NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 6469145" data-attributes="member: 7006">If Skill Challenges (tm) as a thing are ever ported into 5E, I would imagine it would probably occur either as a website article, or as an option in the eventual Unearthed Arcana type of product.  I wouldn't expect to see them occur before then in some other book (like the upcoming Elemental Evil books.)My take on it is simply that one of the facets of using Skill Challenges was that it was an easier format to illustrate to newer DMs the ways in which multiple checks could be used to create and resolve conflict.  That was something that many experienced DMs already did on their own without any format required... but to instruct other people on that sort of free-form "call for checks when you think they're necessary based upon the actions of the players" improvisational dungeon mastering was probably not easily done in the limited page count they had at their disposal.  Sure, you could *try* and teach improvisation in 3 pages of a book... but you shouldn't expect results all that grand.And as one of the tenets of 4E was to codify so many aspects of the game that even someone who had never DM'd at all in their life could still pick the game up, learn the format, and then run series of encounters to create adventures to (at the very least) moderately successful effect... so too came the lessons of Skill Challenges.  What Skill Challenges did was teach DMs the idea of "pre-planned" improvisation.  Scenarios and scenes written as part of adventure design that had beginnings, middles, and ends, using checks to build and resolve actions in a formatted methodology that DMs could then improvise in and around.  It easily answered the question of "How do I determine when to call for checks?" in a way that was comprehensible, formattable, and which produced at the barest minimum adequate results.  It was another facet of 4E's design to make running the game easier to more people.However... that mandate of codification for ease-of-use is not the primary focus in the design of 5E... it's the ubiquitous "Rulings, not rules".  5E is about putting power back into the hands of the DM to make decisions they think are the right call at their table at the time.  Thus dictating a format of "X successes before Y failures" methodology for checks is not something I expect them to usher in as an official mechanic any time soon... because that's definitely a "Rules, not rulings" game mechanic format for calling for checks.  Do I think at some point they will give an optional instruction column that goes into how you could bring them over and use them in 5E?  Sure.  But in all seriousness, the format is so self-explanatory that those who already know how they work can adapt and use them in 5E right now without needing anyone from WotC to write up instructions for it.</blockquote>

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