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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9165050" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, if I may, let me give what I remember of two skill challenges I played in one of my favorite 4e campaigns.For the first, the party had infiltrated an ancient, long-sealed underwater research base from an extinct civilization. [SPOILER="Skill Challenge 1"]That research base was under attack by gigantic kaiju creatures from the outside, and we needed to figure out a way to save the base, while also reviving someone in the party who had died. So we split up; my character went off with a friend to lead the base's soldiers (he was of the same species, but recovered from a stasis box on a different planet, so the soldiers recognized him as "leader"), while the <s>shaman</s> dronesmith and wizard/cleric worked with the ancient healing machines to revive our <s>bard</s> cyber-augmented commando.The Wizard/Cleric succeeded at reviving our augmented friend, after almost telling the machine to reformat her instead (used a reflavored Deva's past-life memories power to improve the roll.) Now she could help out.The Dronesmith attempted to reactivate the external defenses of the base, but failed; this meant she had drawn power away from the structural integrity fields, meaning future damage would be more severe (accelerating the end of the challenge.)I attempted to activate mobility controls to try to escape (because the upper parts of the base could detach and move), but these controls were foreign to me. This drew the kaiju attacks to critical system areas.I don't remember what specifically commando lady tried to do, but that also failed--which meant we failed the skill challenge. The base was destroyed......and as a result, we woke up INSIDE a kaiju that had eaten us! We then had to fight our way out against a gaggle of enemy agents whose ship had been swallowed whole; we eventually defeated them, stole their awesome ship, and then began the next phase of the campaign.[/SPOILER]For the second skill challenge, we started off by trying to negotiate with a businessman to come with us, over the objections of his security staff.[SPOILER="Skill Challenge 2"]Our dronesmith presented technological secrets (without full explanations, just the tantalizing intro) which we only knew because of where we'd gone, which impressed him enough to keep paying attention. He knew we weren't whistling Dixie--this was real, but was it safe?I then squarely looked at him, and vowed that our offer was exclusively (a) because we truly had something worthy of his attention, and (b) trying to be in his best interest, to the best of our knowledge. I presented this with sufficient earnestness that the DM gave an automatic success--no need to roll Diplomacy. (It pays to be a straight shooter sometimes!)At this point, he is on board with joining us--but now his own security detail turns against him, and the skill challenge blended in combat-like elements (meaning, we had to consider safety). Our cyber-commando, having been a bit of a poster girl for her former employer, is a dab hand at dangerous rescues (they make great PR material), so she coordinated our escape.The Dronesmith tried to set up a distraction, but her drones were too obvious popping in from phase space, so the enemy knew they weren't the correct target--allowing them to move toward our intended exit.Finally, our Barbarian (who had replaced the Ranger that dropped out) boldly struck out ahead of the group, causing our opponents to trigger their trap early, before they were fully ready, allowing us to slip through the opening albeit with a bit of damage taken (successful roll, but had to spend a healing surge.)This meant we got out of the restaurant area with our businessman intact, respecting us, and having very good reasons not to want to leave our protection until he was certain it would be safe. Unlike the previous, we not only succeeded, but did so with only a single failed roll.[/SPOILER]The big thing with both of these SCs is that each roll, success or fail, contributes something to the future state of play. The simplest example of this is the stereotypical "street chase scene" SC: each successful or failed roll leads to some specific development in the chase, losing ground, suffering a setback, having to re-locate the enemy, etc.The second major thing is, don't just make the results a hard binary pass/fail. The overall ultimate goal can still be binary (e.g. you catch the bad guy or you don't; you protect the base or you don't; you persuade/protect the CEO or you don't), but the nature of the success/failure can be flexible. With the chase scene example, you might fail to catch the person, but if you only barely fail (e.g. you nearly get enough successes to pass), you now know where their secret hideout is--or, at least, what building it's in. Conversely, if you succeed but only by the skin of your teeth, maybe you do catch the person, but they were able to pass a message to their superiors.Making those two tweaks to the Skill Challenge process turns them from potentially very dry, dull affairs to things that genuinely feel tense and dramatic. It also means that who goes when matters a lot more--it might be the case that a later complication would have been easier to address for a character that has already participated.</blockquote>

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