Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 86 - Skill Challenges

Episode Date: August 15, 2021

Skill challenges were one of the best things to come out of the much maligned 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  What are they?  How can you use them in your campaign?  Will Jeremy ever be able to limit himself to a 20 minute episode again?

This week on the Taking 20 podcast. Every skill challenge will have one or more skills defined along each step of the skill challenge that PCs can use to either gain a success or a failure on the challenge as a whole. You're not limited to use the skills that are listed, though. If a PC can justify using a different skill and it makes sense to you, let them use it. Let them use it. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 86 of the Taking20 podcast. This week, all about skill challenges, one of my favorite things.

This week's sponsor, Archery. Are you interested in the hobby? To get in, you may have to pull a few strings. Thank you so much for tuning in, by the way. Please consider leaving us a rating wherever you found this episode. As I mentioned in episode 80, I wanted to do an episode purely dedicated to skill challenges. They are handy, useful, wonderful tools that a DM can use to bring tension to a game session or campaign, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The definition of a skill challenge is that it's a game mechanic used when PCs are attempting something more complicated than a single check can adjudicate.

Skill challenges require multiple steps, can have multiple contributors to its success or failure. They're designed to feel cinematic, like a race against time. It's an opportunity for teamwork, for your team to work together. for your team to work together. They're really used for complicated situations, and they reward PCs for inventive and judicious use of their character's skills, racial abilities, tools, equipment, and ideas. Let's break skill challenges down into the different types. There are physical skill challenges, a challenge in front of the PCs that requires one or more physical skills that can be used to traverse the challenge. Skills like athletics, acrobatics, and stealth. An example of that type of skill challenge would be chasing a thief through the city streets, traversing a chasm with a rickety rope bridge,

successfully evading capture by the police. There's also social or NPC skill challenges. Many of these use charisma-based skills in order to succeed, like gather information, diplomacy, intimidation, persuasion, performance even. Examples could include negotiating your way through a closed border, successfully gathering information about a particular noblewoman at a high society art show, convincing the seneschal that you need to speak to the emp Empress at court tomorrow. A third type of skill challenge would be knowledge or research skill challenges. This could be anything data or information related. Find the weaknesses of a powerful monster. Repair the escape van before the mob reaches it.

Supercharge the engines to gain more speed. Discover the three distributors who have the best connections for grain shipments in a town. The last example I want to talk about are mixed or hybrid versions. Anything that really doesn't fit cleanly into the three examples above. They may require physical and intellectual skills or intellectual and charismatic skills. Honestly, these are the best ones in my opinion. Knowledge local or geography check to know the best place to lay low from the raiding party. Stealth or nature skill to adequately cover tracks and then arcana to craft an illusion to throw the pursuers off the scent. These type of skill challenges are the most flexible and give the most opportunity for a diverse party to shine.

But how do skill challenges work? I'm glad you asked, fictional person in my head. You have to make a series of skill checks and succeed a certain number of times before you fail a certain number of times. Like you're chasing a villain through a forest, or you're persuading an important NPC, digging in before an invasion, investigation of a crime, escaping from confinement like prison or jail, influencing the outcome of negotiations. Running a skill challenge is actually very, very simple. You, the DM, just need to keep track of how many successes the party has versus the number of failures that they have. The party needs to succeed a certain number of times at skill checks before they fail a certain number of times. You look at the required skill, ask your party to make their skill checks, and then count the successes and failures.

Every skill challenge will have one or more skills defined along each step of the skill challenge that PCs can use to either gain a success or a failure on the challenge as a whole. You're not limited to use the skills that are listed though. If a PC can justify using a different skill and it makes sense to you, let them use it. Absolutely. You can allow them to use that skill instead of the listed skill or in addition to the listed skills on the challenge. Let's say the PCs are on the run from the city watch and need to make a series of stealth checks to hide for a few days. The designer of the skill challenge has determined that the PCs need three successes before they reach two failures.

The skill check states that you, the DM, can determine whether the same player is allowed to make all of the skill checks. In general, I think it's better for more than one player to participate in a skill challenge because it engages multiple players around the table. Also, I buy into Matthew Colville's house rule about skill challenges. Once player A tries skill 1 in a skill challenge, they can't try that combination again. tries skill one in a skill challenge, they can't try that combination again. Player A can try a different skill. Player B can try the same skill that player A used originally, but the same player can't repeat a skill over and over and over again to carry the party single-handedly. As an aside, you could also rule that at least X number, like three PCs, must participate in a skill challenge. So the party decides to let Anleth the Rogue make

the first check because she has a great stealth skill modifier. All you have to do is ask Anleth to make a stealth skill check, compare it to the listed DC. If Anleth meets or beats the DC, that's one success. If not, that's one failure. Now from here, it can go multiple ways. Maybe Baron wants to try his hand at a stealth skill check for the second one. If so, Baron's player rolls a skill check against the appropriate DC. But Analyst's player may say she wants to use Deception to try to lead the guards in a different direction. If that makes sense in this situation, I would allow that as an option as well. What I wouldn't allow is Analyst to try the stealth roll after stealth roll after stealth

roll. That's boring and the rest of the party doesn't feel like they're a part of the skill challenge. If the party gets three successes before reaching two failures, then they've given the City Watch the slip. But if they fail two rolls before succeeding three times, the City Watch has found the party and what happens next is up to you. Before I leave this topic, I don't want you to lose sight of what a narrative goldmine skill challenges are. They can really be used to build tension at the table. Okay party, you're in a skill challenge. To avoid the guards, you need to succeed three skill rolls before you fail two of them. You can use stealth or deception to make

these checks. Who wants to go first? Analyst? Okay, you're going to try stealth? Make me a stealth roll. 16. Good deal. None of the guards appear to have noticed you. They pass by on the street regularly, but no one has discovered your hideout. We need another skill roll, please. Baron, what are you doing?

Stealth? Make me a roll. 14. One of the guards may have spotted Baron looking through the window this morning. The guard noses around the windows and door of your hideout for a bit, but thankfully doesn't come in. Alright, I need a third skill roll from someone. You can see as these rolls go with successes and failures,

you can really start to crank up the tension. Will the guards come back? Who knows. Depends on how stealthy the party can be. Now, designing skill challenges is a little tougher than running them, but I have one trick I always fall back on. Player knowledge and their ideas for using skill checks. Whenever I design a skill challenge, I have a few skills in mind that I think would fit well into the challenge.

But if a player can come up with a good reason why a different skill would be viable, let them use it, even if the DC gets changed slightly for that skill. For example, let's say the PCs have been given one week to determine whether a young girl really is the daughter of the deceased king and therefore has a claim to the throne. If this were a 5th edition game, I would think they could use a medicine check to examine the girl, see if she looks like she inherited certain genetic characteristics from the king. His ear shape, his lip size, or the malady that plagues both me and my son, long, luscious eyelashes. It sucked in college to have a young woman gushing over my eyelashes when all I wanted to do was, how do I say this delicately?

Plow her like a fallow field. I'm sorry, that was probably a little crass. As Shakespeare would say, I wanted to stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie. Unfortunately for my son, he's inherited my rich eyelashes and rather full lips. Thank God he didn't get my ears, by the way. Anyway, another skill that maybe the PCs will have to do is a diplomacy check to gather information from those who knew the king and the mother. An intelligence check to research the birth records officially filed about the young girl. But suppose the player suggests they want to conduct an intense interview with the mother

and use insight to help detect lies. Use streetwise to help find out if the king had taken any lovers about nine months before the girl was born. Knowledge religion to speak with the clergy or maybe even the dead about the little girl. Hell yeah, you can. That's a valid creative use of the skill. Roll that d20 and let's see what you learn. Don't just hand wave and let them use whatever skill they want, though. Ask them to tell you how they will use that skill relevant to the challenge. So, step by step how to design a skill check.

Step one, pick the skills you think that might work and the type of skill check, sandbox or serial. A sandbox skill check allows the players to determine what skills they will use in whatever order they want. It's the one with maximum flexibility. The overall challenge and possible skills is all that has to be designed and the players will pick the order. This is great for skill checks that aren't really on a clock or a really, really tight time window, or things don't have to be done in a particular order. But if they do have to be done in a particular order,

you're better off using the serial design of skill challenges. Like a chase scene where they first have to find the thief in the crowd with perception, and then an acrobatics check to avoid the overturned wheat cart, then an animal handling check to take a shortcut through the stables, acrobatics to jump a loose beam or survival to stabilize it, and so forth. The checks needed are defined in a particular order and must be completed in order in order to proceed to the next one. In the case of trying to figure out if the girl is actually the king's daughter, given that there's not a clear defined order where researching parentage is concerned, I'd say we go with the sandbox here. Now here's the challenge for the entire skill check. Avoid a complicated skill check that can be bypassed

with a single spell. The PC should have a reasonable chance for failure if you start a skill challenge. For example, the default 5th edition spell, Speak with Dead, allows the dead spirit to give brief cryptic answers or even lie to the players. The Speak with Dead spell won't let the party bypass the entire challenge and just cast it and ask, Yo, King Sleeparound, is this your daughter? He says, Yes. Alright, we're done. Where's our money?

If you have house ruled for some reason that the dead cannot lie, then you'll need to have a reason why speak with dead won't work here. Otherwise, you've done all this neat design work of a skill challenge for nothing. For example, maybe the king's head is missing or the jaw is missing and the spell doesn't work without it. Second step in designing a skill challenge. Describe the situation and set the scene. Make sure the party knows the stakes. What will happen if they fail? What are they being asked to do? Will someone die

if they fail? Will they get thrown in jail? Will it be an extra four days of travel from point A to point B? Clearly define the terms for success and failure and give the PCs a clear goal on this skill challenge. In this case, the clear goal is, is this sweet six-year-old girl the daughter of the king of Poo-Poo Pee-Pee Shire? If the PCs are right, the correct person assumes the throne. If they're wrong, then maybe the throne has been usurped by someone who doesn't deserve it. Possible civil war could break out as factions line up behind the potential successors. Step three in setting up a skill challenge.

Set the general difficulty. The difficulty in skill challenges can be set two ways. One, setting the DCs of the individual skill checks, and two, determining the ratio of successes to failures. Look at your PC's levels and pick an appropriate DC for the skill checks. Look at your PC's levels and pick an appropriate DC for the skill checks. The DC you pick will vary depending on your game system, because each game system has a set of standard DCs. Pathfinder 2nd Edition, for example, has a DC of 10 for an untrained check,

15 for a trained check, 20 for expert, 30 for master, and 40 for legendary. There's nothing wrong with varying the DCs up when different skill checks are required, though. I mean, after all, I would think it'd be harder to use physical body characteristics to determine lineage unless there's a distinctive physical trait like purple in the iris, long girly ass eyelashes, or something unique about a body part. In general, if the same skill is being used over and over, the same DC should be used for all the checks, unless there are changes to the circumstances around which the check is made. For example, if the skill challenge is a series of stealth checks to hide from the city watch for a few days, you could use the same stealth DC unless the watch has gotten wind of the PC's whereabouts, or the number of city patrols

changes to make it more likely the PCs would be found. In those cases, the later DCs should be higher than the earlier ones. The other way you can adjust difficulty is by determining the ratio of successes to failures. The DM determines the number of successes and failures for the skill challenges, and these numbers really help determine the difficulty. Easy, for example, 2 to three successes before you reach, say, two to three failures. Maybe a moderate difficulty would be you need four or five successes before you reach those same two to three failures. A very hard one would be six to seven successes before you reach those two to three failures, and then a deadly challenge would be more than

seven successes are needed before you reach two to three failures. These numbers, by the way, can be adjusted up or down as needed. It should go without saying that it is easier to hit a lower number of successes and it's easier to avoid a higher number of failures. So the lower the number of required successes and the higher the number of required failures, the easier the challenge. Step four, introduce complications if applicable. The situation may change while the skill challenge is being performed to make it easier or more difficult on NPCs. While trying to track someone in the forest, it begins to rain. It now becomes easier for the quarry to hide the sounds that they make, but they leave more footprints. So the DCs for perception may go up, but the survival checks to follow footprints may be lowered.

A result of an early skill check in a skill challenge can change future DCs as well. Suppose the party hiding from the City Watch fails their first roll. Logically, that means that they were either spotted or someone ratted them out. The City Watch would likely increase patrols searching for the PCs in the area where they're hiding. The DC for the next check just went up by, I'd say two. You as the DM can adjudicate successes and failures to whatever degree you want. Pathfinder 2nd edition, for example, has critical successes and critical failures built into skill checks. I tend to make the result mean more if either one of those situations happen. Suppose Analyst gets a critical success on the very first check. In that case, I'd probably

do one of two things. Either lower the next DC of the skill check needed, or count that critical success as two successes rather than one needed to evade the City Watch. But one critical failure might mean that they are discovered immediately, or the DC for the next check might go up significantly. Complications can be anything. Weather events, changing terrain, changing political climate, the loss of an ally who is helping the party, new dangers, the wheel breaking on the cart, a third party assisting or hampering PCs. Complications are dramatic moments in a narrative which all can seem lost. Use your best judgment when designing a skill challenge and throw in a

complication or two at the PCs. Fifth step, set your penalties for failure of individual skill checks. And this dovetails into the previous one. If the PCs are rolling dice, there's a chance for failure. When designing a skill challenge, you need to determine if failing individual checks will introduce those complications we talked about earlier or have other negative side effects. Do they take damage? Maybe on a skill challenge of avoiding an avalanche, they take 3d6 bludgeoning damage and are prone every time they fail one. Do they take a penalty on future checks, like the cops are looking closer to where they're hiding? Or do they now have a debilitating condition like exhaustion or blindness?

When designing your skill challenge, consider adding minor penalties for failing one of the individual skill checks of the challenge. Step six, set success conditions and possible outcomes. We'd love it if the PCs would always win the skill challenge and always identify the error, avoid the police, find the killer, the heroes escape the collapsing demiplane, etc. Make sure you define what unqualified success looks like. That's easy. But what if there are failures built in? I mean, I believe in every skill challenge that I design, there are different ways to describe failure. There's critical or catastrophic failure where you can't retry the challenge. There's failure where you can retry. There's success at a cost, and then there's unqualified success.

These degrees of success and failure are easy to apply to skill challenges. If the PCs never roll a failure, bam, unqualified success. If there's a failure or two, maybe it's success at a cost. Maybe someone got injured or they had to spend more resources than they anticipated. If the PCs fail the skill challenge, can they retry? I mean, if the PCs got all failures, no successes, what does catastrophic failure look like? A lot of us DMs fudge some things behind the screen

to help the player succeed sometimes. I'm not here to argue whether that's right or wrong. I talked about that in episode 36. Hey, that's 50 episodes ago. Exactly 50 episodes. Hey, I planned that. Yeah, sure I did. Hey, that's 50 episodes ago. Exactly 50 episodes. Hey, I planned that. Yeah, sure I did. Ah, you just keep thinking that.

I'm a genius. Regardless of whether you fudge, you need to define what success and failure look like for your skill challenge. It could be a toggle. You either succeed or fail with no degrees of either. Or you can define degrees of success and failure. Maybe no matter what the party does while running from the city watch, they'll eventually be found. The only question

is, will they have to fight two guards with unqualified success, five guards, success at a cost, or eight guards and a lieutenant if it's a catastrophic failure? The last thing I'll say about failure conditions is that even a catastrophic failure should not lead to a dead end for the campaign. Maybe the catastrophic failure means the PCs are captured by the City Watch and dragged off to prison. Don't make that the end of the adventure, because now you can have an adventure where they try to escape City Jail. Oh my gosh, I am so far over time at this point and I haven't even gotten to the tips, so I need to cut the rest of the recommendations a little short. Other game systems have great mechanics that you can use in a skill challenge, like retrying failures at a cost, adding an hourglass or timer in few of the PCs while they're thinking, and so forth. So let's get to the tips. One, use skill challenges to tell a dramatic

portion of the narrative. Two, tell your players they are in a skill challenge and optionally tell them how many successes they need before the number of failures they would need. I think players enjoy knowing they're in a mini game and that's exactly what a skill challenge is. Third tip, if there's no risk or cost for failure, no role. No point in it. Fourth tip, let your players give you creative uses of skills to pass a skill challenge. Five, I strongly suggest requiring multiple players to participate in the skill challenge. Six, design degrees of failure into your skill challenges. Seven, vary up your skill challenges.

Don't make them all knowledge-based or all physical-based. Mix them up to get more party members involved. And eighth tip, do not give up narrative goldmine that is a skill challenge. Skill challenges make great story moments, so be effusive in your descriptions about what happens. You can use skill challenges to make the characters feel like they're in a movie with tension and dramatic moments. Will the thief get away with the stolen artifact? Can the characters avoid the avalanche that's barreling down on them? Can the characters fix the starship before it tumbles powerless into a star and consumes it and everyone in it? Consider adding skill challenges to your next

game session. I'm betting you and your players will have fun doing it. Thank you so much for listening. Tune in next week where I talk about gaming inspiration from weird places, including the one-paragraph disclaimer at the beginning of the 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide. Once again, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Archery. Have you ever tried blindfolded archery? You don't know what you're missing. This has been Episode 86, all about skill challenges. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.

The Taking 20 podcast is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2021. References to game system content are copyright of their respective publishers.