Tag: Skills

Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Solving the Skill Challenge Problem – Ensuring Everyone Contributes

Has this ever happened to you? The DM sets the scene and you realize that the party is about to face a skill challenge. As the fifth or sixth player to act you only get to make one meaningful skill check before the party achieves overall success. It was a good encounter because during some of the low complexity skill challenge you don’t even get to act before the party achieves their goal.

What makes this situation an even bigger problem is that most players try to use their best skill even though in many cases it makes more sense (from a story perspective) for them not to. They know that they’re only going to get one or two shots at making a meaningful contribution to the skill challenge, and they don’t want to be the guy who flubs the check and wracks up a failure.

The Dungeon’s Master team has come up with a way to ensure that every player gets to contribute during a skill challenge and that every player feel comfortable using the skills that make the most sense to complete the objective and not just the one or two skills that they happen to be strongest in. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

Continue reading “Solving the Skill Challenge Problem – Ensuring Everyone Contributes”
Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Skill Challenge: Secret Identity

As the PCs become more powerful and earn a reputation they’re going to become better known across the land. However, there are going to be times when this fame and notoriety will actually be a hindrance. So when one of those situations arises why not throw a skill challenge into the background of the story in order to remind the PCs that if they want to keep their identities a secret it’s going to require a little bit of work.

I want to stress that this kind of skill challenge should be going on in the background and not be a full-on skill challenge in the traditional sense. By the time the PCs have earned enough experience to be recognized, a skill challenge to hide their true identities will seem beneath their level. When I say recognized, I mean to the extent that they can no longer walk among the common folk without drawing crowds and onlookers.

However, by making this a skill challenge with real consequences and XP, the players will realize that it needs to be taken seriously. It also gives the players additional motivation to really get into the role-playing.

Continue reading “Skill Challenge: Secret Identity”
Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Greatest Hits 2010: The 5-Minute Rest as a Skill Challenge

While the Dungeon’s Master team enjoys some well-deserved vacation time, we’re breaking out the greatest hits and shining a spotlight on a few of our favourite articles from 2010. We’ve searched for hidden gems that our newer readers might have missed and our long-time readers will enjoy reading again. Enjoy a second look at these greatest hits from Dungeon’s Master.

Between my home games, LFR and D&D Encounters I’ve easily DMed over 100 hours of D&D during the past year. Of all the ideas I had as the DM during 2010, this was one of the ideas that stands out in my mind as a solid bull’s-eye.

Turning a 5-minute rest into a skill challenge seemed like such a simple concept. I wasn’t sure how well it would be executed in a real game scenario, but it turned out better than I’d hoped. It was one of those times when I didn’t feel bound or restricted by the rules. I used the existing materials as a guideline and adapted them to the situation at my gaming table. The result was an extremely memorable encounter.

Everything clicked. The players realized the importance and necessity of taking the rest at that point in the adventure and they were willing to role-play the scenario. Even though they’d typically just say they were taking the rest, this time they wanted to play it out. They understood the objective (to rest without being attacked) and knew the limitations they faced as “resting” character.

As one of the players commented in the original article, he felt the skill challenge part of the 5-minute rest was worked into the encounter so gracefully that he didn’t even realize a skill challenge was going on. When running a skill challenge, this is the highest compliment I think any DM can get from his players.

On the surface, I encourage you to use this idea in your next game and have the 5-minute rest become a skill challenge in itself. However, the more important lesson I hope you take away from this article is that the rules are there to provide direction. Ultimately it’s you – the DM – that drives the game. Feel free to bend and even break the rules from time-to-time if doing so will make the game better.

Continue reading “Greatest Hits 2010: The 5-Minute Rest as a Skill Challenge”
Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Greatest Hits 2010: Making Boring Skill Challenges More Exciting

While the Dungeon’s Master team enjoys some well-deserved vacation time, we’re breaking out the greatest hits and shining a spotlight on a few of our favourite articles from 2010. We’ve searched for hidden gems that our newer readers might have missed and our long-time readers will enjoy reading again. Enjoy a second look at these greatest hits from Dungeon’s Master.

There is one really obvious way to make any boring skill challenge more exciting that I didn’t mention in the original article – getting everyone to participate. I’ve noticed when I’m playing in public games at my FLGS (especially D&D Encounters) that some players aren’t participating in skill challenges. Any encounter you don’t participate in is going to seem boring to you.

Many players assume that it’s the DM’s responsibility to ensure everyone is included. I agree with this, but I also believe that experienced players must shoulder some of this burden. If you’re playing at a table where others aren’t participating try to encourage them to join in.

One reason I’ve heard that some players find skill challenges boring is because their character isn’t that good in very many skills. Too many players – especially newer players – think that they must use their best skills during a skill challenge. You have no idea how much I disagree with this thinking.

Let the narrative and the role-playing guide you during a skill challenge. Don’t look at the skills and then decide on your action, decide on your action and then look at your skills. If you’ve done a good job in-character of explaining what your character is doing and more importantly why they are doing it, the roll should be a lot less significant. Most DMs I’ve played with will usually ignore the roll and just award a success in this situation.

The next time players are complaining that a skill challenge is boring; make sure that it isn’t because they aren’t participating. Once you’re sure everyone is involved in the skill challenge then use the guidelines I’ve described below to work on other ways to spice things up.

Continue reading “Greatest Hits 2010: Making Boring Skill Challenges More Exciting”
Categories
Editorial Skill Challenges

Really Hard Skill Checks

Have you ever needed to roll over 20 to succeed at a skill check? If you’re a combat-heavy PC then the answer is probably yes, but what if you’re a well rounded PC with decent attributes? Does your DM ever make a DC so difficult that it’s practically impossible to succeed? With very few exceptions most DMs won’t present DCs that are out of the reach of the average PC. My question is why not? I know I do when I’m the DM.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the actual numbers when it comes to skill checks and DC. We already covered this issue last week in Bauxtehude’s articles Exploring Skill Checks and the New DCs part 1 and part 2. The point I want to discuss today is whether or not DCs should ever be out of reach to all but the very best and most highly trained characters?

Too many players focus too much on combat and forget just how important the skills are to the game and to their character. Players need to realize that feats and powers that provide bonuses to skills are just as vital to victory as the feat that gives bonuses to attacks and damage or powers that deal multiple weapon damage.

By presenting circumstances where incredibly high DCs rear their ugly head, the DM reminds players that they shouldn’t expect an easy victory all the time. These reminders need to be nailed home for out of combat encounters even more than for combat encounters.

Continue reading “Really Hard Skill Checks”
Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Knowledge is Power (Part 2)

By now most players know, or should know, that a monster knowledge check can make all the difference when you’re fighting a monster for the very first time. Knowing that a monster is undead, has a vulnerability to fire or has a breath weapon will have a significant impact on what you do during the encounter. However, in practice I’ve discovered that making a monster knowledge check isn’t always as simple as rolling against the DCs set in the PHB. There are often other mitigating factors that need to be addressed when determining the success or failure of a monster knowledge check.

Continue reading “Knowledge is Power (Part 2)”
Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Making Boring Skill Challenges More Exciting

Any skill challenge that isn’t a challenge is boring. Here at Dungeon’s Master we’ve written a lot of articles about skill challenges. We’ve created a lot of skill challenge templates intentionally made generic enough that you can drop them right into an existing campaign. However, some skill challenges just aren’t that challenging to some parties. This is especially true as PCs get to higher levels. So what do you do if you find a skill challenge you want to use in your campaign but it’s not going to challenge your players? Simple, you make it more challenging – and we’ll tell you how.

Some DMs feel that skill challenges aren’t that malleable. They believe that skill challenges are designed with a certain level in mind and if you try to adjust the numbers for a party more than a couple of levels up or down it’s not going to work. I wholeheartedly disagree. With a little bit of creative thinking most skill challenge can be adapted to suit your party, regardless of the PCs’ current level.

Continue reading “Making Boring Skill Challenges More Exciting”
Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Inside Out Skill Challenge

When you look at the latest issues of Dungeon magazine or read through any LFR adventure, skill challenges are always presented in the same way. After a brief description of the high-level objective you’re presented with a laundry list of skills and then a brief description of what happens when these skills are used successfully. This presentation is ok, especially for a new DM trying to better understand the tasks that can be accomplished by using these skills. But what if we turned the skill challenge inside out? Instead of revolving the skill challenge around the list of skills, have the skill challenge revolve around the goals.

Continue reading “Inside Out Skill Challenge”
Categories
Month in Review

Month in Review: August 2010

August was a big month for D&D and for D&D fans. Most notably, GenCon gave gamers from around the world an opportunity to get together and play D&D. Wizards of the Coast made numerous announcements about upcoming D&D releases at GenCon during their seminars, many of which we wrote about. In August we returned our attention to skill challenges, a topic we’ve always felt strongly about. And of course, we had another report from D&D camp. This time the kids tackled the Tomb of Horrors. August was a busy month for gaming and if you missed any of our articles this is your chance to get caught up.

Continue reading “Month in Review: August 2010”
Categories
Skill Challenges

Skill Challenges Without Skills

Skill challenges carry the narrative of the story forward in a manner that includes the players in the telling. Through participation in skill challenges players can work with the DM to craft the story. While the DM holds the power of the overall direction of the story by creating the challenge, players control the tiny details by how they react to the situation and what skills they use to overcome the obstacles presented. It’s a great collaborative system that ends up being a win-win.

Of course skill challenges have a drawback. Players often pigeonhole themselves into decisions based on what skills are presented on their character sheet. Worse, many players only fully consider those skills that they are trained in. All this leads to some very boring skill challenges where players decide what skill to use to complete the challenge, rather than deciding on an action that creates role playing opportunities.

Continue reading “Skill Challenges Without Skills”