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Deeper Into Skill Challenges, Part Two

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, yesterday I talked about my thinking behind when and how to use skill challenges. Today, I’m going to post a few examples of skill challenges that I’ve used, or am planning to use, in my games.

Finding the Goblins

One of the first skill challenges I designed and ran was in the Storm Point game. The party had heard rumours of a band of goblins in the countryside stealing from farms. The goblins were said to have a map to a lost Arkhosian ruin that the party wanted. The party had to find the goblins and recover the map, incidentally stopping their predations on the rural folk.

Now, in previous editions, either the whole thing would have fallen on the shoulders of the ranger, who could try to track the goblins while everyone else sat around with their weapons ready and nothing to do. Or I could have laid out a map of the area and let the party wander around until they happened across the goblins. But I thought it would be a good way to use a skill challenge to get everyone involved.
I set the level at 1 (they were first-level characters) and complexity 2. To round out the experience to a full first-level encounter, I put together a squad of goblin minions and a hexer. Then I thought about the different ways the party could try to find the party, looking at the skills they had.
Perception was a good skill for tracking. Nature for understanding goblin behaviour and habits. History to know the area and the good hiding places. I wanted to add some social interaction, so I decided that they could talk to the farm folk in the area with Diplomacy, and use Streetwise to find out about a halfling crime boss that had some dealings with the goblins. This latter one opened up more social interaction – they could use Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate to get the information from him. I also assumed that my players would come up with interesting uses of skills that I hadn’t thought of. I like to encourage that; it’s more fun, and it increases the player buy-in to the adventure.
Now, it was vital that the party get the map, or else the adventure wouldn’t happen, so I set the DCs for most of the skill checks to 10, which is the moderate DC for levels 1 to 3. On the fly, based on the approach used, I shifted the base DCs up and down by a couple of points – If they were rude to the farmers when asking for information, I boosted the DC to 12, but if they spent some time helping with chores, I dropped it to 8. 
The fact that I needed them to get the map to move on to the next stage of the adventure also meant that failure in the skill challenge could not prevent them from finding the goblins. So, for failure, I decided that the goblins would be alerted to their coming and set a trap, with the hexer creating an illusion* of the goblins sitting around the fire while they were really hiding in the surrounding woods, ready to ambush the party when they attacked. If the party succeeded with no failures, the party would get the drop on the goblins and have a surprise round of their own. Success with one or two failures meant neither party had surprise.
In play, the party succeeded without any failures, and didn’t do anything really unexpected, so it worked pretty much as I had envisioned. Because it was one of the first skill challenges I created and ran, it was pretty bare-bones, without a lot of variety to it. Still, it fit the purpose I had intended, so it worked.
Descending the Rift
Later in that same adventure, I built a skill challenge to simulate the party climbing down through hundreds of feet of narrow chasm and caves. I did it this way rather than just mapping it out or reducing it to a single skill check. Mapping it out would have lengthened the dungeon crawl section of the adventure beyond what I wanted, and a single skill check wouldn’t add much interest or risk. Multiple skill checks would work, but if I’m having the party make multiple skill checks to accomplish something, I might as well turn it into a skill challenge, right?
Again, it was a level 1 challenge, to match the party level, and I made it a complexity 4 challenge to make it a larger section of the adventure. Appropriate skills I decided would be Dungeoneering, Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, and Endurance, with DCs of 10 – again, the moderate difficulty for the level. As I looked over the other skills, I couldn’t see much that would be applicable outside those five, but I’m always willing to be surprised by a good idea from my players, so I just decided that any other skills would be a DC of 15 – the difficult DC for that level.
I also decided to add an extra complication: this sort of journey would be physically taxing and exhausting, so every round (which duration I set at half an hour), each character had to make an Endurance check, on top of the skill check made to advance the skill challenge. A success meant things continued as normal, but failure meant the character lost a healing surge through minor damage, fatigue, etc. The DC started at 5, and increased by 2 every round.
Again, this was a sort of adventure bottleneck. The party had to get safely to the bottom of the rift to get to the next stage of the adventure, which means that they needed to get to the bottom whether they succeeded of failed. So, I decided that, for every failure rolled, they would run into some difficulty on the descent that they needed to deal with: a rockslide (the hazard from the DMG), an attack by a cavern choker, and an area of bad air that would sap a healing surge from each of them, in that order.
The party made it down, dealing with the rockslide and cavern choker, but it took significantly longer than I had expected. The fight with the choker broke things up a little, but the skill challenge still went on a bit longer than I personally found to be fun. Not enough variety, and with needing 10 successes, it took some time to run through. If I were doing it now, I would cut it back to about a complexity 2.
Navigating the Winter Maze
In my Post Tenebras Lux game, I decided that the Winter Barrow was surrounded by a mystical maze of ice, snow, and magic, that shifted and changed moment by moment. There were a couple of things they could do before venturing into the maze to make it easier on themselves, but they didn’t do those things, so they went in raw.
Level 3 challenge, complexity 5. I set the complexity that high because I wanted them to have to spend a certain amount of time in the maze, dealing with the cold (1d6+3 cold damage per round, the low normal damage expression for that level). I figured the primary skills would be Perception and Nature for navigating the maze, Arcana for dealing with the magical aspects of it, and Insight to spot the illusory parts. I also decided that each of those four skills needed at least one success for the skill challenge to succeed.
This was designed to be a difficult challenge – I set the DC for the skill checks at 12, midway between moderate and difficult for the level. Now, for the adventure to continue, the party had to reach the barrow, but it wasn’t a one-shot thing, like the two previous skill challenges I’ve described. I thought that making failure of the skill challenge equal death or something similar was pretty harsh – after all, they were in the maze taking cold damage every round, so they were already suffering just from the time put in. And, speaking of time, the longer it took them to navigate the maze, the less time they had to investigate the barrow, which would vanish with the setting of the moon. So, I figured that having a failed skill challenge deposit the party outside the maze, forcing them to retry the challenge and spend more time, was appropriate.
I also wanted to emphasize the danger of being in the maze, so I decided that a failed skill check by anyone would cost that person a healing surge, either from the mystical cold sapping their strength or from a magical or illusory danger that they run into.
Now, this challenge went more smoothly than the Descending the Rift challenge, because both me and my players were more familiar with skill challenges and working them into the game. The players were better at describing what their characters were doing, how they were using their skills to deal with the challenge. This is the most fun part of the rules for me, seeing how the players come up with interesting ways to deal with the difficulties.
The tension created by the risk of the challenge – the ongoing damage, the cost in healing surges, the time pressure – kept people more focused on what was going on, and thinking about ways to contribute. For a long skill challenge, it worked surprisingly well.
Find a Campsite
This is a challenge that my players generally trot out, rather than me calling for it. I run it pretty free-flow, with a level equal to the party level, and a complexity of 1, DC set at the moderate value for that level. They tend to use Nature, Perception, and sometimes History and Insight to find a spot that’s out of the way.
The goal is usually to find a safe site that’s fairly concealed, so I let the results of the challenge determine the difficulty of monsters to find it. They usually make a Nature or Stealth check afterwards to increase the concealment, so I give them +5 to that roll if they succeed with no failures, +2 if they succeed with one failure, +0 if they succeed with two failures, and -5 if they fail.
They like this challenge and the way it works, so it’s become SOP for them when they’re in the field. We’ve got the challenge down to the point where it takes about 3 minutes to run through the whole thing. It’s not terribly exciting, but it’s fast, and they like it, so I like it.
Gang War
This skill challenge is one that I designed, but never ran, because the game went off in a different direction. It was set up as a framework for an entire adventure, where the characters worked to take down a criminal network run by a halfling gangster.
I broke the entire thing into a series of small skill challenges, all of complexity 1, each challenge uncovering one piece of the network. I had a set number of businesses for the party to work their way up through to the big boss. Each challenge would take an amount of time based on the kinds of things the party tried – staking out a known criminal hangout watching for runners might take all night, while buying drinks and pumping people for information might only take a couple of hours. Main skills were Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, History, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidation, but I foresaw a number of other possibilities, like Endurance for a stakeout or History to know which areas the gangs traditionally controlled.
Each successful skill challenge would give the party a line on one of the gangster’s businesses. A failed skill challenge would either lead them into a trap or send a group of hitmen out against something the characters valued – family, favourite hangout, whatever.
A total of five successful skill challenges were needed to make it to the big boss fight. I may still use this structure for something else in the future.
So, there are a stack of different skill challenge ideas. Let me know what you think.
*Yeah, I know goblin hexers don’t have that power, but they can if I want them to.

Now, in previous editions, either the whole thing would have fallen on the shoulders of the ranger, who could try to track the goblins while everyone else sat around with their weapons ready and nothing to do. Or I could have laid out a map of the area and let the party wander around until they happened across the goblins. But I thought it would be a good way to use a skill challenge to get everyone involved.

I set the level at 1 (they were first-level characters) and complexity 2. To round out the experience to a full first-level encounter, I put together a squad of goblin minions and a hexer. Then I thought about the different ways the party could try to find the party, looking at the skills they had.

Perception was a good skill for tracking. Nature for understanding goblin behaviour and habits. History to know the area and the good hiding places. I wanted to add some social interaction, so I decided that they could talk to the farm folk in the area with Diplomacy, and use Streetwise to find out about a halfling crime boss that had some dealings with the goblins. This latter one opened up more social interaction – they could use Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate to get the information from him. I also assumed that my players would come up with interesting uses of skills that I hadn’t thought of. I like to encourage that; it’s more fun, and it increases the player buy-in to the adventure.

Now, it was vital that the party get the map, or else the adventure wouldn’t happen, so I set the DCs for most of the skill checks to 10, which is the moderate DC for levels 1 to 3. On the fly, based on the approach used, I shifted the base DCs up and down by a couple of points – If they were rude to the farmers when asking for information, I boosted the DC to 12, but if they spent some time helping with chores, I dropped it to 8. 

The fact that I needed them to get the map to move on to the next stage of the adventure also meant that failure in the skill challenge could not prevent them from finding the goblins. So, for failure, I decided that the goblins would be alerted to their coming and set a trap, with the hexer creating an illusion* of the goblins sitting around the fire while they were really hiding in the surrounding woods, ready to ambush the party when they attacked. If the party succeeded with no failures, the party would get the drop on the goblins and have a surprise round of their own. Success with one or two failures meant neither party had surprise.

In play, the party succeeded without any failures, and didn’t do anything really unexpected, so it worked pretty much as I had envisioned. Because it was one of the first skill challenges I created and ran, it was pretty bare-bones, without a lot of variety to it. Still, it fit the purpose I had intended, so it worked.

Descending the Rift

Later in that same adventure, I built a skill challenge to simulate the party climbing down through hundreds of feet of narrow chasm and caves. I did it this way rather than just mapping it out or reducing it to a single skill check. Mapping it out would have lengthened the dungeon crawl section of the adventure beyond what I wanted, and a single skill check wouldn’t add much interest or risk. Multiple skill checks would work, but if I’m having the party make multiple skill checks to accomplish something, I might as well turn it into a skill challenge, right?

Again, it was a level 1 challenge, to match the party level, and I made it a complexity 4 challenge to make it a larger section of the adventure. Appropriate skills I decided would be Dungeoneering, Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, and Endurance, with DCs of 10 – again, the moderate difficulty for the level. As I looked over the other skills, I couldn’t see much that would be applicable outside those five, but I’m always willing to be surprised by a good idea from my players, so I just decided that any other skills would be a DC of 15 – the difficult DC for that level.

I also decided to add an extra complication: this sort of journey would be physically taxing and exhausting, so every round (which duration I set at half an hour), each character had to make an Endurance check, on top of the skill check made to advance the skill challenge. A success meant things continued as normal, but failure meant the character lost a healing surge through minor damage, fatigue, etc. The DC started at 5, and increased by 2 every round.

Again, this was a sort of adventure bottleneck. The party had to get safely to the bottom of the rift to get to the next stage of the adventure, which means that they needed to get to the bottom whether they succeeded of failed. So, I decided that, for every failure rolled, they would run into some difficulty on the descent that they needed to deal with: a rockslide (the hazard from the DMG), an attack by a cavern choker, and an area of bad air that would sap a healing surge from each of them, in that order.

The party made it down, dealing with the rockslide and cavern choker, but it took significantly longer than I had expected. The fight with the choker broke things up a little, but the skill challenge still went on a bit longer than I personally found to be fun. Not enough variety, and with needing 10 successes, it took some time to run through. If I were doing it now, I would cut it back to about a complexity 2.

Navigating the Winter Maze

In my Post Tenebras Lux game, I decided that the Winter Barrow was surrounded by a mystical maze of ice, snow, and magic, that shifted and changed moment by moment. There were a couple of things they could do before venturing into the maze to make it easier on themselves, but they didn’t do those things, so they went in raw.

Level 3 challenge, complexity 5. I set the complexity that high because I wanted them to have to spend a certain amount of time in the maze, dealing with the cold (1d6+3 cold damage per round, the low normal damage expression for that level). I figured the primary skills would be Perception and Nature for navigating the maze, Arcana for dealing with the magical aspects of it, and Insight to spot the illusory parts. I also decided that each of those four skills needed at least one success for the skill challenge to succeed.

This was designed to be a difficult challenge – I set the DC for the skill checks at 12, midway between moderate and difficult for the level. Now, for the adventure to continue, the party had to reach the barrow, but it wasn’t a one-shot thing, like the two previous skill challenges I’ve described. I thought that making failure of the skill challenge equal death or something similar was pretty harsh – after all, they were in the maze taking cold damage every round, so they were already suffering just from the time put in. And, speaking of time, the longer it took them to navigate the maze, the less time they had to investigate the barrow, which would vanish with the setting of the moon. So, I figured that having a failed skill challenge deposit the party outside the maze, forcing them to retry the challenge and spend more time, was appropriate.

I also wanted to emphasize the danger of being in the maze, so I decided that a failed skill check by anyone would cost that person a healing surge, either from the mystical cold sapping their strength or from a magical or illusory danger that they run into.

Now, this challenge went more smoothly than the Descending the Rift challenge, because both me and my players were more familiar with skill challenges and working them into the game. The players were better at describing what their characters were doing, how they were using their skills to deal with the challenge. This is the most fun part of the rules for me, seeing how the players come up with interesting ways to deal with the difficulties.

The tension created by the risk of the challenge – the ongoing damage, the cost in healing surges, the time pressure – kept people more focused on what was going on, and thinking about ways to contribute. For a long skill challenge, it worked surprisingly well.

Find a Campsite

This is a challenge that my players generally trot out, rather than me calling for it. I run it pretty free-flow, with a level equal to the party level, and a complexity of 1, DC set at the moderate value for that level. They tend to use Nature, Perception, and sometimes History and Insight to find a spot that’s out of the way.

The goal is usually to find a safe site that’s fairly concealed, so I let the results of the challenge determine the difficulty of monsters to find it. They usually make a Nature or Stealth check afterwards to increase the concealment, so I give them +5 to that roll if they succeed with no failures, +2 if they succeed with one failure, +0 if they succeed with two failures, and -5 if they fail.

They like this challenge and the way it works, so it’s become SOP for them when they’re in the field. We’ve got the challenge down to the point where it takes about 3 minutes to run through the whole thing. It’s not terribly exciting, but it’s fast, and they like it, so I like it.

Gang War

This skill challenge is one that I designed, but never ran, because the game went off in a different direction. It was set up as a framework for an entire adventure, where the characters worked to take down a criminal network run by a halfling gangster.

I broke the entire thing into a series of small skill challenges, all of complexity 1, each challenge uncovering one piece of the network. I had a set number of businesses for the party to work their way up through to the big boss. Each challenge would take an amount of time based on the kinds of things the party tried – staking out a known criminal hangout watching for runners might take all night, while buying drinks and pumping people for information might only take a couple of hours. Main skills were Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, History, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidation, but I foresaw a number of other possibilities, like Endurance for a stakeout or History to know which areas the gangs traditionally controlled.

Each successful skill challenge would give the party a line on one of the gangster’s businesses. A failed skill challenge would either lead them into a trap or send a group of hitmen out against something the characters valued – family, favourite hangout, whatever.

A total of five successful skill challenges were needed to make it to the big boss fight. I may still use this structure for something else in the future.

 

So, there are a stack of different skill challenge ideas. Let me know what you think.

 

 

 

*Yeah, I know goblin hexers don’t have that power, but they can if I want them to.

Deeper Into Skill Challenges, Part One

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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A while back, I posted about skill challenges in D&D 4E. My thoughts at the time were that they were a good thing, but needed to be used appropriately. My opinion on that hasn’t changed, exactly, but it has evolved a fair bit, based both on Mike Mearls’s skill challenge articles in Dungeon (including the podcast he did about them), and my experience using them in play. Because of that, and because someone posted a comment asking for more about skill challenges, I’m going back to the well to talk about how I use them now, and what ideas I have for them.

When to Use Skill Challenges

First off, skill challenges represent people trying to do stuff over time. The timeframe may be a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, whatever. But if its something that takes very little time in the game world, I think its better to use a simple skill check rather than a full skill challenge.

I use skill challenges in fairly limited situations. Here’s my current list of when I use them:

  1. When players ask for them. Often times, my players will ask to do something as a skill challenge if they feel that it falls into one of the cases below, or if they feel that co-operation could overcome some inherent difficulty. So, rather than just say, “Hey, ranger. Find us a good campsite,” everyone will pitch in with Nature checks, Perception checks, History checks, or whatever else they think they can persuade me will be applicable. And I let them. Why? Because it fosters creativity in the players (“Hmmm. I suck at Stealth and Perception, so I’m going to use Athletics to help sneak through the woods by lifting fallen trees out of the way, then replacing them after we’ve gone through.”), it gets everyone involved, and it’s more interesting than just making the same sort of check for every character, every round.
  2. When success in an endeavour relies on a combination of different tactics. If succeeding at something requires the use of two or more skills for it to be believable, I might use a skill challenge. For example, finding the way through a magical maze of ice and snow might require Nature, Perception, and Arcana checks. Maybe even Insight, if part of the maze is illusory. I may set a minimum number of successes for the required skills for the challenge to succeed – maybe the party needs at least two Arcana successes and two Nature successes to succeed.
  3. When success in an endeavour could come about through a variety of different tactics. Sometimes, I can think of several ways that something could be accomplished. For example, chasing someone through a crowded city. When this comes up, I leave the how up to my players, and see what their creativity comes up with. So, using Athletics to run after the target, or Acrobatics to swing up to the rooftops, or Perception to keep track of the target, or History to know a shortcut, or… You get the idea. This lets the characters play to their strengths, stretch their creativity, and set the tone of the success – the conversation with the captured runner is going to go a lot differently if you tackled him in the street than if you persuaded him to stop by promising not to hurt him.
  4. When I want to create a montage feel in the game. Like the song says, “Even Rocky had a montage.” They can be a good way to gloss over hours or days of some fairly uninteresting task, while still letting the players put their own stamp on things. So, if the characters have two days to get a keep ready to defend against the advancing hordes, we don’t have to play through the whole two days. Set it up in eight-hour turns, say, and let everyone decide what they’re doing for that twelve hours. Some may drill the troops, some may reinforce the doors, some may dig trenches or lay booby traps, some may examine maps and plan strategy, whatever. Everyone again gets to play to their strength, you the game moves forward quickly, and what the characters do sets the tone of the following encounter. If the fighter spent sixteen hours a day training with the troops and the rogue spent sixteen hours a day digging pit traps in the approach, the fighter’s going to have a better chance at rallying the troops, even though the rogue may have a higher Diplomacy check.

Those are pretty broad categories, but they do impose some restrictions. For example, if the party comes up to a castle gate and wants to get in past the guard, I don’t turn it into a skill challenge using Bluff. Hell, I wouldn’t even let them use the Aid Another rules! Let’s face it – one character saying, “Let me in, because I am the Inspector General!” and everyone else nodding and going, “He really is!” does not sound like a viable way to convince the guards to let you past. If they’ve decided ahead of time that they’re going to use this tactic, then I might turn it into a skill challenge to build the cover identity, using Thievery to forge papers, Streetwise to bribe someone for information, Bluff to work up a disguise, whatever.

Basically, though, I don’t allow a skill challenge when the co-operation of the party would strain the credulity of success, is what I’m trying to say. I also don’t use one when the entire thing takes place in just a minute or two.

The other time I never use a skill challenge is when the result of it just doesn’t matter to the game. Here, I follow the advice from that great game, Dogs in the Vineyard: Say yes, or roll the dice. I just say yes. Want to see if you can seduce the barmaid? Yes, you can. Want to see if you amuse the peasants with your magic tricks? Yes, you do. No rolls involved, unless a player insists. Why? Because it’s a free way to give a player a bit of the spotlight, let them explore their character and have fun, without the potential for ruining the experience with a bad roll.

Success and Failure

So, if you succeed on a skill challenge, you get your objective, right? And when you fail, you don’t, right? Well, first off, the DMG recommends that, if a skill challenge fails, it shouldn’t end the adventure. Good advice, right there. If failing the skill challenge means failing the adventure, you should probably rethink it.

Also, given the fact that you’re accumulating successes and failures, it makes sense to me that the succeed/fail result be a continuum, rather than a binary state. What does that mean? Well, if you succeed, but rack up two failures, it shouldn’t be as complete a success as a success with no failures. In the same way, getting your third failure when you have all but one success shouldn’t be as bad as getting three failures right out of the gate.

I’ve implemented this idea in different ways in play. Sometimes, like in the “find the campsite” skill challenge that my Storm Point players love, I give them a bonus on remaining concealed based on the success vs. failure ratio. Sometimes, as in the “find the temple” skill challenge I ran in the same game, I impose a penalty for each failure – in this circumstance, every failure had them encounter a patrol of hostile humanoids.  And sometimes I just eyeball it and adjust on the fly – trying to find a goblin camp without alerting the goblins, I decide that no failures means the party gets a surprise round in combat, one or two failures means that there is no surprise round, and three failures (complete failure) means that the goblins have set a trap.

You may have noticed that I link everything to the failures, and nothing to the successes. This is because I already know what unmitigated success should look like (otherwise why have a skill challenge, right?), so I use the measure of the failures in order to temper the success.

Now, there’s a bit of a danger to this – it may prompt your players to resort to picking the character best suited for the challenge at hand, and then just using Aid Another to max out his chances. I haven’t had that come up, but I can see how it could. What do you do then? Well, my first instinct is to let them. I think that would make the skill challenge boring enough for them that they won’t do it too often. My second tactic would be to make them describe exactly how they’re helping – if it doesn’t make sense, they don’t get to aid. Combining the two should mitigate the problem.

But what about success? How to determine what success looks like? This is sort of glossed over in the DMG, and sort of assumed in most of the articles you read about skill challenges, but it may be the most important point to consider when designing one. What happens when the characters succeed?

I decide this by asking myself, “If nothing goes wrong in this situation, and everything goes right, what’s the best outcome that could reasonably come about based on the characters’ abilities?” The two key sections of that question are the “reasonably come about” and “based on the characters’ abilities.”

Let’s talk about the first point – reasonable. You don’t want to give away the shop. If you’re using a skill challenge to bargain with a merchant, it’s not reasonable to assume that he’s going to give you his stuff for free. So, let’s say you set a discount that they could reasonably hope to achieve – let’s call it 25%. More than that, and he won’t be able to feed his kids. See? Reasonable.

Now, let’s talk about basing the success on the characters’ abilities. If the characters are making their way through that magical maze of ice and snow I mentioned, they don’t get to cause the maze to vanish just because they made a good Arcana check – at least, not at heroic tier. Maybe at higher levels. But you can also colour the outcome based on the skills they used – relying on Arcana has them using mystical compass needles and runestones to pick the correct pathway, while relying on Nature has them watching the blowing paths of the snow to avoid invisible walls and crevasses, and relying on Athletics has them scaling the walls to follow a straight-line path to the goal.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my points here: success and failure can be used to make the skill challenge more interesting.

Level and Complexity

What level should the skill challenge be? How complex?

Well, as to level, I generally set all the skill challenges at the party’s level. The reason for this is simple: I can usually remember the target DCs for Easy, Moderate, and Difficult rolls for the party level, so I don’t need to look that up. It speeds things up in play, and lets me make impromptu skill challenges more often if I see the need.

If a skill challenge is meant to be an important, memorable event in the game, then I may set it a level or two higher, but this is rare – the DCs in the DMG are grouped by 3 levels: level 1-3, level 4-6, etc. That means that I may have to bump a challenge by up to 3 levels for it to make a difference to the DCs; easier just to shift to the Difficult category, or increase the DCs by one or two.

Complexity is a little trickier, appropriately enough. Most impromptu challenges I set at complexity 1, because I don’t want them to slow down play. In fact, I lean toward setting most skill challenges at lower complexities these days; it really distinguishes them more sharply from combats.

When I use more complex skill challenges, I try to instersperse the skill challenge rolls with other stuff: other encounters, role playing scenes, dealing with the consequences of failure, etc. This tends to make the whole thing a little less static and mechanical, adding variety and interest to the proceedings.

Samples

I was going to offer some samples of the skill challenges I use (or try to use), but I’ve already topped 2000 words, which is enough for one post. Tomorrow, I will post Part Two, where I will show you some of the challenges I’ve built, and talk about why I’ve done things the way I did with each of them.

Check back then.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Ran the latest session of Storm Point last night. It went quite well, but prompted a bit of a change of focus for the group.

Up until the game last night, they were planning on riding one of the floating islands in Lake Thunder through the perpetual thunderstorm in the centre of the lake to see what was inside the swirling clouds and lightning. However, when they got back to town after their explorations of the Arkhosian ruins, they found that Jemmy Fish, the halfling gangster they had embarrassed way back in the first session, had gone out of his way to mess with each of their lives in some fashion.

This, they decided, would not do.

So, they got together to discuss what to do about it, and were ambushed by a gang of halflings. They defeated them all, knocking most of them unconscious*, though a lucky critical by Ssudai** caused one to fall to his death. As they were tying up their prisoners, they noticed another halfling run off from a hiding spot, and gave chase.

What followed was a very successful skill challenge, if I do say so myself. Ssudai was using Acrobatics to run, leap, and swing across the rooftops and Stealth to sneak up on her; Soren was using History to remember shortcuts through town; Faran used his Perception to keep track of the target and his Diplomacy to convince her to stop; Milo and Thrun just poured on the juice with Athletics to catch up and Intimidate to slow her down; and Galvanys used a number of skills plus his Fey Step power to close distance. It all ended with a well-placed, leaping Thrun landing on their quarry on a barge in the halfling quarter of town.

What made the challenge work, in my opinion, was that everyone not only picked different skills to try, but also narrated what it looked like in game. It changed it from a simple exercise in rolling dice into an interesting, gripping chase scene. People got into it, and kept scouting their character sheet for different skills they might try. This is, I believe, the real strength of skill challenges. When everyone gets into them and lets themselves go with it, it turns into a very entertaining part of the game.

Anyway, rather than interrogate her in the midst of a crowd of increasingly hostile halflings on a halfling barge in the middle of the halfling neighbourhood while looking for a halfling gangster***, the party prudently decided to take her back to the militia’s holding cells for a little talk. Using Diplomacy and Intimidate to do a good cop/bad cop routine on their prisoner, they got the name of Jemmy’s boat, the fact that he was holed up there with about a half-dozen of his men, and that he had hired some extra muscle from the goblins.

So, they stormed the boat. Turns out the goblins Jemmy hired were a couple of bugbears. They gave our boys some tight moments****, what with their ability to dish out huge helpings of damage, along with knocking folks prone and dazing them. Really, the fight on the boat was everything I could have hoped for, with a couple folks (on both sides) going into the drink, and Jemmy taking to the rigging and sniping at the party, and others following him up. It was a blast, and showed off the cinematic quality of 4E combat*****.

Now, with the missing goods recovered, and Jemmy out of the way, our heroes are talking about postponing their little trip on the floating island in favour of trying to figure out what’s going on with the halfling-goblin alliance that Jemmy seems to have been building. I’ve got them discussing it over on our message board, so that I have some idea of what sort of adventure to build around their intentions.

And this is why I’m glad I’m not running an Adventure Path campaign with Storm Point. The party can explore whatever interests them in the setting, instead of following a breadcrumb trail from one dungeon to another. Depending on how they decide to proceed, we may wind up with an urban investigation and gang war, or a wilderness hunt for goblins, or some combination of the two.

I’m looking forward to it, whatever it is.

*And we all liked how easy this was in 4E. When you reduce someone to 0 hit points, you get to decide if they’re dead or just knocked out. No more fussing with nonlethal damage and stuff. Some things, though, I’ve ruled can’t be turned into a knockout: crossbows, arrows, secondary effects of spells, stuff like that.

**And when I say lucky, I mean lucky! He rolled a natural 20 to hit, and I invoked the halfling’s reroll power. He pouted at me, but rolled again. Another natural 20! Right there, in front of God and everyone! So, that was the Trick Strike power, which reduced the target to 1 hit point, and slid the target right off the rooftop for a 1d10 fall. Dead.

***I don’t know what it is, but pretty much everyone I game with just hates halflings, so I find they make a good underclass, outsider society in most of my games. It lets me riff on prejudice and ostracism.

****And I find my self consistently impressed by the way the healing system in 4E changes the resource management model. I don’t have to pull as many punches as a DM, because I know the characters have the hit points and healing surges to take it, but they still have to be careful because they may not have the time or the ability to spend a healing surge when they need to. I was worried that the prevalent healing might remove the risk from combat, but it doesn’t. It just changes it.

*****Which, I am the first to admit, may not be to everyone’s taste. There’s something to be said for the grim, gritty style of fantasy play. But I gotta say, for my money, I want the high-flying, swashbuckling, crazy-magic-wielding 4E feel.