D&D 5E Skill Challenges in 5E

[Majoru Oakheart]

Interesting. That doesn't seem that good to me personally - what is the point of the skill checks if, in the end, the PCs end up at the same point? This looks like an attempt to set up a GUMSHOE-style investigation within the 4e context, but GUMSHOE rations the use of abilities to get anything but the basic clues in a scene, and thereby stops any one player/PC dominating. Whereas, in the scenario you describe, it seems that the best PCs get unlimited use of their abilities.

The point of a skill challenge is that it never stops you from continuing on your mission. It just gives you a disadvantage if you fail. So, in this case, once you fail enough times you still get told where to find the guy with the stolen goods but word has gotten to him that you are looking for him so you need to fight more enemies when you get there(as he's managed to round up more friends to ambush you).

The point really was to give out XP. Especially in LFR, there was an XP maximum we were allowed to give out per adventure. In order to reach that maximum we had to fill the adventure with enough combats and skill challenges. A lot of the authors were happy because in 3.5e we were only allowed to give out XP for monsters. At least now we could have non-combat sections of the adventure that PCs would still get XP for.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is not a skill challenge. This is an adventure written up in the pattern of a skill challenge. It uses very little of the skill challenge rules.

The skill challenge rules when put into their most basic form are:
PCs make skill checks of any kind(which PC makes them and which ones they make aren't dictated by the skill challenge rules). Each one that is higher than X succeeds and each one lower fails. If you get X successes before Y failures, you win the skill challenge and get the XP. If you fail, you still reach your goal with some sort of disadvantage and no XP(though, apparently they errata'd it to allow XP even if you fail later, I haven't seen those new rules. LFR has it's own house rule to give out half XP on a failed skill challenge).

However, that gets rather boring. So you put those skill checks within context of a storyline so it sounds like you are actually doing something and not just rolling dice.

This is a perfectly valid skill challenge:
Figure out the symbols on the wall
8 successes before 3 failures

Player: "I make a Arcana check to identify them. 22."
DM: "That makes it, the DC is actually 12. You start to understand the symbols."
Player: "Oh, I actually make 12 on a 1."
DM: "Ok, then you make 8 successes without failing and understand the symbols."

The problem is that often the act of putting those skill checks in context falls entirely on the DM. The first couple of skill challenges that authors started to write....even before the 4e rules had come out looked a lot like the above.

WOTC kept giving us weird and conflicting advice on how to write skill challenges(it didn't help that the last beta of the 4e rules had completely different skill challenge rules from the final version). We had a panel from a couple of the R&D people who tried to explain to us exactly how to write an interesting skill challenge. The problem appeared to be that none of them had the same ideas on what exactly a skill challenge was.

Some of the advice we were given was: "Each skill check should be accompanied by a description from the DM to help make sure each PC had to make a roll and the skills needed were a variety."

The very first skill challenge I ever saw was the one written by Chris Tulach for D&D Experience, a couple of months before 4e came out. I ran that adventure.

He had a skill challenge where you were trying to run away from people looking for you. Each skill you succeeded on would put you into a new situation you had to deal with. For instance:

"You need to hide, but all you see is a wall that's rather tall, a trash can, and a crowd. You can use Stealth to hide in the trash can, Athletics to climb the wall or Diplomacy to blend with the crowd." You'd ask each player what they were doing. If they all succeeded, they'd still need more successes to complete the skill challenge. So you'd say "Alright, the majority of the guards looking for you pass. However, one spots you and you are forced to run down an alley to get away from him. You can make an Acrobatics check to leap up and grab a railing above you, Athletics to climb the building, or Stealth will let you hide in the alley and wait for them to pass." And so on until they succeeded or failed.

However, later we were told that wasn't a good example of a skill challenge because the players should be choosing which skills they use, not the DM. The idea was to encourage creativity in how their skills could apply to the situation. You should ask the players what skills they use and how they are using them. But this caused players to always choose whatever skill they were best at and often degraded into senseless rolling.

Later we were told to merge the two methods by sometimes allowing players to decide which skills they used but sometimes having mandatory skills that the entire group needed to make.

Overall, the rules for Skill Challenges and exactly what the people at WOTC thought they were kept changing and were kind of a hot mess.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Don't like this part much. Forcingplayers to depend on their weakest abilities is demeaning. Yes, a dump stat should matter, but mainly in reducing options. A step in a skill challenge to pass a 20 ft. wall is good - it can be tackled in a number of ways. A skill challenge step to make a Climb (DC 20) is bad, because it has no narrative meaning. There must always be other things you can do, not the least of which is to depend on your team. Spider climb, ropes, "I use my Diplomacy to encourage McBrute over here to boost me up the wall", whatever. There needs to be options. A climb score of -2 removes that as an option, but should not be an absolute barrier to most tasks.

The problem with this is that in a number of articles WOTC admitted that the DCs are too low to challenge people's good skill checks. They were designed so that sometimes PCs would HAVE to make rolls on their poor skills. That's what makes it a skill challenge and not a skill cakewalk. The advice given out was to always make sure you put some of these situations into a skill challenge.

 

[pemerton]

The skill challenge rules when put into their most basic form are:
PCs make skill checks of any kind(which PC makes them and which ones they make aren't dictated by the skill challenge rules). Each one that is higher than X succeeds and each one lower fails. If you get X successes before Y failures, you win the skill challenge and get the XP. If you fail, you still reach your goal with some sort of disadvantage

For me, judging the concept not from WotC briefings but from the DMG, plus the resolution systems in other games by which skill challenges are obviously inspired, what is missing from your basic presentation is one further thing: at the start of the challenge, and after each check, the GM narrates the fictional situation giving rise to the challenge; the player, in making a check, narrates or otherwise makes clear what his/her PC is doing in the fiction; the GM, after that check succeeds or fails, narrates its consequence, leading to rinse & repeat until the challenge is concluded one way or another.

However, that gets rather boring. So you put those skill checks within context of a storyline so it sounds like you are actually doing something and not just rolling dice.

In combat, what makes it "not just rolling dice" is that there are framing decisions to be made - who attacks what, who moves where, etc. In a skill challenge, the GM and player narration play the same function roll of framing the stakes and context for resolution via dice rolls, but it is in purely fictional terms rather than in the quasi-mechanical terms of positioning and targetting.

The idea of "putting the skill checks into a storyline" sounds to me like a recipe for disaster, because that is analogous to prescripting a combat, which doesn't make any sense.

This is a perfectly valid skill challenge:
Figure out the symbols on the wall
8 successes before 3 failures

Player: "I make a Arcana check to identify them. 22."
DM: "That makes it, the DC is actually 12. You start to understand the symbols."
Player: "Oh, I actually make 12 on a 1."
DM: "Ok, then you make 8 successes without failing and understand the symbols."

I tend to think of this as a complex skill check, which is a special case of a skill challenge, and - as your example illustrates - mostly interesting only when something else is at stake so the expenditure of action economy on the dice rolls actually matters (eg in a combat). Out of combat, you may as well just calculate the odds of success on 8 Arcana checks and set the DC for a single check at that level. Because, at least as you present it, this situation has no internal dynamism and hence nothing is at stake in the individual checks other than ultimate success or failure.

The problem is that often the act of putting those skill checks in context falls entirely on the DM. The first couple of skill challenges that authors started to write....even before the 4e rules had come out looked a lot like the above.

I think the best examples of writing these sorts of challenges for a pre-packaged scenario are provided by Robin Laws in the HeroQuest Narrator's book.

These indicate the initial set-up, and also give indications of what the various dynamics and possibilities are, and hence how things might unfold. They suggest the sorts of abilities that the players (via their PCs) might bring to bear. And they indicate roughly what the range of possible outcomes might be expected to be, and how the GM might build on those outcomes to continue the adventure. In other words, much like a combat is presented in a typical D&D module.

I think WotC would have been well-advised to try and emulate Laws's style.

 

[Starfox]

(it didn't help that the last beta of the 4e rules had completely different skill challenge rules from the final version).

Thank you, very interesting post, all of it. Particularly the quoted bit. I long had a feeling this was the case. The way I have discussed it with [MENTION=60045]Tuft[/MENTION] and friends RL, we always thought they had a skill resolution system that the 4E devs were proud of, but late in development they discovered some problem with it that made it a no-go. In the 4E preview books, they mentioned they had a very cool system for noncombat situation resolution (as opposed to task resolution), but they never went into much detail. However it did not feel much like what was released as 4E skill challenges.

Can you give any clue what this earlier system was like? Was this the earlier system?

"You need to hide, but all you see is a wall that's rather tall, a trash can, and a crowd. You can use Stealth to hide in the trash can, Athletics to climb the wall or Diplomacy to blend with the crowd." You'd ask each player what they were doing. If they all succeeded, they'd still need more successes to complete the skill challenge.

This reminds me quite a lot of dramatic skill resolution in TORG, except no cards and no approved actions. That system also gave a list of default skills to use each step, while leaving it open for player creativity to come up with more.

 

[Starfox]

For me, judging the concept not from WotC briefings but from the DMG, plus the resolution systems in other games by which skill challenges are obviously inspired, what is missing from your basic presentation is one further thing: at the start of the challenge, and after each check, the GM narrates the fictional situation giving rise to the challenge; the player, in making a check, narrates or otherwise makes clear what his/her PC is doing in the fiction; the GM, after that check succeeds or fails, narrates its consequence, leading to rinse & repeat until the challenge is concluded one way or another.

DnD skill challenges did encourage you to narrate the result of skill rolls. The problem was that there were so many skill rolls, at undramatically low difficulties. It is very hard to narrate how players try to cross a chasm in 25 or more discrete steps. This is another advantage with a timed system (5 successes in 3 rounds or somesuch), fewer skill rolls to narrate.

 

[pemerton]

DnD skill challenges did encourage you to narrate the result of skill rolls. The problem was that there were so many skill rolls, at undramatically low difficulties. It is very hard to narrate how players try to cross a chasm in 25 or more discrete steps.

What is key, in my view at least, is that the narration must motivate further checks. If the situation doesn't naturally lend itself to that, that's a reason to set a lower complexity of challenge.

 

[Starfox]

What is key, in my view at least, is that the narration must motivate further checks. If the situation doesn't naturally lend itself to that, that's a reason to set a lower complexity of challenge.

You are right, there is a limit to how much continuing narration is possible (as you do indeed say above in the quote). In many cases, looking at TV series or Cinema for inspiration for RPGs is a good idea. It can be used as a model for how to create tension and drama. But this is not one of those cases; Indiana Jones trying to climb a wall in excruciating detail can be exiting in a movie, but a PC climbing a wall handhold by handhold rarely is.

"Boring and repetitive use" is a phrase coined by Robin Laws in Feng Shui. It applies very much to skill challenges.

 

[pemerton]

YIn many cases, looking at TV series or Cinema for inspiration for RPGs is a good idea. It can be used as a model for how to create tension and drama. But this is not one of those cases; Indiana Jones trying to climb a wall in excruciating detail can be exiting in a movie, but a PC climbing a wall handhold by handhold rarely is.

I thnk that's a case where, in cinema, the emotional effects of the scene depend upon visual communication, which is lacking in a tabletop RPG.

My personal experience is that social challenges are easiest to run, and that environmental challenges are consierably harder, for just the sorts of reasons you give. But [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] does a lot of environmental challenges.

 

[Manbearcat]

I thnk that's a case where, in cinema, the emotional effects of the scene depend upon visual communication, which is lacking in a tabletop RPG.

My personal experience is that social challenges are easiest to run, and that environmental challenges are consierably harder, for just the sorts of reasons you give. But @Manbearcat does a lot of environmental challenges.

I do. I run a lot of them. While I do run social Skill Challenges a fair stretch (assuredly not as much as you nor likely as skillful), and I'm going to post one of my group's better ones in the Skill Challenge Depot thread, environmental/physical threat conflict resolution is indeed predominant in my game.

This is assuredly because (and I suspect I share this with other 4e GMs who have similar backgrounds/tastes) I've been an outdoorsman/sportsman my whole life. Like anything else, a collective knowledge pool comes from exposure (theoretical or field), a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning, and testing hypotheses, and learning from your errors. Hike enough, climb enough, camp enough, run enough triathlons/10 k/half etc, and you inevitably learn what dynamic challenges are faced, what their potential answers are, and thusly how best to frame those situations in a hypothetical world (of an RPG). A trained combat soldier who has spent multiple tours in the field would have the means to deploy great physical challenges, from logistics to hazard navigation to survival in unforgiving, hostile territory.

Whats more...

In many cases, looking at TV series or Cinema for inspiration for RPGs is a good idea. It can be used as a model for how to create tension and drama. But this is not one of those cases; Indiana Jones trying to climb a wall in excruciating detail can be exiting in a movie, but a PC climbing a wall handhold by handhold rarely is.

"Boring and repetitive use" is a phrase coined by Robin Laws in Feng Shui. It applies very much to skill challenges.

...unsurprisingly I do not agree with this. Coupled with the above, a keen understanding of heroic action adventure tropes and how best to map them to an RPG conflict/situation with respect to initial framing, complications, and pacing derives extraordinary fun in physical/environmental non-combat conflict resolution (in this case Skill Challenges). Indiana Jones is at the top of my list of genre logic/inspiration. I think much of this just goes back to resolution (as I mentioned earlier). You're pacing your conflict resolution wrong if you are focusing on granularity in task resolution; eg one handhold to the next...to the next...to the next...to the next. Your resolution is completely off. You have to zoom out and broaden things. Challenge 1 isn't handhold 1 and then 2 is the same, all the way to 10 or whatever. First off, why are you climbing in the first place? That is relevant to framing the situation and the incoming complications, the player answers and the evolving narrative. You're trying to get away? Pursuit is gaining (deal with that). Pursuit is using artillery (deal with that). The environment changes; rain, avalanche, a natural vent or cave becomes available, (what happens now? Handle that.). What is at the top; a major trade route is hosting a moving, tent city bazaar with people everywhere...a rushing river...a dense forest...some humanoids that may be friend or foe but they have pointy sticks in your face (what now?).

But yes, this is terribly boring:

GM: Handhold 1 (roll Athletics)
Player: 15
GM: You pass and and grasp handhold 2 (roll Athletics)
Player: 12
GM: Handhold 3 is just out of your reach but you don't fall (roll Athletics)
Player: 7
GM: You slip and fall. (rolls 1d10). 7 damage. Handhold 1
Player: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

That is poor GMing and anything near or around it is poor GMing. The same holds for combat and social scenes. I attack. You haven't killed him enough. I attack more. I convince the King. Roll Diplomacy. 15. He agrees but you haven't convinced him enough. I convince him harder/more. Roll Diplomacy...etc. Poor GMing. I can't imagine that is controversial.