How to Run Skill Challenges in D&D 5e

Comments · 198

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  @xicarus8141 · 5 years ago

  Sometimes my party gets decision paralysis when I present skill challenges. If this happens to you I recommend giving out roles that the party can pick from if they don't have any ideas. I use this for my travel with roles like navigator, scout, Muscle, etc. This helps players get into the mindset of how they can participate imo

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• RO

  @robocookiess · 5 years ago

  matt colville has three good rules to implement:<br><br>1) you can only attempt a skill if you are proficient in it. he often does this outside skill challenges too, because it helps avoid the situation where a wizard rolls a 1 on the arcana check and doesn’t know it while the barbarian who can’t even read rolls a 20 and somehow knows this obscure fact.<br><br>2) each person can only try each skill once. one person can try multiple skills, and multiple people can do the same skill, but you cannot have one person do the same skill over and over. this prevents the ranger from rolling survival three times as everyone else just sits there.<br><br>3) he always makes it clear that the players are now in a skill challenge. instead of trying to hide it, he explicitly states “this is a skill challenge, you need X successes before 3 failures. ultimate failure means <b>this</b> happens.” then the players know what’s up, they know what’s at stake, they’re going to address it with the appropriate attention and seriousness. you don’t want a player to say “if i knew this was on the table i wouldn’t have done that.”

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• CA

  @Cazleb_Baker · 5 years ago

  I love using skill challenges as a way to offset the random chance element in really significant rolls, where one stroke of bad luck shouldn&apos;t wreck everything, and instead creative thinking it and / or roleplay becomes key.

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• RO

  @robocookiess · 5 years ago

  something i like to use skill challenges for: montages! the players are tracking the gnolls to their lair through the haunted wode, the players are being chased through a city by guards or the thieves guild, a volcano is erupting and the heroes must evacuate the terrified people as best they can. by having the situation be less concrete and more pliable, you leave it open to the players’ neat ideas. if every obstacle is perfectly defined and has clear consequences and impact, then you don’t really need a skill challenge, ultimately. you just run those obstacles! the skill challenge’s failures are better at representing the idea of abstract failure, it’s not immediately clear how it didn’t work but in the end we can see that it wasn’t enough to get you through it.

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• ER

  @erikroth9174 · 5 years ago

  I was playing a 3.5 game and the party was supposed to meet a performer at a tavern. The performer didn&apos;t show. The DM wanted us to investigate his disappearance, but we took the performer&apos;s absence as a sign that we should perform in his place. We didn&apos;t have a bard or anyone with proficiency in performance, but my character was a halfling rogue with tumble, and we had an orcish barbarian. Our solution was a series of attack rolls for the barbarian to throw my halfling across the stage and for my rogue to tumble his way through the air into the arms of the fighter. After a series of mostly-successful checks, we had earned the adulation of the crowd and bonuses to persuasion and diplomacy checks to investigate the performer&apos;s disappearance. It is one of my finest moments as a player and the DM just &quot;rolled with it&quot; as it were.

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• AN

  @andrewjohnson6716 · 5 years ago

  An important thing to remember for skill challenges, as GM, is to destin guise between player and character. In a combat, I don’t require the player playing the fighter to know how to swing a sword, nor the rogue to know how to pick a lock. Yet the first thing a charismatic character is asked by a GM is what and how they talk to an NPC and then the GM judges the response based on the PLAYER’S words and charisma. Just as we must treat the actions of the fighter as though they would be done by am immensely strong and skilled warrior, the arguments of say a bard we have to edit them in our minds as though they were said by an immensely charismatic and clever negotiator.

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• BH

  @BhelliomRahl · 5 years ago

  I did enjoy skill challenges and have tried implementing them in my 5e game. &nbsp;It went well and the players did like it.<br>I did implement a rule occasional that a Player could not use the same Skill repeated. &nbsp;This was to encourage the entire party to participate and also to think more about how to use their abilities and skills.

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• MA

  @MattyPGood · 4 years ago

  One of my favorite moments in 5e was playing my Warforged (just used the race for the initial stats; my character is a reprogrammed Modron with dumped intelligence) Battlemaster in the Out of the Abyss when we found ourselves in the archmage&apos;s tower. We found a locked drawer without a physical lock on it, and my character decided to just Force it open (athletics check) while my party (wisely) backed out of the room.<br><br>When I succeeded, I was transported into the archmage&apos;s secret pocket dimension where I saw a drow maiden tapped in a circle. After passing an insight check to know that the woman was lying to me, I decided to tie my rope into a lasso and... Lasso the lady (survival check). I tentatively pulled her to the boundary of the circle, at which point she took damage and showed her true form as a Yochlol. I then unceremoniously yanked it through the boundary of the circle (athletics check), killing the Yochlol and showering myself with viscera.<br><br>I then took everything I could carry (including the grimoire) and walked through a gateway, appearing in front of my bewildered companions, covered in demon guts, with the archmage&apos;s grimoire.<br><br>It was a ton of fun and let my fighter, who has very bad mind stats and limited utility outside of combat, have a fun roleplay moment.

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• DA

  @darev2335 · 5 years ago

  I once ran a skill challenge that my players still say was the greatest moment in all of our campaigns so far. A zombie horde was attacking a town the players were using as a home base. The players needed to take back control of the city and were told by the captain to close the Eastgate. The counterweight system on the gate was sabotaged to stay open. So during a combat encounter while fighting off zombies, the players had to make accumulative checks to try and lower the gate bit-by-bit. I accomplished this by setting &nbsp;DC a 50 for the gate and making their &nbsp;DC checks lower that number till it hit zero. So for every round they made a skill check The total DC would go down that exact number. Any round where they weren&apos;t actively working on the gate it would go back up 5 to a total of 50. It was a hard battle with clever uses of skills, abilities, &nbsp;an immovable rod, &nbsp;and some homebrew consumables called rune tags. &nbsp;my players felt the pressure and were on the edge of their seats. A player death happened (although somewhat planned because he wanted to change characters) &nbsp;and one of my players actually almost cried because of the story elements. Skill challenges are an amazing element of done correctly.

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• VI

  @virus640 · 5 years ago

  A way I&apos;ve tried skill challenges to include the party, is having the skill check be specifically something that a player is proficient in. Makes it a little more realistic.

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• LI

  @Lionrhod212 · 5 years ago

  One skill challenge I ran some time back: The plan was a chase after a runaway mule through the town. Not only would it introduce the party to the area, it would also encourage being befriended by the mule&apos;s owner who was a potential important NPC to the plot. The party was supposed to run through the streets, track the mule, dodge carts and passerby etc. Well along came a player who wanted to be a half-Avariel elf. I didn&apos;t want a 1st level character who could fly (though I figured he could learn that around the time that wizards get the fly spell) so we negotiated a fluttering &quot;hop.&quot; This required two athletics skill checks - one for lift, the other for distance and canceled other movement for the round. I may have been a little over generous on the distance (don&apos;t recall what we finally settled on) but it wasn&apos;t better than a dash, though it did still allow an action. So the skill challenge starts, the mule runs off, and initiative goes to the half-Avariel, who makes BOTH athletics checks, jumps in front of the mule, manages to grab its rope as his action, and BANG! skill challenge ended. Moral of the story: 1) Definitely take your players abilities in account! 2) Be sure to tone down any house-ruled abilities until you can see what they do. On the good side, other than shutting down the rest of the skill challenge, the encounter DID end with the NPC befriending the party, so I guess it went well enough.

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• MR

  @mrthor8273 · 5 years ago

  I like to let the players give input on not only how they succeed, but how they failed. It adds to the immersion and changes it from a horrible thing to still something fun to come up with.

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