Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gamefiend" data-source="post: 5143340" data-attributes="member: 33187">OK, here's some thoughts:Running a Skill Challenge1. Skill Challenges are about Actions, not skills.  A useful practice when it comes to a player's turn (i don't roll initiative typically, just circle around the table) is to tell them to stop looking at the character sheet.  Don't let them do it.  Have them tell you what they want to do, and then find the skill that maps to that action.  "I'm going to bash through the cockroaches and clear a path".  You can interpret that as a an attack roll (more on this in a second) or an Athletics check.  When players are thinking about what they're doing and not what skills they are looking to leverage, you get better roleplaying and a better skill challenge.  This to me is the most important thing of all.  The flow each player turn should be narrate action, map to skill, make check, narrate results.2. Ebb and Flow --Handling Failure.  The trick in keeping a skill challenge interesting and exciting is the interplay between what a character does and how the environment reacts.  Each failure shuold in narration raise the stakes.  It doesn't have to tie directly into the game mechanics, but it should always be described as though some new twist happens.  In the previous example, don't be afraid to, on failure, make some wierd complication.  "You start hacking at the giant cockroaches, but they are too many.  They swarm around your legs and your arms until you can no longer move.  You find yourself asphyxiated, slowling crushed underneath the swarm."  Now, that could be represented in a lost healing surge, but even if it's not, that feedback adds to the developing story, and the player now has a hook to narrate against.  Rather than a simple "you don't get through", to which the player has to either try again (boring) or make up something new (fine, but can cause a deadlock), your PC now can follow back on his term with:"I'm drowning in a sea of cockroaches (yech) but I was able to gain one last gasp before being surrounded.  With that last bit of air, I'm able to shrug these disgusting things off me and continue to move forward."Skill Challenges work best when you think of them as volleys, directed by the PCs.  The narrative shouldn't be a checklist of things the players do; it should escalate back and forth in tension until a conclusion is reached.Designing Skill ChallengesOK, I'm going to be a touch self-pimping here...I've got a whole series of articles (soon to be published in Open Game Table 2, yay!) that I would like to refer you to.  My archives is currently busted, so I will link to <a href="http://critical-hits.com/features/skill-challenges/" target="_blank">Critical Hits</a> guide.  My section is "How to Design a Skill Challenge" and consists of the following parts:How to Design a Skill Challenge, Part 1: Theory of ChoiceHow to Design a Skill Challenge #2: BranchingHow To Design a Skill Challenge #3: NestingHow to Design a Skill Challenge Part 4: SequencingHow to Design a Skill Challenge Part 5: CyclingFailure is an Option: When to Use Skill ChallengesHope that helps!</blockquote>

Verification