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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 6262457" data-attributes="member: 20323">I'm answering your question about tournaments, but it also relates to skill checks/challenges more broadly. Combat is interesting because D&D provides players with lots of agency (meaningful choices) about how to kill. Skill use in D&D is treated as more binary (10+ on a d20 as you put it) and involves very little agency for players. Thus, whenever you have a skill check / challenge, you want to be thinking about how to increase player agency.Now, *how* you do this depends a lot on how much you and your players like mechanics to be transparent vs. how much you want to be speaking the language of the narrative without mechanical references.So here's how I ran a series of Chivalric Hastiludes in 4e (though the ideas transcend system):<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> I came up with several mini-challenges (e.g. battle of bards, archery contest, horse race, love poem, mead hall mystery) that players could interact with.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> I set up each mini-challenge so that it had presented a choice or dilemma of some kind, and tried to involve three things the player had to overcome or decide to win/resolve the challenge. For example, in the Archery Contest the dilemma became there was a notorious outlaw hidden among the other archers and the PC identified them as the two were clearly honing in on each other as the two best archers there. The final shot was going to be shoot an apple off the head of a nobleman who the outlaw had a grudge against. So the PC faced a dilemma about what to do. It could involve a test of skill, but to test of skill wasn't the main thing, despite it being billed as an "Archery Contest."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> I wrote up three brief possible outcomes for each mini-challenge and corresponding rewards/consequences. For the Archery Contest these were: (1) Turning in the outlaw: 1000 gp bounty, nobleman grateful, (2) sparing outlaw/tying with outlaw: outlaw promises later assistance, nicks nobleman as warning, (3) winning the contest: a magical arrow, nobleman mistakes PC for outlaw due to obvious archery mastery.</li> </ul>So that's an approach I took to increase player agrncy with skills and it worked like a charm.</blockquote>

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