D&D 5E Skill Challenges in 5e

[iserith]

The thing is, I don’t think there would be much need to mandate each character to roll, if the skill challenge was tied to an evolving narrative. You describe the scene including an obstacle or source of conflict, and ask the first player in the order (be it initiative, or just going around the table or whatever) what they do. You resolve that action, narrate it’s consequences, leading a new decision point, so you ask the next player in the order what they do. This is just a slightly more formalized version of the fundamental pattern of play. Sure, if a player says they don’t want to do anything, you can let them, but if the scenario has meaningful stakes and dynamic conflict, it’s as unlikely a player won’t want to try anything as it is a player will want to use their turn in combat doing nothing.

Right. What would typically happen in our D&D 4e games is that there would be an obstacle/complication or objection/question to resolve under the umbrella of the overarching challenge. Initiative was set and everyone joined in because otherwise they didn't earn XP. When someone resolved the immediate issue, another would be presented. If it happened that the complication that was presented was one for which the character up in initiative was not well-suited, that player might try to employ a secondary skill, if it made sense to do so and provided enough of a benefit, or attempt to Aid Another. Aid Another had a bit of a risk to it since you could botch the roll and contribute a -1 penalty instead of a +2 bonus to the primary skill check. But if initiative fell in an optimal order, you could stack up to 4 bonuses (+8 altogether) to the next primary skill check which left some wiggle room for offsetting bad Aid Another rolls.

Oft forgotten by DMs though was Advantages which were absolutely necessary when running Complexity 3, 4 or 5 skill challenges. I don't remember the statistics exactly anymore, but the math guy in my group showed the calculations that the chance of failing the skill challenge went up greatly to a near possibility without Advantages (at least on offer). To my knowledge, those were only included in the RC and not in previous iterations of skill challenges. Anyway, this was another way for a player to try to offset any particular deficiency with the character's ability to overcome the complications presented to them.

 

[Asisreo]

The biggest thing IMO is to actually call for a roll. Without a roll, no tension... And a lot of people seem to want to play 5E without asking for skill checks. It might not be "interesting", but it makes it actually a challenge.

When it comes to exploration and social challenges, removing the roll basically just makes it story-telling. Yet more people want ways to make these things challenging... shrug

Rolls are not challenging. There's 0 challenge in throwing dice down unless you count the addition afterwards.

Rolls are tension, though. It adds randomness to the task and makes it less reliable. However, if no tension can be had, I see no point in requiring a roll. They aren't particularly engaging on their own unless you like to roll dice just for the sake of dice rolling, which can be done outside the session to amuse yourself.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Rolls are not challenging. There's 0 challenge in throwing dice down unless you count the addition afterwards.

Duh... really. I'm glad you pointed out the painfully obvious.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right. What would typically happen in our D&D 4e games is that there would be an obstacle/complication or objection/question to resolve under the umbrella of the overarching challenge. Initiative was set and everyone joined in because otherwise they didn't earn XP. When someone resolved the immediate issue, another would be presented. If it happened that the complication that was presented was one for which the character up in initiative was not well-suited, that player might try to employ a secondary skill, if it made sense to do so and provided enough of a benefit, or attempt to Aid Another. Aid Another had a bit of a risk to it since you could botch the roll and contribute a -1 penalty instead of a +2 bonus to the primary skill check. But if initiative fell in an optimal order, you could stack up to 4 bonuses (+8 altogether) to the next primary skill check which left some wiggle room for offsetting bad Aid Another rolls.

Oft forgotten by DMs though was Advantages which were absolutely necessary when running Complexity 3, 4 or 5 skill challenges. I don't remember the statistics exactly anymore, but the math guy in my group showed the calculations that the chance of failing the skill challenge went up greatly to a near possibility without Advantages (at least on offer). To my knowledge, those were only included in the RC and not in previous iterations of skill challenges. Anyway, this was another way for a player to try to offset any particular deficiency with the character's ability to overcome the complications presented to them.

It would be impossible to know which version of the SC rules were 'usually' used by most people. I do not recall any further discussion of the originally published version post the first errata. DMG2 reprints the basic rules in amended form, although it doesn't delve into a ton of rules detail. However, there is a whole LONG section after this which elaborates on techniques, types of challenges, the best structure, etc. I think this represents what 90% of people were doing with challenges (outside of WotC themselves, who seem to have not really 'gotten' how to make them). RC adds in the explicit concept of advantages. I don't know if your friend was correct or not, my guess is NO, but it heavily depends on what assumptions you make as to what skills people can bring to bear. IME vanilla challenges without any advantages are very unlikely to fail. PCs can bring in their best skills and generally only roll checks which they have 80%+ chances of success on. If you think about it, this is pretty similar to combat, where the party virtually never actually flat out loses an encounter. Party combat loss might happen once or twice in each tier in most games I'd expect.

 

[iserith]

It would be impossible to know which version of the SC rules were 'usually' used by most people. I do not recall any further discussion of the originally published version post the first errata. DMG2 reprints the basic rules in amended form, although it doesn't delve into a ton of rules detail. However, there is a whole LONG section after this which elaborates on techniques, types of challenges, the best structure, etc. I think this represents what 90% of people were doing with challenges (outside of WotC themselves, who seem to have not really 'gotten' how to make them). RC adds in the explicit concept of advantages. I don't know if your friend was correct or not, my guess is NO, but it heavily depends on what assumptions you make as to what skills people can bring to bear. IME vanilla challenges without any advantages are very unlikely to fail. PCs can bring in their best skills and generally only roll checks which they have 80%+ chances of success on. If you think about it, this is pretty similar to combat, where the party virtually never actually flat out loses an encounter. Party combat loss might happen once or twice in each tier in most games I'd expect.

Once RC was published, that's the only method we used. The DM also chooses the primary and secondary skills and can even limit the number of times they are useful in the challenge. So the PCs didn't really get to bring to bear just any old skill or, even if the skills happened to be ones they had, they might not have been able to spam. This is why a lot of my regular players at the time started making characters with more generalist skills rather than specialist. Specialists would struggle quite a bit unless it happened to be a skill challenge that spoke to their particular specialty. So the general tactic was to train skills that wasn't in your highest stat so that you had a decent chance to at least hit a medium difficulty DC with a wider range of skills.

The RC also states that complexity 3 or higher challenges should have ways to get Advantages. It adds that if a published skill challenge of this complexity or higher doesn't have Advantages, the DM should add them. If I remember my player's math, it wasn't too bad at complexity 3 not to have or use them, but for complexity 4 and 5 it made failure almost inevitable unless the party's skills were well-suited to the primary and secondary skill selection.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Once RC was published, that's the only method we used. The DM also chooses the primary and secondary skills and can even limit the number of times they are useful in the challenge. So the PCs didn't really get to bring to bear just any old skill or, even if the skills happened to be ones they had, they might not have been able to spam. This is why a lot of my regular players at the time started making characters with more generalist skills rather than specialist. Specialists would struggle quite a bit unless it happened to be a skill challenge that spoke to their particular specialty. So the general tactic was to train skills that wasn't in your highest stat so that you had a decent chance to at least hit a medium difficulty DC with a wider range of skills.

The RC also states that complexity 3 or higher challenges should have ways to get Advantages. It adds that if a published skill challenge of this complexity or higher doesn't have Advantages, the DM should add them. If I remember my player's math, it wasn't too bad at complexity 3 not to have or use them, but for complexity 4 and 5 it made failure almost inevitable unless the party's skills were well-suited to the primary and secondary skill selection.

Yeah, it really just depended on exactly how many skills the GM allowed, and which ones, and to what degree he's flexible about the narrative. It also depends on the extent to which the players have invested in skills and related stuff, exactly what classes and builds they used, etc. I've seen parties that vary wildly in terms of competency in SCs. This is an aspect of 4e design that caused a lot of problems. While skill bonuses increase at half-level, there are also tons of fairly large and stacking additional bonuses that are available. BUT because they're not as critical as combat attack/damage bonuses it is really hit-or-miss if players have picked any up or not. Some classes, like fighter and barbarian, are also very challenged on basic proficiency. So there can easily be 10 or even 20 points of variance at Epic between one PC and another, even when both have proficiency in the same skill!

This could be a big issue in 5e as well. It generally has less bonuses floating around, but then you have crazy things like thieves with doubled bonuses, vs other characters having no training in a skill with no bonus AT ALL, which can definitely drive some pretty large variance. OTOH the "you can use any ability bonus" thing complicates everything a bit, though it may tend to smooth out the differences somewhat.

The main problem though is what DCs do you use? If they are low enough and non-level-dependent then they will be trivial for trained characters at higher levels. There are no 'good' numbers to use! I guess you could consider 'standard' DCs to be ones anyone could make, at least within reason, and then 'hard' DCs would be more level-dependent and aimed at the trained characters. That might work, though it is a bit weird that the spread between the two is level-dependent. I suppose even the standard DCs can go up some to account for ASIs and some magic/spells/whatever.

Anyway, I think SCs will work OK in 5e, with some minor work. They won't be worse than in 4e in terms of variance in success rates. It is a bit of a problem, but overall the goal isn't to make failure that likely anyway. It is to incentivize thinking about how to succeed and generating interesting narrative in the process, with some nail-biters and one or two failures sprinkled in there to add interest. I think that's doable.

 

[iserith]

Yeah, it really just depended on exactly how many skills the GM allowed, and which ones, and to what degree he's flexible about the narrative. It also depends on the extent to which the players have invested in skills and related stuff, exactly what classes and builds they used, etc. I've seen parties that vary wildly in terms of competency in SCs. This is an aspect of 4e design that caused a lot of problems. While skill bonuses increase at half-level, there are also tons of fairly large and stacking additional bonuses that are available. BUT because they're not as critical as combat attack/damage bonuses it is really hit-or-miss if players have picked any up or not. Some classes, like fighter and barbarian, are also very challenged on basic proficiency. So there can easily be 10 or even 20 points of variance at Epic between one PC and another, even when both have proficiency in the same skill!

This could be a big issue in 5e as well. It generally has less bonuses floating around, but then you have crazy things like thieves with doubled bonuses, vs other characters having no training in a skill with no bonus AT ALL, which can definitely drive some pretty large variance. OTOH the "you can use any ability bonus" thing complicates everything a bit, though it may tend to smooth out the differences somewhat.

The main problem though is what DCs do you use? If they are low enough and non-level-dependent then they will be trivial for trained characters at higher levels. There are no 'good' numbers to use! I guess you could consider 'standard' DCs to be ones anyone could make, at least within reason, and then 'hard' DCs would be more level-dependent and aimed at the trained characters. That might work, though it is a bit weird that the spread between the two is level-dependent. I suppose even the standard DCs can go up some to account for ASIs and some magic/spells/whatever.

Anyway, I think SCs will work OK in 5e, with some minor work. They won't be worse than in 4e in terms of variance in success rates. It is a bit of a problem, but overall the goal isn't to make failure that likely anyway. It is to incentivize thinking about how to succeed and generating interesting narrative in the process, with some nail-biters and one or two failures sprinkled in there to add interest. I think that's doable.

Yeah, as I mentioned upthread, the math just doesn't port over and that's particularly true of DCs. Having some measure of structure is useful to the DM in creating a manageable challenge and it's not bad way to think about framing scenes, but I would not bring D&D 4e mechanics into D&D 5e at all. There should be no assumption that the PCs must make a "skill check" in D&D 5e to succeed in the same way that may have been true in most cases in D&D 4e. Each complication or obstacle just gets resolved by the standard adjudication process.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, as I mentioned upthread, the math just doesn't port over and that's particularly true of DCs. Having some measure of structure is useful to the DM in creating a manageable challenge and it's not bad way to think about framing scenes, but I would not bring D&D 4e mechanics into D&D 5e at all. There should be no assumption that the PCs must make a "skill check" in D&D 5e to succeed in the same way that may have been true in most cases in D&D 4e. Each complication or obstacle just gets resolved by the standard adjudication process.

Meh, each to his own tastes I'd say I like them because they do produce a lot more certainty in terms of the valence of the PC's actions for the players. Dicing for things also works, for the same reason it works in terms of combat. It just adds a stochastic factor to narrative construction. You can certainly make a perfectly good RPG without dice at all (there are several I've played) but I think it is more challenging to make things interesting in the long run. Dicing for stuff is a pretty low-cost way to add more fun, IMHO.