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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4521474" data-attributes="member: 5143">That isn't railroading.  Railroading is removing ALL choices from the players.  Skill challenges don't do that.  They let the player decide how to solve a problem.Deciding that it will take 8 successes beforehand is NOT railroading.  It's simply deciding the difficulty of something in advance instead of on the fly.  Deciding a list of skills that are likely acceptable in advance is also NOT railroading, it is planning.  If I know that during my next session the players are going to have to negotiate for the return of prisoners, I know Diplomacy, Intimidate and Bluff are likely going to be primary skills in a social Skill Challenge.  I might also throw in History because the person they are negotiating with is a historian and respects people who have a knowledge of history.I'd also be well within my rights to specify that Arcana doesn't help at all in the negotiations.  Nothing railroady about that, it's just that a knowledge of magic and arcana doesn't help with the negotiations.I think you misunderstand what railroading is.  Railroading is when you tell the PCs that they are in a negotiation and they say "Hello, we would like the prisoners released..." and you say, "No, that's never going to happen" and they say "I'd like to use a Diplomacy check to convince him" and you say "No, no matter what you do, it won't convince them.  You are thrown in a cell by some big burly guys who easily defeat you and you are unable to escape for a week."The entire point of a Skill Challenge is to provide the PCs with a branching path so that it DOESN'T railroad them.  If the Skill Challenge succeeds then X happens.  If it fails, then Y happens.  And I as a DM don't know which path the story will take until after the dice have their say.  That's the exact opposite of railroading.At any rate, on the original topic.  Here's how I run Skill Challenges:1) Get them into the challenge.  This can be started any number of ways.  Normally it is initiated by the players, but normally with some prompting by me.  I generally don't run skill challenges on the fly.  It has to be something important to the plot of the entire storyline and have a definite advantage or disadvantage that affects the story for succeeding/failing.  It also must be a complex task with more than one step.So: "Can you find the stolen goods or not?" is a Skill Challenge."Can you climb the wall or not?" is not."Are you able to successfully track down the murderer before he gets out of the city?" is a Skill Challenge."Can you convince the merchant to give you a discount?" is not.2) You need to present it to the players.  I generally don't tell them they are in a skill challenge.  I try not to state the objective directly, but often it is implied.  For instance, if someone asks them to track down some items that were stolen from them and they accept the mission, they are now in a skill challenge.  They know the objective: track down to stolen stuff.3) They must accomplish the goal.  How they choose to do that is up to them.  Some successes will lead them to places that will open up new uses of skills.  For instance, they use streetwise to ask around and someone tell them about a fence(Success 1), they go to the fences place and use Diplomacy in order to convince him to tell them what he knows about the stolen goods(Success 2), he doesn't have any of the goods, but he knows another fence.  They go and talk to the next fence who refuses all attempts at Diplomacy, he's too paranoid for that.  However, if they threaten to turn him into the City Watch, he will tell him that he has a contact down at the docks who helps him ship things out of the city.  If anyone was selling high value items, they'd want to get them out of the city fast(Success 3)....and so on.I've found that Skill Challenges that are set too complex are the ones that stick out as kind of boring.  If you have to make 10 successes to fix someone's house, then you might be wondering what the heck is going on about the 4th time you've made an Athletics check to carry wood.  The finding stolen goods Skill Challenge is designed to be long and feels natural when it takes a while to move from skill check to skill check.The best advice I've seen in the DMG about how to run Skill Challenges is that they should be run in Exploration mode.  This means the DM is describing the environment and the players are exploring it and the DM is narrating the results.  And one roll affects others.  If someone makes an Insight check and you tell them that the person they are speaking to seems nervous and someone mentions this during a Diplomacy check, give them a bonus for it.  Perhaps the person is not easily Intimidated, but if someone makes an Insight check they know that the one thing they really care about is their cat and an Intimidate threatening their cat is the only one that works.Be flexible, but not TOO flexible.  Don't let the players just suggest ANY skill.  But don't say no without thinking about it.</blockquote>

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