Skill Challenges

Possibly the biggest new mechanic introduced in 4e was the Skill Challenge, which was essentially an extended skill check. The idea was that the party was presented with a challenge (build a temple, climb a mountain, persuade the duke to help...) and they had to use their skills to do so. There were two key features of skill challenges that were maybe not obvious: firstly, they had to accumulate a number of successes before scoring a number of failures (normally 6 before 3, or 4 before 3, or something before 3...); and secondly that every PC had to at least try to contribute - if the brutish barbarian just hid at the back and didn't contribute to the diplomatic scene, that would count as an auto-fail.

Conceptually, I loved Skill Challenges. I thought they were absolutely great, and proceeded to make use of them in several different campaigns - SWSE, D&D 3.5e, even Serenity.

And in actual use, Skill Challenges fell flat. They were a complete and utter failure.

There were four key issues that seemed to cause problems, the first two of which I should really have forseen:

1. Characters who had an obvious skill they could contribute would do so. And then they'd use the same skill, again and again. Which got really dull, really quickly.
2. Characters who didn't have an obvious skill they could contribute would cast about helplessly, looking for something they could do that would at least negate that "auto-fail" thing.
3. Establishing the structure of the Skill Challenge was easy, but establishing the structure of the scene, and especially the changes in the scene as the challenge went on, was still just as difficult as before. Indeed...
4. Imposing the artificial game construct of the Skill Challenge on very disparate scenes (construction, mountaineering, diplomacy) tended to make the game very homogenous. Rather than scenes coming to a natural conclusion, possibly as the PCs work across several rounds* of rolling, the scene often became just a mechanical matter of throwing the dice and moving on.

* That's "round" as in "once round the table", not "round" as in "6 seconds".

I don't really have a good solution to this. In fact, I'd go further and say that I don't think there exists a good solution to this. Instead, I'm inclined to think that the Skill Challenge mechanics are a noble effort, but that they're trying to impose one solution on too many problems. Instead, I'm inclined to think that the Skill Challenge mechanics should be gutted with a knife, cut into little pieces, and then stitched back together to provide the solution to whichever particular problem the DM is dealing with at the time.

For example, for the "Repairing the Ship" Skill Challenge (spoiler!) each watch will represent 4 hours of work. There will be several roles: motivating the crew, mucking in with the work, security, using diplomacy to have the locals provide supplies, and whatever else I come up with. With each round, each PC will be able to perform one of these roles (actually, they'll be assumed to be working on any and all appropriate ones, but one will be dominant), make the appropriate roll, and then some sort of Magnitude check. For each 4 hour watch, the crew (and PCs) will suffer some sort of environmental consequence, and also run the risk of a random encounter.

What I'll need to do is to determine what amounts of progress represent which repairs (there's the elemental ring, the hull, the lightning projector, and the ballistae... plus any improvements Mondo decides to make). That done, the players will then get to decide how much work represents 'enough', at which point they can abandon the work and continue on their way.

I'll get back to you on how that works out...