Skill Challenges
Added 2024-02-15 14:00:10 +0000 UTCThis week, we take a look at a rough draft of a skill challenge system for 5e.
Comments
I liked the concepts and some tools employed, but i don' really like the resolution part. It's too much wordy and not enough schematized, even thought of course it's about emulating the nigh infinite possibilities of reality. It's also hard to define a correct and easy to handle resolution event. For example it does not state clearly how much success could be required for a challenge for players. The part at the start tho it's very very interesting. I am very interested into this because i employ this a lot, i fiddled a lot with this and i am still struggling to find a universally satisfying rule. So far what helped me was using the improvised health and damage for CR and use that CR to determine encounter difficulty, but then arbitrarily requiring 3 successes in order to escape the hazard regardless of the "hit point" of the challenge. This on paper works regardless of player characters, because the trap always activates once at initiative 20 dealing more damage to more people than few. This system with the scaling success does solve some of the problems i had, nominally I could use improvised damage based on tier based on the result of the roll, so it causes setback, normal and deadly damage based on the roll. This means you can assume a "counter" for successes needed based on that.
Enrico Boccardi
2024-02-15 23:03:31 +0000 UTCskill challenges in 5e (really all editions) are tough to run well. Mike had a whole series of great articles in Dungeon (I think, not Dragon) during 4e giving examples and updating the system.
Michael Sixel
2024-02-15 18:09:32 +0000 UTCI'll be interested in seeing where this goes. A question about the skill challenges: is there a particular problem this is designed to solve or is this mainly exploratory? I'm not super clear from the article what it is.
Marshall
2024-02-15 17:52:55 +0000 UTC
