Skill Challenges

[Mengu]

If DMs have only 1 Skill Encounter and 5 Combat Encounters , 16% of the time you are in a Skill Encounter, 83% fighting.

Now --- same choice in front of the PCs and it is doubtful they will pick something that helps them beat a skill challenge.

I am not saying that players should be up against skill challenges half the time, but increasing the massive chasm of difference in time spent on skill challenges would encourage the players to start focusing on skills as much as their damage rolls.

The problem is not so much the % time, but the consequence of failure. You fail combat, you die, you fail skill challenge, you might lose a surge or two.

I think more skill challenges (or even just required checks) during combat (that can lead to that combat failure), might give players a reason to pay more attention to skills. If each combat has a purpose, it's not difficult to come up with skill uses during combat, terrain features, hazards, traps, or otherworldly entities are all going to be serious threats.

But even that, is not going to be sufficient if players can succeed without paying attention to their skills anyway. So ultimately, you have to create situations where the PC's fail, and when they look back at their failure to figure out what went wrong, the answer shouldn't be "we didn't deal enough damage", or "we didn't have enough healing". If the answer is "we couldn't succeed on a thievery or dungeoneering check" then, and only then is the mission accomplished, and you might have some players beginning to think about bolstering skills.

I don't know if all that effort is worth it. It might just be best to let players pick what they want to pick. Forcing skill focus down their throat is not in the best interest of "fun". But if a player does pick skill focus, I would almost feel obligated to make sure it comes into play.

 

[wlmartin]

The problem is not so much the % time, but the consequence of failure. You fail combat, you die, you fail skill challenge, you might lose a surge or two.

I think more skill challenges (or even just required checks) during combat (that can lead to that combat failure), might give players a reason to pay more attention to skills. If each combat has a purpose, it's not difficult to come up with skill uses during combat, terrain features, hazards, traps, or otherworldly entities are all going to be serious threats.

But even that, is not going to be sufficient if players can succeed without paying attention to their skills anyway. So ultimately, you have to create situations where the PC's fail, and when they look back at their failure to figure out what went wrong, the answer shouldn't be "we didn't deal enough damage", or "we didn't have enough healing". If the answer is "we couldn't succeed on a thievery or dungeoneering check" then, and only then is the mission accomplished, and you might have some players beginning to think about bolstering skills.

I don't know if all that effort is worth it. It might just be best to let players pick what they want to pick. Forcing skill focus down their throat is not in the best interest of "fun". But if a player does pick skill focus, I would almost feel obligated to make sure it comes into play.

True... True...

A clever DM could turn certain situations that players take for granted such as being raised.

Normally it is a case of paying the fee and poof it is done.
Turn that into a Skill Challenge and you have some fun on your hands.

... How about the final effect of a disease, they have tried to beat it using endurance and heal checks but it was too much - instead of going to the final stage they have a Skill Challenge to beat it entirely or push it back a stage

... Lastly what about the effort of selling your items in town. Normally this is just moving numbers from one column to another but what if the group (or someone nominated) had to perform a mini skill challenge at the local shop when they wanted to buy or sell goods

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Skill challenges worked reasonably well for me right off the bat (on game launch, even with the busted DCs), but they didn't really sing until I realized that my style demands that I treat the information in a printed skill challenge as simply a (highly useful and compact) way for the writer to convey information to me.

That is, if you've got an encounter with goblins in Room A, and another encounter in Room B, and you've run games for awhile, you don't need explicit text telling you under what circumstances fighting in A will attract B and vice versa. You use the information on the stat blocks and the map to run what happens in relation to what the players do. An adventure meant to be accessible to a new DM might include such advice for a few common situations, but it is not definitive.

Because skill challenges are new--and because they do tend to come with extra "advice" to help people learn how to use them--it is natural to take the presentation as more definitive than the subject matter warrants. So as far as I'm concerned, when one runs a skill challenge "organically," one is simply adapting the information as a more experienced DM, and not deviating from the RAW at all.

Where I do deviate from the RAW is that I treat the skill challenge framework as a way of telling when skill use has been sufficiently challenging to deserve XP. As far as the players are concerned, they are doing skill checks. (We have discussed some of this out of game. So they aren't completely unaware of when something is morphing into a challenge, the same way the know when I flip open the monster manual and run from it, they might be in a semi-random encounter.) If something with potential serious consequences is at risk, and they get engaged with it enough to do a full complement of checks--then it counts as a skill challenge. If they bypass it or avoid it entirely, then maybe not.

This is again akin to a normal encounter, in my view. Fight the dragon in the cave and take his treasure, get XP. Sneak past the dragon and steal his treasure, get XP. Sneak around the dragon to the other thing you needed to complete your quest, get XP. Take another route through the cave system, never coming within sensing range of the dragon at all--no XP (at least not for the dragon or the things associated with him).

With skill challenges, I see it the same. Make a single arcana or thievery check that lets you ignore the problem altogether--then it stands in the narrative, but wasn't worth XP. Engage in the situation at the risk of consequences over multiple checks--get XP. But the organic part is this is largely player choice based on the situation. A key requirement is that each check comes with narration and description, and can effect the situation going forward.

 

[Riastlin]

[MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION]: I agree with the phases concept -- particularly for longer challenges. Nothing is worse than watching the wizard spam Arcana while the Cleric spams Religion and the rest sit by idly. Frankly, I think in most situations, if it can be accomplished with only two skills, then it really shouldn't be a skill challenge (unless its a part of a combat encounter).

The biggest mistake that I think a lot of DMs make (and a mistake I made a few times myself) is in forcing skill challenges on situations that really don't call for them. Not every negotiation needs to be a challenge for instance, nor does every trek through the woods.

As for encouraging more players to take skill-based feats, unless your campaign is very heavy into the skill check side of things, I think the skill feats will always be the red-headed step children so to speak. The problem is, a player doesn't necessarily know if he'll need a good endurance (I've seen entire campaigns with only 1 or 2 endurance checks for instance). A fighter can usually hand off the negotiations to the party face, etc. However, every players knows that at some point in time, he will be attacking and in return, be attacked. The result is that combat oriented feats become natural choices. You know that Weapon Expertise will be useful. You know that Superior Fort feat will help you. You just don't know that Skill Focus: Endurance will be useful.

/shrug

 

[delericho]

Frankly, I think in most situations, if it can be accomplished with only two skills, then it really shouldn't be a skill challenge (unless its a part of a combat encounter).

The biggest mistake that I think a lot of DMs make (and a mistake I made a few times myself) is in forcing skill challenges on situations that really don't call for them.

Both of these are very true. If it can be handled by one skill, it shouldn't be a Challenge - just go with a standard skill check. If it is best handled by one character acting alone (either because it's a one-man job or because there's only one PC will the trained skills for the job), it shouldn't be a challenge - just go with a standard skill check and move on.

As for encouraging more players to take skill-based feats...

I really think they should have silo'ed the "Skill Feats" away from the "Combat Feats" if this was a concern. Making players choose one or the other will either lead to combat imbalance or, more likely, to the non-combat stuff being largely ignored.

 

[wlmartin]

I really think they should have silo'ed the "Skill Feats" away from the "Combat Feats" if this was a concern. Making players choose one or the other will either lead to combat imbalance or, more likely, to the non-combat stuff being largely ignored.

100% agree on this one
If you give a player the choice between a combat and a skill feat, they will choose combat. WotC should really have said "Ah, well since skills have really no impact on battle (bluff is only 1/enc after all) so why not offer the players a way to focus their skills more". I do think that 3e had it right where you got to choose what skills you wanted to level in although that system was broken because the skills were all combat focused anyways.

So... yes, 100% we need a way to offer skill bonuses that dont take things away from combat - No-one ever picks a Utility Power that offers a skill bonus so why not just have 2 utility powers, one for skills and one for combat related.

 

[OnlineDM]

First, let me say that the other replies on this thread are great.

Second, I'll say that I don't track XP any more, which makes a structured skill challenge with structured rewards less important in my campaigns.

Third, the way you should run a skill challenge depends on how much structure the challenge itself demands and how much structure your players need.

With a fairly linear challenge (navigate these tunnels to find the bad guy, for instance), I'll run it as a series of scenes.
- Wayfinding: The PCs need to use something like Dungeoneering to understand which tunnels are stable and which are dead ends, or Perception to detect the passage of bad guys, or History to see if they remember seeing any accounts of this cavern.
- Pit: The tunnel continues on the far side of a pit. PCs could use Athletics to jump across or climb around, or perhaps Dungeoneering to look for an alternate passage. Once across, a PC could anchor a rope to help the others.
- Ambush: The PCs spot some bad guys waiting in ambush for them. Perception to notice them ahead of time. Stealth to sneak by. Thievery to rig up a trap to drop rocks on them. And so on.

In these situations, I present the scenes and then ask the party what they want to do. I'll have some skills that I think will work, but I'll let the players tell me how they want to overcome the challenge. If they come up with something cool (using skills or powers or whatever), I go with it. Each scene only requires one or two skill checks to overcome (occasionally a group check).

Now, if the challenge itself is less structured, I might let the players allow it to evolve based on their ideas. Searching for information about a murder suspect might go in lots of different directions depending on what the PCs want to do. But even here, I prefer to have some scenes in mind. If you ask around at the local tavern, you might be told to check the abandoned lighthouse at the end of town since the suspect has been said to lay low there before. Once there, they'll have to figure out how to get inside, etc.

Also, I like to intersperse real combats into skill challenges. You're navigating the wilderness, and at some point you'll have to fight some wild beasts. I'll probably trigger this after the first skill failure, and if the group doesn't fail at all, I'll trigger it at the end with a big advantage for the party (surprise round, plus their choice of battlefield position).

I also like to have consequences for failure at individual scenes as well as the challenge overall. This will often be damage - you get jumped and have a brief fight that you win, but everyone loses a surge, or you lead the party into a rockslide area and everyone loses a surge, etc. But it can also be making the next check harder or presenting a new, more challenging scene.

 

[OnlineDM]

Also, I'm with Mengu in being a big proponent of finding ways to make skills matter in combat (usually as a minor action, or an auto-success as a standard). Environmental effects you can trigger (dropping rocks on the bad guys, dipping your weapon in the magic fire to have it deal extra damage) or skills you can use to disrupt the bad guys directly (intimidate to shake them, arcana to weaken the constructs) and things like that make combats more exciting and make skills matter more.

 

[wlmartin]

Also, I'm with Mengu in being a big proponent of finding ways to make skills matter in combat (usually as a minor action, or an auto-success as a standard). Environmental effects you can trigger (dropping rocks on the bad guys, dipping your weapon in the magic fire to have it deal extra damage) or skills you can use to disrupt the bad guys directly (intimidate to shake them, arcana to weaken the constructs) and things like that make combats more exciting and make skills matter more.

I agree...
I am reminded of the Penny Arcade Pax 2010 Event with Aquisitions Inc. where Mike (aka Jim Darkmagic) came up with the idea of making the chest of gold look like a piece of rock food that their hellish mount liked to eat, the DM (aka Chris Perkins) loved the idea and let them roll it...

It is stuff like this that makes D&D the premier daddy of RPGs (take that Star Wars, Pathfinder, [enter non-d&D game here]) because it encourages people to immerse themselves.

I love the idea of letting players use Arcana to aid them. The pitfall here however is that players without skills may feel left out with no skills to rely on that relate to battle.

Also the risk of having too many house ruled playable skill uses can hurt the games mechanics a bit. There have to be limitations on the use for these skills.

One idea I heard once and it stuck with me was to give players an encounter power called a Skill Boost. It meant that once per encounter they could use their Skill check to offer a conditional bonus to their actions as follows
: +1 to hit
: +2 to damage
: +2 to speed
: +1 to AC
: +2 Damage Resistance
: +2 to Saving Throws

They could apply this as long once per encounter (and once per action) as an interrupt to any action they make to buff it.

The rule was that they had to give a solid reasoning for their skill boost in a RP fashion.

This is a really good idea and doesnt overbalance the game (because at worst you are talking about a monster group losing 3 chances to hit or losing 3 extra hits and at worst this could equate to adding an extra monster into the encounter for the characters to deal with where the XP can be justified as a reward for using RP in the game.

I reckon if people introduced this into games lacking Roleplaying all of a sudden thieves would be using their acrobatics to spin out of the way or athletics to spring their attacks foreward...

The DM can be harsh with it as well that if they didnt justify the Roleplay side of things he wont allow the boost but may allow them to try again next turn.

 

[mudlock]

I've run into folks who announce "this is a skill challenge!" and folks who don't, and I've run into folks who like skill challenges and folks who don't.

But I've never run into anyone who announces skill challenges and likes them.

So take that as you will.