Skill Chellenges - unfun?

[Ryujin]

I dislike the skill challenges as well. They seem cumbersome to the flow of the game and not everyone in my group likes them. In another game I played at level 1 we had to do a skill challenge that was "complex" and the result of failing it was horrendous. If you played the intial Scales of War module from Wotc site you will know what i mean.

I think in some instances it is fine if you are well prepared to do it but just from what i have seen I would rather "roleplay" most social challenges.

I lost a third of my healing surges just getting to one of the adventures, because my Endurance skill is non existent. If the situations were played out I'd likely have been able to teleport past obstacles that would have been otherwise too hard, or had one of the party members haul me up in places that I couldn't climb. Just damned annoying. All that dice rolling makes D&D feel like Monopoly.

 

[Mallus]

Skill challenges do not fit well into my more improvised DM style, I think, but they can be nice for DMs who plan ahead more.

It's the opposite for my group. We've had a blast using off-the-cuff Skill Challenges to resolve kooky PC plans that the DM had no time to prepare for. In one we pinned a city official in his residence by convincing a mob he was a pederast. In another we got our pet dire boar sow blessed by a dog god and in the process inadvertently started a false religion around her.

It so happens that tonight's session is going to be one big Skill Challenge, the first one the DM had time to prep for. The PC's are going to put on a stage play. None of them have any theater experience, so it's going to be filled we actual bloodshed, dancing girls, and explosions.

 

[Belares]

It's the opposite for my group. We've had a blast using off-the-cuff Skill Challenges to resolve kooky PC plans that the DM had no time to prepare for. In one we pinned a city official in his residence by convincing a mob he was a pederast. In another we got our pet dire boar sow blessed by a dog god and in the process inadvertently started a false religion around her.

It so happens that tonight's session is going to be one big Skill Challenge, the first one the DM had time to prep for. The PC's are going to put on a stage play. None of them have any theater experience, so it's going to be filled we actual bloodshed, dancing girls, and explosions.

Well it sounds like you found a way to make them more enertaining...I salute you. I think that if a group can handle all the adverse situations that makes for a more fun use of the skill challenges. What level is the group and are you skill heavy or light? I mean do a lot of players take extra skills or use feats to push them up higher because of the use of more skill challenges?

 

[Mallus]

What level is the group and are you skill heavy or light? I mean do a lot of players take extra skills or use feats to push them up higher because of the use of more skill challenges?

The party is currently 5th level (Dragonborn paladin, human wizard, Shadar Kai rogue, human ranger, Shifter fighter, human warlock). Three of the character's have one extra skill from taking a multiclass feat. None of them have skill focus.

 

[SabreCat]

I agree that the base Skill Challenge rules are not very fun. Try using one of the alternate Skill Challenge systems linked in every one of Stalker0's posts (http://www.enworld.org/forum/members/stalker0.html). While you may still run into a little bit of struggle with players finding justification for input in every round, the Obsidian challenges in particular are shorter, better structured, and easier to invent on the fly than the core DMG challenges.

Core Skill Challenges work well for things where you'll put in a roll or two a session toward a very long-term goal, like swaying a faction to your cause over repeated interaction. But they're a quagmire if you try to run through all those rolls in one encounter, unless you keep the Complexity no higher than 2 or 3.

 

[Stoat]

I've found Stalker0's Obsidian system to be pretty compatible with improvisation.

It's more flexible, requires less advance planning and seems to take less in-game time.

 

[Akaiku]

The problem with skill challenges, at least for me, is that if you have no social skills for your character, it becomes just plain a bad idea for your character to be... near even the 'challenge' as your mere input can hose up the social focused people's stuff. And there is the skill challenges that are the other end, were the non-physical people, (charasmadin, I'm looking at you!) have like -2's to the people decent at say climbing or swimming have a +11.

Being forced to screw up the success because you 'must' participate is irratating. And really, sometimes the box you are being forced to think outside of is there for a reason. Sure, I can use atheletics to climb a tree to hang a noose from to contribute to questioning a prisoner, but only twice at best.

About the only good thing I see for this is it allows a party to be stealthy in situations that involve the whole party.

 

[Herschel]

I've found them to be fun and relatively easy, but the ones I've designed were almost no-brainers in the context of the campaign I'm building. The thing I've found about running them is to just DM, let the story flow and make roles where appropriate. I find compartmentalizing them to be rather awkward even though it shortens them. When you complete them in a narrative style you realize what you just did, but it doesn't feel like you just went in to this whole "thing".

 

[jgsugden]

The skill challenge has been with us since 1.0. We just didn't think of them as skill challenges. Every time a 1978 thief tried to climb a tall wall, that was a skill challenge. As such, this isn't really a new problem. It is an old one - how do you make non-combat situations feel dynamic?

#1: The math still doesn't work in skill challenges. The problem is that the skill numbers vary too much to standardize anything. If you want a skill challenge that really works for your PC group, you need to reverse engineer it based upon the statistical chance of success you want your PCs to have if they use reasonable tactics. That involves some serious math skills...

#2: If you're going to have skill challenges be fun, there has to be a good chance of success, yet a reasonable chance of failure. This creates tension. At least, both success and failure need to seem like possibilities to the players. Most skill challenges suffer from two problems in this regard: a.) The players don't have enough information to measure their chance of success, and b.) Most players don't understand enough about probability to understand how likely or unlikely success is. This is hard to overcome, but you can do it by giving the PCs clear indicators of their progress towards success and failure.

#3: Many skill challenges suffer from repetition of the same skill being used. In negotiations, PCs may be asked to 4 diplomacy checks of DC X before they fail 3. Why all of those rolls? Why not 1 roll? Isn't repetition boring? Isn't repetition boring? Isn't repetition boring?

#4: Most skill challenges fail to give meaning to each roll of a die. The PCs need to see something change every time they roll a die. Each success or failure should change something. That change should be visible to the PCs, be meaningful, and should make sense.

#5: Skill challenges need to keep moving fluidly. Skill challenges are more storytelling than combat - more role playing than roll playing. If you're breaking the rhythm of the encounter to roll the dice, try to minimize that and work the die rolling into the talking.

My only house rule for D&D is going to be a rewrite of the skill system. Skill challenges need to be more fluid. I think the best way to do that is to take the numbers out of a player's hands. You don't need everyone to understand the numbers to keep the game flowing - just the person that has to adjudicate the numbers. It is far easier to get lost in the story of a skill challenge when you don't have to wade through the numbers as much.

 

[Nytmare]

I switched over to Obsidian after my first attempt at a skill challenge, so I can't really give too much input from the "right" way to run them, but it seems like a lot of the problem that people are having is that they are ending up in situations where the skill challenge is way too narrow. "Talking to the guy" should be one tiny part of a larger skill challenge. Just like Kzach said, a skill challenge shouldn't be forced to take the place of what should be a single die roll.