Skill Challenge Reboot: Mearls Strikes Again!

Reading the most recent article in Mike Mearls' skill challenge series, I got excited. Once again, the ideas and mechanics in his dramatically different variation on skill challenges shook up everything I was thinking and I went back to the drawing board for this week's game session.

If you have not read the article (and you should), his article details a skill challenge that does not have a "number of successes before a number of failures" mechanic to it at all. Instead, he has used pieces of the core skill challenge mechanic, added some new ideas, and come up with a rich gaming experience that looks very different from the skill challenges we have been playing with.

The two important variations I'm seeing are these:

1. Party skill checks. Rather than track specific successes and failures, everyone in the party makes a skill check. If the party gets more successes than failures, they get a success in the skill challenge.

2. In this challenge, successes mean no change in status, but failures in those skill checks add a failure to an ongoing condition track that measures the ongoing effects of the party's bumbling. In this specific case, since the PCs are trying to move discretely through a hostile city, each failure makes the city's defenses more and more alert to their presence and makes it harder and harder for them to operate.

Those are pretty significant changes, but what's even more exciting is the idea that even the bedrock mechanics of skill challenges can be adapted to fit your specific needs. I mean, a skill challenge that doesn't track successes? If you can do that, and it's still a skill challenge, what CAN'T you do?

###

So, given that, I sent out to rewrite the skill challenge I had planned for my group this weekend. Here's their situation. They are in a major city where the are minor heroes. They have been asked by the Duke to go out among the people during a week-long festival and to be visible, heroic, and to counter the public opinion that is being generated by the pretender prince who is in the city with his army of knights, who are trying to convince the people that the city needs their help to protect them from a looming goblin threat. The Duke fears that if he takes this prince's help he will be tied in fealty to a man he is not sure he wants to serve. All of this takes place during a street festival that is inspired by Mardi Gras.

So, I created five different quarters of the city, described the, the people who live and work there, and how they party during the festival. The idea was that the PCs would move through the city over the course of the day in four phases -- at the end of the day, if the PCs had a majority of successes in a majority of the phases (sort of electoral college style), they would earn a victory in the skill challenge. Each quarter of the city had a risk of some sort associated with it -- something that might happen while the PCs were there (for example, in the big marketplace, the risk was a pickpocket, who made an attack on the PCs' reflex defense and if it succeeded the PC lost 5gp). I also details some specific RP events that would take place in each quarter -- things that would move elements of the game's plot forward one way or the other without being a direct part of the skill challenge. This included things like spotting a Fagan-type trainer of cutpurses and finding a quiet courtyard where a couple dozen of the Prince's knights were practicing (which gave the PCs present the opportunity to earn a reroll they could use in the future in a fight with one of those knights -- to represent having studied their tactics and being able to anticipate them).

Then I took my list of skills that the PCs could reasonably use to try to win the hearts and minds of the people in the city away from the prince and his army of knights, and set DCs for them based on the quarter (following Mearls' example on this)

I decided that the day would play out in four phases of about 2 hours each. In each phase, if the PCs were not in a quarter of the city, the Prince's men in that area would earn a success for their side in the contest to win the hears and minds of the city. Each of the PCs could make a check in the quarter they were in to try to earn a success there.

How did it play out?

Pretty well -- not perfect, but pretty well. Over the course of the day, they figured out that they needed to be in many places at once to stop the knights from winning successes. They decided to save the Dockside quarter -- a part of the city they already had a following and had won successes in the meta-challenge earlier in the week -- for the last phase of the day. But by the time they got to the last phase, they realized they were in a situation where they had made tenuous gains in other parts of the city, and the only way to win the overall challenge was to stay in those parts of the city and not allow the Prince's knights to have the last word. So they had to stay away from the end of the day party with friends in the dockside quarter and to spread themselves pretty thin across the city (and splitting up the party is scary enough for a group of veteran players).

What we came away with was a skill challenge that, including all the ancillary RP stuff that I mixed in, gave the PCs some tough decisions to make, taught them a lot about the city they're in, gave them relationships with some new contacts, and that has set the scene for a lot of fun to come. We played it out in a 3.5 hour session, in which they avoided any combat they might have gotten in to, but still had some good RP fun, had to make some tough, dramatic choices, and even better, the challenge has helped me develop setting and world details that would have had to be boring exposition otherwise.

I had hopes for trying to keep the skill challenge out of the player's line of sight, but there wasn't a good way to do that, IMO. To create the drama of the mounting successes for the other guys in other parts of the city, I needed to show the party some sort of indication of those successes. I could have held that back completely, but in our particular case the players would have lost the challenge and not had the tough choice to make to give up on partying with their friends back at the docks, because they would not have been able to see the strategic situation. And I could have couched the relative success that the knights and the party were having in the different sections of the city in description, rather than using a game mechanic like successes, but that would have added the wrong sort of description and detail to the game, I felt. I needed the visible scaffolding of the challenge to help the players see what was at stake and to help them see it in a strategic way.

In the end, I was pretty happy with the results, although I don't think I want to try to run challenges like this one too often. For one thing, it takes a LOT of work -- far more work than preparing a couple of combat encounters would have taken. I spent several evenings this week scribbling like mad in my game journal trying to come up with enough ideas and events for the PCs to interact with over the course of the day. The work paid off, and we had a good session, but it did take longer. Look at the example challenge in Mearls' article -- that's pages and pages, where one of the more traditional skill challenges in one of the print adventures takes perhaps half a page. I think the work is worth it.