From the category archives:

Skill Challenges

Skill Challenge: Lie To Me

March 15, 2010

Training in Insight does not make you a human lie detector. Too often in D&D a PC rolls Insight and on a successful check knows immediately if a person is lying. This shouldn’t always be the case. Sometimes you need to work at it. If you’ve never met this person before how do you know [...]

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Skill Challenge: Olympic Games

February 18, 2010

The Dungeon’s Master team has used the basics of the skill challenge to create a unique form of athletic competition. Each skill check is scored as the PCs vie for top spot. PCs can compete against each other or against the world’s greatest NPC athletes. This is more than just opposing Athletics checks.
Since this is [...]

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Skill Challenges On The Fly

February 11, 2010

What happens when your PCs make a choice that takes your adventure 180 degrees away from where you intended? Or when those same PCs kill the NPC who will provide the information they require to move onto the next step? Or when the PCs just aren’t picking up on the very obvious, to your mind, [...]

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Skill Challenge: Tavern Treachery

February 10, 2010

It’s well known that the PCs bring vast amounts of wealth back to town after a weekend plundering the local ruins. However, the citizens of a local town are tired of catering to the needs of spoiled, holier-than-thou adventurers. The town isn’t getting rich from the adventurers and no monsters ever attack. Add on the [...]

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The Skill Challenge Backdoor

January 27, 2010

In order to make skill challenges a little bit more interesting I like to try and build in a skill challenge backdoor. This is a very specific set of conditions which, if met, provide a significant advantage not normally available.

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Reusing Skills in Skill Challenges

January 26, 2010

Does this sound familiar? The PCs begin a skill challenge. A couple of PCs have creative ideas and they go at it. They explain what they want to do, use a bit of role-playing and then make their rolls. Right off the bat you’ve got a couple of successes. But as you look around the [...]

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Skill Challenges and Rewarding XP

January 25, 2010

One aspect of skill challenges that doesn’t get a lot of mention is the reward that comes from achieving the objective. Since skill challenges are supposed to be as difficult and rewarding as fighting monsters, the expectation is to be rewarded with XP just like you would for a combat encounter. But in many cases [...]

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Skill Challenges In A Vacuum

December 14, 2009

One of the fundamental design concepts behind skill challenges is that they provide a mechanic for large scale, out of combat encounters. Skill challenges were meant to assist in advancing the story. But the story doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The actions of the PCs should bring about reactions from NPCs or the environment they [...]

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Skill Challenge: Holiday Shopping

December 11, 2009

‘Tis the season for giving and receiving gifts. Regardless of your personal or religious reasons for celebrating during the holiday season, everyone likes getting gifts. This is no secret to retail merchants. They know that you’ll be shopping for everyone on your list at this time of year and they want you to spend, spend, [...]

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Skill Challenge: Crafting Items

December 8, 2009

When the skills were streamlined for 4e D&D one of the skills that disappeared was Craft. That’s not to say that PCs can’t create things anymore, it’s just that this kind of task isn’t something you’re likely to use very often. It’s a task more suited for an NPC, not an adventurer.
However, there might still [...]

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