D&D 5E Questions About Converting Skill Challenges to 5e

[Azzy]

I’d like to ask those of you with some rules mastery in both 4e and 5e for help converting some elements of 4e’s Skill Challenges to 5e. For clarity’s sake, I’m referencing the rules as presented in the 4e Rules Compendium. I’m looking for a (fairly) straight conversion to 5e.

First up is the section on Level and DCs. 5e’s bounded accuracy and static DCs seem to obviate 4e’s DC by level. However, I’d like some thoughts on the matter since there is some variance in level (due to Proficiency Bonus and increasing Ability Scores).

Second, the Consequences section. The Failure subsection mentions the loss of a Healing Surge as one example. Since 5e doesn’t really have a direct equivalent, do you have suggestions for comparable mechanical losses?

Third, sill in the Consequences section. The Experience Point subsection is probably my biggest conundrum because 5e uses CRs instead of Levels for determining a monster’s difficulty to overcome and there is no simple, direct correlation between monster CR and a character’s Level. So, how would you handle assigning a CR (and, hence, XP) for a Skill Challenge?

Is there anything else that you would suggest or advise upon?

 

[Maialideth]

I did a 5e skill challenge with my group not too long ago, so I'll just chip in with my experience of it. The PCs had to lure an astral dreadnought through the astral plane towards the githyanki city of Tu'narath, without it getting too close to them or losing interest.

I set the DC to 10 + double the characters' proficiency bonus, which worked really well.

I divided the challenge into 4 stages, and each stage required a number of rolls to proceed to the next stage. Not successes, but rolls, meaning that the challenge would continue even if a roll failed, so the game wouldn't be slowed down from the players having to reach a certain number of successes to advance to the next stage.
Stage 1: two rolls (getting the astral dreadnought interested)
Stage 2: four rolls (dodging through an astral ship graveyard)
Stage 3: four rolls (plowing through a modron march without the astral skiff taking too much damage)
Stage 4: two rolls (getting the astral dreadnought to continue towards Tu'narath, while the party snuck off towards a githyanki fortress)
The fail condition was if they rolled 3 failures during the challenge, the astral dreadnought caught up with them, and they'd have to fight it (extremely dangerous if you're using Astral Projection spell).

I also wrote down a few skills for each stage to give the players as suggestions, if they couldn't think of something themselves. This included tools proficiencies (when the druid asked to use their weaver's tools proficiency to sculpt a wall of thorns spell into a bumper around the astral skiff, I knew this was a success). Sculpting spells like this is normally not something you can do, but I think a skill challenge shines over combat when the players are allowed to do other things with their powers. I also allowed the percentile die roll for the Teleport spell to count towards the rolls of the challenge.

I chose not to use standard initiative for the skill challenge. Instead I let the players take charge and say if they had an idea for something they would like to try, as long as it wasn't the same player doing taking all the attention (which was not an issue in my group, they are so nice).

If I had to do something similar to the 4e healing surge consequence of failure, I'd use hit dice. But I feel that this is making skill challenges too mechanical. The reason this one worked so well for my group, we talked about it afterwards, was that it was storybased and promoted creativity far more than combat does. We also agreed that that sort of creativity was only for skill challenges, not combat.

Edit: I just remembered, that one of the rolls was a group check where half the rolls had to succeed for it to count as a success for the skill challenge. Just to illustrate how many different types of rolls you can use in a skill challenge.

 

[Blue]

Just as an alternate take, he's what I've written when this has come up before. I am not a fan of the 4e structure - it assumes just a single axis, and the true chances of success/failure are obscured from both the player and the DM unless they are math savvy.

Do you use skill challenges?

I've used skill challenges (so named because 4E formalised them with that name) in every edition of D&D, although I didn't always call them that. Here's my super-simple way of doing it. I'd be curious how others implement it. 1. Set an overall difficulty for the challenge. All checks are the...

www.enworld.org

 

[jgsugden]

I've never found the appear of a skill challenge except in the most abstract of situations. Instead, I put a challenge in front of the PCs and let them tell me how they address it. If it ends up involving a series of skill checks - great. If they use spells, magic items, or non-skill based solutions, great. Exploration and social encounters work best when the story, not the mechanics, drive the situation.

 

[dave2008]

I will just chime in and say the VP (Victory Point) system from PF2 is similar to a skill challenge, but improved IMO. Instead of explaining it you can check it our yourself: Victory Points

 

[Lyxen]

OMG, And to think that I used to like 3e and then PF, but the jargon of PF2 (especially after the refreshing breath of air that 5e is with the natural language) is even more hideous than I remembered from a brief perusal: "There are a few common structures for tracking Victory Points that you might use for your new subsystem. You could come up with a structure based off one of the subsystems below, or you could create your own completely different structure if none of them match the way you’re running your game."

So technical, so decorrelated from the game world, so formal, I already had trouble with the formalism of the Skill Challenges, there is no way I can dig into that monstrosity, but to each his own, I suppose. But I really have enough formalism at work...

 

[Oofta]

OMG, And to think that I used to like 3e and then PF, but the jargon of PF2 (especially after the refreshing breath of air that 5e is with the natural language) is even more hideous than I remembered from a brief perusal: "There are a few common structures for tracking Victory Points that you might use for your new subsystem. You could come up with a structure based off one of the subsystems below, or you could create your own completely different structure if none of them match the way you’re running your game."

So technical, so decorrelated from the game world, so formal, I already had trouble with the formalism of the Skill Challenges, there is no way I can dig into that monstrosity, but to each his own, I suppose. But I really have enough formalism at work...

Yeah, I tried reading through it and couldn't get past the geek speak. I'm sure there was some advice in there somewhere but it was making my head hurt trying to understand it.

To each their own, I prefer more natural language as well.

 

[Garthanos]

I also wrote down a few skills for each stage to give the players as suggestions, if they couldn't think of something themselves. This included tools proficiencies (when the druid asked to use their weaver's tools proficiency to sculpt a wall of thorns spell into a bumper around the astral skiff, I knew this was a success). Sculpting spells like this is normally not something you can do, but I think a skill challenge shines over combat when the players are allowed to do other things with their powers. I also allowed the percentile die roll for the Teleport spell to count towards the rolls of the challenge.

Awesome, I need to find the example but applying the arcana skill to alter a ritual is very like that or like my mention of using the at-will freeze spell expending a healing surge to hold it to walk across a lake like a Death Knight from WoW.

 

[Garthanos]

To each their own, I prefer more natural language as well.

I hate having to dig through several paragraphs for the fundamental information I need for actual use in play... and the implicit this flavor text is all nailed down is anti-roleplay to me.

 

[Garthanos]

Just as an alternate take, he's what I've written when this has come up before. I am not a fan of the 4e structure - it assumes just a single axis, and the true chances of success/failure are obscured from both the player and the DM unless they are math savvy.

Do you use skill challenges?

I've used skill challenges (so named because 4E formalised them with that name) in every edition of D&D, although I didn't always call them that. Here's my super-simple way of doing it. I'd be curious how others implement it. 1. Set an overall difficulty for the challenge. All checks are the...

www.enworld.org

I had thought of how having more than one axis would be interesting actually a single action might result in some progress along each one or neither ... but was not sure where to go with it.

 

[Garthanos]

I will just chime in and say the VP (Victory Point) system from PF2 is similar to a skill challenge, but improved IMO. Instead of explaining it you can check it our yourself: Victory Points

It is certainly intriguing but does seem like you might have to invest brain in it (this is true with skill challenges as well ) thank you for pointing it out. Also its written from the point of view of DM creating his own systems and subsystems.