ToV Skill challenges from Tales of the Valiant

[Maialideth]

I've been reading the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide, and the section on skill challenges is pretty much spot on to how I've been running skill challenges in my 5e games for the last couple of years, with two rather important differences that I want to share here.

I've run 5 or 6 skill challenges in 5e so far. Not many but they all worked exactly as intended for everyone in the group. I ran complex and simple skill challenges for a group of level 17 characters, then, in our second campaign, I ran a couple of simple skill challenges for the group but with low-level characters (level 4 I think, it's been a while). And I ran a couple of more or less impromptu skill challenges for another group, also with level 4 or so characters. All of this is just to let you know, that I've actually designed and played skill challenges in 5e and they all worked beautifully.

The two things I want to highlight, that in my experience works better than the mechanics in Tales of the Valiant are skill DC and number of successes and failures. The way the book describes the rest of planning and running skill challenges is a great way of describing it for a general audience (my description would probably only make sense to me).
However, I have found that setting the DC for all skill checks in a skill challenge to double the proficiency bonus of the group +10 is spot on, every time. So for a group of 5th level characters the DC would be 16. The idea is that the players are allowed to narratively describe their character's actions in a way that leans towards their strongest skills/tools, and that is perfectly okay, especially if it results in fun and exciting narratives (which is the real goal of a skill challenge).
I would never use a higher or lower DC as a dial for difficulty of the skill challenge. I would however, use the number of successes required to pass it as a dial for difficulty... I will deal with the number of failures afterwards.
The number of successes required in Tales of the Valiant is not a bad recommendation. I recommend basing it on the number of characters in the group instead...

• Easy challenge - number of successes required equal to the number of PCs or half the number of PCs (this is probably best for when running a skill challenge as part of a combat encounter).
• Medium challenge - number of successes required equal to the number of PCs +2 (everyone gets a turn and a few gets to be even more creative).
• Hard challenge - number of successes required equal to double the number of PCs +2 (best if the skill challenge is broken up in several parts/scenes with maybe 3-4 checks per scene). This is the big one. It requires the most planning but boy oh boy is it fun. The first skill challenge I ran in 5e was a Hard challenge for 5 PCs of level 17, when they had to lure an astral dreadnought through the Astral plane towards the githyanki city of Tu'unarath.

The last thing is the number of failures. And the magic number is..... 3 always.
Of course you can do whatever you like, it's your game but every skill challenge I've run so far was designed as I've written it here, and every single one of these skill challenges came down to the final nervewrackingly exciting check.

Phew. I think this was the first thread I've started in here. I didn't expect it to be this long. I have had so much fun running skill challenges in 5e, and I was very happy to see that Kobold Press managed to describe them in the same way that I run them, that is focused more on the narrative and creative use of skill and tools rather than how they are used in the more strict sense of the rules (one of my players used proficiency with Weaver's tools to shape a Wall of Thorns spell around their astral skiff, so it became like a bumper car and they could bump the marching modrons away from them without causing harm).

If all of this is too much, then I would recommend at least using the way to calculate the DC... it really really is spot on, also generally as a DC for slightly higher than average difficulty skill checks (PB*2 +10).

 

[Voadam]

I was not aware there were skill challenges in a 5e-ish book, thanks for the heads up.

4e skill challenges were a great concept that had description and implementation issues early on.

Having them in products now after years of being able to use and improve on the 4e base should be useful.

 

[Marc Radle]

Great ideas!

The Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide is absolutely FILLED with great stuff like this - I highly recommend the book, no mater if you play D&D, ToV, or both!

 

[Maialideth]

Great ideas!

The Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide is absolutely FILLED with great stuff like this - I highly recommend the book, no mater if you play D&D, ToV, or both!

Totally agree. I bought it, because @SlyFlourish wrote about it on his blog and mentioned the homebrew section, something the '24 DMG, as good as it is, failed miserably with. The Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide is very much the GM's all-round toolbox.

 

[Maialideth]

As for skill challenges, now that I've opened my own flood gates, so to speak... I'm playing with the format a bit in my current campaign.
For context, there are only two PCs in the group, so the numbers don't work quite as well here. Also, one is a barbarian and the other is a druid, so not a lot of variety in skills and tools proficiencies. The way to calculate the DC I mention in my first post, assumes that most of the skill checks are skills and tools the characters are proficient with, and that there will be a variety of proficiencies in the party.

I'm planning a skill challenge that is divided into 4 phases. The goal is to capture the essence of the Western Wind as part of a quest to gather special ingredients to forge a mighty weapon for the barbarian.
Each phase has a theme, that vaguely define what type of skills are appropriate for that phase, without defining specific skills, so the players have freedom to come up with fun ideas. In this case they are:

• Nature or tracking based.
• Stealth based.
• Physical or social performance based.
• Capture the wind (more freeform than the others).

Each phase requires 3 skill checks (remember only two players). For a phase to be successful 2 out of the 3 checks must succeed. If all 3 succeed, the third success can be used to mitigate a failure from another phase. For example if phase 1 has three successes, but phase 2 only has one success, then one of the successes from phase 1 can be used to get phase 2 up to two successes.

The final result of the skill challenge is based on how many phases are successful (have two or more successes) and how many failures there are in total.

• All 4 phases fail - catastrophic failure.
• 2-3 phases fail - when the weapon is forged, it will have a powerful curse or a strong sentient personality that will conflict with the PC using it.
• 1 phase fail - the weapon will be cursed.
• All phases succeed but there are 1-4 failures between them - the weapon will have some sort of quirk in addition to its magical property (it is going to be a Returning weapon, and this skill challenge is only a part of the quest to determine the powers the weapon will have).
• All phases succeed with no failures - the weapon is going to be Legendary.

The base idea is a skill challenge in phases.
Each phase requires 2 out of 3 checks to succeed.
The third success from a phase can be used to mitigate failures in future phases.

 

[Morrus]

I was not aware there were skill challenges in a 5e-ish book, thanks for the heads up.

4e skill challenges were a great concept that had description and implementation issues early on.

Having them in products now after years of being able to use and improve on the 4e base should be useful.

We put them in Level Up, back in 2021. They form a large portion of our exploration pillar rules--we call them Exploration Challenges. We've got about 250 of them so far and often add more in new books and magazines. They also integrate with encounters and the encounter building rules, and with Level Up's journey rules.

 

[James Gasik]

I just ran Sea of Bones, which has a few "skill challenges" in it. The first happens in the midst of battle, which proved to be kind of rough for my party (Bard, Fighter, Mechanist, Sorcerer). The second is a simple "get past this locked door in a timely manner" (the adventure has a very tight 'doom clock'- no short rests for you, which proved nearly fatal to my players- there are [redacted] to deal with this, which prevented a TPK). The final one however, required a ton of checks and it was a two-parter. Step one, you have 10 rolls to gather successes to make step two easier. Then step two, the real challenge.

I ended up skipping this part (allowing the party to avoid the worst ending) just because it felt kind of tedious, and only two characters had decent checks (and one, an Eonic, was just planning to help, giving the other player super advantage, so I felt there were just going to be a ton of die rolls and it was already past our usual stop time).

 

[Maialideth]

I just ran Sea of Bones, which has a few "skill challenges" in it. The first happens in the midst of battle, which proved to be kind of rough for my party (Bard, Fighter, Mechanist, Sorcerer). The second is a simple "get past this locked door in a timely manner" (the adventure has a very tight 'doom clock'- no short rests for you, which proved nearly fatal to my players- there are [redacted] to deal with this, which prevented a TPK). The final one however, required a ton of checks and it was a two-parter. Step one, you have 10 rolls to gather successes to make step two easier. Then step two, the real challenge.

I ended up skipping this part (allowing the party to avoid the worst ending) just because it felt kind of tedious, and only two characters had decent checks (and one, an Eonic, was just planning to help, giving the other player super advantage, so I felt there were just going to be a ton of die rolls and it was already past our usual stop time).

Sounds like a good call to skip it. If it feels tedious and you are close to ending the session, no one is going to be very creative, and that, in my opinion, is the strength and purpose of skill challenges... allowing the players to be creative beyond what is written on their character sheets and in the rules.

When I'm running a skill challenge for a group for the first time, I also tell them that I am going to allow a much higher degree of elasticity with what can be done with a skill, feature, spell etc. than if it was a combat encounter.
In combat, spells work as written. In skill challenges, the flavor is much more important. Which reminds me, if a skill challenge is inspired by a scene in a movie or tv show, let the players know exactly what the inspiration is. That way they can more easily, again in my opinion, flavor their actions to fit the theme of the skill challenge.
In my group, I ran a skill challenge inspired by the western movie Young Guns, where they were boarded up in a house surrounded by a small army. I don't think any of my players have ever seen that movie (it's from the early '90s), but they immediately grasped the flavor I was going for.

 

[el-remmen]

Thanks for the heads up re: ToV - I may have to check that out. And I appreciate a view into how you run skill challenges

I have been running skill challenges in my 5E games for a few years now too (mostly. . . loosely? based on Matt Colville's description here, never having read, played, or run in a game with skill challenges before encountering this video).

I vary the number successes and failures needed/to be avoided based on the task(s) goals not on the number or level of players, same goes with the individual skill DCs - but I do give them a CR that I only use to determine the XP award for successfully fulfilling them based on the difficulty.

Recently for example, the PCs tried something very difficult (navigating a boat up a river with some shallow portions and other obstacles) and set the conditions at 5 successes before 2 failures! They almost made it! It was the first time they failed at a skill challenge (leading to damage to their boat and the complications that entailed) but I always make sure the players know when a skill challenge has begun and what the criteria for successes/failures might be - so they can decide if they want to try something else.

I sometimes add other non-skill based tasks that count as a chance for a success (or failure). For example, the party above was ambushed by bullywugs, when they drove them off I awarded them a skill challenge success. If the party had had to flee or delay their journey it would have counted as a failure.

I also mention a skill challenge I adapted into "Danger at Dunwater" on my HOW I RUN IT blog, here.