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Message: <blockquote data-quote="C_M2008" data-source="post: 4775410" data-attributes="member: 65375">Well for each failure I planted a red-herring-which could lead to further failures but not successes, which is a bit of a jerk move, but seemed to fit the bill (they only failed one check though). It was a 12-3 challenge, mostly medium DCs. A failure would have meant that they got the wrong guy, the guy that did it got away, or someone else got killed (or some combination there of-again dependant on PC actions). It was basically used as a skill challenge so that I had a metric to measure whether or not the murderer got away with it (and XP rewards but that's not quite as important). It as you say could very easily just have been done as free-roleplay and as far as the players are concerned that's all that happened, they cleverly solved a mystery. This wouldn't work so well for a DM that likes everything set in stone, but for a DM that doesn't mind a fluid game and flying by the seat of their pants it worked well--a skill challenge without breaking out of the actual roleplay.  To me a skill challenge is a DM tool for measuring conflict resolution, the player's don't have to know it's being used for it to be effective. I can see the merits of Piratecat's way though.</blockquote>