I thought I’d set out some more thoughts on how I have approached the Skill Challenges to round off the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition campaign. Skill Challenges, or linked Clocks as the Forged cool kids like to say, are great tools to progress and compress significant free flowing roleplay action with a mechanical underpinning.
The guidance for Skill Challenges in 4e developed a little over the lifetime of the books, though their essential nature and usefulness remained the same. I tend to gravitate to the Essentials Rules Compendium as my default reference, so I took the base structure from there.
To quote:
To deal with a typical skill challenge, a group of adventurers makes a series of skill checks, sometimes taking a few rounds and sometimes spread over days of game time. The DM either informs the players when the challenge begins or lets it begin quietly, when an adventurer makes a skill check that the DM counts as the first check of the challenge. As the challenge proceeds, the DM might prompt the players to make checks, let them choose when to make checks, or both. The DM can have the adventurers act in initiative order or in some other order of his or her choice. The DM might tell the players which skills to use, let them improvise which ones they use, or both.
The skill challenge is completed either when a specified number of successful skill checks is achieved or when three failures are reached.
If the adventurers complete the challenge through achieving a target number of successes, they succeed at the challenge. Otherwise, they fail the challenge.
Whether the adventurers succeed or fail, they complete the challenge, face its consequences, and receive experience points for it.
In my penultimate challenge the overall goal was to recruit neutral factions to your side for the Great Battle to come. In general, I kept to the advice in the Compendium in all but one regard. My approach was to keep it loose and directed by the players.
I had in mind a series of key scenes, with some additions due to the actions of the players. Each key scene had a base DC (in this example it was often ‘Recruit Faction X’). Then we play, with the skills and actions coming out through play. As such, and my slight deviation from the guidance, I allowed the players to define the skills they would use and why (Forged in the Dark style). The DCs were modified up and down depending on their approach to each scene (analagous to FitD Effect).
So, the Skill Challenge was there, provided structure, but only lightly intruded the flow of play and action. That’s as they were designed. This ‘Skill Challenge with soft hands’ provides an optimal blend of play with consequence, driven by player agency and inventiveness. The scenes and DCs could be a little flexible over time. Clever play and good dice rolls would also reverse failures to keep goal success viable. I was a little loose on this too. I telegraphed when a skill roll was coming, though the players were not sure of DCs, so the hint of success came through the way the scene played out. I also included Group Rolls for at least one of the Challenge rolls, so that all involved had a chance to influence the outcome. In this particular example In this example, I also moved Faction tokens onto one side or another on a shared view in Role VTT.
Perhaps the key advantage to this approach is that the Skill Challenge is much simpler to set up. List out some pivotal scenes. Consider an overall DC for each scene’s success, using the difficulty levels suggested in the rules as a guide. That’s about it. The rest emerges organically in play, with the Success and Failure tally being ticked off as play progresses.
This example was a large and ‘complex’ skill challenge, but very quick to setup. Creaing the faction tokens and shared display took most of my time. I’m looking forward to using these techniques a lot more. I might like to try openly shared clock views of progress, to get everything out in view.
Good fun, and a welcome variation in style and pace from the rich combat encounters. 4e really does have tremendous breadth and depth to gameplay.