Deviance #12 – Skills In the Mix

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::