Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maialideth" data-source="post: 8386308" data-attributes="member: 6795301">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.</blockquote>

Verification