Well-designed skill challenges can present many different kinds of options to your players. The highest level choices that can be offered to a player are at the strategic level. What we’ve discussed so far has been on the tactical level: The players are in the challenge, making short-term decisions, performing skill checks. A strategy is required for a skill challenge during which your players will need to plan ahead and work together, such as sneaking into a fortress or calming an angry mob.
Not every skill challenge will require your players to design a strategy, and many skill challenges tend to dictate one “no brainer” optimum strategy throughout. But some skill challenges will naturally allow your players to make more interesting strategic plans.
When building strategies into your skill challenge, you can design either a branching strategy or a cycling strategy.
Branching Strategy
A branching strategy is any strategy that denies another choice for some length of time. At a fork in the road, going left leads me one way, and going right will lead me another. When I go down one path, the other disappears. I can’t go down both paths at once, so choosing one negates the other. When determining branching strategy, you’ll find that there are usually only about two to four good strategies to choose from.
For example, the characters need to get into a castle in order to obtain some item. Barring ultra-powerful rituals, the players have two basic options: Sneak their way in, or fight their way in. If they’re sneaking, they’re not fighting, and vice versa. Maybe the characters go guerilla, and fight some, flee, then sneak, but I’d prefer to look at that as an outlier. The PCs have two real strategies for getting in the castle, then, and because they don’t have the option to do both, this is a branching strategy. You’ll design one skill challenge for sneaking, and another for fighting. You could also rule that fighting through the castle is really more a straight up combat, and run it as such.
Your branching strategies will tend to be bigger as they represent bigger chunks of action. This is in contrast to cycling strategies which have a greater number of strategies that are less complex.
Cycling Strategy
If branching strategy is an either/or affair, cycling strategies assumes the party gets to choose multiple paths to do the same or similar things. In keeping with the definition of cycling, cycling strategies are iterative.
Going back to the castle, our party is now in a situation where they must lay siege. Each push against the castle walls and defenders represents a different strategy the players could use. Maybe one day they ply their archers. Another day they try to sneak inside and poison the water (your PCs aren’t that dastardly, are they?). A lot of options of what tact to take are before the players.
In these situations, what you do is break down those options into a series of low complexity skill challenges. You may have quite a bit more than you’d have with branching strategies, but they will be shorter because they are not describing as huge a slice of action.
Coming up: Skill Challenge Taxonomies.
Similar Posts:
- How To Design a Skill Challenge #3 Part 3: Nesting
- How to Design a Skill Challenge Part 5: Cycling.
- How to Design a Skill Challenge Part 4: Sequencing
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Great article. I prefer to use the branching strategy in my games. It lets the players decide what avenue to pursue without me railroading them. It may be a little bit more work, but I often recycle the “road not taken” for a future skill challenge. As a DM I need to work smarter not harder.
I have to agree to you, Ameron! If you can’t simply use them again, they make good templates that require minimal tweaking (hopefully)!
I highly recommend Dungon Magazine’s “Ruling Skill Challenges” series. Apparently, most skill challenges fall into one of three categories: social situations, travel and exploration, and large-scale mass battles. I haven’t used skill challenges for anything past that.
How do you figure out how much XP to give for a skill challenge? If you said that somewhere, sorry, but I didn’t see it. My best guess is complexity times level, but I’ve never seen it said anywhere for sure. Thanks!