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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blackbrrd" data-source="post: 6039860" data-attributes="member: 63962">Now, I really don't like the skill challenge as written in 4e. It's more or less just roll x skills and hope you succeed. What they do give is a framework for creating challenges that uses skills in a more complex way to decide the outcome. What makes me feel it's not particularily good is the more or less scripted binary outcomes.To me skill challenges can be fun, but then you have to run them more like you would run combat. Give the players a challenge, for instance: impress some dwarves so they will let you enter their domain. Give some options on how to do it: (obvious) help them repair a winch; (unlockable through making some small talk) help them investigate missing items.Some of my players wanted to help out with the winch and convinced the dwarves that they could do it. Now, that wasn't strictly true since only one character had the appropriate skills and didn't roll well. One of the other characters took it on himself convincing the dwarves that this was actually all intentional so they would give them enough time to actually fix it. The fun part was that the talking player made several good rolls and made convincing points to let the fumbling player doing the work actually get his <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> together. There was nothing about "extending" the skill challenge in the rules, but I think it was a great solution by the player to get the challenge done.I think skill challenges can be fun and interesting, but you have to integrate them tightly with the role playing or they just become a set of random rolls. My players really loved how this turned out and we spent most of the session in character, role playing, much more so than we usually do when there is a lot of combat.What I would do is to make something looking a bit like a 4e skill challenge with many small problems that need to be solved with multiple approaches to the them and some possible outcomes and let role playing take care of the rest. Maybe the thing the characters want to do is to enter a fortified city and then the keep without fighting their way through the front gates. There are a lot of ways to make this task easier and multiple ways of actually getting in. Maybe they befriend some farmers and smuggle along in the hay? Can they bribe the guards? After getting into the city, might there be some back doors that you can get a bribed guard to open for you? How do you find the bribeable guard? You don't want to just find a random one and try to bribe him. You might need to stalk some of the guards off duty to find the typical tavern they stay at. Make the task complex enough that failed rolls don't end up collapsing the whole thing and let the players find ways to "fix" the situation if it's going badly. For instance if you rolled badly on the sense motive check and ended up trying to bribe the wrong guard? One way of "fixing" the problem might be to knock him out, drag him out of sight, force him to drink a lot of spirits and pull his pants off and drop him off outside the gates to be found with his pants down, unconscious and reeking of alcohol.For something like this to work the DM needs to prepare well before the session, with multiple NPC's, obstacles, reactions and such planned in advance and some quick thinking when the players find a totally different approach. There is in my eyes nothing wrong with having a combat or two in the middle of a big skill challenge as the one I described here.</blockquote>

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