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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badwe" data-source="post: 4644640" data-attributes="member: 61762">A Skill challenge is a great place to start, but you should know ahead of time that you have a lot of work cut out for you.  Long term "sim-style" challenges are not entirely covered by the rules, nor are the skill challenges immediately fleshed out in order to expediently facilitate that.  However, skill challenges ARE general enough and flexible enough to reasonably be grafted onto anything.Let's go over some basics and try to imagine how we could apply them to a king based skill challenge.1. Granularity: is this a single "Be the king" skill challenge, or is the overarching goal to run a kingdom, punctuated by small skill challenges for certain events such as: unrest in the kingdom, unruly diplomats, etc.  Whichever you choose consider below:2. Representation of skills:  In running a kingdom, what does a single diplomacy roll mean? what about bluff? Insight? perception? streetwise? Athletics?!  For a given challenge, your players will do most of the imagination legwork IF you give them a good starting point.  Give them enough examples and they'll start concocting ideas for themselves on how best to use their skills.3. Timing: This has been covered in blogs better than I could in a forum post, but the gist is you need to decide how much time passes every time a skill check is made.  Are these checks a per-day activity, per month?  Can the number of skill checks made in a unit of time change depending on the situation?4. Coverage and variance:  this is another important lesson.  Not all your PCs may have diplomacy, and therefore will feel left out.  Even then, if a single player has the highest diplomacy score, one would expect them to be "The king" regardless, and then be the only one making a check.  Ideally, you will have a DC and a result for every skill, but realistically things like athletics, acrobatics, and endurance are going to be VERY hard to cover.  Still, you shouldn't neglect skills like insight, perception, streetwise, or even religion/nature/arcana.  Also, try to think of reasons that one player can't keep making the same check.  One route is to have events unfold during the skill challenge that lock out certain avenues.  Another option would be to allow parallelism.  If the king spends the next 3 months being diplomatic, perhaps the rest of the players will need to do something in those 3 months in order to keep up with the pace of the kingdom.5. Mechanics:  Whatever you decide to do, keep in mind the following base ideas of skill checks:a.  for a given number of monsters worth of XP at their level, the PCs should be able to succeed X checks before they fail 3.  b.  skill checks are predicated on the idea that the main roller will be assisted in some capacity with a number of +2 bonuses.  Without them, the statistical success rate drops dramatically, so be sure to include opportunities for players to gain an edge through assist rolls, utility powers, or rituals.c. skill challenges are intentionally sparse.  If you have your own ideas for a system, go ahead and use it within the context of the skill challenge.  The key is a correlation between number of d20s rolled and the subsequent reward of XP and treasure parcels.Hope this helps.</blockquote>

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