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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jbear" data-source="post: 5465196" data-attributes="member: 75065">Only that a character with 8 Charisma, when they say things, speak or attempt to have people listen to them, they are weak at it. Maybe they mumble, speak too quietly or too aggressively. Perhaps when you 8 CHA Shaman speaks he does it with such a freaky spirit world look on his face, eyes bulging, tongue flicking out licking badly cracked lips and with a freaky ghostly otherworld echo of the spirits in his voice that surround him that even if he says something valid, his message may not get across because of the way he projects that message.If it is particularly to the point, if he hits the bullseye you can just notch up a success without rolling anything. If you insist on a roll give him a bonus and drop the DC to easy. Personally I don't run Skill Challenges on the fly. I do a lot of prepartaion for them, I often sketch them out. I think this is vital in order to make a skill challenge worth the while. Failures are points where I get to add a complication to the situation that the PCs must immeadiately resolve before they can progress. So even with a single failure in a challenge something exciting happens to twist the situation and add to the tension.I also use a lot of group skill checks where either the majority need to succeed to notch up a success. Partial success is neither a success or a failure, but a complication arises that has to be dealt with. Group failure means that the complication is more severe. Even with a group success, even a single individual failure during a group success leads to a minor dramatic complication that the group needs to resolve.The other way I involve everyone and avoid the 'best skill use' syndrome is to have a main PC make the skill check (the speaker for example). Let's say the Sorceror wants the Hobgoblin Captain to swollow his Fishy Tail. No sweat, with that High Bluff score, not a problem. But I'm not having everyone just sitting back while she does her stuff. No way in hell. Besides, the Captain is no fool, he's checking out the rest of the group's body language as the Sorceror speaks, listening to their side comments to see if her story rings true. So everyone has to make a moderate bluff roll; of course i actually want to see and hear what your character is doing while the sorceror speaks, +2 to the roll if I like what I see. Every failure adds a +2 to the DC on the Bluff check that the Sorceror has to make. Hell you should have seen how fast the chairs went scraping back as my players scrabbled to their feet to build a living portrait around the player running the sorceror, striking their best in character convincing poses and adding comments to support her lies. Awesome moment. Anyway, I could go into different elements I involve in my challenges that makes them work but what i really want to say is that the challenge provides a great structure for me to adjudicate when a situation changes direction, for better or for worse, when things get complicated, how complicated things get, when the group gets to the goal, when things have gone so terribly wrong that some serious unforseen complication changes the situation and sends the adventurers in a new unforseen direction. For me failure doesn't mean things end, for me it's when something dangerous happens.But they require a lot of thought and preparation in my opinion. I probably spend more time working on my skill challenges than I do my combat encounters. Although there is nothing like adding a simultaneous challenge during a combat situation. But simply put,  like someone up page said, you get out of them what you put into them.</blockquote>

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