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[babinro]

My skill challenges are pretty basic since its relatively new for most of the players I play with these days.

I like to use them as a means of gathering information/getting from point A to B.

For example, I will setup a basic quest: There is a plant whose healing properties are required to remove a curse from the king. It is located deep within the forests, however the exact location is unknown.

If the party doesn't pick up on it right away, I would then have to prompt that this is a skill challenge and that they can utilize their skills in order to retrieve this object at its unknown location in the most expedient way possible before the king is killed via the curse.

This would hopefully prompt players for things like knowledge history checks to find out information on the plant. Knowledge nature checks to help find typical locations. Acrobatics/Athletics checks to speed up passage through the forest, etc.

Failing a check would often have a penalty such as they stumble in the woods making enough noise to attract the following animals (encounter). Or their research on the matter yields no helpful information, if they do not hurry, the king may not survive the night (placing the pressure to hurry and possibly go through more encounters than they would like without healing properly in order to accomplish the goal).

Failing the overall challenge could kill the king and possibly cause those in the city to turn against you if the story would allow for such things. If he were vital to the story he would still survive but his means or reward would pale in comparison to the successful skill challenge. For example he may reward the party with only gold on a failed skill challenge...rather than with gold and multiple magic items from his treasury for the success.

So I guess you could say, until the players become comfortable enough with my DM style, the inclusion of skill challenges would have to actually be announced. Ideally after a couple of them people would realize they don't have enough information to accomplish something and thus should utilize their skills in order to reach their goal. Ideally, this could easily lead into unplanned skill challenges (IE: the PC wants to find their long lost brother all of a sudden), which I would be perfectly content with.