The perfect skill challenge

For a long time, I've been struggling with designing good skill challenges. No matter how many articles I read, no matter how many examples I read, they never came out right. Until our last adventure. This time, it turned out to be perfect.

The challenge

The party had to "retrieve" (steal) a talisman from Carlos, an up-and-coming local crime lord, and his bodyguard Donnie. A simple storyline that resulted in the following challenge.

Retrieving the talisman

Difficulty: Moderate
Complexity: Requires 6 successes before 3 failures

Part 1: Recon - Finishes after 3 successes, or when the players decide to go on
Success: The players know the exact layout of the house and the location of the talisman
Failure: The exact location of the talisman remains unknown

Part 2: Breaking and entering
Success: The players retrieve the talisman without being noticed
Failure: The players are caught in the act, resulting in a combat encounter with Carlos and his brother.

Even before playing this encounter, I knew I was on the right track. The skill challenge involved a non-trivial task, and had clear and reasonable success and failure states.

I completed the challenge itself by choosing the appropriate skills and assigning DCs. Most of the recon would involve searching for the maid and pressing her for information; most of the breaking and entering would involve, well, breaking and entering. The details are not shown, because they turned out to be irrelevant.

The finishing touch

While designing the skill challenge I was browsing some DND-related articles. And I stumbled upon an excellent article about Personality Stat Blocks. Basically, the author suggests a simple format to define your NPCs:

Name: <the name of the NPC>
Key Traits: <about three defining personality traits>
Goal: <this NPC's goal in life>
Motivation: <the reason why this NPC values this goal so much>
Fears: <one or more fears, possibly related to the goal and/or motivation>
Weaknesses: <one or more weak spots, possibly related to the goal and/or motivation>

Being stressed for time, I quickly defined all relevant NPCs in the adventure using this stat block. An hour later, we started playing.

The fun part

Of course, this being a role playing game, nothing went quite as planned. Ignoring each and every hint on the existence of a maid, the challenge went as follows:

Part 1: Recon - Find Donnies favorite bar, seduce him, and get a guided tour through the house.
Failure: The party knew everything about the house, apart from the exact location of the talisman.

Part 2: Drugging and stealing - Have a date with Donnie, keep Carlos occupied, drug Donnie, search the house, steal the talisman, plant some false evidence, turn Carlos over to the local militia. 
Success: The talisman was "retrieved", and Carlos will spend considerable time in the local jail.

Lessons learned

The challenge was a big success. And I believe it was such a success for three important reasons.

As said before, the challenge involved a non-trivial task and was very open-ended. In my opinion, many published skill challenges suffer from the more-complexity-than-relevant-actions-problem where a party quickly runs out of ideas. Such skill challenges eventually revolve around redoing skill checks just to make the required number of successes.

The second reason was the personality stat blocks. Because each NPC had a concise set of guidelines, I could ad lib the seduction of Donnie without problems - in fact, my players even believed I had prepared for this specific eventuality.

And finally, most importantly, I viewed the skill challenge as a formalization of the role-playing aspect. Yeah, that sounds very professional and sciency. What I mean is that we played the skill challenge just like we'd play a non-combat part of an old-school AD&D adventure - the skill challenge just provided a framework to determine the DCs, the required amount of successful checks and the amount of XP to be earned.

In the end, this meant that as far as the party was concerned, we were just roleplaying. At certain points I'd demand a skill check, but they always felt natural. This was a big step from previous skill challenges, were we'd always end up with some forced, non-sensical checks that were just there to make the required number of successes. To be honest, it was liberating.

I'm not sure if this means I've finally mastered the skill challenge, but I'm looking forward to the next one.

Links

• The article on personality stat blocks
• A concise overview of personality traits

Skill challenges and NPCs

This weekend my player encountered Loxar the Spellscarred, and the experience was even better than I hoped for. The encounter went well, my player survived, and Loxar has accidentally been upgraded to a major NPC.

Running the encounter

I wrote the encounter as an exercise in skill challenges, the way they are described in the Dungeon Master's Guide 2. If you're struggling with skill challenges (as I was) and don't have the book (as I did), get a copy of DMG2 right now.

The encounter was set up as a robbery - my player was escorting a trade caravan, and Loxar had set her eyes on the goods. The encounter could either be resolved by defeating Loxar, or by negotiating a way out. Each success would lower the amount of money required to pay off Loxar.

In the beginning, the encounter played out as planned. As soon as my player realized her adversary had some intelligence, she started negotiating. I let her roleplay the negotioations at her leisure and called for skill checks when appropriate. The pay-off had already been reduced to a meagre 400 gold pieces, when my player managed to surprise me completely.

She suddenly proclaimed that the Eladrin Courts in the Feywild had the means to cure the spellscar and proposed a deal: she would send Loxar to an Eladrin healer, and if that failed, she would reimburse Loxar by paying her the 400 GP.

I was stunned. My girlfriend is new to playing D&D, but she seemed to have grasped the very essence of the game: cooperative play when appropriate. For the sake of it I let her make another Diplomacy check, but in my head the matter was already resolved. Loxar agreed, and she will meet my player again.

Discussion

Afterwards, when discussing the adventure, my player made three interesting observations about this encounter.

First of all, during the skill challenge itself she had no idea she was playing a skill challenge. This can be partially explained by her limited exposure to skill challenges so far, but the fact that I used skill challenges as an underlying mechanism to roleplaying instead of treating it like a combat encounter also helped a lot.

The second observation was about metagaming. While I was composing the encounter and when I was writing my previous article, she had a lot of exposure to Loxar's picture. In her head this exposure translated to "must-be-an-important-character". So while I had envisioned Loxar as a minor NPC, my player considered her a major part of the plot she's unravelling. In turn, this was an important reason for her to compel Loxar to be cured.

The last observation worth mentioning was her own joy at the cooperative play. It gave her a chance to expand on her own background, and she continued to do so during the rest of the adventure.

Lessons learned

In the end, to me each encounter is a lesson in writing and running better encounters. Most importantly, this encounter taught me that skill challenges can indeed be fun, as long as they are played properly.

The other lesson was: don't be afraid. When writing the encounter, I opted for a skill challenge of standard difficulty with complexity 1 and worried that this might be too hard for my player.

It wasn't.