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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6041998" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Exploration Challenge - True Grit's "Find the Outlaw While Navigating/Surviving Hostile Territory"There are many sorts of exploration challenges but, to my mind, this one captures one of the best.In that Exploration Challenge, we've got:Classes - a Fighter (Bounty Hunter Background), a Ranger (Guide Background), and a Commoner.  Deployed Resources - Balance, Bluff, Climb, Gather Rumors, Handle Animal, Heal, Intimidate, Knowledge, Listen, Perform, Persuade, Ride, Sense Motive, Sneak, Spot, Survival, Track.  Heck, you even have Use Rope.  You've got both the Bounty Hunter and Guide trait leveraged.  This is so perfectly in play for a Skill Challenge.  In fact, I used this exact movie trope as inspiration for an extended one.  It went off perfectly...including the fail forward hijinx and the morale boosting perform/heal over the campfire when things were going poorly.  However, its clear that many are not enamoured of Skill Challenges.  So how do you pull this classic exploration challenge off in 5e - replete with interesting, dynamic success with complication and failing forwards?  What do you need bare minimum?- You need well established stakes.- You need non-binary outcomes.- You need conditions for ultimate success or ultimate failure.- You need hard-coded PC build resources that clearly interface with the mechanical resolution framework.Those are the minimum prerequisites to pull this off.  Things that would improve it:- Advantages, Bennies or Fate Points or something to incentivize players to play to theme/genre expectations rather than always play to optimal resource deployment.  - These Advantages, Bennies or Fate Points can be used later in the exploration challenge to affect success (depending on the system this can be any number of things).- GMs gain Threat or Complication dice that they can spend during resolution to threaten or complicate (shocker, eh?) the challenge or a single resolution step.Overall, I like:- Dice pool for task resolution with non-binary outcomes (mostly advantage complications and threats).  Attribute leveraged can be used to affect either total dice or, my preference, dice outcomes.- Either an Exploration Track (where PCs start in the middle and getting to the end is a succes and going back to beginning is a failure) or HPs for the challenge, HPs for the group and some attrition (damage dice) used during each resolution step.</blockquote>

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