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 failuresPart 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 unknownPart 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.
