How Do You Narrate/Present Skill Challenges

[Stoat]

IME, D&D Combat has a clearly defined beginning: "Roll Initiative." As soon as the DM says those two words, everybody at the table knows what's about to happen. They know what skills or powers or abilities they can use. They have a pretty good idea of the stakes. They have a solid way to measure success or failure. They know when its over.

4E Skill Challenges seem a lot fuzzier to me. A month or two ago, I my players were trying to track down some wererats when one of them said, "seems like this would be a good skill challenge." Thing was, we were halfway through with one. I had just been prompting folks, calling for skill checks and keeping track of the successes without telling anybody.

I'm curious how others do it. Do you call out, "This is skill challenge, go!" Or just start asking for skill checks?

How strongly do you guide the players' choice of skill? On the one hand a DM could take a real light touch: "Bob, what do you want to do?" On the other hand, you could be more direct: "You can use Acrobatics, Athletics, or Streetwise as primary skills. You can use History or Religion as secondary skills, but you can only use them twice each. You can use Diplomacy to add +2 to any other check. You need 8 successes before 3 failures. Go!"

So I'm asking. How are skill challenges presented/narrated in your games?

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Very loosely. I essentially just let the scene unravel, I show what is happening or what is before them and let the players decide their course of action.

Once the initial dices are rolled I then describe what happens accordingly and it continues.

Behind the scenes I crunch numbers and track stuff, but generally I am very loose with my numbers and don't follow any strict math or guidelines. It basically falls under the, "rule of cool" and "this makes common sense" guidelines in general. I find this allows me to be more involved in making the narrative interesting and expanding on the Skill Challenge.

 

[Lord Xtheth]

As far as narration goes, it depends on my mood. Normaly I just say what's happening and let the players decide their cource of action.

When it comes to skill challenges, my players are like deer in the headlights. Unless I actively tell them "This is a skill challenge, roll some dice" they sit there staring blankly at me wondering what's going on.

There are some skill challenges that I force people to use spacific skills, but I always leave open the option of "If you have a skill that you think might help, tell me why and I'll say whether or not you can use it."

 

[Obryn]

Skill challenges are still pretty new to my group - I think we've had 5. The best ones are the ones I kind of dropped in spur-of-the-moment, like when 2 characters were running from a hobgoblin through Thunderspire.

I still introduce them to my players whenever we start one. I say, "OK, this is a skill challenge" and give a brief spiel about how they work. I don't tell them what skills they should use, but I make it clear they should feel free to try anything. I then try to encourage them to act.

So far so good. We need more practice, but it's a good enough mechanic I imported it into my d20 Call of Cthulhu game last night.

-O

 

[Felon]

When it comes to skill challenges, my players are like deer in the headlights. Unless I actively tell them "This is a skill challenge, roll some dice" they sit there staring blankly at me wondering what's going on.

Well, sure, why wouldn't they? Skill challenges are supposed to be announced.

My method of describing skill challenges?

"OK, this is a skill challenge. The primary skills are blah, blah, and blah. Figure out who's best at those skills and have them roll a bunch of skill checks. Everyone else, sit back and watch. If you get really bored, you can tell me that you want to use another skill, and I'll decide if it's kosher."

Something like that. Because for all the anticipation of the skill challenge system, that's what it seems to have boiled down to. There's little complexity and pretty much nothing dynamic.

 

[Rel]

I simply say, "This is a skill challenge" to let them know it is started.

There are a couple things I do to more clearly define them and track success in a slightly different way:

At the very start I make the group decide on a goal that is an ideal outcome for them. For the first one I ran it was "We want to get out of this river we're being washed down". More recently we had "We want to find our way through these mines, hopefully to the top of the plateau." Since I then have a clear endpoint I am more easily able to visualize and narrate their progress toward that goal.

In terms of tracking their progress, I've kind of discarded the PHB method of X Successes before Y Failures. Instead I have a positive and negative number in mind. Each success adds one and each failure subtracts one. If they ever get to the positive number they win and if they ever reach the negative number they fail. So tracking it might look like this if my target for success was 4:

success (1) failure (0) failure (-1) success (0) success (1) success (2) failure (1) success (2) success (3) success(4)-> Win.

Then I kind of include some benchmark events. For example in my "find the way out of the Mines" challenge, I decided that if they ever went into the negatives that they would get to a dead end and be attacked by Stirges and Kruthiks. First roll of the challenge was a failed Dungeoneering check by the Paladin and triggered that encounter right away. I knew that getting into the positives would let them find some plot-related carvings on a wall. Getting three successes would get them to another combat encounter. Four successes would get them to the elevator up to where they wanted to go.

 

[Thasmodious]

For me, it depends on the challenge. Physical challenges I often give out quite a bit of detail - "okay, getting up this mountain without being spotted is going to be a skill challenge with two phases, phase 1 is about the climbing, phase 2 is about remaining unseen from the patrols or the guards in the tower above, primary skills for the first part will be athletics, nature, and perception".

On the other hand, I'm running a skill challenge in the background that the players don't know about. The group has founded a mercenary company, with a charter from the local ruler, and rented a building in the town to set up shop. I want to determine what kind of impression they manage to make on the locals without directing them through a challenge and making it an obvious goal. Success or failure will have a number of benefits or penalties when dealing with the townsfolk and, hopefully, will provide some nice RP elements to relate back to them through interactions.

Most challenges are somewhere in between. I generally like to let the PCs set or realize the goal of the encounter - "we need to convinced the duke!" rather than "you need to convince the duke", then announce a skill challenge is underway and play it out as it feels appropriate. I think skill challenges shine when approached with feel rather than as a rigid structure.

They definitely fall flat when approached as felon describes, but that's a failure of the DM, not the system.

 

[El Mahdi]

... In terms of tracking their progress, I've kind of discarded the PHB method of X Successes before Y Failures. Instead I have a positive and negative number in mind. Each success adds one and each failure subtracts one. If they ever get to the positive number they win and if they ever reach the negative number they fail. ...

This is simply brilliant. Consider this well and truly stolen.

(You should copyright this before it ends up in 4.5E! - Or DMG2/3/4...).

 

[Jack7]

I take an extremely light touch Stoat and let them role play it. Everything that can possibly be role played.
We use describe and demonstrate and only use dice if someone doesn't know what to do or how to proceed.

For instance if they are tracking something through the woods then I show them pictures of the tracks. They figure out what made the tracks and the best way to do the tracking.

If it's a puzzle then I give them the puzzle and let them do it themselves, like in a video game.

If they need clues or the players can't figure it out then we might turn to dice.
(Then again they might fail at it, or have to come back at it later on when they've figured out something they missed before.)
Otherwise they demonstrate the skills and initiative and creativity necessary for problem solving.
And so solve the challenge for themselves.

Having number rolls for everything seems like having a video game cheat code to me.
And to me defeats the point of role play. As a matter of fact it's not really role play at all, it's go up to the challenge and then roll dice instead of figure it out for yourself (there are obvious exceptions of course, things that cannot be demonstrated properly by the players).

I keep up with all that in background and award experience for clever solutions or actions later on. But I never say this is a skill challenge, instead I give them a problem and they deal with it themselves.

I do like the fact that 4E attempts to address these things and expand the game, but in the old days we just called this role playing. And you did it by talking about it or showing what you were gonna do.

You didn't need a die roll to do your thinking for you, you played it out yourself.

And basically I think that is a built in game design flaw, designers not trusting the players to be bright and innovative and creative and instead saying, well, we'll just roll the dice as a mechanical method of problem solving. this is an attempt to mechanize everything, when just letting people think would be a far better course of action to pursue. Plus people get better at all kinds of skills with actual practice, die rolling the results robs players of the ability to think creatively and act innovatively, letting them fall upon the crutch of their own method of escaping skillful use of capabilities. Player's don't really practice their own capabilities of problem solving or challenge redress, they die roll to avoid the real effort. Of course there are exceptions, you cannot fight a real dragon, so you die roll it, but you can easily try to convince a DM playing the part of the dragon that your argument is persuasive if you actually try a real and valid argument rather than just saying, I'll die roll to show you how brilliant my argument is. Really? You can't just devise a brilliant argument? Can anyone really envision being in a difficult negotiation and saying to the other party, "hey, my argument is really, really great, and I've got the die rolls to prove how skillful and brilliant an orator I am." And then the other guy going, "Really, show me, show me! And do I get a saving throw, or am I gonna have to really think about the gravity of your numbers?" I think certain unchallenged RP game paradigm theorems are the result of overstressing artificial mathematical and mechanical assumptions over any recognizable semblance of reality to the point of near ridiculousness.

Imagine if you were playing an interesting video game, or were playing a sport, or taking part in a play, and instead of having to resolve a difficult problem or situation by action or innovation you just hit a button to simulate random number generation and the numbers, not your actions, thoughts, innovation, experimentation, or ideas, decided whether you actually solved the problem or overcame the challenge, or not? How would that be interesting, and for how long? And how is that "challenging to the point of requiring a skill?" What skill, die rolling? You're not really role playing a skill, you're roll playing a random number generation of an approximation of a skill if you did in fact exhibit a real skill (but you don't, neither on the part of player, or character), which you're not because what you are really exhibiting is a numerical substitute for what you would have done had you really role played the skill.

I like the idea of skill challenges, very much, (of course they are really as old as the game itself) but I don't like a mechanic in which the method of problem solving is to die roll the problem to death.

Numbers are not actions, dice are not methods of problem solving, a flick of the wrist is not a real skill of any kind in most situations, and statistical variation is not a pathway towards innovation or overcoming "challenges."

It's just a mechanic, not a solution.

 

[ryryguy]

Well, sure, why wouldn't they? Skill challenges are supposed to be announced.

My method of describing skill challenges?

"OK, this is a skill challenge. The primary skills are blah, blah, and blah. Figure out who's best at those skills and have them roll a bunch of skill checks. Everyone else, sit back and watch. If you get really bored, you can tell me that you want to use another skill, and I'll decide if it's kosher."

Something like that. Because for all the anticipation of the skill challenge system, that's what it seems to have boiled down to. There's little complexity and pretty much nothing dynamic.

Agreed, the bare bones skill challenge system described in the DMG can easily lead to this undesirable outcome.

If you have insider, check out Mearls' series of Ruling Skill Challenges articles for some good advice on going beyond the bare bones and making the skill challenges much more complex and dynamic.

One key take away for me is to try to make the challenge evolve in response to the players' successes and failures. Then they can't just sit back and roll the same skill over and over, the skills they might choose to use and the immediate goals they can choose to pursue keep shifting as the situation shifts.