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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fox Lee" data-source="post: 5470944" data-attributes="member: 4346">Loooongass overdue response. Excuse me if I reiterate anything that has already been thoroughly trod.We've had lots of interesting Skill Challenge examples in our games so far - interesting in particular because they have been so very, very varied.Our first GM ran the Keep on the Shadowfell module, but because he wasn't comfortable with speaking in-character yet (he's fully aware that this is his one big GM flaw) the encounter with Sir Keegan went over a bit flat. As the module advised, he targeted each check toward the PC with the highest modifiers, but in more than one case this meant they went to the party Warlock, who also was totally not comfortable role-playing yet. What should have been some of the most poignant moments in the story were reduced to matter-of-fact explanations, and the two characters who were actually being roleplayed (my fighter and the party shaman, who were trying for a sort of tough-love "man up and earn your redemption already!" approach) were mostly ignored.Our second GM ran a fantastic skill challenge, which involved getting us to re-activate what was essentially a giant magitech gun to shoot down an undead dragon. With the group's girl-genius Artificer in the lead, all the characters came up with cool, relevant ideas on how we could use our skills to help the situation - even the Warlock from the previous game, who is still very hard to interest in skill challenges, actually thought of her own actions and used them well. In the final round, my Paladin taunted the dragon with an intimidate check and jumped on its back; the party's Avenger used his high perception to act as a spotter targeting her shiny plate armour, and the Artificer blew that sucker out of the sky. It was EPIC.However, the first skill challenge of that same game was a chore for everyone involved. The PCs had to get over the walls of a city wall that was beseiged by an undead army - you know, without actually fighting our way through - and it just all went wrong. The players didn't really understand what was required, and nobody had any creative ideas, and a couple of the players were very short-tempered with the idea of something getting between us and combat... one player just made her own Athletics check and assumed she was over, leaving the rest of us to whatever. The exasperated GM eventually just informed us that it was a skill challenge, we needed to roll X, X or X, and let's just get it over with. Definitely a low point of the game, especially for the first session :\Anyway, I guess the point I'm coming around to is that there are a lot of factors at work here (at least that one player is getting far better at thinking creatively) the "Duck Hunt" encounter (as the GM named it) went over so well in part because it had way more options. We had a big area to work - a sort of forge tower with lava at the bottom - and plenty of jobs to be done. The core of the challenge was the engineering aspect, but the more physically-inclined party members also had options, like climbing the tower to reach particular items/areas or enduring the tremendous heat in the forge area. I think the key to making a decent skill challenge may be "trying to say yes" - thinking of as many potential skill uses as you can, and working with the players if they have other ideas.That's not the same as being unnecessary or a bad idea. I want the players to succeed in combat, too - I've no interest in a story where the heroes die to bad rolls and the bad guy wins. The use of characters' bonuses and the randomness of die rolling are valuable to both of these scenarios because that's what D&D is; it's a game where you try to make your character good at what they do, but you still roll a dice so there's an element of chance. Just saying that those fundamental rules shouldn't apply to anything outside of combat is as detrimental to the game as a purely flavourless skill challenge is, IMO.Of course roleplay has value, and I do agree that skill challenges are hard to grasp, and require work in presentation. But a skill challenge doesn't get in the way of roleplay unless the group approaches it that way. Approached correctly, they encourage creativity (you need to think about what your character will do, and how) and add that aspect of challenge (just saying it isn't enough - you have to get a good enough result to pull it off) that makes us play D&D rather than freeform.</blockquote>

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