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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Markn" data-source="post: 5064548" data-attributes="member: 21827">I've run some really interesting skill challenges lately, by playing with the results of failures.  Some are totally my own idea, some have been ripped off.  Here goes:Last session we hit epic tier and I designed a fight where the PCs would be fighitng on some earthmotes.  The premise is that they were in Hestavar (MotP) and several portals from the Elemental Chaos opened up and diminished (weakened) primordials came through along with all klinds of elemental energy.  This caused earth motes to crash together and made "getting to the encounter" a challenge.  Basically, the PCs had to dodge flying earthmotes, various elemental phenomenon and so forth to get to the fight.  Since the fight was up in the air on some earthmotes and they were in Hestavar I told the players that it was easy to find suitable flying transportation to get there (pegasus guided chariots, etc) but once they got there the flying transporation would be useless.  They had to use various skills - acrobatics, athletics, arcana, religion, etc to dodge dangers.  The intersting thing was that each failure delayed that PC in getting to the fight by an extra round and additonally, they would arrive on a different earthmote for each failure with multiple failures leading to the PC being further from the fight to start.  So each PC had his own Skill Challenge needing 4 successes.  This worked out really well and is a great change from the drab 3 strikes your out mechanic!!!!I also recently used Mike Mearls Colossus of Laarn skill challenge.  I totatlly reskinned it, dropped some of the skills he put in (as I really felt some of them were a reach) but the idea of a fight/skill challenge was a lot of fun.  I highly recommend reading it.I also did a skill challenge in the Astral Sea where the PCs were affected by a psychic storm.  They had an astral skiff and it requires a pilot to fly it, and 3 crew members to help.  There were 5 PCs that night and each round I through a different challenge at them - one PC fell out of the skiff and had to be rescued, a ghostly githyanki skiff attacked, etc.  Combining the round to round issues they had to deal with and damage that automatically happened to their skiff (which got progressively worse if PCs did also not keep the skiff piloted) it made for a pretty intersting encounter becuase the PCs had to constantly split resources to success at all the little mini challenges.  If they focused to much on one challenge or didn't resolve the challenges timely enough the issues would overwhelm them.  Basically, they had to get three successes on certain skills to drive the githyanki away, use different skills and get a number of success to rescue the ejected PC, and if there wasn't 1 pilot and 3 crew members the skiff woud slow down for each failure and the skiff would incur more damage.  Additionally, the PCs could also try to repair the damage to the skiff.  I somehow had the balance work out really well.  This turned out to be a lot fun.One thing I will state - skill challenges need to be more like combats.  IN combat, the DM responds to the players (or vice versa) forcing a change in strategy to be succesful.  My early skill challenges were more having the PCs roll and they either got sucesses or failures.  When I started introducing things that happened each round to change what was happening in the skill challenge they became WAAAAAAY more interactive and dynamic and a lot more fun.  In fact, my players prefer these types of challenges over fights now and believe me, my players like fighting a lot so that says something.I give PirateCat credit for teaching me this.  I read one of his threads and some of his designs and found them way more interactive.  Once you figure out how to do this skill challenges rock!</blockquote>

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