Forum

[Rel]

Originally Posted by vagabundo

Nice session, congrats!!

I was wondering if you had any more info about the skill challenge, from the summary it sounds like it is ongoing.

The Skill Challenge is over at this point. The party wanted to find a way through the mines and "up". Even though they are not all the way at the surface they have certainly gone up and there looks to be only one direction to proceed at this point. So mission accomplished.

Were there more checks than was mentioned in the summary (I counted two)?

Yes. There were several other Dungeoneering rolls and also an Athletics roll by Eshik the Ranger who was climbing up to the top of the passageway to look for vents or fissures that might lead to the surface. He didn't find any but he did detect a very faint breeze heading in one direction which they interpreted to mean that there must be an exit that way.

Did you tell your players it was a skill challenge (and did they care; I mean did it make a difference in how the acted)?

Yes I did. I don't perceive any real difference in how they act when I tell them there is a skill challenge. But I have helped them understand that it's just a slightly more formalized method of task resolution than we're used to.
My view of what skill challenges are really good at is the players identifying a desired outcome and, by virtue of their successes or failures, allowing me to provide some exposition between each roll that gets them closer to or further from the desired outcome. This is instead of narrating each and every step of the process.

These mines are a good example. This is a fairly huge complex of mines that were dug over the course of hundreds of years. One way of resolving how they might get "up and out" would be to describe (or, God forbid, draw) the pathway the PC's are taking. Each time they got to an intersection I could have them make a skill check of some sort to try and determine the best way to go to get out. The problem of course is that this isn't very interesting all by itself and it would take a lot of time. So by using the abstraction of the skill challenge I'm able to break this off into specific chunks. In this case the chunks went (more or less) like this:

Dungeoneering Check - Failed - Dead End + Combat Encounter (with no treasure!)
Religion Check - Success - Found ancient carvings containing a religious reference
Dungeoneering Check - Success - Proceed further along the right track
Athletics Check - Success - Pointed in the right direction again + Combat Encounter
Dungeoneering Check - Success - Proceed further along the right track and arrive in elevator room

Hopefully that makes sense.

I'm haven't had many opportunities to run skill challenges as my players have been stuck down in the dungeons of KotS for the past 6-8 months <sigh>!!

I would encourage you to look for ways to incorporate skill checks (if not skill challenges) into your combats because I think it breaks up some of the "business as usual" tactics. I've had two fights now where some sort of skill roll or attribute check was necessary in the course of the fight and it made those fights much more interesting.