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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 6551182" data-attributes="member: 97077">I'll do you one better: I think I found where the issue may actually be given your description. It has to do with how open-ended you're leaving things. It's likely the players lack the context to know what to do or what to react to. When players have their characters engaged in a combat, they're dealing with specific complications that are right up in their grills. It's easier for them to make decisions about what to do in the face of that. This is what you should be doing with your "skill challenges."Think of it this way: Characters have goals. Your role as DM is to put genre-appropriate and fun obstacles in the way of those goals. A skill challenge is just a structure for doing this and in D&D 5e it serves chiefly as a pacing mechanism for you to gauge when those obstacles have been sufficiently overcome and the characters' goals achieved. It's a tool only for you so that your challenges aren't too long or too short and are easier for you to run at the table. (In D&D 4e, it's arguably a more "gamey" affair not far removed from combat in the tactical game sense depending on how the group approaches them. But that's not terribly compatible with D&D 5e.)Anyway, let's talk about this skill challenge with Wendy. The goal of the characters is to help Wendy figure out the location of the lost airship. The stakes are that they discover the location (victory) or they discover the location and there's some cost, setback, or complication (defeat). Now what you do is write up a list of complications to specifically present to the party that are standing in the way of the goal. Some examples might be (and I recommend writing a couple of words or short phrase at most for each): Maddening Cipher, Archaic Language, Missing Sections, and Obscure Maps. These are just things to job your memory so you can improvise the complications as they arise in the scene. Prepare more if you need to, just don't you be writing solutions because that's not your role - that's the players' role. If the players can overcome these complications successfully before accruing three failures (say), then they achieve victory in the skill challenge.Now it's time to do the damn thang. Frame the goal in fictional terms, make sure the stakes are clear, and describe the environment - the stacks of dusty journals in a disorganized pile in a cluttered library, Wendy with her sleeves rolled up, or what have you. Then present the first complication, Maddening Cipher. "Wendy looks like she's been up all night by the bags under her eyes. Her ink-stained fingers indicate she's been pouring over these documents from dusk till dawn. She tells you how frustrated she is that she can't seem to crack a maddening cipher in which several important scrolls are written. She hands them over and asks if you can make any sense of them. How do you approach solving this mysterious code?"Time to clam up and encourage the players to come up with an approach to the goal of cracking that cipher. They might decide to puzzle it out themselves (Intelligence check maybe, plus time). They could have a spell that will solve it (automatic success). The rogue's criminal contact might know a guy who knows a guy who's good at ciphers (automatic success, but now owes a favor). And so on. Play out scenes as needed e.g. the paper-pushing montage or the clandestine meet-up with the cagey code-breaker. When an approach has been nailed down and you're clear on its certain success, failure or uncertainty, adjudicate accordingly. If they succeed on overcoming the complication, carry on to the next one, Archaic Language: "With the cipher cracked, Wendy knows where to look next for clues - a moldering tome scrawled in a language lost to time. It will narrow down the list of possible locations if it can be translated. How do you deal with that?" If they fail, the complication either remains, changes, or is replaced by a new complication that arises as a result of the failure (whatever makes sense in context).And that's basically it. I think the key thing missing from what you described is how specific the complications are and that you need to be all up in their grills with it. State the specific problem clearly in fictional terms, point to someone, and ask how they deal with that thing. Play out what scenes need playing out in response to that approach and boil it down to success, failure, or a check. Repeat until done. I don't know your players, but this advice has never gone wrong in all the many years I've been giving advice on skill challenges (google "iserith" and "skill challenges," heh).Let me know if you have any questions or if you want to workshop an upcoming skill challenge here on the forums.</blockquote>

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