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The Dilemma of a Skill Challenge

May 18, 2009 By

I made a quick dungeon from scratch with the hook something is taking some poor farmer’s chickens. The dungeon follows simple underlying pattern to role playing games research, explore, return. The quick dungeon works well with most game systems out there though it was designed for Dungeons and Dragons. Here though it breaks once you get to 4e because of the skill challenge. I have run a dozen games so far and the players pick up on the skill challenge and go into meta-game mode instinctively and IMO start to ruin the game.

Farmer Jones Old Mines Level 1

In 2e and 3e of the game when players were stuck in a dilemma in which they either had the wrong resources say a party of fighters in a rouge’s den the PC’s would have to think outside the box of their character class to get through the dungeon. As judge I would approve or disapprove of the method to bypass the pit trap. In 2e if they made too much noise I would roll for a chance of a wandering monster or a monster from another room would come and look, or I would assess the whether the people at the table were ready for complications, if they were not I would allow them to blunder forward without incident. In 3e a party of all fighters, could be, by virtue of the rules, screwed over in the “rouges den” no matter how clever the party was. In 4e the skill challenge created a way to bypass the downside of 3e but it still is broken. I think the skill challenge is cool but the players are seldom creative they just ask what number do I have to hit to beat he challenge. I have sat at cons and heard the DMs at tables around me say “ok I need three athletics checks and 4 blah blah checks.” The days of four fighters figuring out on their own to use pole arms, shields and ropes to make a bridge over a pit trap have been replaced ok after three successful roles for athletics and four success rolls for blah blah you make it over the pit trap.

Farmer Jones what is he up too?

The skill challenge is neat rule but hard to implement. In part one of farmer jones and his chickens how do I implement a skill challenge that his cousin Darryl is actually behind the summoning of the chicken stealing beast? All of this was so easy to home brew in 2e and 3e. Now it is such a dilemma.

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About shent_lodge

Shent_lodge, AKA Jon, started this website, in 2000, initially as a player's guide to his home game. He has run through, and run for hundreds of players of the Dungeons and Dragons game since 1980. These days he mostly plays the Pathfinder RPG at cons.

Comments

  1. Mike Shea says:
    May 18, 2009 at 11:15 am

    In the example you give from the Con DMs, it sounds like the lack of creativity is on the DM’s part. Here are a few things I do that might get the result you’re looking for:

    1. Don’t tell them its a skill challenge. Drive them to find a solution based on the skills of their characters and roll on those.

    2. Don’t tell them the actual skills or DCs they need to hit. Creative solutions are the best part of a good skill challenge. Describe the situation and ask for their possible solutions.

    The trickiest bit of a skill challenge comes from giving the players enough structure to get ideas for what they need to do but enough freedom to come up with really creative solutions.

    I don’t think 4e breaks anything – you can play it exactly like a 1e or 2e or 3e game if you choose. Skill challenges just give you a bit more structure to what previously were done with skill checks.

  2. shent_lodge says:
    May 18, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    Thanks I just saw a note on mad brew about skill challenges I’ll look into.