D&D 5E Skill Challenges in 5e

[OptionalRule]

There's been a good amount of discussion about Skill Challenges in my feed lately. It tends to degrade into an argument about 4e that misses the point but I think pedantic arguments about implementation aside, there's a lot added to a game that uses skills in an interesting way that builds tension. So I wrote a thing. I hope you get some use out of it.

Skill Challenges in 5e

What techniques or methods do you use in your 5e game that make skills and non-combat challenges more interesting?

 

[Oofta]

Sometimes I'll just have the players resolve challenges through the actions of their PCs, no rolls needed, other times it will be a series of checks.

The actual mechanics vary but there are some things I try to keep in mind

• What the PCs do and the content of what they say matters. I don't expect players to have silver tongues just because their PCs do.
• Vary the skills; I like to keep a "cheat sheet" handy with a list of who's good at what just so I remember to switch it up now and then.
• Allow a variety of skills to overcome obstacles, just because I only thought of using an athletics check to open the portcullis, perhaps a player wants to use some skill from their carpenter background to use a fulcrum.
• Actions and checks have consequences; even if I have a 6 step process in mind, if the players do something cool, maybe they can resolve it in 2. Or maybe things just go wrong and it takes 8. In part this is result of degree of success and failure but also having the actions and words of the PCs should matter.

One more thing (and for some reason this is controversial) is that sometimes I will allow a check even if I know it will never fail or succeed as an exception to the rule. I do this because I may not to give the player knowledge they should not have. If the person they're questioning is telling the truth but an insight would be called for I allow it.

 

[DND_Reborn]

The biggest thing IMO is to actually call for a roll. Without a roll, no tension... And a lot of people seem to want to play 5E without asking for skill checks. It might not be "interesting", but it makes it actually a challenge.

When it comes to exploration and social challenges, removing the roll basically just makes it story-telling. Yet more people want ways to make these things challenging... shrug

 

[Rune]

The important thing to remember about ability checks (and sequences thereof) is that the stakes are what matter most. If those aren’t clear and significant (and interesting), then the challenge isn’t going to be interesting (or worth wasting time on), no matter the mechanics used.

Of course, the fix for that isn’t to just not do it; the fix is to introduce meaningful stakes when they are lacking.

If the DM is having trouble coming up with interesting stakes consistently, one thing that might help would be to pay attention to what the players make preparations against.

The things they are anxious about will always make compelling stakes. But not too often, of course – otherwise it becomes a grind!

On the other hand, if they never make preparations, that probably means they don’t have any anxieties (or they don’t feel preparations can meaningfully affect things – which is a separate problem entirely). In which case, it’s time to shake things up and introduce something to be anxious about.

 

[jgsugden]

4E wrote mechanics for things that many DMs had been doing for a long time - requiring PCs to make rolls to do things where there was a chance of failure. All Skill Challenges did was group them together and provide a group mechanic.

I felt like the sin of 4E Skill Challenges were encouraging overcomplication of simple situations. I saw skill challenges being used where the structure of the challenge was more important than the story being told. The DMs set up a skill challenge, a player/PC came up with a solution that negated the concern, and the DM did mental gymnastics to stop that very clear solution from solving the entire challenge, because he'd planned for 7 successes before 3 failure.

Your approach is in the direction I went, but I take it farther and just say: There is no such thing as a skill check. There is just a situation that might be addressed by ability checks, spells, or other things. I give them the situation and see how they approach it. That might take several skill checks, where some failing may be disastrous, and others might just cause a setback, they might bewitch someone and end it, they might just fly past the challenge.

I think looking at Skill Challenges is a great thing for breaking down how encounters may be constructed, but once you understand it, being bound by the rigidity, even when simplified, of a Skill Challenge detracts from immersion.

That being said, I do still use them, on occasion - but only when lowering immersion doesn't bother me. That is generally going to be 'montage' moments where we don't want to role play the details, and the ramifications of success and failure have only short term impacts on the game. For example, rather than walking through how the PCs explore a carnival and all the games there, we may do a skill challenge to see how they did at the games while trying to gather information on where they can buy magic items.

 

[Charlaquin]

I didn’t really like skill challenges during 4e, but that’s because I didn’t understand how to run them properly. By the time I had been shown how to use them in a way that worked and felt organic, the 5e playtest was happening and I was ready to move on from 4e.

I do think 5e could do with a skill challenge like system for non-combat encounters, but I’m not so sure that skill challenges as they appeared in 4e are the right solution to fill that need. Skill challenges work best under the 4e action resolution paradigm where players suggest what skills they would like to use, and the DM says yes unless they have a compelling reason not to. Under the 5e action resolution paradigm where the player describes their action in terms of the fiction and the DM calls for a check if they determine it’s necessary to resolve uncertainty in the outcome of the action, I’m not sure skill challenges would work as well.

Personally, I use the angry GM’s tension pool mechanic in place of skill challenges in 5e. Time-consuming actions add a d6 to the tension pool, noisy or otherwise risky actions trigger a roll of all the dice currently in the tension pool. When a sixth die is added to the tension pool, all six are rolled and then removed from the tension pool. If any tension dice come up a 1, a complication occurs.

I’ve found this to serve a similar role to skill challenges as a pacing mechanic, but makes the dramatic tension feel like an emergent result of the player’s actions, rather than a property of an artificial encounter structure, and fits much better with the 5e design paradigm. YMMV.

 

[OptionalRule]

4E wrote mechanics for things that many DMs had been doing for a long time - requiring PCs to make rolls to do things where there was a chance of failure. All Skill Challenges did was group them together and provide a group mechanic.

I felt like the sin of 4E Skill Challenges were encouraging overcomplication of simple situations. I saw skill challenges being used where the structure of the challenge was more important than the story being told. The DMs set up a skill challenge, a player/PC came up with a solution that negated the concern, and the DM did mental gymnastics to stop that very clear solution from solving the entire challenge, because he'd planned for 7 successes before 3 failure.

Your approach is in the direction I went, but I take it farther and just say: There is no such thing as a skill check. There is just a situation that might be addressed by ability checks, spells, or other things. I give them the situation and see how they approach it. That might take several skill checks, where some failing may be disastrous, and others might just cause a setback, they might bewitch someone and end it, they might just fly past the challenge.

I think looking at Skill Challenges is a great thing for breaking down how encounters may be constructed, but once you understand it, being bound by the rigidity, even when simplified, of a Skill Challenge detracts from immersion.

That being said, I do still use them, on occasion - but only when lowering immersion doesn't bother me. That is generally going to be 'montage' moments where we don't want to role play the details, and the ramifications of success and failure have only short term impacts on the game. For example, rather than walking through how the PCs explore a carnival and all the games there, we may do a skill challenge to see how they did at the games while trying to gather information on where they can buy magic items.

I agree people took it like that, and I think 4e skill challenges feeling like canned video game dialog made that whole "this feels like an MMO" criticism worse. I still feel the 4e creators caught more flack for that then they deserved. I think they were just trying to provide a structure if you didn't have another idea or the concept was new. I feel like they intended for us to run with it on our own. Obviously I can't prove anyone's intention but that's how I took it. Then again, I've always assumed it's my game to do with as I will regardless of what any book says.

 

[Charlaquin]

I agree people took it like that, and I think 4e skill challenges feeling like canned video game dialog made that whole "this feels like an MMO" criticism worse. I still feel the 4e creators caught more flack for that then they deserved. I think they were just trying to provide a structure if you didn't have another idea or the concept was new. I feel like they intended for us to run with it on our own. Obviously I can't prove anyone's intention but that's how I took it. Then again, I've always assumed it's my game to do with as I will regardless of what any book says.

I agree with you that skill challenges were probably meant to be a way to teach new DMs a skill that came naturally to long-time DMs. I suspect they were also trying to formalize the way such complex challenges were run. Mike Mearls has talked before about how WotC tried with 3e and 4e to standardize the experience of playing D&D from table to table (though the two editions went about it in different ways), whereas with 5e they made the decision to give up on that goal and embrace the uniqueness of each individual table as a strength of D&D rather than a weakness.

 

[jayoungr]

I tried out skill challenges on my players, who were coming straight from 3.5. They hated the fact that everyone had to roll, even those who might not be suited for a particular situation. They felt that if one person in the party could solve the problem single-handedly, that should be rewarded. I eventually gave up on trying them.

 

[NotAYakk]

Skill Check: Something an individual can do in a short period of narrative. Resolve using a few rolls as possible. Have clear stakes.

Skill Challenge: Extended problem over characters and narrative.

The problem is the protagonist. The problem will do something that the players may want to stop.

There must be something narrative that breaks the "rounds" of the skill challenge up; the situation must change, regardless of the PCs actions.

The challenge is extended over narrative in that things happen as you proceed. The challenge is extended over characters in that the contributions of multiple PCs can solve the problem.

As the narrative is an active participant, doing nothing or letting 1 PC handle it means the narrative "wins" more.

---

There is a royal gala, and the players want to assassinate the king there. Here the royal gala is the protagonist. If the players do nothing, it occurs and the king lives (or someone else kill him!)

The players can challenge the actions of the royal gala in order to prevent it from unfolding as it will by default.

---

Crossing the wilderness, the protagonist is the wilderness. It will kill you and eat your corpses if you do nothing.

So the wilderness regularly consumes your supplies, attacks you with weather, makes you lost, spawns predators tracking you, etc.

In this case, if the PCs don't enter the wilderness, the wilderness doesn't really bug the PCs. But once in the wilderness, doing nothing makes the wilderness take the PCs out.

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Now, Skill Checks are still part of the challenge, and they can have consequences. But as I want even lower skilled (more likely to fail) character contributions to matter, the protagonist actions you are trying to mitigate/avoid should be larger than skill check failure consequences.