Skill Challenge vs Fighting

[pukunui]

Hi all,

I don't have the books. Just thought I'd get that out there.

I don't know if this has been brought up already or not but after reading a number of people complaining about how the books are like 90% combat-oriented, I was thinking about ways of injecting more "roleplay" options. One thing I came up with was making up an optional Skill Challenge for every potential combat so that every encounter could go either way - PCs can either try to sweet-talk/bluff/intimidate/whatever their way out of a fight or just get right down to the nitty-gritty if they wish. Now, I admit that there will be instances where this might not work -- there will be times where the monster isn't interested in talking. It just wants to kill you. But that doesn't automatically preclude a Skill Challenge of some kind (perhaps more physical skills could be used to try to avoid the monster or something).

Anyway, so what I'm wondering is ... if I were to do something like that -- whip up an encounter so that it can either be a Skill Challenge or a Fight (or, I suppose, to put it another way, you'd make it a Skill Challenge first and then make combat the penalty for failure), would I make the complexity of the Skill Challenge such that the XP for it equals the XP the PCs would theoretically get for just defeating the monsters in combat? Is it as simple as that?


Thanks in advance.


Cheers,
pukunui

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Unless there are no rules for granting XP for skill challenges, yes, it sounds like that's how you should do it.

You could actually make the skill challenge a little more difficult, thus granting more XP, so it is more rewarding for the players not to fight. Since combats can be a lot of fun, that might be a fair compensation.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Well actually in the DMG, it states for handing out XP for skill challenges:

"A skill challenge’s complexity, combined with its level, defines its value in experience points. A skill challenge is worth the same XP as a number of monsters of its level equal to its complexity. Thus, a 7th-level challenge with a complexity of 1 is worth 300 XP (the same as one 7th-level monster), while a 7th-level challenge with a complexity of 5 is worth 1,500 XP—the same as a 7th-level combat encounter.

You can also decide to allocate some of the adventure’s treasure to the challenge."

So I have to ask, in a alternative life were you a game designer since you seem to think alike

 

[ForbidenMaster]

Essentially what it will come down to is how important you want the skill challenge to be. If you want it to be just as important as the encounter such that if they succeed in the skill challenge they would get the same rewards, you can do that and there are rules for it.

 

[pukunui]

Hey guys. Thanks for the quick responses!

Fallen Seraph - thanks for confirming that the DMG has rules for working out the XP for skill challenges. That should make it pretty easy to set most, if not all, encounters up so that they can potentially be either a Skill Challenge, a combat, or both.

Basically I want my players to feel like they never have no choice but to fight something. Even if what's attacking them is a hungry monster that can't be reasoned with, they still might be able to use some combination of skills to trick it into letting them pass or something.

I realize this isn't really a new concept but having actual rules for Skill Challenges and the like should make it a bit easier.

The main thing for me is simply that it seems like most people are thinking in terms of an encounter being designed as either a Skill Challenge or a combat but not in terms of an encounter being potentially one or the other or both.

Does that make sense?