Evolving Skill Challenges

If you've been suffering along with the blog posts I have been making lately, you know that I've been experimenting and playing around with skill challenges, and the way they work, especially responding to the way the designers are driving the evolution of skill challenges since the initial release of the game. Ideas about skill challenges have changed a lot since the game was first released, and it seems like they still have some room to grow.

In last week's D&D podcast and in the dragon article about skill challenges, the ideas and evolution took a little more form. I like the direction things are going in -- even when I think they're going in directions that I've argued against in the past, I can see the case they're making and I think they're right, in the long run. But there are still questions that I have, and clarifications that I would like to see.

1. Tell or Don't Tell?

This was addressed in a question in the podcast -- should you tell your PCs that they're in a skill challenge or not. The answer they gave was sort of the one I prefer -- that it depends upon the skill challenge -- but I think they could have put better emphasis in their answer on the idea of making a choice, and discussion the advantages of each option. Instead they talked about skill challenges that are just rolling dice and making checks as the lesser of the two options.

And, well, I can see plenty of opportunity for challenges that are primarily tactical -- making skill checks and using a very visible scaffolding to structure the challenge -- and see them as engaging moments in the game session. That's very, very different from the narrative style, story-driven skill challenge. But I don't think that it's necessarily any less interesting.

They also mentioned, in passing, the idea of grand-scale skill challenges -- challenges that have other encounters embedded within them. I think that's terrific, and I've been playing with similar ideas.

In past posts -- in the blog and in other forum discussions -- I've frequently asked or wondered what advantage there is to gain from having a skill challenge without showing the structure to the players. My point at the time was that the structure allows the players to react to the challenge as a game -- to use tactics and teamwork to beat the challenge, and without the structure being visible they don't have that available to them.

But my opinion is changing on that note; there are some pretty important advantages to the DM using the challenge structure even if he is not going to show the structure overtly to the players. The challenge structure gives a DM a template for building this sort of narrative element into his game -- and it gives the DM a structured way to reward the players for those sorts of encounters. So, I do want to back off on that criticism of the idea of not showing the structure to the players. I still think there are moments are reasons why you might want to show the structure to the players -- probably in much smaller scale challenges, challenges that are more about a tactical situation than a narrative one (you need to cross a chasm or pick a lock, not woo the princess or convince the crew to mutiny).

2. In narrative challenges, how do you handle including everyone? How do you adjust for rampant assists?

One of the things that I liked about the initial incarnation of skill challenges was that in most cases the DCs were high enough that it took the entire party to succeed -- in most cases you needed to have half or slightly more than half of the party providing assists checks just to get enough. And the challenges were handled in a sort of round format, with the DM making sure everyone was contributing something to the challenge. There were problems, however -- some PCs were just not suited for some challenges and if the were not given a way to try not to hurt the party's chances of success by staying in the background the challenge would be doomed to failure.

The update that revised the DCs and failures changed that landscape a great deal -- now there is no reason for assisting, since the DCs are by and large 8 or 10 lower than the original ones were. Skill challenges have gone from moments that require teamwork and planning to complete successfully -- and that are achievements during the game -- to moments in the game that are just about as much a guaranteed success as combat is.

Now, the only way to challenge the party is to create a sitation where the party members cannot assist each other. That seems to run counter to the ideas that are so built into the rest of the game -- the party that works together and supports each other will be able to defeat combat encounters that are far too tough if they don't.

In my own opinion, assists should -- at least some of the time -- be a part of the structure of the challenge. My recommendation would be to make all checks that are made to assist "medium" or "hard" checks (using the medium or high DC) rather than a simple 10. After a certain point, if the assist check DC does not go up, it becomes an automatic +2.

I would probably also add +1 to the DC for every PC that can potentially assist. So, to push down the door, you can have one PC make the check and two others assist, the DC should be set at +2.

In the more narrative challenges -- in which the PCs are inventing their own solutions to challenges, writing their own story as they go, and things are much more unstrucutred and open, it seems like it's much more difficult to give every party member something to do in the challenge. In a more "tactical" challenge, it's easy to work around the table and figure out what everyone is doing, but when you start buliding challenges in which each check represents a stage in the challenge, it starts to move completely away from giving everyone something to do. The only potential way to try to achieve the same indended inclusiveness of the challenge is to try to write it so that there are stages in the challenge that other PCs can be good at.

So, if the challenge is about trying to navigate through a haunted forest, and each success creates a new situation for the PCs to respond to, the challenge will be to build stages at which the PCs discover something or open up an option that involves a new skill that will include another player. So, the initial nature check to find the path might lead the party to a ruin that would open up a history check that might open up a dungeoneering check that might open up a stealth check . . . and so on. I'm not sure I am totally comfortable with that idea -- I'm going to be very interested to see if these values that seemed so important to the initial skill challenge design just end up discard on the side of the road.

3. Why are we still calling these skill challenges?

Even though the primary tool players use to handle these moments in the game will be skills, those will not be the only thing they use, and calling them Skill Challenges is conceptually limiting.

I think we can create a much more interesting tool if we talk about "Challenges" -- a sort of umbrella term that brings with it the basic structure (DCs, successes vs failuers, etc). Then we can start talking about challenge types:

Skill Challenge -- the more tactical, smaller scale challenges
Narrative Challenge -- the more grand-scale, story-driven challenges

and perhaps some others, like . . .

Combat Challenge -- unlike combat encounters, a combat challenge is a challenge that can be completed using combat skills (think of an archery tournament or a jousting match).
Meta Challenge -- a challenge that does not actually include any individual checks of it's own -- successes and failures are earned by completing other encounters and challenges.

And so on.