic
1st-3rd.......25
4th-5th.......28
6th-9th.......30
10th-11th...33
12th-15th...35
16th-17th...38
18th-21th...40
22th-23th...43
24th-27th...45
28th-29th...48
30th-33th...50
34th-35th...53
Action Points
A player may up to once during a skill challenge spend an action point to do one of the following:
- Reroll a check. This reroll can not score a failure. It can score a success or nothing. Other penalitys for failed checks may apply.
- Make an additional check during the same round. This allows a player to make 2 skill checks during a round and scoring up to 2 success or failures in a single round.
You would need to include this as house rule.
Compexity and Conditions
A skill challenge is modified by certain conditions, making it more difficult or easier. The dm has a budget of negativ conditions equal to the complexity of the skill challenge. The dm can increase his Budget for negativ conditions by including positiv conditions. Increase the level of the skill challenge by one for each two negativ conditions over the budget or decrease the level of the skill challenge for each 2 negativ conditions under the budget. All conditions can be taken several times and some conditions cost douple, marked as douple negatives.
The negative Conditions
Time pressure......douple negative condition ✦ rounds, involve player
The party is chasing a target.
Every round add an automatic 1/2 failure. Be careful, if you apply this condition more then once, your skill challenges will get much harder.
Uphold......douple negative condition ✦ rounds, involve player
Only the strength of the fighter keeps the ceiling from collapsing.
The DM choose a skill. Every round the players need to try a check in this skill or score an automatic failure.
Required......negative condition ✦ variety
"All that's left now is to jump over this chasm."
The DM choose a skill. At least one success in this skill is needed to solve the skill challenge. If only this last success remains all players with this skill trained will be hinted at it.
Precarious......negative condition ✦ scrape
"You jump to short and were unable to reach the other side of the chasm."
The DM choose a skill. A failure in this skill results in one or more bad consequenzes.
- closes off this approach
- The player who failed the check lose a healing surge
- increase the DC of other skill checks by +1
- The players are suprised and enter combat. (This would count as a douple negative condition)
Expensive......negative condition ✦ scrape
The fee for a scholar or a ritual.
The DM choose a skill. Each attempt in this skill requires a fee of 50gp per level of the skill challenge. Or a similar cost.
Depleting......negative condition ✦ variety
"You've read through all those books, they can't help you any further."
The DM choose a skill. Only a given number of successes(about 1-4) can be scored in this skill. OR each success increases the DC for further checks in the same skill by an additional +2.
Compulsion......douple negative condition ✦ rounds, involve player
"Sailing doesn't happen on its own."
Whenever a player choose to do nothing during a round of the skill challenge, he scores an automatic 1/2 failure.
Specialistic......negative condition ✦ specialist
"Stay back, you can't help me here."
The DM reduce the number of primary skills for the skill challenge to one or two. OR the DM choose a primary skill. The DC of that skill increases to hard.
Impossible......negative condition ✦ specialist
"The Duke refuses to be intimidated by anybody."
The DM choose a secondary skill. The use of this skill earns an automatic failure. If you use the houserule of epic DC's, allow for a success on a epic DC.
Sudden End......double negative condition
One false move and your all going to drop.
Decrease the number of failures needed by one.
The positive Conditions
more failures......positive condition ✦ ease
"Ok, lets try this once more"
Increase the number of failures needed by one. You can't choose this condition and the 'Sudden End' condition.
Follow up......positive condition ✦ variety
"You learn that the ghost never received his last rites."
The DM choose a skill. The first success opens up the additional single use of a secondary skill at easy or moderate DC.
Repeatable......positive condition ✦ rounds, ease
"As the rogue joined you you were able to keep the door shut."
The DM choose a skill. During each round after any failure in this skill another charakter may try the same approach. The failure is discarded in favor of the new result.
Unpretentious......positive condition ✦ ease
You may look for hours at the puzzle before you finaly solve it.
The DM choose a skill. The players can't score failures in this skill. This is best used together with Time pressure.
Rewarding......positive condition ✦ rounds
"Your insight revealed important information."
The DM choose a skill. The first success with the given skill provides a minor benefit. For example:
- some Information about the nature of other conditions
- some early treasure
- reducing the DC of a primary skill to easy until the end of the round
- an additional success
Aiding......positive condition ✦ variety
"You spot a shortcut to aid your cause."
The DM choose a secondary skill. The skill can be used throughout the skill challenge at a easy DC. Using this skill doesn't count as a success or failure for the challenge, but instead provides a +2 bonus or a -2 penalty to the next character's skill check. (Aiding with a moderate DC doesn't count as positive or negative condition)
General......positive condition
"I think we'll find a job for everyone."
Add a further primary skills at medium difficulty.
Partial Victory......douple positive condition ✦ ease
You were unable to convince the duke, but at least he's not going to hinder you in any way.
If the players fail to complete the skill challenge, but they would have needed only one or two further successes they get a partial victory. They do not get the reward of a full victory. They basicly have succeeded in the given task, but they receive some penality. For example in an interrogation they receive only parts of the needed Information.
How to build a skill challenge
It is still possible to make impossible challenges or far to easy challenges. But it is a help which tools you've got and how to apply them. Build a skill challenge by thinking of the given challenge first, and how many players you want to have involved. Then choose the primary skills and add the obvious conditions for the skill challenge. If your above or below your budget you can either roll with it and tune the level of the skill challenge or add further conditions and think of reasons why they are in effect.
Keywords
Following is an overview how the conditions can help you. Conditions in parentheses may help in the specified cases, but it's not for sure.
'involve player'; Certain conditions are useful to keep several players involved:
Time pressure, Uphold, Compulsion
'rounds'; Basicly the same conditions require to keep track of rounds in a skill challenge:
Time pressure, Uphold, Compulsion, Repeatable, (Rewarding)
'variety'; Certain conditions are useful to encourage the use of multiple skills:
Required, Depleting, (Follow up, Aiding)
'ease'; With partys of 4 or more people 3 failures can be dissatisfying. Some conditions are able to ease this problem:
Partial Victory, Unpretentious, Repeatable, more failures
'specialist'; Certain conditions are useful to let the specialist shine:
Specialistic, (Impossible)
'scrape'; Certain negative conditions may bother the players but do not stop them from completing the challenge itself. You may use these conditions if you want the challenge itself easy or you may add those conditions even if you already used up your budget and simply raise the level of the challenge without making it too hard:
Expensive, Precarious
It's strongy recommended to include one 'involve player' condition and several 'variety' conditions. For skill challenges for partys of 3 or more people it's recommended to include at least one 'ease' condition. You could follow these suggestions:
Players.....complexity.......involve player........variety.......ease
1...............1.....................0...........................2...............0
2...............2.....................1...........................2...............0
3...............3.....................2...........................3...............1
4...............4.....................2...........................3...............1
5...............5.....................3...........................4...............2
Time Challenges
A interesting variant is to include time pressure twice, for 1 failure every round and to apply unpretentious to every single skill. You can assume that applying unpretentious to all primary skills and a secondary skill is roughly the same as applying unpretentious to every skill. This means you would consider this 'only' 4 uses of unpretentious and 4 negative conditions through time pressure canceling each other out.
This variant of the challenge lasts for exactly 3 rounds and is a pure race against time, during which every player can do his best to help as they can't score failures only successes.
You can still apply a lot of the remaining conditions as normal to spice it up.
Examples
As the above hasn't been playtested too much the numbers could be off. I did some math to make the chance of succeding reasonable.
As an example on how to use these tools i apply them to some of the examples in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
The Negotiation
Complexity 3
Primary skills: Diplomacy, Bluff,Insight
- Follow up - Diplomacy (followed by History)
- Rewarding - Insight (gives Information about the Intimidate Condition)
- Impossible - Intimidate
The remaining Budget is 4, the challenge could be too easy. To keep to the example in the book i would decrease the level of the challenge by 2 levels.
In the Errata the number of failures is set to 3 now, this would make the challenge sleigthly more difficult.
The Dead Witness
Complexity 2
Primary skills: Diplomacy, Bluff, Insight, History
- Follow up - Insight (followed by Religion)
- Precarious - Bluff (allows the Ghost to tell a lie)
- General - (additional primary skill)
The remaining Budget is 3, the challenge could be too easy. I would propose to spice it up by adding Time Pressure once, as the spell is going to end soon, and the players still want to ask questions. Add depleting to history (with the +2 DC after every success) as it gets harder to find more and more relevant information of the ghosts past.
Urban Chase
Complexity 5
Primary skills: Acrobatics, Athletics, Streetwise
- Precarious - Acrobatics (lose one healing surge)
- Precarious - Athletics (lose one healing surge)
- Aiding - Perception
- Specialistic - Streetwise
The remaining Budget is 3, the challenge could be too easy (for 5 people at least). I would propose to add Time pressure once or twice to the challenge and further add Uphold - Athletics. Every Round at least one member in the chase would have to check, because after all they a running most of the time.
In the Errata the number of failures is reduced to 3 now. This would balance the budget.
The Interrogation
Complexity 1
Primary skills: Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate
- Precarious - Bluff (closes off this approach)
- Precarious - Intimidate (closes off this approach)
The remaining Budget is -1, this challenge is harder then the previous challenges. Maybe up the needed failures by 1.
In the Errata the number of failures is increased to 3 now. This would perfectly balance the budget.
Lost in the Wild
Complexity 2
Primary skills: Endurance, Nature
- Precarious - Endurance (party loses one healing surge)
- Precarious - Nature (party loses one healing surge)
- Uphold - Endurance
- Uphold - Endurance
- Uphold - Nature
- Specialistic - (less than 3 primary skills)
The challenge exceeded its Budget by 7. Given 3 Uphold's alone this challenge needs at least 3 people to solve properly. Obviously the challenge is meant to involve the whole party, so the complexity should be higher. However the reduced number of primary skills hinder the whole party to participate.
Rebuild with the tools given here the challenge would be about 3 levels above the party level. It's would be a short but troubeling challenge and is likely to frustrate the party.
Alternate Systems
I developed this system on my own. But of course i did some research and I found alternate systems from other people. Some Ideas seem to be pretty common, for example the use of Action Points or some kind of time pressure in the skill challenges. I like to thank these people for their fine work and assure them at the same time that this toolbox was developed independently and is not 'stolen' from any of you. You can easily find their work by searching for "skill challenge" in this forum, google or enworld.
Review
What do you think, does this 'feel right' ?
Would you propose other numbers?
Do you have questions to the reasoning behind some decisions?
The reason I say this is at 5/10/15 for a first level group, most everyone is going to have Trained +5 (or possibly Jack of All Trades +2), Stat +4, and some are going to have Skill Focus +3 and Racial +2 personal and Racial +1 group.
So at first level with those DC's while it'll be probably unique you're could have legally have a character with up to a 15 skill level. At 5/10/15 he can't fail, ever. The average character will probably have a 9 at just a +5 for trained and +4 for stat. That character can't fail at easy or medium.
Even the hard ones,they only have a 25% chance to fail. And that's without counting in taking skill focus, or racial skill benefits.
They 'erratad' skill challenge ratings into trivial events by lowering the base DC's by 5 and removing the "Add +5 for skill checks" One or the other would have been sufficient. As it is they're trivial by dropping the total by 10 they reduced the chances of failure by 50%.
Another issue I have is the DC's go up 1 in 3 but skill levels go up 1 in 2. So skill challenges get easier and easier as you go up in level.
Personally I use the following formula for skill challenges Moderate = 20+Level/2 and I pretty much just use Moderate or Hard and use Easy only for entertainment value.
Where an Easy skill challenge could be legitimately easy is when tailored for a specific group that has low skills or stats or where the skills pertinent are very few so the majority of the characters might end up with a 2 maybe 3 in a skill.
But typically challenges with diplomatic or intimidate both are going to be a bit of a cakewalk.
If you had a challenge with say only arcana, religion or history then the party could very well be in trouble.
D
That is the reason why i recommended to use the DC's of one or two rows below the partys level.
For a level 1 party this would be 8/14/19 which is pretty close to your suggestion of 10/15/20.
I agree as well, primary skills in a skill challenge should never be easy. I considered easy checks as automatic success when i did the math.
Further i pushed the DC of some levels up by default, 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th are up one DC. This fixed some of the problems with difficulty getting easier. They do get easier from time to time, but leave the players the joy of indeed feeling that they get better. Overall they are slowly getting harder whithout the big jumps.
Beyond that i did not want to rewrite the rules itself, i tried to make the best out of the given tables. I think it's possible to use them without having to completly rewrite them. I think the acceptance is better if i do not completly rewrite them.
Last but not least, don't tell the players, but they are supposed to win most of the encounters.
