While they had a troubled start, and many people really don't care for them, I was thrilled that 4th Edition at least made an attempt to make skill-based challenges more interesting. I had struggled with them for years, and while 4th Edition didn't offer a slam-dunk fix it showed me some new directions to try that have really worked for me. In fact, I try to stick to the format in the DMG (though with the updates to the success/failure ratio and skill DCs) as much as possible and use it as a skeleton to be fleshed out with description, and just doing that has brought about some results that I found really enjoyable, though I guess I'm not certain what the players thought of it.

So, by request, here's a thread to discuss skill challenges. Questions, suggestions, and examples are all welcome of course. Criticism is fine, but please try to veer away from complaints like "It should just be roleplayed not ROLLplayed." By participating in this thread, you indicate to me that you at least like the general concept of making certain non-combat challenges into something that requires more than one action or check to complete.

Giving noncombat skills some "crunch time" is a great idea that 4e awkwardly embraced like a junior prom date.  With great enthusiasm and a bit of clumsiness.

"Noncombat challenges" is such a broad category though, ranging from networking a fancy party to eluding a pack of jackals in the desert.  Is there really a good way to give Skill Challenges a bit more meat in general, on the system level, that can be applied to all skill challenges?  Or is dressing them up better handled on a case-by-case basis?

In reply to GreyGriffin (msg # 2):

I think a general framework of a number of skill checks and a number of "strikes," is a good one, that just needs "dressing up" case by case. Fate Core uses a similar approach, though failure there is less arbitrarily determined: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/challenges. But I feel that goes to show that the basic concept is considered sound.

I'm extremely glad that 4th Edition gave me "permission" to have a preset number of attempts. I can't recall ever really enjoying skill situations I've been in before in which the GM decided that one character ended the whole thing immediately with a massive success, or in which a GM kept asking for checks until they either got they outcome they were looking for (such as rolling until someone managed to save themselves, or rolling until someone failed to hide themselves) or enough rolls had piled up that it was clearly impossible to have any result other than what the dice were saying. With a challenge the way 4th Edition or Fate Core handles them, everyone knows up front when it's done and when there's nothing more than can be tried, so that we can move on and see what happens.

And that's another import thing I like about skill challenges: the exhortation in the rules to make failure something that doesn't slam the door on progress. Vague understandings of what success and failure mean, or allowing for only extreme success or failure (i.e. unraveling the adventure, or killing the character) seemed to be the drivers for a more "mushy" approach that let the GM decide what the difficulty was and when enough rolls had been made. Deciding upfront what victory and defeat look like lets me detach myself from worrying about the outcome. Players still tend to get worked up about it, though, even when I assure them that losing the challenge is intended to be interesting, and even when they have a hand in setting those stakes.

I actually like the analogy of a prom date: it fits perfectly.

Skill Challenges were probably the hardest aspect of 4E for me to integrate. Most of the time when a skill challenge shows up, it breaks the flow of the game. I discovered the trick to a skill challenge was not letting your players know they were in one. Just quietly keep an ebb and flow going, describing progress to your players while not giving them a quick success. Describe setbacks (skill failures) in detail.

This requires a lot of planning. In fact, I would actually argue that even a premade 4E adventure required the GM to read it well in advance, and try to learn what kind of group would be running through it, and what the challenge was trying to describe. Choice of words, degrees of failure...in a lot of ways, it is comparable to a politician or a con artist standing in front of a mirror, and practicing a dozen ways of saying "trust me." This doesn't come naturally: it takes practice to say those two words convincingly when you are lying through your teeth.

So I wouldn't say, "don't use them," but rather I would say, "don't let them break the flow of the game." It has to seem natural. This sounds second nature, but most people who have read these adventures that use them would not be able to tell that, and frankly, neither did I.

This was one of the first bits of good advice the authors came up with after the fact. The initial description in the DMG had you treat skill challenges the same way you ran combat encounters, rolling initiative and taking turns.

To use the prom analogy, it was like starting your first dance with your hand on your date's butt. One not-so-subtle 'hands off' and you move on.

Something else that hindered skill challenges was players not being aware of just how low most skill DCs really are. Especially when they adjusted the numbers in later errata, it was set up so that 'easy' DCs could be done by anyone, 'moderate' was just that, and 'hard' was easy if you were optimized.

To give a concrete example, let's go with Diplomacy. Say you have four characters: Gronk (a half-orc barbarian) with an 8 Charisma and that's it; he's got a –1 to Diplomacy. Eswin the wizard has training in Diplomacy but an average Charisma, so let's say he's got a +6. Misha the cleric has no training but a high Charisma, a +3. And Nebbin the bard is built all around it -- high Charisma, training, maybe even a background bonus, so he's got a +10.

Now, at 1st level an Easy skill DC is 5. Anyone can manage that, even Gronk. If there's no pressure, anyone should be able to take 10 and pass. A Moderate DC is 10, which would be just a little tricky for Gronk but everyone else should be fine. And the Hard DC -- 15 -- is still doable for Eswin, and only a little risky for Misha. Nebbin should basically own this skill all over the place.

The point I'm making here is this: too many players assumed that the skill DCs were a lot higher than listed. (If you only had the 1st DMG, and never followed any of the official stuff, then you'd be a little right.) Because of this, if someone didn't have training in a skill they'd consider themselves to be completely inept at it, even if they had a high supporting stat. Since most skill challenge DCs are supposed to be Moderate, it should be possible for most of the party to attempt anything.

To really make skill challenges work as intended, you have to first take some time to educate the players on how they work. Point out the skill DCs, and make sure they understand that the idea is that they have a chance no matter what. They should only worry about sticking to the optimized stuff if they've blown a few rolls and failure is getting too close.

Once they understand this, then you can drop them into a challenge without fanfare, and just let them work their way through it. If they know you're not going to make skill DCs needlessly high, they should be willing to at least try.

I don't hide them, but I also don't hide anything else. I want the players to know by more than just my powers of description how the challenge is going, and I also want them to understand some of the "moving parts" of the challenge, so they can describe the consequences of their rolls (positive or negative) without waiting for me. That's mainly for the purposes of play-by-post, but I've made the situation clear in table top games too. Seemed to work alright for me, but I guess I can't speak for what the players really thought of them.

I noticed early on that some players don't like being required to participate in a skill challenge, no matter how easy the DCs are. I've mostly given up trying, and I usually try to mix skill challenges with combat or something else, so that characters can contribute to the scene without having to contribute to the skill challenge.

I'm not entirely sure how skill challenges were "intended" to work, and I suppose at this point I don't really care. I figured that the overall takeaway was meant to illustrate that non-combat situations could be handled in a mechanically balanced way, instead of just handwaved.

Well said!

Unlike LonePaladin and Redsun, I don’t hide skill challenges from the players. I find that some players prefer to know, while others prefer not to know, but I prefer when everyone knows, because it provides a structure and a pace to the non-combat encounter scene, so everyone knows exactly when the half-way point, when the climax is, when the moment that you nearly failed is, and when they are on the cusp of success.

I’ve tried a number of different approaches to skill challenges, with varying degree of failure (usually) and very occasionally the rare success (when all the players go – whoa! That was great!).

In one of my current games I’m trying a new approach: GM sets challenging scene and announces skill challenge. Players declare what they do and do not roll. GM announces that everything the players attempted works perfectly, but comes up with one complication per player, that the player must then roll to overcome, with that counting as the failure/success.

I’m not sure if this is working yet, as the limitations of rpol (irregular posting etc) make pacing rather challenging, but hopefully I’m onto something.

I do agree that there has never been an official version of skill challenges that properly worked, and any time I've read an official adventure that uses skill challenges, they always feel a bit weird and repetitive.

That said, it's not too hard to alter the official version of skill challenges to make them work as intended (to help encourage role-playing and grant a sense of challenge and accomplishment outside of combat.)

One of my favorite alterations of skill challenges is the one created/adapted by Rodrigo of Major Spoilers' Critical Hit podcast.  It pretty much goes as follows:



a. Overview: The party is addressed with a challenge. In a cooperative narrative, they work to overcome the challenge by using skills in turn. The players come up with ways to progress the party toward a goal, and the DM determines the skill that applies.

b. Preparation: Loosely storyboard the scenario. Prepare some challenges to pop up if the storytelling becomes stilted or the players have trouble coming up with a way to progress. Determine the results of failure and success. Choose a difficulty for the challenge. Assign a baseline DC based on the level of the party and the desired difficulty of the challenge. A good way to set this metric is by calculating what an average player would roll on a trained skill:  10 + 5 (for training) + ½ level (This is a good starting point, but feel free to tweak it if it seems too easy or hard. In this method, the DC is the same for everything, as it’s a free-form environment and thus very difficult to plan for every contingency.)

c. Set the scene: Describe what challenge the party is facing. Discuss with the players a goal or desired outcome from the scenario.

d. Mechanics: Roll initiative. Characters will attempt to aid the party in initiative order. Any skill which the player can find a relevant use for is an option—with the following two rules:
i. A player may not use the same skill twice in a row
ii. A player may not use the same skill as the one immediately before them
iii.    The player must be able to justify how the skill helps the party advance towards accomplishing the goal.

e. Endgame: Narrate the effects of failures and successes. Adapt the situation to the skills used by the players. Usually, this method uses a set difficulty, so once the final success required is reached, or the final failure, explain how this wraps up the challenge, and discuss whether the goal was achieved and how any failures affected it.


Source:  https://tmblr.co/ZCo6Rv2LhGxTB
This message was last edited by the player at 10:27, Wed 31 May 2017.

I think its important to differentiate between running a skill challenge in person (or on a 'live' medium such as skype) vs running it on rpol. On rpol a system that depends on each player posting in a specific order and within a specified time (like in combat) does not seem ideally suited to that medium. That's why I prefer to use a much looser posting system for skill challenges here, but perhaps it would be better to set up the same posting expectations in players and GM for running skill challenging as in combat situations?

In reply to jacktannery (msg # 9):

Naturally, I'd imagine anything using initiative would have similar posting rules in PbP.  You are right that there is some incentive on rpol to avoid initiative-based posting, so the turn-order-based rule would probably need adjusting to compensate.  But, since each GM I've played under here has handled initiative differently, it's difficult to predict how to make that adjustment to compensate from this thread.  But, many GMs have followed the rule of 'first to post, first in the initiative,' and I think that could work well here.

The key (in my mind) is turning the Skill Challenge into a collaborative narrative.  Anything that encourages players to do that is all for the good.
This message was last edited by the player at 15:02, Wed 31 May 2017.

That's a good description of a desirable function of skill challenges. I think there was a common belief (including by some of the designers) that skill challenges were meant to be a somewhat mechanical minigame, and in that the concept surely fails (though I think there's probably a way to do that).

What never worked for me for skill situations before 4th Edition were:
Lack of easy guidelines for setting DCs.
Lack of easy guidelines for knowing how many checks to make.
Lack of experience award guidelines.
Lack of advice for keeping the game moving despite failure.
Roleplaying and a sense of accomplishment were fairly easy to generate in past versions, I guess, though skill situations always seemed awkward and forced to me.

4th Edition skill challenges at least covered those bases. When skill challenges in 4th Edition haven't worked for me, it has mainly been when people weren't bought into the pacing concept and wanted their one good roll to settle everything, or when players weren't particularly interested in doing things that lent themselves to skills or even ability checks.

Another key problem I ran into early on is that players tended to want to put their best character forward and let that one roll all the checks, pretty much trivializing the challenge. I think the avoidance of that was the intent behind the rules in the DMG that required participation, but yeah, that didn't really work, in general. I think I have ways of dealing with that, though I still don't force anyone to participate.

The purpose of those two (three) rules seems to be to keep players from just spamming their best skill over and over, trivializing the challenge. I understand that impulse, but the trouble I encountered was that it's not always clear in-game why a character can't, or shouldn't, or wouldn't use the same skill again, or the same skill as someone else (it was, arguably, clear enough why, say, using Streetwise to climb a cliff isn't really in the spirit of things).

So, I found that skill challenges needed a lot of description. The example in the DMG actually shows this pretty well, as I recall, with the duke's objections changing as the negotiation continues, and players rising to meet each new objection, rather than just making the same point the same way over and over.

I feel like every skill challenge has to change with each skill check, pass or fail and, ideally, fail in a way that offers a clear opening for another clearly-applicable skill (or several others). I will often have skill challenges "go on the offensive" and directly threaten or challenge the next player or a player who hasn't done anything recently. That player isn't required to act, and isn't required to use the skill or skills indicated; anyone can help them, with pretty much any skill. But I find that when I "target" players and give them a reason to have to do something, they often will, even if it's not their best skill.

The issue I've found with iii. is: Who judges whether a player's justification is adequate? Do people find that rules like that are necessary, or do they find that players generally stay "in bounds?" Do they find that players are hesitant about using certain skills, because they don't want to be told that they can't or shouldn't? Can (or should) a GM or player offer to assist a player with a justification?

I agree that skill challenges work well when they're a collaborative narrative. Apart from encouraging "Yes, and..." though, I don't know that 4th Edition encourages collaborative narration all that much. I use it a lot in D&D, but I feel I mostly get it from other games.