Skill challenges

[ScorpiusRisk]

"uh...I don't know, whatever my diplomacy says?"

Would not fly in my games. My players know that they need to actually come up with something to accompany their roll. If it's lame, I add a penalty, and it's brilliant they get a bonus.

Sometimes the lame things crits anyway, and that can be very entertaining, but you have to say something.

 

[Voda Vosa]

Personally I make skill challenges the way I come up with them, depending on the skill challenge. See my "Water Problems" adventure thread, around page 3 or 4 where I explain the challenge of enduring the desert (Or dessert as suggested by one of the PCs). For the last skill challenged I went more kosher.
I think it's more accurate to let individual DMs come with a skill challenge system they want for the particular skill challenges.

 

[stonegod]

Love them to pieces (my last two RL sessions had about 3 of them). Some of them have combat for failure, but the XP there is never more than the XP from the challenge itself. The DCs are the sticking point, but for challenges that matter, I generally use higher level challenges and keep in mind "who should succeed" at this skill, which helps determine difficulty. The 5+1/2//10+1/2//15+1/2 is a start, but I often bump some by 2 to 5 depending on circumstance (trying to use Diplomacy on a mob? Hard+5 difficulty).

 

[ryryguy]

I also bump up the difficulties in my RL sessions. stonegod's formula "5+1/2//10+1/2//15+1/2" looks pretty good. One thing I don't like about the official skill difficulty table, besides the fact that they are just about 5 points too low, is that they give the same DC for a range of three levels. So if you go strictly by the rules, the DCs are exactly the same in a level 1 vs a level 3 challenge, yet the level 3 challenge awards more XP. How does that make any sense?

I also agree with others that an interesting failure case is essential. I often find that to be one of the most difficult things to come up with when designing a challenge. Often the problem is that if you want failure to send the adventure down a different (but still interesting) branch, how much effort can you realistically put into designing an alternate branch that there's a good chance you won't use? Actually I wonder if this might be a little bit less of a problem in PbP due to the slower pace. The DM still needs to at least have a sketch of what will happen, but should have more time to fill in the details if and when it becomes necessary.

Partial success and failure effects are also great if you can manage to work them in. Relatedly, making specific successes and failures have visible impact beyond just the success/failure count going up seems to help.

 

[H.M.Gimlord]

I remember D&D before editions, when I was too young to understand all the rules, and we didn't do skill challenges, just opportunities for the DM to say, "That's not likely. Roll the dice, and we'll see if it works..." Ah.... I loved those days. You could roll up a 9th level character, kill a dragon on your first dungeon, and reap a huge pile of gold within the course of a single encounter. Then you would scratch everything down on a sheet of 3-hole, wide ruled 8.5" X 11" paper. *sniff* Memories!

 

[Katana_Geldar]

The way they are constructed means they can seem contrived unless they're used well. Then again, I'm a roleplayer and will roll as a second nature while I speak.

I am interested to see how 4E's older cousin of a system Star Wars Sage uses the mechanic in the upcoming book, maybe it could make room for an improvement as the difference is negligable. Of course, that didn't stop me from using them before I knew what they were called.