Skill Challenge Clinic

[Dr. Confoundo]

I'm prepping for my next 4E campaign that should be starting within the next couple weeks, and I've got some ideas for skill challenges that I'd like to include. So far, skill challenges have not gone over very well with my group, but I think that there's some interesting stuff that's possible there - it's just that our execution has been lacking so far.

Hopefully if any of my players are browsing this board, they'll do the right thing and not look at the spoilers below.

[sblock]Skill Challenge #1 - Cockroach Horde!

Bubbling up from below the city are an effectively endless horde of icky bugs - buzzing flies, cockroaches, centipedes, etc. While some of the party will be busy fighting off some giant versions of these insects, others will have to peel off and rescue some trapped citizens.

Without knowing what PCs my players are going to be bringing into the campaign, I'm going to try and include enough skills to allow anyone to participate. Of the common skills, I'll include Athletics (to physically skirt the bugs), Diplomacy (to calm the trapped citizens), Endurance (to shrug off any attacking bugs), Intimidate (to get the citizens moving), and Streetwise (to know ways around the horde). Added to that would be Perception (to spot openings) and Nature (to know how the bugs might act).

I'm also considering allowing the PCs to offset some or all of their failures by taking damage - one healing surge per failure?

Some concerns that I have for the skill challenge are:

1) I need to make sure that the players realize that they can't just wait until after the big bugs have been defeated for them to focus on rescue. How about an automatic failure for any round in which no skill challenge actions are attempted? I'll have 6 players, so maybe I should up that to 2 attempts per round.

2) Should most of the skill attempts be standard or move actions? Making them standard actions means that those two players are effectively out of combat, but if they were move actions, they could still be laying down covering fire.

3) Would it be too complicated to make this a series of cascading skill challenges? First the players need to rescue the kids trapped on the wagon, then they need to focus on the merchants in the store, and finally they have to rush to aid the townsfolk near the well... each area could be a separate Complexity 1 challenge, all while the fight is raging near the center of the map. [/sblock]

Has anyone run anything similar? Any suggestions or glaring problems?

 

[Camelot]

Definitely go with your number three, I think. Multiple small skill challenges give a fun sense of progression, while one long skill challenge, unless it is very multilayered (see the DMG2, chapter 3), gets boring.

Make sure to tell your players right off the bat that there is no way to defeat the beasts simply by fighting. Something like, "Bugs and vermin burst forth from the sewers all over the town! There are billions of them swarming the city. People start panicking as they are attacked by the violent creatures. There's so many of them that it would be impossible to fight them all; you'll have to focus your efforts on getting the civilians to safety." Then give them their options: kids in a wagon, merchants behind locked doors, etc. If they fail the skill challenge, then have them go into an easy fight against some of the vermin., worth the same amount of XP as the challenge would have been.

Coincedentally, I homebrewed some cockroaches a while ago. If you need some roach monsters, since I don't believe there are any in the official books, you can find them at my blog, The Dungeon's Dragon, in the post of Resistant Roaches.

 

[Keenberg]

I'm prepping for my next 4E campaign that should be starting within the next couple weeks, and I've got some ideas for skill challenges that I'd like to include. So far, skill challenges have not gone over very well with my group, but I think that there's some interesting stuff that's possible there - it's just that our execution has been lacking so far.

Hopefully if any of my players are browsing this board, they'll do the right thing and not look at the spoilers below.

[sblock]Skill Challenge #1 - Cockroach Horde!

Bubbling up from below the city are an effectively endless horde of icky bugs - buzzing flies, cockroaches, centipedes, etc. While some of the party will be busy fighting off some giant versions of these insects, others will have to peel off and rescue some trapped citizens.

Without knowing what PCs my players are going to be bringing into the campaign, I'm going to try and include enough skills to allow anyone to participate. Of the common skills, I'll include Athletics (to physically skirt the bugs), Diplomacy (to calm the trapped citizens), Endurance (to shrug off any attacking bugs), Intimidate (to get the citizens moving), and Streetwise (to know ways around the horde). Added to that would be Perception (to spot openings) and Nature (to know how the bugs might act).

I'm also considering allowing the PCs to offset some or all of their failures by taking damage - one healing surge per failure?

Some concerns that I have for the skill challenge are:

1) I need to make sure that the players realize that they can't just wait until after the big bugs have been defeated for them to focus on rescue. How about an automatic failure for any round in which no skill challenge actions are attempted? I'll have 6 players, so maybe I should up that to 2 attempts per round.

2) Should most of the skill attempts be standard or move actions? Making them standard actions means that those two players are effectively out of combat, but if they were move actions, they could still be laying down covering fire.

3) Would it be too complicated to make this a series of cascading skill challenges? First the players need to rescue the kids trapped on the wagon, then they need to focus on the merchants in the store, and finally they have to rush to aid the townsfolk near the well... each area could be a separate Complexity 1 challenge, all while the fight is raging near the center of the map. [/sblock]

Has anyone run anything similar? Any suggestions or glaring problems?

Here are my suggestions:

[sblock]1) Your idea sounds good. If your players wait around, narrate the gruesome deaths of the townsfolk as they get munched alive by the hoards (in addition to the fact that they're failing the skill challenge.)

2)Maybe this could be broken down depending on the skill they're using

• Athletics - Move Action. Athletics implies your moving around, after all.
• Diplomacy - Standard action. Use your judgement based on the description they give you for how the character act.
• Intimidate - Standard action. Same as diplomacy.
• Streetwise - Move Action, they're moving based on what they know about the city's layout.
• Endurance - Have every character, combatant and skill challenge worker, roll this at the beginning of their turn. Gives a +1 bonus or -1 penalty to attack/check rolls accordingly. Rolls don't add to successes or failures.
• Perception - Available as an alternative to Endurance
• Nature - Another alternative to Endurance

* Acrobatics could be another move action option. I.e. The player vaults over a mass of bugs to reach a group of townsfolk.

3) Having a cascading series of skill challenges would make the encounter very lengthy. It would also decrease the chance of an overall success for your party. If you're okay with these things, go for it. If you want the encounter to be long without increasing the difficulty of the skill challenge, include each separate task as part of a high complexity challenge. This will actually increases the chance of them succeeding. As they succeed at one spot (wagon, well, tavern, etc.) the townsfolk flee and are safe. If they fail, they can try again next turn.
[/sblock]

 

[Amaroq]

[sblock]Ewwww! Cockroaches! I hate cockroaches![/sblock]

I like #3 as well.

I'd also describe each "Failure", especially the "Failure to act" failures as "some nameless NPC falls to the vermin and dies"... putting just enough character (description) into the NPC and the manner of his/her death to make the players feel bad about it.

You might want to write your skill challenge skills more along the lines of "How does this skill help the helpless NPCs move?".

That might give you:

[sblock]Athletics: using your shield, sword, staff, at-will-fire-power, etc, to "clear a path": difficulty: easy in rounds 1, 2, medium in rounds 3, 4, hard thereafter. Gives a fairly large plus to anybody trying to convince the NPCs to move along the path ...

Acrobatics: carrying an NPC past the bad guys: difficulty easy for children, medium for some NPCs, hard for the largest ..

Bluff: convinving the scared NPC's that there's a worse uprising of bugs coming their way, run, run now! ...

etc.

Almost every skill might be applicable to this challenge .. and you don't know the characters, so what you really want to set up is a "some skills work in some situations, other skills work in other situations" challenge.

For example, Intimidate might be easy against the children, but have negative repercussions if used against the adults.

Nature may not get you a success .. but it may give you some clues: they hate fire, they're stronger over that way, they can flatten under things, etc. Ideally those clues point to other skills to use, possibly even giving a +2 "Aid Another" bonus to the person that tries them ...

Just, creative, creative, creative.[/sblock]

I do, by the way, absolutely love the "Skill Challenge in the middle of a Combat" sequence: its an absolutely fantastic way to add a sense of time-pressure to a battle sequence, as well as to prevent the combat from becoming a routine "kill 'em all" battle.

In fact ... you might go with a "Add 2 swarms per round of combat" mechanic to *really* drive home the fact that you can't win this one by sheer force of arms.

Or even ... four minion swarms plus one real swarm, giving the minion-swarms the possibility of overrunning the battlefield, getting in the way of the rescue attempts, etc ..

 

[Stormonu]

The one thing I have problems with is getting everyone involved in a skill challenge. It's a lot easier to make sure everyone is doing something in combat, but how do you make sure all the PCs are involved in a skill challenge and not just one or two PCs are making all the checks?

 

[Keenberg]

The one thing I have problems with is getting everyone involved in a skill challenge. It's a lot easier to make sure everyone is doing something in combat, but how do you make sure all the PCs are involved in a skill challenge and not just one or two PCs are making all the checks?

In a skill challenge, each of the players rolls initiative, and the rest follows like turns in a combat encounter. So each person has to do something on their turn...

 

[Amaroq]

The one thing I have problems with is getting everyone involved in a skill challenge. It's a lot easier to make sure everyone is doing something in combat, but how do you make sure all the PCs are involved in a skill challenge and not just one or two PCs are making all the checks?

Well, by RAW there was no penalty for not-attempting, just for failure, so it actually made sense to "sit out" if a skill challenge doesn't suit your character.

Which is fine, for some challenges: my fighter should neither be contributing to nor harming the attempts of the party wizard, sorceress, and paladin to wrestle with that crazy arcane lock.

But it doesn't work for other skill challenges, where the DM wants to push everybody to get involved, more like a combat: in that case, the DM may want to structure the challenge a little differently.

Here's my suggestions:

1. The DM may want to explicitly declare "no action" to be a failure; this forces characters to try something, anything.

2. The DM may want to specify a number of successes-per-round mechanic rather than a successes-before-failures mechanic. Again, there's no penalty for failure .. unless enough of the party fail.

3. Inserting skill challenges into combat makes them very interesting: now my fighter has something to do while the wizard and sorceress wrestle with the arcane lock, and the paladin has a tough choice to make whether to help me defend them or to help them out.

4. The DM may want to encourage an improv-style "skill challenge"; one of our DM's does this to great effect. He basically divides his target-window for any given roll into "major success", "minor success", "failure", and "major failure".

Then, he'll describe the initial set-up, and encourage the party to start. So, say the party are going wandering in the forest, and don't want to get lost. A traditional skill check might be "Nature, 4 successes before 2 failures". His version would be, "Okay, you're wandering into the woods. How do you make sure you get where you're going?"

Ranger: "Well, I'll use my Nature to get us on the right track. Oh, man! A one? Plus nine gives me a ten."
DM: "Ouch, that's a major failure. Tell me what happens."
Ranger: "Hmm. Well, we're making our way mostly to the north, but I fail to notice a patch of bad footing, and start falling down a ravine towards the stream below."
DM: "Okay, fighter, what now?"
Fighter: "I'll grab a rope, toss it to the Wizard, and rush headlong after him."
DM: "What?"
Fighter: "Well, I want to grab him, holding onto the rope, and pull us back up the rope. I figure, maybe, Athletics to grab him before we both reach the bottom?"
DM: "Okay."
Fighter: "16, plus 9 is .. 25."
DM: "That's a success. What does that look like?"
Fighter: "Great, I have a hold of the Ranger. But this rope is pretty useless just yet ..."
DM: "Wizard?"
Wizard: "I'll try a .. guys Thievery is like my worst skill. Well, I'll try tying the rope off before they reach the bottom."
DM: "Okay."
Wizard: "7. Minus 1. So, 6."
Fighter: "Minus one!?"
Ranger: "You should've tossed that to the rogue."
DM: "Clearly that's a failure. In fact, that's a major failure. What happens?"
Wizard: "Well, clearly I don't get the rope tied in time .. and since its a major failure, they probably jerk the rope out of my hands when they reach the bottom. It snakes down after them ..."

And so on.

From a players' perspective, really super fun, because we have a group that really go for it, and "gift each other the scene" as described (the ranger "gifted" the ravine and the stream, then the fighter gifted the wizard a rope to tie. The wizard kinda let down the next character by not doing do.) .. and also because we have players who won't min-max. I mean, yeah, the fighter probably shoehorned Athletics into a situation where it wasn't normally called for, but he also didn't turn it into a "and we win"; the wizard was willing to try a skill he was terrible at rather than just jump to something he knows he's best at. Takes a good group!

 

[gamefiend]

OK, here's some thoughts:

Running a Skill Challenge
1. Skill Challenges are about Actions, not skills. A useful practice when it comes to a player's turn (i don't roll initiative typically, just circle around the table) is to tell them to stop looking at the character sheet. Don't let them do it. Have them tell you what they want to do, and then find the skill that maps to that action. "I'm going to bash through the cockroaches and clear a path". You can interpret that as a an attack roll (more on this in a second) or an Athletics check. When players are thinking about what they're doing and not what skills they are looking to leverage, you get better roleplaying and a better skill challenge. This to me is the most important thing of all. The flow each player turn should be narrate action, map to skill, make check, narrate results.

2. Ebb and Flow --Handling Failure.
The trick in keeping a skill challenge interesting and exciting is the interplay between what a character does and how the environment reacts. Each failure shuold in narration raise the stakes. It doesn't have to tie directly into the game mechanics, but it should always be described as though some new twist happens. In the previous example, don't be afraid to, on failure, make some wierd complication. "You start hacking at the giant cockroaches, but they are too many. They swarm around your legs and your arms until you can no longer move. You find yourself asphyxiated, slowling crushed underneath the swarm."

Now, that could be represented in a lost healing surge, but even if it's not, that feedback adds to the developing story, and the player now has a hook to narrate against. Rather than a simple "you don't get through", to which the player has to either try again (boring) or make up something new (fine, but can cause a deadlock), your PC now can follow back on his term with:

"I'm drowning in a sea of cockroaches (yech) but I was able to gain one last gasp before being surrounded. With that last bit of air, I'm able to shrug these disgusting things off me and continue to move forward."

Skill Challenges work best when you think of them as volleys, directed by the PCs. The narrative shouldn't be a checklist of things the players do; it should escalate back and forth in tension until a conclusion is reached.

Designing Skill Challenges

OK, I'm going to be a touch self-pimping here...I've got a whole series of articles (soon to be published in Open Game Table 2, yay!) that I would like to refer you to. My archives is currently busted, so I will link to Critical Hits guide. My section is "How to Design a Skill Challenge" and consists of the following parts:

How to Design a Skill Challenge, Part 1: Theory of Choice
How to Design a Skill Challenge #2: Branching
How To Design a Skill Challenge #3: Nesting
How to Design a Skill Challenge Part 4: Sequencing
How to Design a Skill Challenge Part 5: Cycling
Failure is an Option: When to Use Skill Challenges

Hope that helps!

 

[Dr. Confoundo]

I've gotten some great feedback in this thread so far on my first skill challenge. Lots of good advice to help make it better, and some good tips for skill challenges in general.

Camelot - thanks for the roaches. I'm not sure that I want them to be so hard to kill, but it is a good starting point. I was also considering reskinning Kruthiks.

Keenberg - re: Rolling Initiative in Skill Challenges. That might be RAW, but it often seems very clumsy. In a situation like I described, in the middle of combat, it makes perfect sense; but in a social skill challenge, I don't think that I'd ever use it. Personally, I'm not sure that it's always necessary to have every character involved in every skill challenge. It's a nice goal, but sometimes it just isn't feasible.

Amaroq - I like the concept of breaking success and failure into more categories - any idea on how the numbers for the 'major' categories work out? I'm also a big fan of the improv skill challenge you described. Letting the players create the reality of the world is definitely something that I'm planning on including heavily in this campaign.

Gamefiend - I've actually already read your essays, and I thought that they were very informative. That whole list of articles at Critical Hits should be considered required reading for anyone planning a skill challenge.

 

[Dr. Confoundo]

Let's move on to the next challenge.

[sblock]Skill Challenge #2 - Elemental Quandry

Tracking the cause of the insect attacks is fairly easy - an obvious trail of bugs, requiring only a few Perception and Nature checks to follow into the sewers. I don't want to create another skill challenge for this because it doesn't seem like enough of a hook to hang a good challenge on.

But when the team gets down into the sewers, they'll find the culprit: an insane swarm druid, with his buggy entourage. After a quick battle, the druid will make his escape into the water purification section of the town (actually a massive sealed underground bunker housing thousands). And that's where the next skill challenge will occur.

Following the druid's trail, the party will be trapped in a room with the biggest danger in the sewers - one that they shouldn't kill... the water elemental that purifies the drinking water for the bunker. If they kill it, they've just written a death sentence for the thousands of inhabitants of their town.

So this skill challenge can be potentially be solved in a number of ways. Mystically control the elemental. Find a way to escape the chamber. Hide from it until it moves away on it's path. Convince it that they aren't in need of purification. Seems like plenty of skills will be able to come into play... all the while the druid will still be a threat that needs to be taken care of.

1) With enough different options, should each one be it's own challenge? Multiple layers of a higher complexity skill challenge? I haven't had a chance to review the DMG2 skill challenge chapter yet (as Camelot suggested), but I will do so very shortly.

2) What happens if they fail? This challenge has the danger of becoming a death trap... perhaps the challenge should instead be defined as 'capture the druid without interfering with the elemental', not just 'defeat/bypass the elemental'. How can I make it into a three way game of cat-and-mouse?[/sblock]