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<blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 8193872" data-attributes="member: 5889">Having wrote my Obsidian System for 4e and trying out a lot of skill challenges, what I generally found was the &quot;group&quot; aspect of them was the main detraction.Over time I found that the full out skill challenge was generally too long and unwieldy most of the time...and the super freeform ones just never provided the narrative oomph that I really wanted.Instead, I found the 3 roll &quot;personal&quot; challenge to be the ideal. For example, one player wants to research something. They give me 3 knowledge checks (or maybe 2 knowledge and one persuasion or something, the DM sets the skills its not freeform). Quick, clean, with some math to back up what I want to set my DCs to be for a reasonable success chance. sometimes you would have maybe two players doing it, but very rarely was it the whole group.Also I would use 2 roll &quot;combat challenges&quot; a fair amount. Within combat, a character could try to activate a &quot;gizmo&quot; over 2 rounds, one check a round, no action required (part of the &quot;use an object&quot; ability). That way they could still participate in the main combat, but had the ability to do some extra as well.For a chase, its not &quot;okay 7 rolls from the entire group&quot; its &quot;ok each person make 3 X rolls&quot;. Based on who succeeds, I set a new scene, its the quarry and the successful PCs, and then I run the scene as a combat....if a PC is super successful maybe I start the combat with the quarry grappled and then we go from there.I have found that players don't treat these kinds of challenges the same, they aren't &quot;big involved things&quot;, its just &quot;make a few rolls and see what happens&quot;. Players don't disengage like I saw with full challenges, so I have had a decent amount of success.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Stalker0, post: 8193872, member: 5889"] Having wrote my Obsidian System for 4e and trying out a lot of skill challenges, what I generally found was the "group" aspect of them was the main detraction. Over time I found that the full out skill challenge was generally too long and unwieldy most of the time...and the super freeform ones just never provided the narrative oomph that I really wanted. Instead, I found the 3 roll "personal" challenge to be the ideal. For example, one player wants to research something. They give me 3 knowledge checks (or maybe 2 knowledge and one persuasion or something, the DM sets the skills its not freeform). Quick, clean, with some math to back up what I want to set my DCs to be for a reasonable success chance. sometimes you would have maybe two players doing it, but very rarely was it the whole group. Also I would use 2 roll "combat challenges" a fair amount. Within combat, a character could try to activate a "gizmo" over 2 rounds, one check a round, no action required (part of the "use an object" ability). That way they could still participate in the main combat, but had the ability to do some extra as well. For a chase, its not "okay 7 rolls from the entire group" its "ok each person make 3 X rolls". Based on who succeeds, I set a new scene, its the quarry and the successful PCs, and then I run the scene as a combat....if a PC is super successful maybe I start the combat with the quarry grappled and then we go from there. I have found that players don't treat these kinds of challenges the same, they aren't "big involved things", its just "make a few rolls and see what happens". Players don't disengage like I saw with full challenges, so I have had a decent amount of success. [/QUOTE]

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