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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9290201" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, I said it above: Skill challenges, when done correctly. That is, DO NOT do the thing several printed adventures did, where there's a fixed list of valid rolls and everything else is obstructionistically blocked, and you just force players to keep rolling until they've either failed three times or passed whatever threshold you set.Instead, treat them...well, kind of like how one treats combat! That is, each time a player rolls, they're DOING something, acting or reacting, changing the state of play. If someone has just rolled, for good or for ill, they've changed the results. Further, the Skill Challenge format is ideal for representing degrees of success because it is no longer shackled to individual rolls, but rather to group effect. So, maybe the characters do hit three fails (and thus fail the challenge)...but they were one success away from victory, a nail-biter and no mistake. That's a great time to pull out soft failure--a bad thing still happens, but it has a silver lining, or opens a new avenue of approach/attack. Likewise, if that last roll had gone the other way, that's success by the skin of their teeth--which should have some negative consequences, even if the bulk of what happened was a good and real success.The effort the DM puts into a skill challenge really should be commensurate with the effort they put into designing a combat--it's just that that effort takes a very different form. Instead of being about clever creature design and terrain, it's about goals and incentives, environmental considerations, plausible paths, and intentionally preparing to be surprised by what the party ends up doing, not getting overly precious about any specific result. That's how you can get AWESOME dynamic Skill Challenges, like this one from the science-fantasy 4e game I played, where we were persuading a big business magnate to come with us (to act as...sort of avatar/host for a powerful being, which would coincidentally give him a massively extended lifespan, something he's pretty on board for).We were able to get him to agree with us very easily and quickly, in part because I got a success without rolling by my Paladin doing what he does best, speaking the truth without artifice. But it turned out he wasn't the only hurdle--his bodyguards had been paid off (or replaced) by the enemy, so now we had a firefight where the obstacle wasn't our survival (we'd wipe the floor with them if it was just us)...it was HIS survival. We had to get him out of there unscathed. When our cyber-augmented squad leader (mechanically, a Bard) vaulted across a gap to hold our position while jumping through enemy fire, it was genuinely tense, and her success was awesome as she brought down the casino awning on top of our foes.That sort of thing, a structure that gives enough mechanics to hook into and wrestle with, but enough abstraction and flexibility to tackle nearly any situation where it makes sense that a sequence of successes need to occur before too many setbacks, is just...really really helpful for making it feel like an actual game, without sacrificing any of the actual roleplaying.You're still naturally responding to your environment. It's just....cinematic, I guess is how I'd phrase it. When Team Avatar has to work together to put out that fire in the episode "Sokka's Master," that's absolutely the three benders doing a skill challenge. We get to see a sequence of actions from each of them that stops the fire. Of course, since that scene is prewritten and meant to only be an inciting incident, it's not a very big or profound skill challenge and nobody fails any of their rolls. But it represents the kind of thing that a good skill challenge should be: a real, tense, dynamic event that can't be solved by a single roll and doesn't really fit with a slow-walked, casual kind of situation.You SHOULD NOT use Skill Challenges all the time. That would be very bad! But having them crop up now and then--maybe about, I dunno, a quarter of all the encounters you face per level? That makes a huge difference to me for making skills feel like actual gameplay elements, rather than a pretty perfunctory coda to "learn how to play your DM so you get what you want (if the dice let you)." Many situations should still just be resolved as individual skill checks, or as group checks for singular tasks (like the group trying to sneak past a sleeping giant, or whatever.)</blockquote>

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