Skill Challenges

As a means of increasing player/character engagement, I'm going to try out running some skill challenges. This is a work in progress, but the general outline of how they work is thus:

1. Establish what the party's goal is. For example, in the case of the junk pile, a reasonable answer might be "find all the obviously useful items and other valuables."
2. Based on the stated goal, I will generally provide some guidelines for initial difficulty and upper/lower bounds so folks don't devote tons of resources for no additional gain. For example, "Base difficulty is 15 and three successes mean nothing bad happens" or "Base difficulty is 20, 1 success is enough, but more is better..."
3. For each player, determine what skill you want your character to leverage to help achieve the party's goal. Each player will describe how they're helping, and the better case you make for your skill being useful, the more likely it is to make the roll easier.
   • Each character can contribute to the party's success here, but no duplications on skill use will be allowed (e.g: only one character can roll Investigation per challenge; other characters would need to do something else).
   • Use of different abilities than are standard for a given skill (Intimidate based on Strength, for example) may be allowed depending on how they're applied.
   • Use of spells, class abilities and so on can also be worked into your description.
   • Some player choices/skills may make that character's roll (or the entire party's rolls) easier if they succeed. These would happen before everyone else rolls.
   • More successes tend to yield better results, be it more information, more loot, or less bad things happening.
   • The Help action, Chronicler's Luck, and inspiration (regular and bardic flavor) are allowed on these rolls.
4. Once all the above discussions have taken place, players will apply whatever buffs/help actions and so on, then roll their character's relevant skill:
   • Skills that lower the difficulty for everyone else should happen first, in the order of the players' choosing. Success on these counts as a success for the overall roll as well as lowering the difficulty.
   • Once the difficulty is as low as it's going to get, everyone else rolls their skills.
   • Critical successes may have bonus beneficial effects (count as an extra success, confer advantage to avoid something bad, etc) at GM discretion.

Raised player concerns:

1. Timing - it might be mechanically useful to devote all characters to each task, but if that's to mirror reality then that would affect how long the various tasks take. Are we hand-waving that?
   • These first challenges (Session 31) do not incorporate a time pressure or require splitting the party. Future challenges may necessitate either or both of those things, but I will make an effort to clearly communicate if it's required or if there are clear consequences to taking longer or splitting the party. Otherwise, it's at the discretion of the party who is involved in which tasks.

A few traits to keep in mind for this to be a good fit:

• Gradiated success/failure: really binary options are not a good fit for this.
• Predictability: if I can't anticipate likely goals, it's going to be hard to prepare these ahead of time.
• Justifiable difficulty: if it's too easy or too hard, don't bother.
• Clear start and end: if it's not clear what things should be part of the challenge versus what should be before or after, make sure you draw clear boundaries.