Tag: Skills

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DM Resources

The Problem With Assisting

Cruven – I use Arcana to investigate the origins of the portal in order to learn how we might vanquish the elder evil that has attacked the realm.

DM – Will anyone assist Cruven? The DC to assist is 17.

Dox – 29. I assist.

Jacinth – 25. I assist.

Luk – 17. I assist.

Josey – 18. I assist

Cruven – Ok, with four assists that’s +8 to my roll. My base is a 17, so I’m rolling on a 25. Here goes…

DM – Don’t bother. The DC is only 23 so with the assists you can’t fail this check.

How often has this happened at your gaming table? Assisting is a great way to help a PC out with a check that they might not make on their own. It’s a potentially game breaking mechanic if a PC is already highly proficient at a given skill. As the DM, how do you prevent reckless assist roles?

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DM Resources

The 5-Minute Rest as a Skill Challenge

Normally when combat is finished the PCs take a short, 5-minute rest. They get to rest up, heal, catch their breath, and regain the use of encounter powers. But what many players forget is that all of the benefits that come from taking a 5-minute rest come at then end of those five minutes. If the party is attacked or decides to venture onwards before the short rest is finished, they are still hurt and resource depleted.

In a recent game the PCs found themselves in a situation where they really needed a short rest, but couldn’t just drop their guard for five minutes. I decided to turn the 5-minute rest into a skill challenge. If they succeeded, then after five minutes they got all the benefits of taking the short rest (and some XP for completing the skill challenge). If they failed then at least some of the PCs would have to engage in combat to guard the others still resting. Here’s how it played out.

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D&D Encounters Dark Sun Player Resources

D&D Encounters Dark Sun Character Skill Cards

The six pre-generated characters provided for D&D Encounters Dark Sun are so condensed that they only list the three or four skills each PC is trained in. So for everyone playing D&D Encounters season two, I’ve created skill cards for each character.

I’ll admit that the character sheet cards Wizards provided look great, but other than the aesthetic quality, the cards are terrible. They provide the absolute bare minimum detail required to play the characters. Some might even argue that they don’t even contain that much.

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DM Resources Top 10

5 Ways To Include Rituals In Your Skill Challenge Design

Rituals are an underutilized aspect of 4e Dungeons & Dragons. One way to increase the way rituals are used in your campaign is to incorporate them into your skill challenge design. By providing opportunities for your PCs to use their abilities you increase their engagement in the campaign. They feel that they are more involved in what is occurring and are committed to seeing things through. Using rituals in your skill challenges does require a little bit of extra work, but is well worth the reward.

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

Creating and Running Engaging Skill Challenges (Part 2)

So you’ve chosen the premise of your skill challenge. Great, now for the second step. The second step is all about forecasting possible developments for the challenge.

Bauxtehude, our newest contributor at Dungeon’s Master, continues his look at skill challenges. In yesterday’s article, Creating and Running Engaging Skill Challenges (Part 1) he stated that the best skill challenges pose a very open-ended problem to the party. Open-ended problems allow for a diversity of possible approaches as well as interpretations of the actual nature of the problem. Good skill challenges allow the party to overcome the problem presented to them in their own way while forcing them to interact with increasing complications. Picking up right where we left off yesterday, we follow the example begun in part 1 through to its natural conclusions with a heavy dose of Bauxtehude’s thoughts and insights added along the way.

I find it harmful to try to start setting DCs for various skill checks unless there are obvious hurdles that will need to be overcome. It’s better to not set any expectations for the party’s actions. The telling of the narration should reflect the choices the party is making rather than what the Dungeon Master thinks the party would do or what the Dungeon Master might figure the party ought to do. In this way time is better invested in thinking about what sort of place the PCs find themselves in.

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

Creating and Running Engaging Skill Challenges (Part 1)

The best skill challenges pose a very open-ended problem to the party. Open-ended problems allow for a diversity of possible approaches as well as interpretations of the actual nature of the problem. The other great virtue of open-ended problems is that they have the unique ability to develop in any number of directions allowing for a multitude of possible resolutions. Good skill challenges allow the party to overcome the problem presented to them in their own way while forcing them to interact with increasing complications. These challenges allow the party to exercise their wide range of skills as they see fit and interact with the results that they generate. Perhaps an example is in order.

The Dungeon’s Master team welcomes Bauxtehude, our newest contributor and author of today’s post. We’ve written a lot of article on skill challenges and thought Bauxtehude’s take on the subject provides new and exciting insights.

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Player Resources

Have You Retrained Today?

One of the great aspects of 4e is it officially recognized retraining. Finally, we had a formal rule for the process of substituting a power or a feat. In previous versions this aspect of the game was either forbidden or house ruled. Now, the concept itself isn’t a big stretch. The idea of swapping this power for that one isn’t new. What is new is the recognition of the game creator to enable this as an official rule.

I’m well aware that many other gaming systems have had such rules for a long time, but D&D has not. Now, you might be wondering what’s the big deal. If I’m not happy with my character I’ll simply change it or speak with my DM about the problem. Fair enough and in most instances a change is able to be made. What happens if you only play RPGA games though and you don’t have a real mechanism to make the changes you desire because a new source book has been released?

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

Skill Challenge: Lie To Me

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 that they’re lying. Everybody lies to some extent. Figuring out if the lie they just told you impacts your current line of questioning or not requires work.

For situations where more than one simple roll is required, a structured skill challenge may be more suitable. This is not to say that every attempt to detect a falsehood requires anything this complex, but it might be a good idea to remind the PCs that sifting through an intricate web of lies often takes time and many skill checks.

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

Skill Challenge: Olympic Games

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 a test of individual ability, each PC must accomplish the required number of checks by himself. After all, outside help would be considered cheating.

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

Skill Challenges On The Fly

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, clues that you are leaving them? What do you do?

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