It’s time for the last segment on Skill Challenges, which is good because I’m getting kinda tired of this and ready to get on with something else .

When “Chatty DM” Phil Menard was on a few weeks back, he mentioned something he calls “Mouseguarding.” This is of course, a reference to the Mouseguard RPG; specifically page 91 of the core rulebook (which I own!). The text on the page reads as follows: “One of two things can happen and the GM gets to decide which one he wants. You can fail to overcome the obstacle and the GM can inject a twist into the game or you can succeed at your attempt with some cost. The GM can’t apply both options to one test.”

So what we’re actually saying here is that your PCs can fail a skill check and still succeed.. sort of. The concept needs to be translated slightly since Mouseguard has ongoing status conditions closer to Star Wars: Saga Edition’s condition track rather than 4E’s combat conditions and tends to use said conditions as the cost of success. If you’re in combat, you might be able to succeed on the check but are then Dazed until the end of your next turn, representing the extra focus required for the task that pulls you out of the fight momentarily. Outside of combat, though, we’re shooting for spirit rather than letter of the law.

I believe I may have used this example at the beginning of the series, but I’ll use it again because it’s good. You fail on an Athletics check to climb a cliff. The DM can simply say that you can’t find a good handhold and must locate a new way to your destination – the twist – or charge you some toll for the successful climb A healing surge or having to temporarily leave behind your armor immediately come to mind as costs. For a full skill challenge where the party is trying to locate the next major villain, the cost of failing the skill challenge could be an increase in the number of bad guys in the next combat or being stuck on the business end of a surprise round. Depending on the situation, these might be preferable to the pure fail, which is having to wait until the villain make his or her next move.

Most of the time, I recommend you go ahead and ask your players outright what they’re willing to sacrifice for the success. I am of the school of thought that meaningful choice, not just immersive narrative or setting, is the heart of the tabletop RPG and so I’m willing to step back into the metagame for a little bit to let the players mull it over. You can choose for them in secret occasionally, but I find it preferable more often that not to put that decision squarely in the players’ hands.

Why do this? Why add these complications or costs rather than simply failing? Several good reasons – first, it’s an extra layer of plot glue in case your PCs come up short on the rolls to move the story forward. If your skill challenge is built well based on the other criteria from the last few weeks, you shouldn’t need it, but better safe than sorry. Second, it helps the players feel engaged, even when they fail. There’s still a meaningful choice to be made. Grognards tend to be hard on “new school” gaming for being ‘soft’ when it comes to abject failure and character death. This is primarily a game genre issue and something I’ll revisit later, but remember that you as a DM want to encourage your players to keep playing. Besides, forcing characters to live with the ramifications of a bad decision is almost always worse than simply killing them or otherwise removing them from the game. Finally, imposing a toll can help expand the content and depth of what you already have written rather than being forced to improvise all the time.

I’m almost out of time and really, this isn’t something you write into a skill test or challenge inherently but a technique you use in play, so I won’t point out any DMG2 or RPGA module references. And with that (does it count if I say it?) we conclude the series on skill challenges. Next week – making magic items feel awesome and unique again without technically breaking the 4E magic item schema.

Section 3 of the Skill Challenge series – dead skill challenges.  What do I mean by a dead skill challenge?  A dead skill challenge is one that does not create a feedback loop, a back-and-forth with the PCs.  I used to be a big proponent of the idea that a skill challenge should feel like and be run like a combat for this very reason.  I don’t feel quite so strongly about that anymore since not every skill challenge needs to involve NPCs or forces antagonistic to the PCs.   You can have “friendly” skill challenges, like..  L..  alright, I have a sort running metaphor and I promise I’ll keep this modest but hold on a second.  (BBC Warning).  Making love to your spouse is a skill challenge.  I don’t care who you are or who you married, it’s a skill challenge.  I think many of you would agree with me.  But it’s not openly hostile to you — unless you’re into that sort of thing I guess.  Point being, if your partner just lays there you’re not going have as much fun.  In the same way, if a skill challenge just “lays there” as it were, it’s not going to be much fun.  It needs to respond to the PCs and prompt a response from them.  I have three primary methods of making skill challenges feel alive and interactive to share with you today.

First off, narrate your player’s successes and failures along linear time.  If you’re using various techniques and such with your partner but there’s no excitement building towards a climax, someone’s going to end up frustrated.  Similarly if your players are making various skill checks but you don’t narrate the events as being related to one another and getting closer to (or further from) the goal, it’s going to break immersion very fast.  Remember that your PCs should be navigating a small scene from a beginning to an end when involved in a skill challenge.  The challenge needs to tell the entire story of the scene, not just the beginning and end. “The Rushing River”, pg. 94 of the DMG2 does a very good job of this, splitting up the challenge into a sequence of smaller location-based checks; the characters literally move from one place to the next with their checks, giving them a sense of progress.  Encounter 3: Preparation from LFR Module CORE1-3 “Sense of Wonder” on the other hand, does not do this well.  The narration provided does not connect any skill checks to any other skill checks, requiring the DM to make a coherent story of the ship’s repairs.

Second, there’s structure.  Sometimes a little direction in the bedroom goes a long way – “faster” “softer” “higher” help convey individual preferences to common practices that maximize enjoyment.  In a skill challenge,  forcing a couple skill rolls is an excellent way to convey flavor without restricting number or type of primary skills.  A long forest hike that requires half the group to pass an Endurance check every once in a while is going to give the same feel as if Endurance were a primary skill to passing the challenge.   More aggressive lovers might employ a “do unto you so you’ll do unto me” approach.  Mimic this by occasionally giving your skill challenges a roll of their own against the PC’s defenses or passive skills.  Avoid doing this often or  when your PCs are near their last failure, obviously, but if they’re just breezing through the challenge without really paying much attention, a quick hit in the collective Fortitude or Passive Acrobatics is going to make them sit up and take notice.   “Traveling through Gorgimrith,” pg 92 of DMG2 really takes this concept and runs with it.  Dictating ALL of the PCs skill rolls in this way can be a little too rigid and domineering, making the PCs feel railroaded, so you probably don’t want to build a challenge quite like this one.  The point of the game is to interact with other people, not just perform a set mechanical routine, but it’s a goldmine of ideas for forced rolls.

Finally – branching.  Branching means that are several ‘paths’ through the challenge that open and close based on decisions the characters make and which checks succeed or fail.  For example, if the character succeeds on a Stealth check to sneak towards the door, the character can continue on the road to infiltration with a Theivery check to pick the lock.  On a failure, he or she may have to use Bluff or Diplomacy instead to convince the guards that he’s supposed to be there in the first place.  You can also just hand the player the opportunity to choose which path to take to involve more r-o-l-e-playing vs. r-o-l-l-playing.   Unfortunately, I don’t have a sly, risque analogy for this one, so you’ll just have to make do.  Sorry.  On to the books,  DMG2 pg 98 “Moving Through Suderham” by Mike Mearls involves a TON of implicit branching and branching by purposeful choice.  In terms of pre-written challenges, this is the gold standard for branching.  Encounter 2: Sava from EAST1-2 “Marauder’s Spear” is also good and far less complex.

Next week – we are rounding third and heading home to the last segment of the series.  Complications and Mouseguarding.  Thanks for staying with it!

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.

 
(Intro music discussion omitted)

I want to talk this first week about setting up proper goals and complexities for your skill challenges. We’ll look at some DMG2 challenges as well as a couple from the RPGA. The first one, and let’s start with a good one, is from CORM 1-1, “The Black Knight of Arabel.” This encounter, Encounter 2B, has you chasing the Black Knight of Arabel to try to catch him. Now that initially sounds kind of lame for a skill challenge, but once you read it you find out that you’re actually chasing him at night through a forest, so that gives you a couple of complications to play with, opens up more skills and makes the whole thing a bit more narratively interesting. Furthermore if you look at the victory conditions, you’ll find that the players always catch the Black Knight whether they succeed or fail. It’s merely a matter of ‘in what condition’ – whether the players get a +4 initiative bonus on a success or the Black Knight gets a surprise round on a failure. Add in the fact that there are a few optional scripted events as you go through the challenge and the DM has some really solid ways to provide varying degrees of success and failure based on how well the PCs do. Even at Complexity 3, this is a good, solid skill challenge, worthy of 8 successes to finish.

On the other hand, we have page 93 of DMG2 which contains the skill challenge “The Restless Dead.” No $%#!. That’s how your players are going to feel after this one. In this skill challenge, the PCs are trying to obtain information from some guardian ghosts about an upcoming puzzle trial they’re going to have to endure. That’s pretty much it. There’s no complications, no time limit, the ghosts aren’t going to lie to them, it’s just “get information.” It’s also information your players need to complete the puzzle so it’s kinda already smelling funny from the beginning as a skill challenge. Furthermore, it’s complexity 5. That’s twelve successes, ladies and gentlemen, TWELVE on FOUR primary skills – Arcana, Athletics, Dungeoneering and Diplomacy and you can barely count Dungeoneering since I think only three classes have it as an option for a trained skill so you’re really looking at twelve successes on three primary skills. Not only that, the Diplomacy check is a hard DC for the level and though you can replace it with Bluff, it’s still probably the same party member – the face – doing the same thing over and over and over again. So other than that, you’re looking at Athletics and Arcana checks to vaguely impress these spirits as to just how awesome you are. You see why I don’t like this challenge? I could even give it some bonus points for including multiple stages of failure (for every two successes you get, you gain a new piece of information), but why not make it a Complexity 2 challenge with six successes and give a new piece of information for each success? Why drag this monstrosity out twice as long as it has to be? This is just a bad skill challenge. It’s too long for not enough complications and the DM is going to burn out of ways to describe how you made a fool of yourself after the first couple rolls. Plus even after it’s over, the PCs are still in the same place, at the same time, facing down the same problems. Since the players need the information to continue, it’s not even a good skill challenge premise in the first place – at best a Complexity 2 but even then there should be another complication like “also determine if the ghosts are lying to you” or something. For 12 successes, you should be able to go through the entire puzzle trial. If you must use this skill challenge, shrink it down. Otherwise, just skip it.

For a better example of a long skill challenge, check out page 90 of the DMG2 “Hunting the Mastermind.” This is by James Wyatt, adapted from the Eberron Campaign Guide. This is a Complexity 4 challenge and the only goal is apparently to “find the demon” but if you read it carefully, this is really two skill challenges jammed together. The first half (5 successes) is “learn about the demon” where the second half, the last five successes is to physically locate the demon. Thus you can think of this as two Complexity 1 skill challenges (maybe Complexity 2) back-to-back. Here again, there’s not as much active opposition as I would like – there’s no time limit, no one is trying to protect the demon, no one is trying to stop you. The challenge is a little bit too passive for my tastes, but admittedly the PCs are physically moving around the city the whole time so there’s a nice change of scenery (always helpful for a skill challenge) and there are six legitimate primary skills with which to complete the challenge. Like “The Black Knight of Arabel,” the PCs will always end up at the demon’s lair whether they succeed or fail – it’s merely a matter of the circumstances under which they do so. So go ahead and take this one. You’ll have to fill in some of the details on your own and bring it to life a little bit more but as a framework or skeleton its really pretty good.

So that’s my rant on complexity and length. Next week, we’re going to talk more about primary and secondary skills in particular.

 
I’m launching a short Aberrant Rules series this week about skill challenges. I have four major problems with the way skill challenges are generally written and run in most preset modules, so in true Ryven fashion, I’m going to break them up into four segments to be aired at the end of the next few podcasts. I’m briefly going to cover each point in today’s show and then go into more detail using some RPGA modules as examples in the weeks to come. So here we go.

Point 1 – Scene Resolution and Mismatching Complexity. A skill challenge is best used when the characters are trying to resolve an entire scene – that is, the result of the challenge, whether passed or failed, will move the party on to a new plot point. A skill challenge to convince some guards to let you through a door isn’t all that great. It’s a single task. Do some roleplay, make a single skill check and be done with it already. Now having a two-hour dinner with the king and trying to convince him of your point of view while simultaneously fending off the opposition and maintaining courtly demeanor? THAT’S a skill challenge! It’s also worth mentioning at this time that the numerical complexity of your skill challenge should match the in-game complexity of your challenge. My rule of thumb is one level of numerical complexity for each complication in your challenge concept. Thus “scale the wall” is at best a Complexity 1 skill challenge and should really be considered for a single roll as task resolution. “Scale the wall at night in under half an hour” now has two complications on it and is more worthy of a Complexity 3 challenge. Don’t require your PCs to have eight successes to chase the bad guy through an open field. Just do it in three or four rolls and get on.

Point 2 – Managing Expectations. This has been said a hundred thousand times before but it’s crazy important so I’ll say it again. Do your PCs need to pass this skill challenge to move the story forward? If so, your challenge is invalid. Rewrite your challenge or add complications such that failure doesn’t kill the plotline. You don’t want to back yourself or the PCs into a corner. Skill challenges are for side advantages or disadvantages surrounding the main story, not the main story itself. Furthermore, make sure your players don’t feel like there’s only one right way to complete the challenge. I think Bonus Tokens (shameless self-promotion!) are an excellent way to do this, but however you go about it, let your players know that any reasonable idea will be acknowledged.

Point 3 – Dead Skill Challenges. If your skill challenge is unresponsive, your characters will be unresponsive as well. Don’t be afraid to have the challenge “bite back,” forcing the characters to make rolls they weren’t planning on in the beginning. A monster that doesn’t hit you back would be really boring. In the same way, a challenge that doesn’t react to what the players are doing is essentially dead. Furthermore, if your PCs are solidly whooping the challenge, a few unforeseen and awkward skill checks can push the tension factor up and leads nicely into my fourth point which is…

Point 4 – Complications, Not Failures. This was mentioned a couple weeks ago when ‘Chatty DM’ Phil Menard was on the show – he calls it “Mouseguarding.” A failed skill check doesn’t have to mean ‘no action’ or ‘no interest.’ As a DM, you can only tell your players “you don’t (whatever)” for so long before it simply gets lame and frustrating. So say one of your PCs fails a climb check on a wall-climbing challenge. Rather than simply tell him (or her) that the character doesn’t climb the cliff, say “You get partway up but the effort is exhausting you. You’ll need to make an Endurance check to keep going or lose a healing surge or leave behind some gear or something.” As much as possible, give your players a secondary skill roll and/or a couple of roleplaying choices to deal with the effects of the failure. In this scenario, the Endurance check doesn’t count as a failure for the purposes of the challenge if they botch it – it only forces the character to take the roleplaying route.

 
I originally started writing this entry talking about manipulatives, which are any tokens, objects or bits of something that is handled and moved around to signify meaning. But as I wrote it, it really coalesced around skill challenges and one manipulative specifically – the Bonus Token. Don’t go looking in your core rulebooks for this because you’re not going to find it. It’s something I’ve cribbed from other games and ported into 4th Edition D&D.

How often have you been adjudicating a skill challenge and one of your players makes a check that goes beyond a simple secondary skill, in a way that is both creative and reasonable but doesn’t directly contribute to winning the challenge? Many times, you dole out a +2 to the next check and go on with it, but as a DM, I found that got really lame really fast. It increases the odds of the next check succeeding by 10% but if it doesn’t help (or isn’t necessary), the player may not feel particularly inclined to come up with another unique idea later and I definitely want to encourage that sort of thinking. So here’s what I started doing. When one of my players goes in a direction with a skill check that I didn’t expect and passes a level-appropriate DC, I throw them a little chip with the word “Bonus!” on it. (I play mostly on MapTools VTT, by the way, so I can make all sorts of weird virtual stuff). Anyway – it tells the player that I officially recognize the successful skill check and feel that it was somehow appropriate but have no idea how to incorporate that check at this exact moment. I also take particular care to NOT describe that check in the game story when it’s made. In this way, I don’t feel like I ever have to say “no” to anything, but the pressure to come up with the result immediately is lifted. Later on in the challenge, players can ‘cash in’ their tokens for other effects related to the skill check.

Here’s an example – the players are chasing a thief through a busy town. The primary skills are Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, Endurance and Streetwise. Your player’s Cleric is not trained in any of these things, so she decides to use Religion; she prays to Erathis, the goddess of law and civilization for help. That seems both creative and reasonable, so upon making her check, you throw her a Bonus Token. When the thief is caught, the cleric asks “is the thief part of the evil cult we’re looking for?” and waves her token. If the thief wasn’t already a cultist, but you’re prepared to play it that way you have her return the token and you say “yes, in fact he is and he has the entry password tattooed on his left hand.” Perhaps you don’t want to go just hand your players quite so much information. You could trade that token for “no, he isn’t, but one of the guards that comes to arrest the thief comments that the last couple burglars they’ve caught were dead and marked with a strange sigil in blood.” Now if the PCs were about to botch the challenge and had only one or two failures left, maybe the cleric player could decide to use the token more mechanically, say to add 2 to a check an ally has already failed in the hopes that it would then succeed or grant a new reroll altogether (much like the way the LFR card system works). However you do it, the purpose of the Bonus Token is to teach your players that a unique, creative idea will pay out somehow in a meaningful way. A simple +2 bonus may be the DM’s best friend, but after a few sightings, that Bonus Token will become your players’ best friend.