Mastering Skill Challenges in Three Easy Steps

[Kzach]

I have mastered skill challenges.

Finally.

It took many, many failures before my first success. I think the GM's (my players) were being generous

I'm not sure why it is exactly that I couldn't grok it but something about them just didn't click and no matter how hard I tried, it was always clunky, boring or just plain frustrating for everyone at the table.

And not to disparage the great name of Mike Mearls (I'm a founding member of the secret fan club who gather on new moons to try and summon our unholy master by chanting "Slraem Ekim... FTAGHN!" but it never works... we're thinking of using some sort of take out food as a lure next time instead) but his articles are rather... err... dare I say it? Long-winded.

Now the following method may not work for everyone, as it has been a matter of discussion often that there are many ways to skin this cat, but it has worked out nicely for me so I thought I'd pass it along to those poor, desperate souls, still wrangling with the hippo. For those of whom it doesn't work, then all I can say is that I'll see you in the insane asylum soon, hopefully before you've torn all your hair out

Step One

Do not tell the players that they're engaged in a skill challenge. Yes, I know it works for some people to be obvious about it but after DM'ing and playing in quite literally dozens of groups and running and DM'ing up to four games a week at times since 4e was released, the overwhelming experience I've had in groups is that by announcing a skill challenge, the dynamic at the table immediately changes.

And not in a good way.

Invariably, players want to either use their best skills and only their best skills, not rolling if they don't think a skill they have will suit, or everyone aiding one player with a high bonus. That, of course, gets quickly repetitive.

Players then start counting successes and failures and the entire exercise becomes a very artificial one that disrupts the flow of the game.

By not making it obvious that you're running a skill challenge, I find that in most cases, the challenge becomes an organic part of roleplaying through whatever situation the players are facing. It doesn't bump them out of their suspension of disbelief to roll a few dice when they haven't 'switched modes'.

On my side of the screen, I also find it a lot more engaging and fun to run skill challenges when they're a natural extension of the surrounding events. I also 'switch modes' when running a skill challenge that has been announced or made obvious. It's easy to say, "Well don't switch modes then!" but at the table it just doesn't work for me.

When in this 'mode', I find I start thinking with my left brain instead of my right. My imagination switches off and I become focused on the rules themselves rather than the situation they're facilitating. If I stay in right-brain mode, however, I find I can adapt the skill challenge on the fly much more easily and make every roll an interesting and engaging part of the challenge.

Players seem to do the same thing and respond much better when in right-brain mode. They tend to use much more imaginative solutions and come up with a much greater variety of ways to contribute to the skill challenge itself. When in left-brain mode, however, I find people just can't adapt and focus only on the most logical and effective solutions.

Step Two

Allow players to adapt, change and even start skill challenges themselves, whether they realise it or not.

This was a big thing for me. Part of why skill challenges felt so artificial was that I couldn't think them up on the fly. So when it came time to run them, I was referring to books and became set in the method of the skill challenge rather than the spirit of it.

Again, players tended to do the same in that they think of skill challenges as being the DM's domain so they never initiate or change a skill challenge. But if you allow for the possibility of players starting and even creating skill challenges as you play, the entire concept becomes so much more fluid and dynamic and organic to whatever situation you're playing through.

Essentially, if the players say they want to accomplish something and you feel it warrants more than just one roll, you can turn it into a skill challenge on the fly.

Step Three

Not all rolls have to be successes, and neither do they have to be failures.

I know this sounds simple and probably obvious, but it was something that tripped me up for a long time. If I was running a skill challenge, there were skills that could be used and they either contributed a success or a failure.

This really limits players options and if the players are aware that one particular skill is succeeding more often, they'll all of a sudden develop blinkers and not use any other skills.

Part of running skill challenges is to engage the player's creativity and imagination. They should feel as if they're free to try anything they want without the threat of imminent and dire failure. Of course, there are exceptions to this but for the most part I find that by not creating a focus on a certain set of skills, players become much more inventive and willing to take risks.

So a check may or may not contribute a success or failure, depending on the circumstance rather than the rules. For instance, you might decide ahead of time that bluff, diplomacy and intimidate are the primary skills, but someone comes up with a really inventive use of intimidate. Despite this, the circumstance of it really shouldn't contribute to success or failure, but should rather contribute to the flow of the game.

In these instances, granting a 'secret' +2 bonus to someone else's roll or perhaps just roleplaying an 'opening' for someone else to use a better skill that does contribute to the success or failure of the challenge, really helps the organic flow from one roll to the next without making it feel like a skill challenge.

In many of the games where I've run skill challenges openly and stuck to whichever set of skills are appropriate to the challenge, people end up hitting an imaginary brick wall. It becomes a mechanical exercise in overcoming the encounter rather than a natural extension of the circumstances.

By not revealing that it's a skill challenge, allowing players to initiate or change the nature of the challenge, and being flexible in what contributes to a success or failure, my skill challenge encounters have become very smooth and lots of fun instead of tiresome and boring mechanical encounters that frustrate and annoy.


So, there you have it. Maybe not revolutionary or even that insightful and if I've repeated anything anyone else has written (I never did actually read Mearl's articles having suffered from spontaneous narcolepsy every time I tried) then I guess it's just a case of GMTA

 

[Windjammer]

Yay, another one for running skill challenges in stealth mode and track successes behind the screen. You've been bested by Mearls' articles on this one, though I emphatically agree with suffering from assaults of narcolepsy at attempts to digest them.

In my book, skill challenges are simply a design failure. If you run them in stealth mode, you might as well revert to the freeform roleplaying experience interspersed with the occasional skill check you've run oh so successfully all these years. If you don't, you reap all the problems outlined by your OP and in Mearls' own article (as in, break immersion, introduce artificialities, engage players at the wrong level, etc.).

Either way, you're better without skill challenges. There, that's my one line advice on how to grok them. Yippee! I beat you in the contest for concision!

 

[Haltherrion]

While I almost shudder to drape the old-school mantle about my shoulders, in this case I must say, I remain old-school. I don't run formal skill challenges. We have always integrated RP and non-combat skill actions as needed into our non-combat portions of the game. And we have always always factored this part of the session into an overall session XP award (we haven't done encounter XP in decades).

The skill checks happen as needed. They aren't part of some planned give and take. Most of the skill challenge examples I see in the 4E books seem rather constrained to me. They appear to be flexible but if you actually plotted them out as a decision tree, it would be a fairly sparse tree. My players and I usually go all over in these things.

I will say having skill challenges codified and discussed in the rules has made me better about "building in" some explicit options on these sorts of things which helps me as I only ad-lib so well but the players generally take these non-combat encounters where they will well enough on their own.

 

[darjr]

To me skill challenges have always been a way to build an encounter and consequences with an XP reward around traditional kinds of non combat play.

Consider looking at it as running a traditional kind of encounter and then fitting a skill challenge to it after the fact and you'll get my take.

You'll know if they were successful and what they've earned for XP.

Include automatic successes and failures and bonuses to other checks based on plain old role playing and you'll approach a very old school feel. I'll let 'player skill' alone win a skill challenge if it's appropriate or cool or good.

I really like the clue by four of player initiated skill challenges. That's a great idea, I'll have to get better at cobbling them together in my head on the fly.

 

[Klaus]

Here's my ideas on SC:

1 - Design them as SKill Challenges, run them as freeform roleplaying.

The SC format is a great framework to work within. But just like you hide the backstage from an audience in the theatre, keep the actual complexity/successes/etc to yourself.

2 - Reward out-of-box thinking, not cheesifying.

If a player has a good idea that uses a skill you hadn't foreseen, let him use it (if it's a really great idea, mark it as a success regardless of the actual roll). If the idea is a lame-ass excuse to roll with a high-stat skill, let him use it (but either don't count it to the tally or mark it as a failure).

3 - Successes/Failures can be more than just numbers on a tally.

Look at Blackdirge's recent 'Dead by Dawn' adventure in Dungeon mag: each failure in a skill challenge to barricade a location simply adds more creatures to a combat that will be coming along sooner or later.

 

[Jhaelen]

I agree with Kzach and that's exactly how I've been running skill challenges!

In my book, skill challenges are simply a design failure. If you run them in stealth mode, you might as well revert to the freeform roleplaying experience interspersed with the occasional skill check you've run oh so successfully all these years.

You're wrong, though.
You'd be right if everyone had indeed been running 'the freeform roleplaying experience interspersed with the occasional skill check [...]oh so successfully all these years.'.

But not everyone has done that. If you've grokked skill challenges before they've been formalized in 4e, good for you! That's doesn't say anything about anyone elses game.

I remember, I've used something like a proto-skill challenge in some of my 3e games, but I did it without realizing what I was doing. They worked well and were fun, but I didn't actually realize _why_. Now, I have a much better understanding of the mechanics at work.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

When in this 'mode', I find I start thinking with my left brain instead of my right.

Uh, Kzach is an ... Ettin? Shudder. Say, MerricB, are those critters common in Australia?

 

[MrMyth]

In my book, skill challenges are simply a design failure. If you run them in stealth mode, you might as well revert to the freeform roleplaying experience interspersed with the occasional skill check you've run oh so successfully all these years. If you don't, you reap all the problems outlined by your OP and in Mearls' own article (as in, break immersion, introduce artificialities, engage players at the wrong level, etc.).

Except that's precisely what I've found they are best for. A way of giving you guidelines on taking that freeform roleplaying experience, and giving out XP for it - and, more than that, having some guidance on when players succeed or fail at such a scene, rather than having it come down to one diplomacy check that everyone assists the bard on.

It doesn't need to be hidden, but the key is keeping the character's in that freeform RP mindset. The goal shouldn't be for the players to figure out how to justify the best skills to use to succeed at the scene - the goal should be for the players to do whatever they would normally do, and the DM figure out what skill checks they are making in the course of that.

Yeah, there are some issues with it and it is more of an art than a science, but saying everyone is better off without skill challenges is simply wrong. You might be better off without them - but I've found they work well for me, and seen a lot of people that say the same.

 

[Haltherrion]

Except that's precisely what I've found they are best for. A way of giving you guidelines on taking that freeform roleplaying experience, and giving out XP for it - and, more than that, having some guidance on when players succeed or fail at such a scene, rather than having it come down to one diplomacy check that everyone assists the bard on.

They seem fine on a number of fronts. Some ref's may have felt uncomfortable giving out XP for none-battle fights. I never did but it did always feel like I was swimming against the rules so that is nice.

Something formal like this is also nice for more formal game settings like conventions and such.

Despite doing this on my own for years, I liked seeing the treatment and while as I said earlier, I don't do it like this, it was helpful looking at this method in contrast to how I do it.

I will say, it can have its pitfalls. In the wrong hands, you can end up with a mini-railroad: ref plots out all allowed use of skills and inflection points, players fail unless they work to that structure. While a SC provides branches, it could be implemented as one of those not so flexible dialog trees you find all the time in CRPGs that appear flexible until they give you two choices, neither of which you would actually do if you were able to fully roleplay the interaction.

Anyway, while I don't use them literally, I think they are a nice addition to the game system. After all these years, it nice to see non-combat XP receive more than a passing nod.

 

[UniversalMonster]

I run skill challenges only *partially* in stealth mode

I guess that is to say: it's not in stealth mode.


Here's my procedure:

1. I will usually draw a success/failure chart right on the battlemap and leave it there. I let them know what the goal of the challenge is, and that they are in one.

2. I set up the baseline DC for a moderate check up front, and a hard is +5 from that, and an "impossible" is +5 from that one.

So for 1st-2nd level, the DC is 11. It goes up by +1 every two levels for the average party level.

Ok, stop there. We don't do the round-robin "I intimidate the wall.. does that work? Ok, next..." stuff. We jump into stealth mode at that point.

At that point, it's just roleplaying stuff. "Pretend a skill challenge isn't taking place. What are you guys doing?"

Here's an example of my "Assassination as a Skill Challenge" post.

It started just by running scenes, but I had already set it up that they were supposed to 1. gather information on a target, 2) surveill the possible locations for the assassination, and 3. carry out the actual killing.

So it plays out as if this was just your normal roleplaying stuff. Characters are doing their thing, until someone finally starts pursuing a goal, and if it's something that requires a skill check I'll let them know that it counts towards the skill challenge for good or for ill.

In a sense, it's like running the challenge in the background. And it isn't simply a roll-off.. a typical give-and take room by room dungeon exploration can be run as just one long skill challenge as long as you have some goal in mind, and decent consequences for failure. You can run a single 8/3 or 12/3 Skill Challenge over the course of a 3-4 hour adventure this way.

Setting DCs is what makes this work: use the lowbie DC of 11+(average party level/2) as your moderate DC, and YOU (the DM) tell the PC what skill he should be using regardless of whether he is good at it. If he wants to get creative (use a different skill) and has a good explanation, allow it, or allow it at a slightly higher +5 DC. Or disallow it. But remember that you (the DM) are in charge. This keeps the intimidating character from trying to use intimidate on walls or the wizard trying to arcana his way over a pit. But if the rogue wants to acrobat his way over a wall vice climbing it? Yeah, I'd allow that. At a slightly higher DC

So by this standard, you should feel free to assign the heavily armored dwarf a stealth check or give the wimpy wizard an athletics check. Why not? This has been a tradition in D&D since the beginning and it really does happen. The number is still possible (usually) and players can still get creative.. and most importantly: do the Skill Challenge right, and you have a decent handle for about how much XP to reward.

Skill challenges are encounters, so I can't justify removing them entirely- they affect milestones and XP. And played correctly..they are a lot of fun. But it's also import that *losing* a skill challenge be kinda fun or at least interesting too. The clock runs out, the prisoners die, the goblin bandits escape the area, the planned ambush becomes a counterstrike.. the assassins leave clues to their identity. Failure shouldn't just be a possibility, it should be an alternate plotline.