Stalker0's Obsidian Skill Challenge System (NEW VERSION: 1.2!!!)

I just stumbled on Obsidian researching how to use the original skill challenge system and think it's really cool. With the original system I had many difficulties. It focuses on skills used not on actions or intentions. You think out uses for some skills, but the characters will never do what you thought of but something totally different. It's just more of the old gm expectations vs. players actions that every gm did try to avoid as much as possible. And the old system did lack any temptation for each character to act. If they didn't want to the system was broken. This also got a heavy mechanical and meta-gamey impact, which somehow ruined play.

Obsidian solves both of it very well, by asking players what their characters will do and THEN choosing skills. And it tempts players to role, because it can never ruin anything. That's pretty awesome. What I'm still unsure about is the aid another option. Does that count as a success? And does it apply a bonus to the other characters role as well? Is it a roll against the Obsidian-DC or against the usual 10?

I wish WotC would have thought more like [MENTION=5889]Stalker0[/MENTION] when they designed their system. I never got at least a little comfortable with it. Neither using those challenges in WotC-adventures nor by designing my own. It always has a strange "wanna be immersive but am f**king mechanical meta-gamey" feel to it.

The aid another is against the standard Obsideon DC and counts as a success if they make it. The aid other doesn't add a bonus to the aided characters check... unless the dm decides that the roleplaying/description warrants adding a bonus.

Essentially, the aid other is one of those metagamey/anti-immersive bits that is done away with!

And I agree, WoTC should pay Stalker0 tons of money and use his system

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Its highly dependent on style of play and what you are doing. I've run a lot of SCs, many with Obsidian and many with the standard SC system. They both work fine, but I find the standard system is actually more flexible and generally you can achieve the same things with it that you can with Obsidian. It is mostly a matter of how you organize your approach to building the SC.

The intent with SCs was never, AFAICT, to try to restrict you to specific skills or make it a numbers game where a player would do nothing but AA. Remember, they have to actually interact with the narrative. The SC rules don't suspend 'reality', the PCs actions have to make sense within the game. Most of the early SC examples used in DMG1 (and some of the DMG2 ones as well) were not all that well thought out or very illustrative of how the system should really be used.

Where Obsidian is useful is if you have a challenge that is 'all in' and very linear. In that case the standard system as written isn't great, though you can definitely tweak it. Obsidian is just a pretty decent tweak for that situation. Overall it is a great thing to study because it can show you some different ways to use SCs. It definitely isn't a panacea or superior to what WotC did, just different and a bit more narrow in its applicability.

Nytmare said:

So what do the updated DCs per level guidelines do to the Obsidian numbers?

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Missed this one a while back...
I still use the Obsideon DCs as written, but the new DCs could be drppoed into place without any fuss.



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Primitive Screwhead said:

The aid another is against the standard Obsideon DC and counts as a success if they make it. The aid other doesn't add a bonus to the aided characters check... unless the dm decides that the roleplaying/description warrants adding a bonus.

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Did I understand correctly that you meant to give the roleplaying bonus to the aided character? Or to the aiding character? Nevertheless, giving the bonus to the aided character sound like an interesting idea to me. Depending on the aiding character's player's choice though. It would emphasize the aspect of aiding instead of just generating success (which helps the group rather than then character).

AbdulAlhazred said:

Its highly dependent on style of play and what you are doing. I've run a lot of SCs, many with Obsidian and many with the standard SC system. They both work fine, but I find the standard system is actually more flexible and generally you can achieve the same things with it that you can with Obsidian. It is mostly a matter of how you organize your approach to building the SC.

The intent with SCs was never, AFAICT, to try to restrict you to specific skills or make it a numbers game where a player would do nothing but AA. Remember, they have to actually interact with the narrative. The SC rules don't suspend 'reality', the PCs actions have to make sense within the game. Most of the early SC examples used in DMG1 (and some of the DMG2 ones as well) were not all that well thought out or very illustrative of how the system should really be used.

Where Obsidian is useful is if you have a challenge that is 'all in' and very linear. In that case the standard system as written isn't great, though you can definitely tweak it. Obsidian is just a pretty decent tweak for that situation. Overall it is a great thing to study because it can show you some different ways to use SCs. It definitely isn't a panacea or superior to what WotC did, just different and a bit more narrow in its applicability.

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Seems like we have just the opposite point of view. I found the WotC SC rather more linear. It's not that you can't be flexible, but with thinking in advance about what skills are appropriate you have a limited set of options. Surely nobody will stop you from allowing other skills ingame, if the players have good ideas. The method of this rules is first to think about a limited set of options and later on maybe expanding that. Obsidian starts with the ideas of the players and afterwards thinks about what skill is matching. Surely it does say you should not allow certain skills for certain types of SC more than once per player and challenge. But that can very easily be ignored, if you like to.

I don't wanna say that you are incorrect. In fact you are more than accurate in saying that is depends on play styles. But I don't seem to get your point. Why should the WotC variant be more flexible if it starts with restrictions and Obsidian starts with openness? But maybe I'm just overlooking something.

TheClone said:

Did I understand correctly that you meant to give the roleplaying bonus to the aided character? Or to the aiding character? Nevertheless, giving the bonus to the aided character sound like an interesting idea to me. Depending on the aiding character's player's choice though. It would emphasize the aspect of aiding instead of just generating success (which helps the group rather than then character).

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I think what wasn't said was that the standard SC system does require characters to narratively justify their actions, which includes AA presumably. There's been a meme floating around that the system has a 'flaw' in which all but the best skill bonus character can just AA the lead guy through the whole challenge. At best this was rather overstated, though I don't recall Stalker0 saying that.

Seems like we have just the opposite point of view. I found the WotC SC rather more linear. It's not that you can't be flexible, but with thinking in advance about what skills are appropriate you have a limited set of options. Surely nobody will stop you from allowing other skills ingame, if the players have good ideas. The method of this rules is first to think about a limited set of options and later on maybe expanding that. Obsidian starts with the ideas of the players and afterwards thinks about what skill is matching. Surely it does say you should not allow certain skills for certain types of SC more than once per player and challenge. But that can very easily be ignored, if you like to.

I don't wanna say that you are incorrect. In fact you are more than accurate in saying that is depends on play styles. But I don't seem to get your point. Why should the WotC variant be more flexible if it starts with restrictions and Obsidian starts with openness? But maybe I'm just overlooking something.

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I thought actually that Obsidian started out with a more fixed set of ground rules than the standard system. Challenges are always divided into 3 parts, lead skill, etc. Mostly it can naturally map well to a nice dramatic structure, but it isn't as easy to graft other mechanics onto it. An example would be the "Suderham" SC example in DMG2, which I think would be more difficult to pull off.

Frankly I've come to see the "describe what various skills do" aspect of EITHER type of SC as much more of a "hey DM, think of some of the creative things your players may do ahead of time so you can work out what might happen" kind of thing than an attempt to specify any kind of exclusive list of possible solutions. Obsidian effectively does the same thing in any case, both were written with lists of skills. My conclusion has been that the better approach would be to list resources, decision points, rewards, and obstacles. When you do it that way the more structured Obsidian framework can tend to get in the way somewhat. I think I just sort of evolved a style that didn't require that structure anymore. It did work well for several challenges and it is good to keep the concepts it uses in mind. There might be a next generation system which steals a bit from both hiding in there somewhere.

AbdulAlhazred said:

I think what wasn't said was that the standard SC system does require characters to narratively justify their actions, which includes AA presumably. There's been a meme floating around that the system has a 'flaw' in which all but the best skill bonus character can just AA the lead guy through the whole challenge. At best this was rather overstated, though I don't recall Stalker0 saying that.

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I depends a little, but it's possible, if the DM allows it. It's part of the thing that doing nothing (usefull) or supporting other helps more since you avoid a failure and mostly have no time pressure for gathering the required successes. But surely you can circumvent that with a little creativity. But have to do that, it does not come automatically.

AbdulAlhazred said:

I thought actually that Obsidian started out with a more fixed set of ground rules than the standard system. Challenges are always divided into 3 parts, lead skill, etc. Mostly it can naturally map well to a nice dramatic structure, but it isn't as easy to graft other mechanics onto it. An example would be the "Suderham" SC example in DMG2, which I think would be more difficult to pull off.

Frankly I've come to see the "describe what various skills do" aspect of EITHER type of SC as much more of a "hey DM, think of some of the creative things your players may do ahead of time so you can work out what might happen" kind of thing than an attempt to specify any kind of exclusive list of possible solutions. Obsidian effectively does the same thing in any case, both were written with lists of skills. My conclusion has been that the better approach would be to list resources, decision points, rewards, and obstacles. When you do it that way the more structured Obsidian framework can tend to get in the way somewhat. I think I just sort of evolved a style that didn't require that structure anymore. It did work well for several challenges and it is good to keep the concepts it uses in mind. There might be a next generation system which steals a bit from both hiding in there somewhere.

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Okay, I viewed it from a more ingame point of view, not from a mechanic point of view. Your needs surely go beyond both systems, but maybe are too lose for any system? But I think I could use such a system for my challenges, too. For now I find Obsidian to be the best system. But let's see what creative gamer's minds will bring up next

Yeah, I hope some even more interesting systems come up. Where I think Obsidian is really nice is where you have say a chase type scene. It is an 'all in' kind of challenge, the whole party is going to be hauling butt, which lends itself nicely to the "you must all roll a check" type mechanic. It may not make as much sense when you are say negotiating with someone, the barbarian would really rather just shut up. In Obsidian he can't really do that. It is nice if it is a long significant scene, everyone should be able to get involved, but OTOH if the SC is more tactical then the standard ones work well.

And yeah, I have needs I kind of think it might be good to have a couple of systems for different specific purposes.

I use a variant of Obsideon in which the 'prefered' skills are at the normal DC and 'odd use' skills are at the DC +5...with the DC increasing for multiple use of non-preferred skill check {ie, knowledge check in a physical challenge}

The other thing I do is require the player to describe the action, and I set the skill and DC based on this.

I also allow players to 'bow out' and not participate.. but I encourage them to join. That barbarian might be able to help the negotiation by standing there looking impressively strong {intimidate}... there is always something they can do.

I don't plan out skill uses in advance, and often run the SC of the cuff. I do try to set up key items to 'unlock' based on a given skill check.

In short..love Obsideon, even for non-linear challenges!

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I've been off the boards for a very long time, so its heart-warming to see that this system is still seeing good use for people.

I hear people clamoring for the next revolution in skill challenges. I probably won't be the one to build it (though you never know), but if I was going to....


In my own experience with skill challenges, I found over time that I use them less and less. What I discovered for my game is that 9 times out of the 10, the things I was using them for was better resolved with a few skill rolls and roleplaying. HOWEVER, there were a few instances that I found skill challenges to be very useful and superior to basic skill rolls.

There are two instances off the top of my head: Chase scenes and rogue scouting.


Its one of the cliches of dnd. Your party gets to a dungeon, and the stealthy rogue wants to scout ahead. What does he find, does he hit a trap, does he get detected, does a fight break out?

With scouting, though the circumstances change, its literally the same series of questions over and over again, and for a party with a rogue it can be a very common occurrence.

What I would love to see is a scouting skill challenge. Not a general framework like Obsidian or the core system tweaked for scouting....but a system built from the ground up to handle the scouting subset of a DND dungeon crawl. If such a system was clean, quick, and useful.....I would consider it a major jump forward in the core rules.

The same could be done for chase scenes, and other very specific cliches of dnd that come up a lot.

I think 2-3 of these "skill challenge toolboxes" could ultimately provide 90% of what skill challenges were originally designed to provide without all of the ambiguity and clutter that come with them.


EDIT: I saw some questions about Aid Another, so might as well answer them while I'm here. In Obsidian, Aid Another doesn't exist as a mechanic. It is simply a way of describing your action for that round of a skill challenge, and produces a skill roll just like any other action would. Whether you are giving an inspiring speech to the duke or slipping him some "special drink" to aid your friend's speech....you are ultimately contributing to the success of the challenge.