Skill Challenges : invisible ones ?

[surfarcher]

My last 4E group was all newbies, so when the first skill challenge came up, I explained the mechanics to them explicitly. Other than that, I generally don't announce them, although if someone asks, I'm certainly open about it.

I kinda extend that to any new group... If they are noobs they need the intro. If they are more experienced they need to know that my Challenges are probably pretty different to what they have experienced before.

On their way back from routing the hapless Skull Kicker kobolds of Kobold Hall at the behest of the shadowy Bloodghost Syndicate, my PCs realized that they were being followed....
...snip...
They all got a big kick out of designing their ambush location, so I think it worked out pretty well.

Quite nice!

One of my favourite Challenges with my current group was an ambush raid on a caravan of 75+ Orcs, half-orcs and humans. I used a full colour battlemap and intiiative and everything. They needed to get in and out with a certain object as fast as they could so that their Silver Dragon ally could clean up the much stronger force.

The players and I both had a ball and while they knew it wasn't combat I'm not sure how many of them twigged that it was a Challenge. I know one of them would have for sure and a second probably did too. But the other three... Probably not.

 

[surfarcher]

Oh, I don't restrict it to that either. Anything the players come up with, they are welcome to try. The list of options is just a starting point to address the obvious choices.

Ah cool, gotcha. Actually sounding very similar to what I do then!

I'll have to go see what the DMG2 has to say on the subject, then. It hasn't been an issue since I started adopting the looser approach I described above, but maybe WotC has some tricks I missed.

It's worthwhile. The spice of life is variety and I found the DMG2 was what started me really thingking outside the box with Challenges and lead me down the path of trying to inject a lot of variety into this aspect of my game. Which has been pretty successful, from what I've gathered from player feedback.

 

[Balesir]

One of the advantages of running them quite loose and using the "mechanic" primarily as a measurement is you don't have to be a slave to the success/failure part of it. You can run that loose and Advantages loose and just make judgement calls. So you can upgrade or downgrade complexity on the fly and decide they've done really well and deserve early overlall success or exceptionally poorly and need to put in a little more effort.

I think that's probably the optimum way to run most challenges as long as it doesn't become a game of "press the DM's buttons". I think you need to be really vigilant for that.

Another, practical, point I find valuable - mutability in game-time. What I mean is that the time (in the game) the characters perform the actions that benefit them does not need to be the same time as the resolution die roll(s) is(/are) made. For example, in the OP's case of characters reading up before going to meet the king, I would not neccessarily have the players roll for their researching in the "research" scene. OK, they might make a one-off roll each to get some handy pointers, but rolls for the real meat of the help in the upcoming skill challenges - no. I wouldn't even mention or hint at it - just make a note of who did some reading and their relevant skill mod at the time. Later, when the skill challenge proper is under way, then I would reveal (maybe in response to player questions) that, yes, those who did some reading earlier can make some extra rolls. You have History what? Did you do any reading? No? Well, OK, I guess you can try at -5...

Same works for Stealth and other skills where it's better if the player rolls rather than the DM - but only at the point where the character finds out if they did good or not...