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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5858934" data-attributes="member: 27160">I'm growing to like Skill challenges, but it was a half-baked system when first presented, I think. Some points to try/remember:- Instead of healing surge loss try minor combat or trap encounters. Take 1/3 to 1/2 of the XP for the Skill challenge as your budget, but the characters don't get any XP for the fight at all (it's just the cost of failing). Each failure in the challenge means one such encounter. The encounters should be pretty trivial - they just take the odd surge away.- Have each success in a travel challenge relate to a specific site on the travel map. Sites might contain information and/or clues about the destination/plot, or might have opportunities to find treasure. With this setup, the party can arrive at the destination whether they succeed or fail at the overall challenge - failure will simply mean that they arrive tired, unprepared, beaten up a bit by the minor "failure" encounters and without any bonus treasure they might have found...- Think about how the challenge you have planned would pan out "old style" with just skill rolls, if you are used to running that way in the past. If it would have been boring as watching paint dry, the chances are it will be a poor Skill challenge, too. You need to either think of reasons for it to be interesting, or just narrate it as a quick "link scene".- Remember automatic successes! For instance, if a well prepared party could breeze accross a desert with no problems, start by thinking what "well prepared" means. List the items required: suitable mounts, adequate water, food and fuel, shelter (tents?), a navigation technique/route map and so on. Assume that a party with all these gets auto-successes enough to complete the journey. Now think what skill rolls might be substituted if a party lacks each of those elements of "well prepared". Hunger and thirst may really be best represented by healing surge loss, but navigational failures are more likely to give "failure encounters" and other lacking elements may lead to lost gear, rather than lost surges...- Library searches give snippets of information with each success. Failures can give accidental damage (requires payment/Diplomacy, and eventually gets the party ejected from the library, maybe) or permanently lost resources (like maps that you might have given as handouts). Final failure means no further information will be found, regardless how long the search continues.</blockquote>

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