What is wrong with skill challenges?

[Galdor Miriel]

I have come across many posts were people claim that skill challenges do not work, they are one of the things wrong with 4E that needs to be fixed etc etc etc.

What gets me about this is that to me, skill challenges are one of those big improvements in the game. The skill challenge concept meshes seamlessly with role playing in our games. We use a challenge for interrogations, pursuits, searches. All kinds of things. As a dm I just decide on the level of difficulty and let the players justify the skill. I find it easy to create and adapt them.

So what is it about skill challenges that is not right? What really needs to be fixed, or is it simply that people need a bit of a better pointer, or user manual, on proper use.

[NecroRebel]

The concept is fantastic, and very few people argue against that. The problem is that, by the original rules, they require you to go in initiative order, and not everyone will have relevant skills at all times. This means that you're still leaving out much of your party.

Even with the errata (which involved cutting two paragraphs out of the rules entirely), you still get the latter problem. Further, it's often not clear to players what skills would be appropriate, the skill DCs are either too hard or too easy, which make them little different from single-check rolls, and the complexity issue is fairly arbitrary.

Simply put, the idea is good, the implementation is shoddy.

[valadil]

I'm of the opinion that they can work, but would benefit greatly from a manual.

The skill challenges I've enjoyed have usually been social. The ones I haven't have usually been physical.

To generalize that further, social skill challenges are more open ended. You'll have a number of options. Pick someone to speak to, hear what they have to say, choose a social skill that applies, and pray that the PC who has that skill is a decent roleplayer. This takes some amount of problem solving skill as you have to find a way to get your 4 or 5 skills to apply to a situation.

The less interesting skill challenges are run as a series of DC checks with some flavor text in between. IE, everyone roll stealth, okay now everyone roll athletics, okay now back to stealth again. This bores and infuriates me.

If I were to write a skill challenge I'd definitely favor the first type (obviously since it's what I prefer). I'd also try to add elements that affect the skill challenge without being able to give a success or failure. These would be NPCs that might not have information but can point you toward someone who does. I'd have these NPCs not just dish out information on a high roll but on certain keywords. IE, if you mention the new mayor the NPC tells you why he's incompetent and that everyone should have voted for so-and-so (who is a major NPC and gives out SC success and failure). I think this method would add some depth to skill challenges and encourage a little more roleplay as the more you say will get you more information in return.

I'm not sure that skill challenges merit their own separate book, but they certainly could get a chapter in a DMG at some point.

[Haarkla]

How I like to play:

Players and DM roleplay confrontation. At crucial points, when it could go either way, roll dice against skills to determine outcome.

Skill challenges:

Get x amount of successes before y failures.

[TheEmerged]

Mark me down as someone that threw out the initiative order bit, especially during social challenges.

[Galdor Miriel]

We have had a great deal of success with both physical and social. I think that both work if you strongly encourage role playing, and a story element in the skill being used. That's obvious in a social challenge but may be more demanding for physical ones.

The DCs I treated as a guide line and if they are too hard I start to adjust them. What is wrong with going in initiative order, you can hold inititiative, or take readied actions. Ready an action to intimidate in a social skill challenge when something happens. Why not.

I think that the rules for skills as they exist are actually very flexible, while combat rules are rigid.

When I was a dm back in the day for 1E and 2E you made stuff up and made the players roll a dice. The skill rules now allow you to do the same thing, but in a way where it is quantified. You know what should be easy, medium or hard. This way you do not fix things unconsiouscly to always make it hard, which may punish someone, unintentionally, for being good at a skill like diplomacy.

In my last game, the players had a a chat with a Baron in a town where a wizard was going to set them up for murder. I decided it would be a hard thing to do to swing the Baron round to them and gave it a high dc. The heroes role played the conversation well, then rolled a string of 19s and 20s. Later on when the setup happened the Baron believed their story. I had to rethink my game, but I also fairly rewarded good rolls and good skill choices. They knew they rolled well so things had to go their way!

I can see that using skills and skill challenges might be difficult, but you do not always get what you need from reading a book. Sometimes you have to figure it out by giving it a go.

GM

[Ninetail]

I have come across many posts were people claim that skill challenges do not work, they are one of the things wrong with 4E that needs to be fixed etc etc etc.

What gets me about this is that to me, skill challenges are one of those big improvements in the game. The skill challenge concept meshes seamlessly with role playing in our games. We use a challenge for interrogations, pursuits, searches. All kinds of things. As a dm I just decide on the level of difficulty and let the players justify the skill. I find it easy to create and adapt them.

So what is it about skill challenges that is not right? What really needs to be fixed, or is it simply that people need a bit of a better pointer, or user manual, on proper use.

The idea of skill challenges is a very good one. (Also one that many people have been using for years, just without that name attached to it.)

The execution of skill challenges was fairly poor.

In the original writeup, the math was broken in such a way that challenges of "greater" difficulty were actually more likely to succeed than challenges of "lesser" difficulty -- it was easier to get 10 successes before 5 failures than 4 successes before 2 failures, for instance. Errata changed this to keep the number of failures constant at 3.

The original writeup also suggests using initiative, which is a bad idea. Skill challenges work a lot better as more open-ended roleplaying, with dice rolling thrown in when necessary. (You do need to be careful to involve all of the players, and not let one or two dominate the whole thing, but using initiative is a poor way of handling that.)

The original writeup is also read by many people as discouraging roleplaying in favor of a series of dice rolls. This isn't true, but the book could have been more explicit about it.

Basically, more of a user manual would have been helpful. People try to misapply skill challenges, in my experience -- either relying too heavily on rolling and disregarding roleplaying, or setting up a challenge where failure is a roadbloack to the adventure, or using skill challenges for trivial things. (Need to climb a mountain? Are you in danger or under a time limit? If not, the GM should just say yes, because you'll make it eventually...)

I wrote a little more about What Skill Challenges Aren't and Hacking Skill Challenges to use them in different ways, back in January.

[Pharaoh's Fist]

Question:

Can you use skills in a non-skill challenge environment, such as in combat?

Can you use spells in a skill challenge?

[Artanis]

Question:

Can you use skills in a non-skill challenge environment, such as in combat?

Can you use spells in a skill challenge?

1) Yes. Skill challenges are an entirely optional part of the game, and even if your DM uses them, many skills are far more suited to combat than to skill challenges.

2) Yes. In fact, many powers give bonuses to the skills that skill challenges seem to cater to, like Insight and Diplomacy.

[Gralamin]

I ran with the concept in the way I thought it should work. So far, my way works fine.

[Saph]

There are two issues:

• If run by the rules printed in the DMG, skill challenges are horrible. The combination of initiative order, the screwy DCs, and the fact that you have to take an action on your turn instead of sitting back and leaving it to the guy who's good at the job makes for some of the worst game design I've ever seen. I sat through exactly one 4e session where the DM was using by-the-book skill challenges, and by the second skill challenge I was ready to chew up the DM's notes with my teeth if it would get us out of the encounter.

• If run by the errata'd rules, skill challenges work much better. However, understanding the errata is a nightmare! They've errated every page and every number in the entire section, meaning that you have to cross-reference back and forth between the book and the PDF to figure out what the new rules are. I've written essays that were less work.

When I DMed a 4e campaign, I just gave up the whole thing as a bad job and did skill challenges free-form. You let the players solve the problem how they want, with whatever skills or powers they want, in whatever order they want. Then eyeball it and give them an appropriate amount of XP afterwards. Works much better.

- Saph

[sonofzeal]

Honestly, I think the whole thing has been done before, and handled a lot better, by individual DMs working within the 3e framework. We already had Complex Skill Checks, and the "Encounter Traps" section of Dungeonscape already laid the foundation to solving skill challenges as a team. The two ideas work well and naturally together, and good DMs would try to manufacture situations where people could collaborate and solve skillcheck-like situations as a team. Even on 'basic' skillcheck situations, I often see my players getting creative with Aid Another actions to solve it as a team.

The problem with 4e skill challenges, is that it took this good idea and tried to enforce it within the existing mechanic. Going in order isn't actually all that bad an idea, the bad part is the implication in the initiative order that everyone has to be doing something on their turn, and is made to feel guilty every time they sit around doing nothing when the DM points to them, even if any active contribution would hurt the team effort. I don't know if that's how it's 'supposed' to work, but my limited experience and what I've read suggests that's how the rules go.

Point is, under a good 3e DM you could expect to see the good sides of skill challenges in play years before 4e officially introduced them. Presumably, under a good 4e DM you could have the same thing. To me, this means that the actual 'Skill Challenge' portion of the rules is not only unnecessary, it's counterproductive as the result of following it is actually worse than what most groups would come up with on their own. I suppose it might be vaguely better than not having anything of the sort, but honestly that's not much of a defense. There's so many ways they could have done it right, that there's no excuse to have gone as wrong as they did.

[Sinfire Titan]

There was some math run on the challenges as written in the DMG a while back. IIRC, even the most simple of skill challenges had a 20% failure rating, and the value only increased as the difficulty went up. And I mean increased dramatically, to the point that even a +2 to the DC would increase the failure chance for 20% to 45% or more.

[bosssmiley]

The mathematics of skill challenges provably fails to work towards the designer's stated intent.

The idea was that distributing chances to succeed across the group would keep all players involved in the game (obviating the so-called 'netrunner problem'). Unfortunately 4E's designer's failed their maths-and-stats module and the actual result of their flailing (even after the errata excised chunks of the rules) is that adding more chances actually makes the party more likely to fail.

Statistical analysis of Skill Challenge fail:
here (Caution! Brace for aggressive use of pre-calc and vitriolic swearing), and
here (+ charts and tables, - swearing)

Related link: Skill Challenges done right