So, as a newbie DM I've been running and experimenting with what I've been calling "skill challenges" for a while now. Over time I've watched people's confusion and frustration with this part of 4e wax and wane, and the definition of what really is a skill challenge define itself more and more. When the DMG came out, convincing a Duke to help you would have been a good skill challenge, but today, more and more people are starting to dismiss that.
Reading some of Mike Mearls's recent thoughts, a "skill challenge" now seems to become accepted as multi-scene, long projects or plans that take hours or days, have different paths that you can choose to go through, present choices to the players, and generally give everybody a chance to be creative and suggest different solutions to a complex problem. Skill challenges have to "be like fights", they have to have oomph and pizzaz and result in unexpected and interesting situations for our characters.
And our friend the Duke? Do we still take a skill challenge to convince him to help us? "Nah," people are starting to say, "that's not really worth a skill challenge, that's just a couple of skill checks."
That's all well and good of course. It's a great way to look at it and it shows that the concept is developing and maturing. But there's a small oversight being committed here, I think: What about when I want it to be a series of skill checks?
I mean, just because someone tells me "That really should be just a couple of skill checks" doesn't mean I automatically know how to structure those checks, or that I have the best idea on how to ask for rolls or how to best insert their consquences into the game, or how each roll or series of rolls impacts what's going on in the game world. There's nothing that teaches me as a newbie DM how to do that, and increasingly it seems that the skill challenge part of 4e is saying "No, that's not what I'm for, you should already know how to do that".
Also, the more I read posts asking and arguing about skill challenges and the more I think about how I actually *use* supposed "skill challenges" in my games, the more I realize that a good structure for a simple series of skill checks and their outcome IS a big part of what people were looking for when they started learning about this part of the game. I know at least in my case it was.
So, I started thinking: What if we just forget about the concept of skill challenges altogether for a little while and try to come up with ideas for those "simple couple of checks" parts of the game? Make those easy and fun to run, and come up with some templates for them? Don't call them skill challenges. Call them "skill tests" maybe.
I'm not a math whiz by any means, and mostly I just fly by the seat of my pants with Stalker0's Obsidian system as my 'numbers' guide, but here are descriptions of the different types of skill tests I've come to discover in my games.
Please note that the numbers and the probabilities are not important here. What's important is the general structure and how it encourages a specific type of flow into the game, and how different structures are good for different situations. I share them with the hopes that other people out there that have been doing the same thing will come forward with new or better ideas to share with me, so that I and everybody else can run better games with more confidence. Again, Stalker0's system is more than good enough for anybody to come up with good DCs for a specific party. We're looking for general ideas and structure here.
Another note, these tests are obviously geared more towards players and groups who don't prefer to "leave it to the roleplaying". Yes, we do exist, and even though it's more high-brow and prestigious around these parts to resolve these kinds of things through play-acting and storytelling, those of us who want purely mechanical ways of doing it also have a right to do so.
Here we go:
***
1: Combat - This I've taken straight out of the Obsidian system because of how well it works. Simply, in the middle of a combat, each skill check takes one move action, each success brings the party closer to disabling a threat or activating an asset.
Example: A rogue needs to disable the swinging pendulum trap that keeps making attacks against his party's defender. He needs to succeed on 2 or 3 Thievery checks to get the pendulum to stop.
Example: The party's wizard and warlock try to activate a circle of power that will double the damage made by all their arcane attacks. They need to jointly succeed on 3 or 4 Arcana checks before the bonus becomes active.
2: Quantifying - This is when a positive but binary result is looked for. There is no consequence for failure, but success can be slight or great. Each success of a skill increases the consequence of the benefit of success, and failures do nothing. Usually is just one round of each player rolling, could be two.
Example: The party is trying to get the shopkeeper to give them a better price on a specific magic item, or trying to charm a shopkeeper into giving them a discount in general. Everybody in the party rolls either a Diplomacy, a Bluff, or an Intimidate check. The price starts at the normal market price, and every success grants the party an additional 5% discount on that price.
Example: The party is setting up an ambush for some enemies. Everybody in the party rolls Nature, Thievery or Insight. Every success gives their enemies a -1 on their surprise rolls when the time comes.
3: Endurance - This is just like Quantifying, but backwards - the party already has a penalty or cost they must pay for something, but they are trying to reduce the size of that penalty as much as possible. In this test every success does nothing, but every failure incurs a penalty or increases a cost that is to be paid. The test goes on until the situation passes or until a necessary number of successes is achieved.
Example: The party is in the middle of the desert and must walk back to civilization. They are not lost but they have no food and must endure the harsh environment and hunger. Everybody in the party rolls Endurance, Nature, or Healing for every day they are out there. Every failure means that character who fails loses hit points or a healing surge.
Example: The party is bidding on an extremely rare item in an auction house. Everybody rolls Bluff, Intimidate, or Insight. For every failure, the price of the item goes up 5%. Everybody continues rolling until 5 successes are acumulated.
4: Competing - There is another presence who is competing against the party to get something. Both the party and this other presence roll their checks at the same time, and the first to accumulate a certain amount of successes, gets what they want.
Example: The party is chasing a runaway panther through the woods. Everybody rolls Nature, Athletics, or Endurance. On its turn, the panther rolls three checks of its own. The first side to stack up 7 successes either catches up to the other one or gets away.
Example: The party is hunting a bounty who is also being hunted by several other bounty-hunters. Everybody rolls Streetwise, Insight, or Stealth. Other bounty parties are also rolling one check each every round. If the party accumulates 7 successes before anyone else, they get to fight the fugitive by himself, and if they fail, they must fight him *and* a couple of competing hunter bands.
Example: The party is having a sack race against a band of pirates. Everybody rolls Athletics, Acrobatics, or Endurance. On 10 or more the character advances two squares, 9 or less they stay still, on 20 they advance 3 squares and on 1 they faceplant into the sand. (This is an actual thing that we did in our game, I include it because it ended up being one of the most fun things we've ever done with D&D
).
5: Deterministic - Among 3 or 4 possible outcomes both good and bad, each skill success or failure can push the final outcome towards a specific one. This can go for a single round or for up to 3 or 4 rounds. At the end, the outcome with the most "pushes" is the one that comes into being.
Example: The party is desperately trying to sail a ship in a storm. Everybody rolls Athletics, Acrobatics, Insight, or History. Every success on a physical skill pushes the ship towards landing safely, while every failure on a physical skill pushes the ship to crash. Every success on a mental skill pushes the ship to land or crash where the party had originally planned, while every failure on a mental challenge pushes the ship to get lost and land somewhere else.
Example: The party is in charge of marshalling and preparing the city's army during the coming battle from the command tent. Everybody rolls History, Insight, Diplomacy, and Intimidate. For every History or Insight success the army is closer to getting the high ground in the coming battle, every failure, the swamp. For every success on Diplomacy or Intimidate, the army is closer to getting more recruits and outnumbering the enemy, and on failures, the opposite.
6: Decision - Among 3 or 4 possible outcomes, all good or desireable, or several different possible decisions, each skill success gives that player the chance to push the final outcome to being the one he or she wants. This is good for when players can't decide amongst themselves which path or decision to take and agree to leave it to the dice (but important - they must agree to go with the dice). Important that the skills featured must include every player being trained in at least one. After a certain number of rounds, the choice with the most "pushes" is the one chosen, or when a certain choice gets a certain number of "pushes", it succeeds.
This test seems a bit weird at first but trust me if the players go along with it, it can be HUGE fun because genuinely nobody knows what's going to happen.
Example: Some players in the party want the Duke to go to war, while the others want him to try to make peace. Everybody rolls Diplomacy, Intimidate, Bluff, Insight, History or Religion to try to get the Duke to go their way. The first side who reaches 5 successes gets their way.
Example: The party completes a quest for an Eladrin noble and, being very grateful to them, the noble offers them to choose their reward between a magical armor, a staff, or a rod. Every member of the party wants the item for themselves but they agree to do an all-out skill competition to see who wins it. Everybody can roll any skill, whoever gets 5 successes gets to pick the reward.
7: Branching - The skill test I've come to call "branching" is the most complex and seems to be the one that skill challenges are gradually becoming. Simply, each round consists of a different scene or location, with several different solutions or ways it can be dealt with. Each use of a skill opens up a different solution, and players can choose from any solution that becomes open to progress to the next "branch".
Example: The party needs to gather enough evidence to prove that a certain noble is guilty of murder and extorsion. Everybody rolls Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, or Intimidate. On a Streetwise success, the party may investigate rumors about this noble's shady dealings. On a Stealth success, they can attempt to sneak into his house at night and look for evidence. On a Perception success, they can more closely investigate the crime scene. On an Intimidate success, they can try to simply confront the noble and scare him into telling the truth. The party decides which path they want to take, and each path would generate a different scene with different obstacles and solutions. Within each scene, it's also possible to introduce any of the previous smaller skill tests to make it more challenging or more interesting.
***
Finally, I want to emphasize that the important thing here is that we need to divorce the concept of "skill challenges" from the concept of "skill tests". There is a lot of confusion and frustration and miscommunication going around because the two concepts are being melded together by some people and split apart by others.
I realize that skill tests are something that may seem rudimentary and totally basic and obvious to many people here, and that's why they get assumed away most of the time, but I think for us newbie DM's it really is an important point to develop. I had no idea any of these structures existed a year ago, and I'm sure there are several I've yet to discover.
Reading some of Mike Mearls's recent thoughts, a "skill challenge" now seems to become accepted as multi-scene, long projects or plans that take hours or days, have different paths that you can choose to go through, present choices to the players, and generally give everybody a chance to be creative and suggest different solutions to a complex problem. Skill challenges have to "be like fights", they have to have oomph and pizzaz and result in unexpected and interesting situations for our characters.
And our friend the Duke? Do we still take a skill challenge to convince him to help us? "Nah," people are starting to say, "that's not really worth a skill challenge, that's just a couple of skill checks."
That's all well and good of course. It's a great way to look at it and it shows that the concept is developing and maturing. But there's a small oversight being committed here, I think: What about when I want it to be a series of skill checks?
I mean, just because someone tells me "That really should be just a couple of skill checks" doesn't mean I automatically know how to structure those checks, or that I have the best idea on how to ask for rolls or how to best insert their consquences into the game, or how each roll or series of rolls impacts what's going on in the game world. There's nothing that teaches me as a newbie DM how to do that, and increasingly it seems that the skill challenge part of 4e is saying "No, that's not what I'm for, you should already know how to do that".
Also, the more I read posts asking and arguing about skill challenges and the more I think about how I actually *use* supposed "skill challenges" in my games, the more I realize that a good structure for a simple series of skill checks and their outcome IS a big part of what people were looking for when they started learning about this part of the game. I know at least in my case it was.
So, I started thinking: What if we just forget about the concept of skill challenges altogether for a little while and try to come up with ideas for those "simple couple of checks" parts of the game? Make those easy and fun to run, and come up with some templates for them? Don't call them skill challenges. Call them "skill tests" maybe.
I'm not a math whiz by any means, and mostly I just fly by the seat of my pants with Stalker0's Obsidian system as my 'numbers' guide, but here are descriptions of the different types of skill tests I've come to discover in my games.
Please note that the numbers and the probabilities are not important here. What's important is the general structure and how it encourages a specific type of flow into the game, and how different structures are good for different situations. I share them with the hopes that other people out there that have been doing the same thing will come forward with new or better ideas to share with me, so that I and everybody else can run better games with more confidence. Again, Stalker0's system is more than good enough for anybody to come up with good DCs for a specific party. We're looking for general ideas and structure here.
Another note, these tests are obviously geared more towards players and groups who don't prefer to "leave it to the roleplaying". Yes, we do exist, and even though it's more high-brow and prestigious around these parts to resolve these kinds of things through play-acting and storytelling, those of us who want purely mechanical ways of doing it also have a right to do so.
Here we go:
***
1: Combat - This I've taken straight out of the Obsidian system because of how well it works. Simply, in the middle of a combat, each skill check takes one move action, each success brings the party closer to disabling a threat or activating an asset.
Example: A rogue needs to disable the swinging pendulum trap that keeps making attacks against his party's defender. He needs to succeed on 2 or 3 Thievery checks to get the pendulum to stop.
Example: The party's wizard and warlock try to activate a circle of power that will double the damage made by all their arcane attacks. They need to jointly succeed on 3 or 4 Arcana checks before the bonus becomes active.
2: Quantifying - This is when a positive but binary result is looked for. There is no consequence for failure, but success can be slight or great. Each success of a skill increases the consequence of the benefit of success, and failures do nothing. Usually is just one round of each player rolling, could be two.
Example: The party is trying to get the shopkeeper to give them a better price on a specific magic item, or trying to charm a shopkeeper into giving them a discount in general. Everybody in the party rolls either a Diplomacy, a Bluff, or an Intimidate check. The price starts at the normal market price, and every success grants the party an additional 5% discount on that price.
Example: The party is setting up an ambush for some enemies. Everybody in the party rolls Nature, Thievery or Insight. Every success gives their enemies a -1 on their surprise rolls when the time comes.
3: Endurance - This is just like Quantifying, but backwards - the party already has a penalty or cost they must pay for something, but they are trying to reduce the size of that penalty as much as possible. In this test every success does nothing, but every failure incurs a penalty or increases a cost that is to be paid. The test goes on until the situation passes or until a necessary number of successes is achieved.
Example: The party is in the middle of the desert and must walk back to civilization. They are not lost but they have no food and must endure the harsh environment and hunger. Everybody in the party rolls Endurance, Nature, or Healing for every day they are out there. Every failure means that character who fails loses hit points or a healing surge.
Example: The party is bidding on an extremely rare item in an auction house. Everybody rolls Bluff, Intimidate, or Insight. For every failure, the price of the item goes up 5%. Everybody continues rolling until 5 successes are acumulated.
4: Competing - There is another presence who is competing against the party to get something. Both the party and this other presence roll their checks at the same time, and the first to accumulate a certain amount of successes, gets what they want.
Example: The party is chasing a runaway panther through the woods. Everybody rolls Nature, Athletics, or Endurance. On its turn, the panther rolls three checks of its own. The first side to stack up 7 successes either catches up to the other one or gets away.
Example: The party is hunting a bounty who is also being hunted by several other bounty-hunters. Everybody rolls Streetwise, Insight, or Stealth. Other bounty parties are also rolling one check each every round. If the party accumulates 7 successes before anyone else, they get to fight the fugitive by himself, and if they fail, they must fight him *and* a couple of competing hunter bands.
Example: The party is having a sack race against a band of pirates. Everybody rolls Athletics, Acrobatics, or Endurance. On 10 or more the character advances two squares, 9 or less they stay still, on 20 they advance 3 squares and on 1 they faceplant into the sand. (This is an actual thing that we did in our game, I include it because it ended up being one of the most fun things we've ever done with D&D
).5: Deterministic - Among 3 or 4 possible outcomes both good and bad, each skill success or failure can push the final outcome towards a specific one. This can go for a single round or for up to 3 or 4 rounds. At the end, the outcome with the most "pushes" is the one that comes into being.
Example: The party is desperately trying to sail a ship in a storm. Everybody rolls Athletics, Acrobatics, Insight, or History. Every success on a physical skill pushes the ship towards landing safely, while every failure on a physical skill pushes the ship to crash. Every success on a mental skill pushes the ship to land or crash where the party had originally planned, while every failure on a mental challenge pushes the ship to get lost and land somewhere else.
Example: The party is in charge of marshalling and preparing the city's army during the coming battle from the command tent. Everybody rolls History, Insight, Diplomacy, and Intimidate. For every History or Insight success the army is closer to getting the high ground in the coming battle, every failure, the swamp. For every success on Diplomacy or Intimidate, the army is closer to getting more recruits and outnumbering the enemy, and on failures, the opposite.
6: Decision - Among 3 or 4 possible outcomes, all good or desireable, or several different possible decisions, each skill success gives that player the chance to push the final outcome to being the one he or she wants. This is good for when players can't decide amongst themselves which path or decision to take and agree to leave it to the dice (but important - they must agree to go with the dice). Important that the skills featured must include every player being trained in at least one. After a certain number of rounds, the choice with the most "pushes" is the one chosen, or when a certain choice gets a certain number of "pushes", it succeeds.
This test seems a bit weird at first but trust me if the players go along with it, it can be HUGE fun because genuinely nobody knows what's going to happen.
Example: Some players in the party want the Duke to go to war, while the others want him to try to make peace. Everybody rolls Diplomacy, Intimidate, Bluff, Insight, History or Religion to try to get the Duke to go their way. The first side who reaches 5 successes gets their way.
Example: The party completes a quest for an Eladrin noble and, being very grateful to them, the noble offers them to choose their reward between a magical armor, a staff, or a rod. Every member of the party wants the item for themselves but they agree to do an all-out skill competition to see who wins it. Everybody can roll any skill, whoever gets 5 successes gets to pick the reward.
7: Branching - The skill test I've come to call "branching" is the most complex and seems to be the one that skill challenges are gradually becoming. Simply, each round consists of a different scene or location, with several different solutions or ways it can be dealt with. Each use of a skill opens up a different solution, and players can choose from any solution that becomes open to progress to the next "branch".
Example: The party needs to gather enough evidence to prove that a certain noble is guilty of murder and extorsion. Everybody rolls Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, or Intimidate. On a Streetwise success, the party may investigate rumors about this noble's shady dealings. On a Stealth success, they can attempt to sneak into his house at night and look for evidence. On a Perception success, they can more closely investigate the crime scene. On an Intimidate success, they can try to simply confront the noble and scare him into telling the truth. The party decides which path they want to take, and each path would generate a different scene with different obstacles and solutions. Within each scene, it's also possible to introduce any of the previous smaller skill tests to make it more challenging or more interesting.
***
Finally, I want to emphasize that the important thing here is that we need to divorce the concept of "skill challenges" from the concept of "skill tests". There is a lot of confusion and frustration and miscommunication going around because the two concepts are being melded together by some people and split apart by others.
I realize that skill tests are something that may seem rudimentary and totally basic and obvious to many people here, and that's why they get assumed away most of the time, but I think for us newbie DM's it really is an important point to develop. I had no idea any of these structures existed a year ago, and I'm sure there are several I've yet to discover.
