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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 8197359" data-attributes="member: 97077">By the time the Rules Compendium was published, D&D 4e skill challenge design was finally sorted out in my view. Anything published prior to that point can effectively be ignored. At the time, I had a serious math guy in my group who crunched the numbers on the RC version and it was very solid, provided the challenge was run with the characters in initiative. As long as the group was able to think of initiative in a way that didn't conjure combat-like play, it really presented a solid challenge that produced a fun story. The running joke in my group at the time was that skill challenges were actually scarier than combats. In fact, including them as designed in my games pushed players from being specialists in skills to more generalists and encouraged them to take skill powers or utility powers that were often ignored by the character optimization threads of the time. They went from being geared mostly toward combats to having a mix of options for social and exploration. This was a good result in my opinion.I don't really think this same structure can be imported directly to D&D 5e. It just doesn't fit the paradigm in my view and the math is very probably off for the latest edition. I do still recommend having some kind of structure for exploration and social interaction challenges though rather than just run them on the fly. For D&D 5e, in my games that means thinking about specific obstacles/complications (for exploration) or questions/objections (for social interaction) that may arise during the course of the challenge, then not thinking about the solutions. Difficulty is set by way of the number of obstacles/complications or questions/objections - the more there are, the harder it is. Once we go through all of them, I tally the number of successes and determine the result which is typically a set number of successes for overall success with anything less than that being overall failure or progress combined with a setback.When it comes to social interaction challenges specifically, the structure I use is very much based on the DMG's rules for social interaction challenges which I think work well enough for this edition of the game. In this case, each overcome objection works toward modifying the NPC's attitude toward the PCs temporarily, setting them up for the final ask which determines if the PCs get what they want or not. Because this structure incentivizes trying to learn the NPC's agenda, bonds, ideals, and flaws (and in the case of my games, any relevant history), this means that more than just the party's face can interact in a meaningful way to support the more Charisma-based characters. It works well and is worth considering in my view.</blockquote>

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