This is Part 2b of my Skill Challenge series, now covering skills in context of the challenge itself, not just the system.   There are two points to consider for skills when writing a skill challenge:  which skills and how many skills are primary.  The latter question is easier to deal with, so we’ll start with that.  As a quick guideline, the more primary skills you have, the better off you’ll be.  You’ll undershoot when writing a challenge  more often than you overshoot.  Now that being said, this is still supposed to be a challenge.  If every character could hit effectively off of every attribute in combat, you’d have a much more difficult time making combat a challenge.   You still want your players to be following specific skill paths or roles, but have several such roles available – Face, Tracker, Strongarm, Healer, Magician, Scholar and Thief to name the most common.  Assuming your skill challenge is of sufficient complexity, you’ll find this gets built in automatically.  I shoot for a number of primary skills just about equal to the number of successes required, but no less than 2/3 of said value.

Having figured that out, what skills will be involved in the challenge?  There are two ways to approach this: emphasize roleplaying or emphasize mechanics.  You see, some people aren’t really comfortable play-acting and just prefer to roll dice.  If you know your characters’ skills, this gets a lot easier.  Choose one or two skills that only one PC has, and then fill out with skills that multiple PCs have.  If you don’t know your characters’ skills, pick out about a quarter from the low tier I mentioned last episode, half from the high tier and then fill out with mid tier skills.  You want to reward and spotlight characters who have specific training but not rely on them to carry the challenge.   This method will force you to craft the story of the challenge around the mechanics and some people may not be OK with that, but you can be sure that your characters will at least get through it.

On the other hand, you could simply write out a number of skills that make sense given the story of the challenge.  I consider this the default way that most people write skill challenges and there’s nothing wrong with it.  You may find, though, that you tend toward the more specialized low and mid tier skills since things like Acrobatics, Diplomacy and Thievery feel more “skillful” than say Athletics or Insight.  These type of challenges also tend to wind up requiring only a single role – usually the Face but occasionally the Thief or the Strongarm.  I recommend throwing in at least one or two high tier skills, even if you don’t quite know how they work, so that none of your PCs just get stuck.  Let them figure out why its a primary skill and then run with it.  They’ll feel smart for figuring out your “secrets.”

With only a minute or so left, I’ll quickly point you in the direction of some good and bad skill challenges based on number and type of skills.  I’m going to move fast so if you have your material out, you may need to pause the recording to look them over.  Starting in the DMG2, page 89 “Closing the Portal” is pretty solid; four successes, three skills (one in each tier!) and plays across the Magician and Thief roles.  Two roles for a Complexity 1 challenge is fine.  The very next skill challenge, though, “Opening the Ninth Ward” calls on the Magician and the Tracker and requires ten successes on four primary skills.  That’s less than a one-half ratio and gets pretty repetitive.  “Hunting the Mastermind” which I mentioned last week is on the same page, is of the same Complexity and has six primaries across at least three different roles – a much better option.  Really, most of the DMG2 challenges are pretty good for skills..  except “The Restless Dead!” If you have the LFR mods available, Encounter 3 “Into the Shade” of CORE1-1 blatantly splits up the primary skills into ‘Legal’, ‘Stealthy’ and ‘Social’ so you can really accentuate your characters’ skill roles.  On the other hand, Encounter 2 of CORE1-5 “What’s Your Name, Little Girl?” is a little short on available skills.  It really requires only a Face and I can tell you having played through it several times myself that I find it mind-bogglingly boring.  Encounter 3 of MOON1-3 “Roughing It” is also short on skills and is distinctly aimed at the Strongarm and Tracker roles.  In other words, don’t bring a Wizard.

And that’ll do it for skills.  Next week, we try to resuscitate some dead skill challenges.  CLEAR!  ::ZZZAPP::

We’re talking about the Skills themselves now in Skill Challenges. As I prepared my notes, this topic got a lot bigger than I expected, so I’m actually going to cover it in two segments. Today I want to open up the math of the Skills and then next week we’ll look at them in deeper context with Skill Challenges. When I say the ‘math’ of the Skills, I’m not just talking about DCs. Earlier this week I went through each class (including the PHB 3 and Assassin, but excluding the Runepriest*), figuring out the odds that any given class could be trained in any given skill, excluding feats and backgrounds. I then averaged the probabilities universally and across power sources and roles. This information is similar to the information on pg 85 of the DMG2, but more detailed and because it takes into account the number of skills each class can train and not just which ones are available, I think more useful. If you’re interested in the full data set, I can give it to you but I want to share here a few interesting things I found buried in the system itself.

The 17 skills arrange themselves fairly neatly into three bands or tiers of probability for any given character. The High tier skills each have a 32-38% chance of being trained for any given character based on class alone. These skills are Athletics, Arcana, Endurance, Heal, Insight and Intimidate. The Mid tier skills, at 24-28% chance of training are Diplomacy, History, Nature, Perception and Religion and the Low tier skills at a 12-18% probability are Acrobatics, Bluff, Dungeoneering, Theivery, Stealth and Streetwise. Now admittedly, the standard deviation here is 8.5% but for our purposes I think this tier system is a reasonable approach.

Off the bat, this makes me take a good long look at the Heal Skill. It’s in the High Tier, yet not one Skill challenge in the DMG2 includes Heal at all and looking through my collection of LFR mods, I found Heal as a primary skill once and secondary once for about every dozen or so adventures. A good third of your party is likely to have this skill, yet outside of combat it’s almost pointless. I have two suggestions to change this. First, you could alter Nature such that it only deals with non-sentient things (the weather, plants, directions, tracking, navigation, etc) and use Heal for animals/monsters as well as people so that its more like the Saga Edition Knowledge, Life Sciences. The other option is to expand Heal into something like the 3rd edition Profession skill and have it include heal checks. I haven’t tried either yet, so if you do, let me know how it goes.

Second, we find that in a five-person party, you’re likely to have only one person trained in Diplomacy, where you probably have one or two trained in Intimidate and Insight each! This should clue us to lay off the Diplomacy rolls a bit to let more characters have some face time and be involved in a social situation. Expand Intimidate to include stating the importance of any threat to the NPCs involved, not just one from the PCs and allow characters to actually make statements using Insight, particularly about the character’s personal life or culture. Reserve Diplomacy for negotiating and bargaining so that everyone, even the Fighter, can get in a word edgewise.

Also, what about Arcana? According to my numbers it is, in fact, the number one most-trainable Skill, but its use in skill challenges is primarily that of gaining information about the presence or absence of magic or the occasional vague manipulation of energy to close and open portals and junk. Here’s where I think some earlier edition books and the willingness to improvise can be a great boon. You see, Rituals are nice because they always work, albeit at the cost of some time and resources, but even though 4E has 225 of them at the time this segment airs, there are some beloved spells from previous editions that aren’t included. Consider letting your trained Arcanists (also Religion or Nature or what have you) cast spells or use Rituals free of cost to accrue successes in a Skill Challenge. The trick here is that they will have to pass an appopriate DC to do it and the spell’s effect is limited to the stakes of the challenge. For spells from previous editions, set a DC equal to 5 + 5 times the spell’s level (10 for level 1, 20 for level 3, etc). For rituals, simply add 15 to the half of the current Ritual’s level. You’ll want to limit the usage somehow, but that’s primarily an issue of the group’s taste. You could have each eligible character record some sort of spellbook, use a spell only once per Challenge to earn successes , whatever suits the needs and flavor of your campaign.

As an aside before I close out for the show, it turns out that only one type of themed party – and by that I mean all one power source or role – could be trained in all 17 Skills. Only an all-Striker party could have access to all 17 skills; every other role or power source has a skill gap, although an all-Leader, all-Arcane or all-Psionic party could arrange such that only one skill was left untrained. That’s all for now – next week, we’ll look at example Skill challenges to see which ones have the right number and mix of Skills to keep the party interested and engaged.

*This segment was created just prior to PHB 3, but the emergent results aren’t vastly different with the Runepriest included.