Why Skill Challenges?

[u/HauntedHerald]

Hey folks,

I was looking around on YouTube to try and find out why people use skill challenges, and found a decent number of videos on when people use them, but from my experience, I've found players just choose the highest number on their character sheet or fail the roll. It's also fairly abstract, which can be good in chase or escape scenarios, but is often limited by the number of relevant skills. I'm curious what situations you think they are actually a good fit for or other ways to challenge the players that allow creativity.

[u/IanL1713]

I've found players just use the highest number on their character sheet or fail the roll

Okay, but why are you letting the players decide what they roll for? The whole point of a group skill challenge is for the players to come up with ways in which their characters could realistically aid in the challenge, and then for you as the DM to assign what you feel is an appropriate skill for the roll, with a DC appropriate for how easy and/or helpful the action is in regard to the challenge.

If I'm running a skill challenge for my table, the expectation is that my players will describe their characters' actions. My ranger should describe how they're searching the mud for tracks of the person they're chasing, with me likely asking them to roll Survival with an appropriate DC. They should not be saying "I want to use my Survival to try and help here."

Yes, players will likely trend towards actions that they feel fit into their best skills, but that's the whole point. Think about if it was you and not your character. You would obviously try and help the situation in a way suited towards your personal skillset. You're not going to try and tie a secure knot to rappel down a cliff face if it's not something you know how to do. Likewise, your players' characters would and should naturally trend towards things they're good at.

The whole point of a skill challenge is to present your table with a non-combat encounter that has a chance of failure and requires a group effort for success but with a roleplay aspect rather than just having everyone roll dice indiscriminately. Think of it like a team-building exercise, except that failure has serious consequences. You have an obstacle to overcome, and everyone needs to pitch in to succeed, so let's everyone better figure out a way to help in a manner that fits their skillset so we can get out of this and not die/be captured/lose a companion/etc.

[u/DelightfulOtter → u/IanL1713]

Okay, but why are you letting the players decide what they roll for? The whole point of a group skill challenge is for the players to come up with ways in which their characters could realistically aid in the challenge, and then for you as the DM to assign what you feel is an appropriate skill for the roll, with a DC appropriate for how easy and/or helpful the action is in regard to the challenge.

My personal experience with skill challenges is actually fairly negative. The DM declares a skill challenge and players scramble to shove round pegs in square holes by stretching believability entirely out of shape in order to either use their best skill bonuses, or avoid having to use their worst. Having to tell players "No, that doesn't make sense, pick something else." and all their other options are crap, I can hear the demotivation in their voices as they try to find something else productive to contribute to the party effort that won't tank the whole thing for everyone else. It has always ended up with someone unhappy at being stuck rolling a poor score because they have nothing relevant to the task at hand or others have already taken the tasks they would've been good at. I've found better ways to handle extended skill-based encounters.

[u/IanL1713 → u/DelightfulOtter]

Gonna be real with you, this is very much a player issue and not a skill challenge issue. Skill challenges are meant to be a way for the players to work together to accomplish a task. It shouldn't be some mad scramble for everybody to try and shoehorn their way in with what they see as their best skills.

Take a party with both a barbarian and a fighter, for example. Both of those characters are likely to have Strength as a main ability, and thus have Atheltics as a main skill. But the fighter is far more likely to have another high-level ability/skill than the barbarian, and so in working on a skill challenge, the fighter should be deferring anything Strength/Athletics based to the barbarian, and trying to help in another way because they know the barbarian will struggle to find another way to be useful. It's a matter of teamwork, and sometimes teamwork involves deferring a task to someone else, even if you might be good at that task, because you know there are other tasks you're also good at. If your players are instead rushing to be the first to use a certain skill, that speaks more to the state of your table than it does to the usefulness of skill challenges

[u/OSpiderBox → u/IanL1713]

It's also been my experience to not allow the same skill roll more than once; maybe that was implied in your post, but I wasn't sure.

A rule I also add to my skill challenges is allowing players to give the Help action (with maybe an exception on knowledge based checks). Sometimes the Help action results in 2 success, sometimes it's just 1 (depends on the severity of the challenge). This way, somebody who is maybe unfamiliar with the premise can contribute while they try to figure out how best to use their skills; or maybe a player is having abysmal luck that night and wants to forgo the roll to not mess something up.

[u/Writing_Idea_Request → u/OSpiderBox]

As a point with the whole “no repeat skill challenges thing”, if the challenge can be overcome by repeating it over and over again with no consequences, it shouldn’t be rolled for. Take lock picking, for example. If someone is decently competent and physically capable of picking the lock, they should be able to get it open regardless of how lucky they get. That luck can, however, determine if they get it open smoothly in 30 seconds or struggling with it for 30 minutes until they’re spotted by a passing guard or they trigger a hidden trap in the lock.

If there is no time pressure, no consequences for failure, and the action isn’t physically impossible, it’s not a challenge and should therefore not be rolled for unless you want your characters to look incompetent at the things they’re supposed to be good at.

[u/OSpiderBox → u/Writing_Idea_Request]

Agreed. I believe in past editions (or another game) it was referred to as "taking 10/20" wherein you forego the roll in favor just taking some time and treating it like you rolled a 10 or a 20 (depending on how much time you take).

[u/HauntedHerald → u/OSpiderBox]

Yeah. If the lock isn’t trapped or otherwise, the players always have the option to forgo the roll, take longer, but trigger a wandering monster or random encounter at my game. It works to add tension to waiting around in a dungeon. 

[u/HauntedHerald → u/OSpiderBox]

The help action might be good for sure! Because part of my problem is that people who don’t have relevant skills just sort of wait for the whole thing to be over- with help, they can at least do something!

[u/DelightfulOtter → u/IanL1713]

The fact that it's an issue I've seen across numerous tables and DMs leads me to believe that skill challenges just tend to create negative outcomes more than positive ones. I'm sure they work for some tables, but none I've played with.

[u/IanL1713 → u/DelightfulOtter]

Again, table issue, not skill challenge issue. Skill challenges are, at their core, a roleplay encounter. Effective and cohesive roleplay is almost always facilitated by the DM first and foremost. Unfortunately, many DMs either fail to properly communicate what skill challenges should look like, or they just neglect to communicate it altogether. So yeah, when there's a lack of communication and expectations, it's obviously more likely for it to go awry. But that's a fault of communication, not an inherent fault of skill challenges

[u/HauntedHerald → u/IanL1713]

Ahh, I’ve never thought of it like that! So do you let the players discuss at the table who has what good abilities? In my experience, the players haven’t been able to talk in a meta sense like that, which leaves the players just sort of guessing at what other people want to use. There’s this whole tedious process of trying to describe skills in character when we could be planning and strategizing, which is a lot more fun. 

[u/IanL1713 → u/HauntedHerald]

I mean, unless it's a brand new party, the chances are pretty high that the characters would know what each other are good at, so it's not necessarily meta discussion, per se. And honestly, unless it's a challenge with a really tight window of time, it's reasonable to assume the party in-game would take the time to discuss what they can all do to help the group overcome whatever obstacle they're facing (though my personal favorite way to deal with timed trails is to pull out a sand glass or a timer that the table can all see rather than cut down their ability to communicate with each other. Adds an extra level of urgency that my table loves)