Skill Challenge Structure and Scale

Is a skill challenge a multi-roll test to disarm a trap or work thorugh hazardoust terrain? Is it a large-scale story buliding tool? Can both be skill challenges?

In reading and thinking about skill challenge discussions on the main Wizards site (here and here) and in discussions on ENWorld (like here) it feels, to me, like we all have a good idea about what we're talking about, when we talk about skill challenges, but we're not always talking about the same thing, and part of the problem is that we don't necessarily have the same language to use to talk about them.

We have some terms already set for us -- primary and secondary skills, success and failures, DC, level and complexity of the challenge, etc. But it seems to me that we need a little bit more jargon to help talk about these sorts of challenges.

Also . . . and this will come up later . . . the key components of all skill challenges are choice and chance. A player makes a choice (what skill check to try, etc) and takes a chance at success (rolls the dice). Both are important -- without being able to make interesting choices, and without the chance for both success and failure, the skill challenge is a dud.

Scene and Story Challenges

The Skill Challenges presented in the DMG are primarily Scene challenges. They take a particular moment in the story of the game, and play it out with the structure of the skill challenge. The players need to negotiate with a brigand leader, disarm a complicated trap, or navigate through a treacherous swamp -- those are scenes, even if they take a bit longer than a single combat in game time (the swamp navigation, especially, might require hours).

The articles that Mike Mearls has been writing seem to be talking about a new scale of skill challenge. He recommends that we "start early" so that the challenge can be more flexible, and that makes a lot more possibilities open to the players. I'm calling those Story level challenges -- and they do seem to be very different animals than Scene level challenges. I like the idea that we can have a system that handles both, but it's probably useful to talk about them distinctly -- they do have some very different components and uses.

Another challenge when talking about skill challenges is that -- much more so than combat -- skill challenges depend very much on the skill level, experience level, and inclincations of the gaming group. That's most clear in the case of diplomatic challenges -- some groups like to have the exposed structure of the challenge, some like to just role play and let the DM tell them when to roll and hide all of the challenge structure in the roleplaying. That's a matter of style, taste and skill, and the system can handle both.

Scene Challenges

I'm not going to elaborate too much on scene challenges -- they are a fairly well-worn path. Scene challenges come up in places where many decisions about how to handle the situation are already made. Another way to think about Scene-level challenges is that they are tactical, not strategic. They represent the efforts the PCs make on a given path that has already been chosen, either by the adventure or the players themselves.

Scene Challenges:

• take place in rounds, minuntes and sometimes hours
• may engage part of the adventuring party -- the more involved the better, but in the case of some very specific challenges, it's possible to have a challenge that involves just one character (a rogue disarms a trap, etc)
• allow PCs to make tactical choices, like whether to bluff or intimidate, or whether to climb or jump, and which party member is best suited to make those checks
• run best when the PCs can clearly see and make choices about their tactical situation, much like combat. This means that the PCs need to know appropriate information about the tactical situation -- where they can hide, how hard it will be to climb the wall, a rough idea of an appropriate bribe, etc.

Story Challenges

A Story challenge is one that steps back a bit further and puts the more strategic possibilities in front of the players. They represent efforts the PCs make to solve a problem when a given solution to the problem has not been preselected. They represent the efforts the PCs make in a wide open field to find a way to solve a problem.

These sorts of challenges are very useful for someone running a home game, and far less useful for someone writing an adventure that will be played by many different groups of players -- for this reason, I expect that we won't see too many story-level skill challenges in RPGA adventures, Dungeon adventures, or print products. There's a continuum here, though, and it's possible to see examples of Story level challenges that could work in a print adventure -- but the more you extend the idea of "starting the challenge early" the more you make it hard to write the challenge for a generic audience.

Story Challenges:

• take place in weeks, days, and sometimes hours.
• should engage the entire adventuring party
• allow PCs to make strategic choices, like where best to use diplomacy (which contact might be the most help), who might respond to bribes or intimidate, or where taking alternative paths (like sewers or rooftops) might help the PCs reach their goal.
• run best when the PCs can clearly see and make choices about their strategic situation. They need to be able to draw on information from the campaign setting -- what they know about the world and how it works, and that means that the players need to be informed and invested in the game world. When a story challenge starts, the less the players know about the world they're playing in and how it works, the more the DM is going to have to spoon feed choices to them.

See? I said choice would come back! I'm actually going to devote another blog post to building choices, so if you're not bored, check back!

Anyway . . . This is all just some jargon and definitions that I'm using in my own head to try to understand what I'm creating for my players. The idea of the Scene and Story levels of skill challenges helps me understand and explain the way I think about some of the different types of challenges -- and talking about them in this way helps me identify some of the special opportunities inherent in the sorts of Story level challenges that are being proposed.

More soon, I'm sure . . .