skill challenge set up

[cstyln]

Just wondering how other dm's set up their skill challenges. Do you come out and tell your players that it is indeed a skill challenge? Do you give them hints, or do you let them figure it out for themselves?

I threw some high lvl npc's in the path of my players and it was supposed to be a SC but it didnt go well and my players decided that they could take them. Needless to say it went bad for them and i had to intervene with a hunting party showing up to chase off the higher level npc's.

I dont want to cheese it up by saying "this is a SC btw" but at the same time how do I let them know they might not wanna fight everything they come across.

[FrozenChrono]

Skill challenges work best when there's a clear objective the party desires and a clear obstacle to overcome. If the obstacle is potential enemy's many parties will default to killing them.

Your best bet are things they can't fight like

Escape: Running away from flooding river, finding a way out of a hazardous maze, climb down from a burning building.

Rescue: Drag people out of burning building, stop damn from collapsing, convince king to help rebuild/feed a village.

As far as cheesing it up goes, your players know when you are entering combat right? Do you ever say "this is a combat?" No, you say "arrow wiz by your head," or "a fireball ignites in the middle of your group."

If you simply describe the situation, "there's a high cliff that extends for miles in each direction. You think you will lose a lot of time if you run around the side, but if you climb up it you might be able to chase the dragon faster. You know this dragon makes slaves of it's captives after a day or so and they will fight against you after that. Time is clearly of the essence."

"To get to the top you can use perception, dungeoneering, and nature to find the best route up and avoid obstacles, endurance to keep holding on the whole way, acrobatics if you want to use some of the hanging vines to swing up in places, and athletics. "

It also helps to explain how you will run skill challenges before your game so that your players know they will happen and how best to interact with the challenges they face. They spend a lot of time learning about how to use their characters in combat, but rarely is much time spent learning how to use actions or skills for a skill challenge. Many players may not know that you need a certain amount of successes before failures (you should be letting them know when they get each of these). It's worth talking over.

[Camelot]

I agree, you don't need to come out and say THIS IS A SKILL CHALLENGE unless you're new to 4e and they have no idea what a skill challenge is.

However, I would like to add that in a social situation with potential enemies, you should make it clear that the NPCs are way too hard to fight.

Then what I do is let the players know what primary skills are useful, like "Maybe you could talk them into letting you past, or bluff about your purpose." Let them figure out which secondary skills are useful. I call secondary skills the ones that don't grant successes or failures, but that do give some bonus or penalty to other skills, like perhaps insight or history in this case. You could tell what their intent is to help your lies seem truthful, or by remembering a fact about these particular travellers, you can know how to talk their 'language.'

If the players shout out attacks before you finish, just say "Hold on a minute," and finish describing the circumstances, because the PCs would notice this before getting the chance to attack. If the player's still attack, well, then they deserve to get their rear ends served to them on a silver platter. But always provide a means for escape, such as the hunting party or a simple retreat. I would imagine that such NPCs would see the PCs running and not follow, just shouting taunts and laughing at them.

[FrozenChrono]

If you're looking for ways to show that opponents are way more powerful than the players here's something that happened to a party of mine.

Our party had accidentally entered some kind of fey circle. My GM said we heard giggling and could see shapes darting from boulder to tree around us (we were in the middle of the forest). They told us to wait there for the Grueselug, then shot a bunch of small darts at us each of which skimmed the players narrowly missing clearly on purpose. My character still tried to leave the circle and in the round I tried to move out I got shot for over half my hp. I still couldn't see my attackers and the GM made it clear that only a few darts were shot compared to before. Needless to say I turned around and walked back quietly then sat down and waited for the big G.

Rewarding players after these challenges with treasure or gold is also a good way to reinforce that doing skill challenges is a good thing.

[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.