Skill Challenges

Ok, I will admit, that I have more than a casual affection for skill challenges in this game. I've been playing for years with characters backgrounds, the stories that surround the characters, the stories that unite the party, and the revealing of information that ties together and interesting and compelling story arc, and ultimately, campaign.

In my opinion, what they've done with skill challenges, is provide a basis from which to build a simple and elegant system to tie these stories together, to move them forward, to reveal information within the "context" of the game, and with legitimate "positive and negative" consequences. This is really, really terrific, and I've enjoyed them tremendously thus far.

An example of a skill challenge I ran in our first story, was that the characters were trying to locate an ally who was taken captive by kobolds, most likely taken to their lair. The party was at a point that they decided they wanted to try to find him. I indicated to them, formally, this would be a "Complexity 1" skill challenge, and I encouraged them to be creative in determining ways to tell the story of how they may have found this NPC. At each step in the process, there were positive and negative consequences. Ultimately, the skill challenge success would lead them to the correct Kobold lair. Failure would lead them to the Keep of Nerath (Keep on the Shadowfell), which had encounters, but they would have grown too difficult very fast for a 1st level party. It creates a much more "real" storytelling aspect, and I look forward to following the story as people do fail, and the individuals and parties react to the consequences and continue to build the story.

Another example of this came from one of the character's backgrounds. He is creating a "Robin Hood" situation for himself, in which he is robbing from the rich to give to the poor in Loudwater. He is busy building his own network that will support him in this endeavor. I am treating this as a Complexity 4, Level 4 challenge (when I anticipate he will complete it), and I'm really looking forward to the different stories that could arise from his success or failure.

The beauty of the skill challenge is that it relinquishes some of the power and control from the DM's hands when it comes to relating the story of the world, backgrounds, and party interaction and places it squarely into the hands of the players. Further, it is terrific fun for improvisational interactions and provides interesting twists to the developing stories that surround a fun game.