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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8158470" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Yeah, I used to joke that the best thing you could say about skill challenges was that they didn’t suck if the players didn’t know they were happening. That was a bit hyperbolic, but expressed the frustration I felt that the majority of advice out there on how to run skill challenges better boiled down to “hide the fact that they’re skill challenges from the players.” IIRC, I think it was [USER=97077]@iserith[/USER] who finally explained it in a way that clicked for me, but by then the 5e playtest was happening and I was ready to move on from 4e.The bolded bit is of crucial importance, and the rules just didn’t really tell DMs to do this. And if you do this, it doesn’t really matter a whole lot of the players know it’s a skill challenge or not. The biggest problem with skill challenges in my experience wasn’t that the players had to take turns, but that there was nothing for the players to respond to when their turn came up. Maybe for the first check made in the challenge you’d have a clear obstacle and come up with an action to try to overcome it. But more often than not, after that first success, the DM would just be like, “ok, what else?” and you’d have no idea why that first success wasn’t enough or what else to do to make progress, except that this was apparently a skill challenges and you needed more successes. So you’d just sheepishly ask to make a check with your highest skill until the rules decided you’d gotten enough successes to move on.Well, the DM is the mechanism. Just ask a specific player what they do instead of asking the whole table at large. This is good practice in general, skill challenge or not.It isn’t nothing, but it also isn’t what was really needed. Yeah, sure, narrate clear measurable progress towards the goal, but what’s more important is to narrate a complication, otherwise the player will just be like “umm... I try to make more progress, I guess?”</blockquote>

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