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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MarkB" data-source="post: 5465314" data-attributes="member: 40176">Playing and running LFR, I've seen skill challenges running the gamut from great to terrible, and when they're good they can enhance the playing experience greatly - but when they're bad, they can kill it just as readily as a badly-designed combat encounter.At the last convention I attended, I got to experience two LFR scenarios. In the first, the skill challenge - involving pursuing an escaping suspect - was truly terrible, requiring everyone to roll initiative, then act in order, and choosing to miss a turn or even Delay for another player to act was considered a failed check. Options were limited, substituting powers or other actions instead of skill checks was disallowed, and everyone generally felt pressured into trying to do things they weren't good at. Nobody was surprised when the party failed the encounter, but the results of failure were poorly written up, leaving the DM flailing for some way to bring the characters back to the plot.The second scenario presented a skill challenge to investigate the location of an elusive criminal. This time, the presentation was entirely different - the challenge was broken down into stages as the party progressed in their investigation, with multiple alternate paths at each point to accomodate any of several lines of investigation they might pursue, and ways to accomodate other options if players took them. It was broken up with two encounters to keep things interesting, and failure was accommodated in the form of a third encounter which would provide clues to put them back on track (not that it was needed in this case).This is where skill challenges stand or fall. Depending upon who's putting them together and how they do it, a skill challenge can be a constraint upon player creativity, forcing them into taking actions by rote that they don't feel invested in - or it can provide the structural narrative support in which players' creativity can be allowed to flourish, whilst still guiding them towards some defined goal.Basically, skill challenges can suffer from poor encounter design, just like combat encounters. What it takes to make a good one is experience and some good examples to show what works, and what doesn't.</blockquote>

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