Skill Challenges: Please stop

[MrMyth]

I still don't get it. It's not exciting to talk about dreary walking through the swamp and rolling the dice 24 times each or 120 times in an hour and a half.

Player: "I rolled a 16."
DM: Ok, that's +1 to the Nature roll. Sally, what are you doing?
Player 2: "I guess I'll try Athletics again."

Well, sure, if you describe it like that, and make it about swatting mosquitos and not dying of swamp fever... sure, not the most exciting thing.

But that's... generally not the goal, here. It's about providing a framework to give ways to resolve more unusual encounters in the swamp. I mean, you describe things that are cool - interacting with NPCs, puzzles, problem solving. Skill Challenges aren't intended to replace those things, they are just another medium through which those scenes can happen.

You encounter a group of lizardfolk. You don't need any skill checks involved, but having some to figure out if can communicate with them, if you can manage to convince them you are friendly, and even persuade one of them to guide you - I see room for interesting things, there.

Or you find yourself hindered by the curse of the Swamp Witch (an ancient fen hag escaped from the Feywild), and the party is wandering through the same region of swamp over and over again. Eventually the ranger realizes he's seen the same broken tree several times. The wizard starts to realize what happened, and they need to work together to figure out how to break the curse and escape.

Or the heavily armored paladin finds himself stuck in a tarpit. Finding a way to get him out - sure, you can just make it about one or two strength checks. Or it can involve finding some well-rooted trees, securing rope to the branches, and then getting him out that way. Or figuring out alternate approaches as well!

Or simpler stuff - the party needs to cross an especially treacherous area of swamp. The halfling rogue tries jumping across via several logs - but looks like one of them is a crocodile! Sure, you can resolve this as a combat instead, but a skill challenge to get around it and calm it down or drive it off (while still dealing with getting across the swamp area)... well, it can often be more exciting than some attack rolls in difficult terrain.

What about the classics? Will-o'-the-wisps floating in the dark. Maybe they lead a hireling astray - maybe PCs are drawn into their lure. This seems the exact sort of extended scene that is ideal as a skill challenge, rather than a combat. I suppose you could reduce it to just a description of what happens, but what is the advantage to removing player influence over the results? Getting out of the swamp faster?

Sure, if you don't find any of these encounters interesting, you can just fast-forward straight to the next region. But if the idea is that there is adventure to find everywhere, I imagine there are plenty of possible encounters in the swamp for which a Skill Challenge seems perfectly suitable to me.

 

[wedgeski]

I'm not sure if I am clearly indicating my confusion as to why this sounds like a lame skill challenge to me, but that's how it seems (and note: I'm not trying to dig on this particular challenge, it obviously has a lot of thought and effort put into it).

I like to make mundane skill challenges (such as "cross the swamp with the minimum of fuss") more interesting through the use of quirky penalties for failure, for example:

First failure: the company ventures hopelessly off track, losing sight of landmarks and applying a -2 penalty to all skill checks until the next success.

Second failure: the PC's fail to recognise they have entered the sacred grounds of the marshbogpeatmud tribe. They attract a marsh spirit, which will haunt them (randomly attack/scream out their location/attract vermin/whatever) until it is appeased.

Third failure: the PC's emerge from the swamp at pretty much the point they went in, much to the derision of those who saw them to the fringe of the marsh.

Other than that the main benefit for me, as a DM, in designing skill challenges is that they force me to build interesting skill synergies into the encounter, which I can then have fun hinting at during the narrative.

Longer SC's must also be punctuated with events which might change the nature of the challenge completely (e.g. "After a second successful Nature check, the party realises that the rain which has been following them is anything but natural."), giving other members of the party than the survival expert a chance to shine.

These events can easily be entire encounters in themselves (e.g. the party encounters a group of bandits who have deliberately tampered with markers mentioned on their map in order to lead them astray), and can also lead to other interesting branches in the challenge (e.g. "if the party makes three successes before any failures, they realise something is suspicious about the placement of the landmarks they've been told to find.")

But yes, a task which allowed those trained in Nature to simply make six rolls and "win" is the worst kind of Skill Challenge. Unfortunately for all of us that's exactly the kind of design that the DMG1 and early adventures propagated (but which was mostly expunged by Mearls and subsequently in the DMG2).

No doubt about it, creating a rich, textured, and engrossing skill challenge is every bit an art as creating a memorable combat encounter.

 

[wedgeski]

I'd note too that the loss of resources could be quite significant. The SC specifies that resting is difficult and only possible in certain situations, so losing HS etc could be a problem for the party.

I did enjoy building overland journeys back in the days of the Wilderness Survival Guide, and there was something very primal about hex crawling through randomly-generated weather and holding your breath every time the "% chance of encounter" was rolled. Not only that but a party could be thoroughly tested by its ability to prepare for and survive long journeys through the wilderness. Despite how much I like 4E and the Skill Challenge idea, this is a loss to my own style of game which I might have to redress in my next campaign.

 

[KarinsDad]

Sure, if you don't find any of these encounters interesting, you can just fast-forward straight to the next region. But if the idea is that there is adventure to find everywhere, I imagine there are plenty of possible encounters in the swamp for which a Skill Challenge seems perfectly suitable to me.

Well, I agree that there are plenty of possible encounters. But that's not how the SC was set up.

Meet some NPCs. Negotiate with them. Fight them. Flee them. Meet some monsters. See some interesting swamp feature. There's plenty of options.

The only monsters in the SC that I was discussing were a few snakes on one day out of twelve. There were some herbs to find one day. And a boat to find one day.

Now, a given DM might just throw other interesting encounters on top of the SC that was presented, ad hoc. He didn't have Lizardmen in the SC, but now he does. He didn't have an old man with a coon hound listed in the SC, but now he does.

To me, ad hoc encounters are fine, but they are similar and only a tiny bit preferable to the random monster generator tables from earlier editions. Most ideas that the DM comes up with pre-game tend to be better thought out and fleshed out on average than ad hoc ideas that he comes up mid-game. To me, ad hoc ideas are a further fleshing out of the overall adventure set up, not a way to introduce multiple new encounters on the fly. Those tend to be less satisfying overall. IMO. YMMV.


For this particular scenario, I would think that it should be designed like a dungeon (or a flowchart). There are x number of encounters, some roleplaying, some combat, some environmental. If you go from one encounter to the next, a few skills might or might not be rolled. The overall swamp has a few required skill rolls at certain points in time between encounters, Endurance for disease, Nature for navigation.

But if there are not going to be any significant encounters in the scenario, then yes, a few skill rolls to determine how long it took and any disease acquisition and whether the PCs get hopelessly lost. If successful enough, the PCs take X number of days to get through the swamp, and they are there. If they took 9 days, then the temple is 60% inhabited. 10 days? 75% inhabited. A lot of this type of cause and effect can still be done, just most of it is done off camera with just a few skill rolls total.

If the scenario has encounters, then it is a lot more interesting. It is still not a skill challenge, the swamp itself is a dungeon with some skill checks involved and some encounters involved. And Jester's idea that the PCs just do not find their way through the swamp is still viable.


If there are not going to be any enjoyable encounters (combat or not) in the trek, then why waste the time with 120 skill rolls and a few hours of pontification of what minor things happen to the PCs while they are in the swamp based on their skill check rolls and how they try to interact with the swamp. Is interacting with a swamp that doesn't have a single NPC or neat puzzle or other real challenge listed really fun and heroic?

This is the wonkiness I see in most SCs that I have read. And it's probably part of the reason that the OP wrote the post here.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I did enjoy building overland journeys back in the days of the Wilderness Survival Guide, and there was something very primal about hex crawling through randomly-generated weather and holding your breath every time the "% chance of encounter" was rolled. Not only that but a party could be thoroughly tested by its ability to prepare for and survive long journeys through the wilderness. Despite how much I like 4E and the Skill Challenge idea, this is a loss to my own style of game which I might have to redress in my next campaign.

Yeah, I think hex crawling can be interesting. It is more useful when the party is wandering around in a sandbox type wilderness area vs say making their way from point A to point B.

The PF AP Kingmaker Part 1 Stolen Land for instance is organized as basically a hex crawl where the PCs get a charter to clear out an area of roughly around 20 12 mile hexes. Most of the hexes have an encounter area in them, and there are random encounters to boot. There is a specific plot the PCs will deal with as well, but they'll probably take a while to execute it and it isn't at all linear, just more like a bunch of the encounters have a thread linking them. There are a couple other lesser threads that pop up here and there.

The thing is, there's no provision for the players to focus on the main plot and use their skills to go to the specific encounter areas where it can be pursued. It isn't necessary to the adventure for them to do that, but IME most parties will probably want to focus on that. Structuring that process with an SC could be an interesting approach. Anyway I don't think hex crawling and travel SCs are incompatible. You'd just want to structure things so that they work together in some fashion. The SC could govern something other than the travel aspect.

For instance an SC could govern how aware the main threat is to the party in the above mentioned AP. So the party could keep a low profile and gain some level of advantage. It might for example open up an opportunity for infiltration or something like that.

 

[Zinovia]

Like making an omelette, skill challenges should start with good ingredients, but how well they turn out depends mostly on technique.

A skilled DM can make and run skill challenges that are fun and memorable, just as a skilled chef can make a delicious meal out of basic ingredients. Given the same basics, a novice in either art can easily wind up with a big mess on their hands.

The initial presentation of skill challenges was really bad, leading to an overly mechanized system that imposes artificial constraints on character action. They had to roll multiple times to accomplis the same thing. They had to roll when they had no applicable skills. Everyone had to participate even when it was counter-productive for them to do so.

WotC has sinced changed the rules and published more information on how to run skill challenges, and it is better. Still, it is much harder to learn how to DM (or cook) just from a book. The best way is to see a master in action, and lean from him. Most of us will never have that opportunity, unless WotC makes some videos of Mike Mearls running cool skills challenges. Or we can always ask Piratecat to do it.

 

[the Jester]

This entire skill challenge could be replaced with a single Nature roll and an Endurance roll from each PC and they either get lost or they don't. They either get diseased, or they don't. The DM could describe the harrowing journey through the swamp in a few minutes and the players could cut to the chase and be at the adventure site.

To me, the journey can be exciting, but not with skill rolls. And, it's not just about combat. The journey can be exciting by meeting and interacting with NPCs in the swamp.

But interacting with bugs and just the fellow PCs for an hour and a half of real time at the gaming table? Meh. Sorry, but I don't get the attraction.

Fair enough. It sounds like a difference in tastes. However, there is- I think- an issue of missing context here. I am starting to realize, based on some of your later posts, that I haven't been clear about something. The skill challenge here goes along with other stuff. There are random encounters, as well as planned encounters, that occur as the pcs move through the swamp. They are parallel to and at the same time as the skill challenge, but not included in the skill challenge itself. So when you say:

Well, I agree that there are plenty of possible encounters. But that's not how the SC was set up.

Meet some NPCs. Negotiate with them. Fight them. Flee them. Meet some monsters. See some interesting swamp feature. There's plenty of options.

The only monsters in the SC that I was discussing were a few snakes on one day out of twelve. There were some herbs to find one day. And a boat to find one day.

...you are missing that context. Which is my fault, because I didn't think to mention it- because it isn't part of skill challenge itself.

Within the swamp there was indeed a crazy swamp hermit trading with bullywugs and lizardfolk, all of whom had been intimidated by the yuan-ti. He wasn't part of the skill challenge, per se, but if the pcs made a good Diplomacy check and paid him 20 gp/day they could gain his aid and get an automatic success each day. There was Yngmar of the Willow, a fey spirit within a willow tree who had been hurt by the blood and venom the yuan-ti brought and, while not part of the skill challenge per se, could get the swamp to aid them, reducing random encounters and giving a bonus to skill checks. There were the aforementioned lizardfolk and bullywugs, who were potential allies against the yuan-ti (and again, creative pcs could have gotten their aid in the SC). There were other, more strictly combat encounters possible too- giant wasps, ghouls, water moccasins and other snakes (a preview of what they might find at the ziggurat), shambling mounds, etc.

But see, those aren't part of the skill challenge, so I didn't mention them in that. The "find the island" skill challenge is more straightforward, not taking days to attempt and including the ghouls as a complication within the framework of the challenge itself.

Again, though, I get that our tastes differ and there is nothing wrong with that.

Do people layer this effort with a lot of significant worthwhile roleplaying? They might stay in character a bit more, but then again, maybe not.

I am fortunate to have a group that generally enjoys the rp aspect of the game approximately as much as I do, so yeah, generally they do in my group. Obviously, that's one of the things that makes a good skill challenge stand out- it flows as part of the game's narrative, if you will, rather than standing out as an exercise in dice rolling. If it's feeling clunky, we'll accelerate through it.

I think you're casting it as 'pedestrian' and making it about "fighting off bugs". I don't think that's the way it went at the table, though I obviously wasn't there. Personally I think if the swamp itself is a serious bad-assed thing then spending 5 or 10 minutes on it and make 2-3 skill checks doesn't really convey that at all.....

....I'd note too that the loss of resources could be quite significant. The SC specifies that resting is difficult and only possible in certain situations, so losing HS etc could be a problem for the party.

Right- the badassitude of the swamp is one of the things I wanted to capture in that SC. Back in the 3.5 days, my group's halfling campaign had a near-tpk while wandering around in the jungle after a bunch of them got blinding sickness, and the whole jungle adventure was exceptionally memorable. If the party goes into a harsh, difficult environment, I like to make it actually harsh and difficult.

And I know a lot of groups don't track food and water and arrows and stuff, finding it boring and unfun, but I like it. It doesn't come up much, but when it does, it can be a major factor. "Oh crap," the ranger says, "I'm down to 10 arrows and we're 10 days from home!" To which the paladin says, "Worse than that, we're down to only 4 days rations!" And the dwarf replies, "Worse yet, we're out of ale!"

 

[KarinsDad]

...you are missing that context. Which is my fault, because I didn't think to mention it- because it isn't part of skill challenge itself.

Ok. Cool.

But with this idea in mind, it's now a dungeon with some skill rolls. The skill rolls occur sporadically over time in the game between the other encounters, not in a 1.5 hour non-stop marathon (which is what I had a problem with). It's 2 rolls per PC per day, possibly punctuated with an encounter or two.

The difference with our POVs here then becomes one of the skill challenge itself. Why is it a skill challenge at this point? For the XP? The real fun and the real adventure here is in the interactions with the hermit, the yaun-ti, etc. The swamp skill rolls and descriptions are flavor and mood at this point, not adventure. Why is it an encounter all its own?

You didn't use it as a single encounter. You interspersed bits of it between other more interesting and fun encounters.

Again, though, I get that our tastes differ and there is nothing wrong with that.

I'm not convinced that our tastes do differ that much. A SC is just a mechanical way of accomplishing some goal and in this case, getting through the swamp and not getting diseased.

I have zero issue with that.

As you describe it now, the Swamp is just a big dungeon. The PCs go from encounter to encounter, making a few skill rolls in between.

You as DM decided to make those skill rolls a skill challenge, but there is no real major reason that you should or should not do it that way (except maybe as an additional XP tracker).

Personally, I just see the Nature and Healing skills for this (viewing this scenario from this perspective) as a few extra rolls, no different than a Thievery roll or a Perception roll in a normal dungeon. Skills are used. They either help out the PCs or they do not. Success in them are their own reward, so no need for a SC and no need for extra XP for a SC.

Failing the Nature check is no different than failing a Perception check and not finding a secret door that leads to the next room in a normal dungeon. The skill failure limits one choice option of the PCs.


From one perspective, the entire D&D gaming experience is just going from one room in a dungeon to another room. In other words, a flowchart of going from one scene in the story to the next scene.

So to me, using a SC for moving through a swamp is ok, but not necessarily required or desired. It's not an individual "encounter" where combat isn't an option, so skills must be used. It's a collection of skill rolls based on the environment between one scene and the next scene that give some flavor and might add a bit of disease.

No real difference than the Athletics skill rolls made in a dungeon where the PCs have to climb to get from one room to the next.


So my confusion remains for a more typical use of a skill challenge (i.e. the players make decisions, rolls skills, and the skill challenge itself IS the encounter) and I'm still looking for a good example of it (PC said that he would post some). The wonkiness remains. Some PCs tend to be excluded because they don't have the required skills. They become the sidekicks to the superheroes of the skill challenge who are the ones with the primary skills. And even the superheroes are straightjacketed into a few skill options, no matter how well they try to describe their actions, they are still limited to rolling the same skills over and over.

The mechanics and the spotlight on the PCs just seems to be wrong.

In combat, every player can contribute, every player can shine, and every player has multiple viable options.

In roleplaying, every player can contribute, every player can shine, and every player has multiple viable options.

In puzzle solving, every player can contribute, every player can shine, and every player has multiple viable options.

Not necessarily so with skill challenges.

Skill challenges just seem so restrictive in options and only one or a few PCs shine. Yes, a different player can come up with a cool idea, but it's like watching Family Feud. Just because the other players clap their hands and say "Good answer, good answer" doesn't mean that the idea is really worthwhile. And when rolling skills, the greatest idea in the world doesn't mean much if the player rolls a 1 on the die.

 

[mneme]

FWIW, Karinsdad, I really enjoy skill challenges, and I'm not enthused by the swamp challenge.

I don't think it's the "trudging through the swamp" thing -- sure, that would be dull, day in, day out, but it's fun for a lark. But the tiny bonuses to a central skill thing just leaves me cold.

Were I building it, if I kept the "Central Nature Check" gimick -- which -is- an interesting gimmick--I'd bump -up- the bonuses you get for helping, not drop them. Make the target number 35 or so; then use something like the following:

Primary Skill: Nature (special: only one Nature check may be used per turn).
Primary Skill: Endurance (Special: All players must make an endurance group check every turn; success matters nothing, but a failure is a failure on the overall challenge.)
[Keep track of Nature failures and Endurance failures separately.]
Secondaries: (by default, secondaries can neither produce a success nor a failure in this challenge, but modify it in other ways. Narration may change this).
Arcane: There are magical current in the swamp that may be used for navigation. With a moderate check, you can make a compass (or equivalent), giving a +2 to all subsequent nature checks in this challenge. [this may only be done once; further Arcane checks require original ideas]
Social skils: Social skills (diplomacy, bluff, intimidate, insight) may be used to raise the group's spirits, granting a +2 to all characters in the endurance challenge for this round.
Heal: Heal may be used to bolster a single character against the elements (+5 to the endurance check for one, moderate difficulty). Or it may be used to repair damage done by the swamp (hard difficulty, erases an endurance-based failure).
Nature: Nature may be used as a secondary check -- to erase a nature failure (hard difficulty) or to find food and avoid more troublesome areas (+2 to the endurance check for all characters)
Religion: Can once be used to gain guidance from the gods or ghosts in the swamp, gaining a +5 on the nature check for this round.
Perception: Can be used to aid the nature check for this round, granting a +4 to the nature check for this round (1/round). If your Aid grants more than +2, add the difference to this bonus (actually, a good general rule for special Aid rules combining with Aid bonuses)
Acrobatics: May be used twice to avoid hazards in the swamp -- hard difficulty, if you succeed, you count as having passed the group Endurance check; if you fail you take a -1 penalty to that check.

And so on, really; the only skills I can't see making use of are Streetwise (though in a game that isn't half-urban I'd be tempted to houserule SW to be more useful overall), stealth, and thievery (ok, I could see using theivery as a "raise spirits" skill using juggling or whatnot).

That said, even with this (which I think would improve the challenge, as even with a couple of primary skills, the secondary skills would be providing enough of a bonus to be worth using, and to make it feel like they had an impact (+2 to multiple rolls or +4 or +5 to one roll, not just a +2 to one roll), and you could differentiate between success, failure due to exhaustion (endurance checks) and failure due to getting lost), it's a fairly static challenge. The situation doesn't really change until you succeed or fail.

IMO, a really good skill challenge is like a really good boss fight. You've got your opening situation, and the skills that best apply there. But success or failure in that opening challenge (and the choices you make there) will change the situation, and suddenly completely different skills will be more important, and more choices will be unlocked. The skill challenge is still there; it establishes that there's opposition, or a clock is ticking, or otherwise that there's a framework driving failure as well as success. But there's no reason a skill challenge has to stay static--and every reason for it not to.

For instance, the clue chases in the LFR Pain/Agony games (and probably the follower, Dispair, but I haven't played the P3 one yet) are mysteries, but technically they're skill challenges too. Very big, very complicated skill challenges (and when I ran one, I totally underprepared; you have to prepare this stuff as much as you prep a clue chase in CoC -- and probably prepare the players to be in a mystery chase, and not really an action adventure for most of the game), with a variety of things to investigate, clues to track down, and npcs to question. And each has their own piece of info, which they'll divulge when asked (and more if you can get on their good side).

The skill challenge is still there, though, keeping track of how many failures you have (how many successes isn't so important; when you know the answer to the mystery, you know the answer to the mystery and what to do!) and making sure that if the players -are- flailing around, the secondary plotline activates instead (the bad guys who -do- know who the killer is attack the PCs and leave them enough clues that they can get back on track--if a little worse for wear from the combat).

But this isn't "ok, I roll arcana again" -- instead, it's more "do you head down to the apothecary to ask him about the paste you found? Or do you go to the merchant you heard of to ask him about a illicit drug smuggling ring? Or do you head over to the city's official necromancer and see if you can get something useful from him?"

 

[MrMyth]

Well, I agree that there are plenty of possible encounters. But that's not how the SC was set up.

Meet some NPCs. Negotiate with them. Fight them. Flee them. Meet some monsters. See some interesting swamp feature. There's plenty of options.

The only monsters in the SC that I was discussing were a few snakes on one day out of twelve. There were some herbs to find one day. And a boat to find one day.

Ok, if your comments were intended mainly for that SC in particular, I admit to being much more able to understand where you are coming from.

But I dunno. Even then, it seems like exaggeration. The group has scenery to interact with and remember - a rickety boat to tinker around with, an algae-filled pond to explore, snakes erupting forth out of the bog.

I admit that it may not be for everyone. But many people do like that sort grounding the world in this sort of flavor, to feel like traveling across the countryside is a genuine task, and you aren't just fast-forward teleporting to the next stop in the game. You could handle it in various ways - simply description, intersperse it with combats and random encounters, etc - but the skill challenge approach also seems a viable one. The players get to feel their characters dealing with the dangers of the swamp and overcoming them.

It at least seems like a good option to have, for those who thrive on that sort of in-depth exploration.

For this particular scenario, I would think that it should be designed like a dungeon (or a flowchart). There are x number of encounters, some roleplaying, some combat, some environmental. If you go from one encounter to the next, a few skills might or might not be rolled. The overall swamp has a few required skill rolls at certain points in time between encounters, Endurance for disease, Nature for navigation.

I actually tend to like a combination of the two, an overall 'exploration' skill challenge that breaks down into mini-scenes along the way, some of which could be interaction, or combat, or the like. And it sounds like that is what the 'swamp expedition' ended up being overall, between the skill challenge and the other possible encounters along the way.

EDIT: For myself, I probably wouldn't go with quite as generic pieces of scenery as seen in the 'Finding the Ziggurat' skill challenge. Or rather... one thing I like to do is make sure that every mini-scene serves a second purpose. Whether that is providing some background for the setting, or providing useful clues or tools for future plot, I've found that having that second layer can really help players thrive on the RP opportunities of such things.

What sort of things am I talking about? Well, let's take that boat they found, for example. Why is it there? Did it belong to some earlier explorer looking for the Ziggurat? Or a native of the swamp?

Later, we have the blue mud with the stone altar. Who worshipped here, and what was worshipped? Now, these are all sorts of questions the Jester probably has some answer to if the PCs do investigate deeper, even if there wasn't a need to flesh them out in the Skill challenge itself. But it is the sort of thing I find that players like - finding markers of lost civilizations or wild tribes.

You can even support it with other elements elsewhere. If it does belong to swamp tribefolk, maybe the party were warned about them before entering the swamp. Throughout their journey, they run across other signs of them, like the altar. Even if they never actually encounter them, having those details build together helps give the feeling of being in a living, breathing world.

That can be the advantage of the 'swamp expedition' - even if it features no other encounters at all, it helps ground the PCs in the setting. Again, you don't need to run it as a skill challenge in order to do so, but it certainly is a viable framework for this sort of exploration.