There's a section in the DMG2 that suggests that skill challenges should be proactive. That is, the players shouldn't be just reacting to the challenge as it's presented to them or flatly rolling skills, but rather engaging in the skill challenge and trying to think up creative uses for their skills to attack the situation. I think the example that's given is a chase scene where the party is trying to escape some guards. The players can be proactive by knocking over barrels or causing disturbances that trip up the guards, rather than just repeatedly rolling Athletics checks to try to outrun them.
I've been thinking about this a lot, because it sounds like this might be the key to engaging players and creating really fun challenges. My question is: how do you do it? I'll give an example: I'm writing a skill challenge right now that involves climbing up a cliff to reach the back entrance to the lair of some bandits. Now, it seems to me that a cliff is something that the party will have to react to, no matter what. It's big, it's in their way, and the only way around it is to climb up (or use Nature checks to find safe paths.) So, how do you go about making a challenge like this one something that the players can attack?
There's a section in the DMG2 that suggests that skill challenges should be proactive. That is, the players shouldn't be just reacting to the challenge as it's presented to them or flatly rolling skills, but rather engaging in the skill challenge and trying to think up creative uses for their skills to attack the situation. I think the example that's given is a chase scene where the party is trying to escape some guards. The players can be proactive by knocking over barrels or causing disturbances that trip up the guards, rather than just repeatedly rolling Athletics checks to try to outrun them.
I've been thinking about this a lot, because it sounds like this might be the key to engaging players and creating really fun challenges. My question is: how do you do it? I'll give an example: I'm writing a skill challenge right now that involves climbing up a cliff to reach the back entrance to the lair of some bandits. Now, it seems to me that a cliff is something that the party will have to react to, no matter what. It's big, it's in their way, and the only way around it is to climb up (or use Nature checks to find safe paths.) So, how do you go about making a challenge like this one something that the players can attack?
Obvious skill would be Athletics for Climb.
But other options could be:
Nature: to spot local predatorial birds that will attack climbers if they don't bypass them\plecate them( ranger shouting instructions like 'don't move or it'll peck your eyes out'.
Dungeoneering: To help spot good places to put in pitons. Eg Dwarf saying 'that section can take a piton but that bit to the rights too hard and you'll just bend it'.
Stealth: to bypass caves containing other local predators like large spiders who are feeding on local birds.
This part is, in my mind, a tricky one. In theory it can be about how one climbs a cliff but I'm not sure you'll get that. In fact you might want to think about your cliff scene one more time and think about how important it is to your story and how well you can narrate it and make it seem interesting because chances are your heading for a passive skill challenge here.
I broke them down into three general types on the split thread.
Basically you have challenges where your kind of stuck with the PCs being essentially passive, climb a cliff, flee a volcano, cross a desert, sneak through a hostile city at night. Its possible in some points in the skill challenge your players will be very proactive but chances are things are going to be mostly in your lap. For starters that makes these scenes tougher to pull off. Unless there is something else adding tension to the scene they are just harder to do because its harder to get your players engaged. Climbing the Cliff and Crossing the Desert in particular have warning signs on them. Here in particular you want to know the answer to - what if they blow it? This is particularly true here because I think this kind of challenge only has meaning if failure leads the story down some other direction - if they just loose a healing surge then the whole scene was just probably not worth it. Sneaking through the town at night is probably fine because there is a lot of tension there even if they are just rolling some dice - Volcano is likely the same, presumably they caused it somehow so we should get a good seen while they flee from it even if its mainly just underpinned by dice rolling. Consider things like group checks here. It'll strain the scene less if everyone has to make an Athletics Check and it will keep everyone involved in the type of challenge that you don't really want to be a spectator much of the time for because watching fellow players interact with a cliff usually is not all that fun.
A lot of challenges are naturally pro-active. If they have reason to believe the bum knows something about the murder they'll be proactive when they catch up to him. This is true anytime they are causing things to happen - when they are asking the questions. You can get it if they are brainstorming as well. I was in one like this were we where thinking up ways to slow down an advancing army. Essentially any time your players are throwing things out there you have this kind of a Skill Challenge. As a side bonus your players probably won't even realize they are in such a skill challenge as they'll be too busy doing stuff.
The final type is one where there is likely a mixture of proactive and reactive. These are challenges that are on some kind of a timer. Blow the dam before the Orc Hoard arrives, break the enchanted lock before the Kings Gaurdsman gets back to checking on the vault. Get to the mechanism in the tower and use it to cut off the endless enemy forces flowing in from the underdark. Often the scene takes place in the middle of a combat. Players know there is a challenge and are frantically trying to solve it. They are probably meta-gaming here but, while you want to take that into account in setting the DCs, you've faced them with choices that mean they can't sit back and just allow the best guy to make the roll. Call it a standard action to even make a check and the fact that the players are on a brutal clock means they simply don't have time to just have one player go at this. They need to make choices involving riskier rolls but faster versus slower but more sure. Usually you want failure to just be a reset. The real thrill is whether or not they finish before they are dealing with some outside threat so they can go at the challenge until that outside threat forces them to stop or they pull it off.
The only real tip I have for you is to simply not tell them that they are in a skill challenge to begin with. Let them decide how to solve the problems and don't worry if dice are rolled or not.
I think the other thing with skill challenges is to get the players to think about the challenge in a longer term view.
Climbing a cliff would be a single check of one party member rather than each party member rolling which represents the skill of the more skilled climber leading the climb, directing other players to climbable surfaces even pulling them up parts of the cliff.
Nature check to know the type of creature that could be dangerous int this environment would once again be a Nature skilled character advising of probable dangers then pointing them out for the climbers to avoid.
Dungeoneering would make the climb easier if incorporated as the dungeoneer advises which sections of rock would be best for pitons, loads etc.
It becomes more about the group working together, combining their skills to overcome the obstacle instead of rolling 5 Climb rolls each player, running a combat encounter against a couple of birds\spiders or other dangers and getting to next encounter.
Skill challenges can be long term (over a course of days or weeks), or immediate as you see fit. I envision them as mental combat where you view your environment for advantages to give you some edge. I often find it useful to create a decision tree, as this draws back to my GURPS days and Cyberpunk. In a cyberpunk style campaign, characters often had to hack into computer systems with various software defenses, malicious programs and backdoors. I see skill challenges working in the same manner. When you add combat on top of it, the choices seem endless, and really forces you to create a dynamic encounter.
So for players to be proactive, you have to be equally descript with the environment, so preparing handouts is a plus.
Once this is all layed out, then brainstorm what skills may apply, versus starting with skill first (which may bias your decisions).
First off, there's this:
http://at-will.omnivangelist.net/2009/12/skill-challenge-bonus-tokens/
Part of the issue of getting players excited about a skill challenge is that there's usually one obvious "right" way of doing it - in your case, a Climb check. It's hard to get excited about a bunch of Climb checks. If your players know that there's really no "wrong" way to go about tackling the task, they will be more inclined to become personally involved.
Second, you have the plot requirement factor - do your PCs have to get up that cliff to progress the story? If your PCs must climb the cliff to move forward, then your challenge is invalid; if they need to get up the cliff, then they NEED to get up the cliff. Your challenge would be better served as "Climb the cliff without being detected" at which point you also inuitively open up the Stealth skill (as well as Athletics and Nature) and maybe some of your characters' utility Powers. The PCs will make it up the side no matter what - the stakes of success or failure at the challenge is the element of surprise. Generally speaking, the more you can add to the complexity of the stakes (not to be confused with the numerical Complexity of the challenge), the better skill challenge you create.
Third, don't be afraid to have the challenge "bite back", forcing the characters to make certain rolls that they may not have planned on. A monster that doesn't hit you back would be very boring. In the same way, a challenge that doesn't react to what the players are doing is essentially dead. Furthermore, if your PCs are solidly whooping the challenge, a couple unforeseen and awkward skill checks can push the tension factor up, which leads to my fourth and final point..
"Complications, not failures." Chatty DM Phil Menard calls this 'Mouseguarding.' A failed skill check doesn't have to mean no action. As the DM, you can only tell your players "you don't (whatever)" as a failure result for so long before it gets lame and frustrating. Say one of your PCs fails a Climb check on your challenge here. Rather than simply tell him (or her) that the character doesn't climb the cliff, tell him "You get partway up, but the effort is exhausting you. You will need to make an Endurance check to continue, or (lose a healing surge, have to leave some of your gear behind, etc.) " You have now brought in another Skill AND provided the character with a meaningful roleplaying choice.
Bottom line, if your skill challenge is unresponsive, your characters will be unresponsive as well. Hope that gives you some ideas.
Your challenge would be better served as "Climb the cliff without being detected" at which point you also inuitively open up the Stealth skill (as well as Athletics and Nature) and maybe some of your characters' utility Powers.
Oh, that's a great idea! And it makes a lot of sense for the way I had envisioned the scene. The players are trying to get into this back entrance to avoid alerting the guards if they approach the heavily guarded front entrance. So... now we have Athletics, Stealth, and Nature as primary skills, probably some group Endurance checks in there as they start to tire out halfway up the cliff. Cool stuff.
Your challenge would be better served as "Climb the cliff without being detected" at which point you also inuitively open up the Stealth skill (as well as Athletics and Nature) and maybe some of your characters' utility Powers.Oh, that's a great idea! And it makes a lot of sense for the way I had envisioned the scene. The players are trying to get into this back entrance to avoid alerting the guards if they approach the heavily guarded front entrance. So... now we have Athletics, Stealth, and Nature as primary skills, probably some group Endurance checks in there as they start to tire out halfway up the cliff. Cool stuff.
Note that here you also may be opening up the possibility for viable failure. If there is a front entrance and its not utterly inconceivable for them to use it then you've got a pretty good place to stick this sort of a Skill Challenge. Now they can either get up the cliff undetected, get up the cliff but they are detected or even fail to get up the cliff and have to use the front door instead.
In theory you could even run two small skill challenges in parallel - one for climbing the cliff and the other for being detected.
Your challenge would be better served as "Climb the cliff without being detected" at which point you also inuitively open up the Stealth skill (as well as Athletics and Nature) and maybe some of your characters' utility Powers.Oh, that's a great idea! And it makes a lot of sense for the way I had envisioned the scene. The players are trying to get into this back entrance to avoid alerting the guards if they approach the heavily guarded front entrance. So... now we have Athletics, Stealth, and Nature as primary skills, probably some group Endurance checks in there as they start to tire out halfway up the cliff. Cool stuff.
What about Perception to see an easier path to climb, natural handholds, things like that, perhaps as a 'give a bonus to the next Athletics check' kind of thing.
Oh, that's a great idea! And it makes a lot of sense for the way I had envisioned the scene. The players are trying to get into this back entrance to avoid alerting the guards if they approach the heavily guarded front entrance. So... now we have Athletics, Stealth, and Nature as primary skills, probably some group Endurance checks in there as they start to tire out halfway up the cliff. Cool stuff.Note that here you also may be opening up the possibility for viable failure. If there is a front entrance and its not utterly inconceivable for them to use it then you've got a pretty good place to stick this sort of a Skill Challenge. Now they can either get up the cliff undetected, get up the cliff but they are detected or even fail to get up the cliff and have to use the front door instead.
In theory you could even run two small skill challenges in parallel - one for climbing the cliff and the other for being detected.
That's pretty much the point. Adding complexity to a challenge sets you up for multiple failure scenarios. You know what happens if they succeed. You may have to wing it if they fail and so you want to have more than one way to deal with it. You can also give the players the choice of which failure route they would prefer to promote further roleplaying. I'd still run the whole thing as one challenge, though.
What about Perception to see an easier path to climb, natural handholds, things like that, perhaps as a 'give a bonus to the next Athletics check' kind of thing.
I'm allowing them to use Nature checks to find safe, easy paths up the cliff face. Perception can give them a bonus on those checks (Dungeoneering could help, too, I suppose). Also, with the challenge reconfigured so that they're trying to avoid the guards, Perception could give them the chance to work out the guard's routines, granting them a bonus on Stealth checks. The more skills I can get into the challenge, the better, I think.
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As an aside, I'd like to share how I "deal" with skill challenges.
Rather than try to outline them in any fixed sense ahead of time, I like to keep things fairly loose. I may know I have a "chase scene", a cross the desert scene", and a "Climb the cliff" scene, but I try not to say "this is a hard challenge of level x, and these are the skills." Rather, I let the players describe their actions, help them determine appropriate skills for that action, provide DCs for the Skill check (in my head, using the DMG guideline), and let the dice roll.
In many cases, a "climb the cliff" scene I had in my head turns out in the gaem to be a single die roll of a single character who then drops a rope to the others who easily climb up. The players weren't engaged in making it more complicated, the story needed to move forward faster at that point for whatever reason (we hadn't had a combat that session, the sessions almost over, and the fight is at the top of the cliff, whatever). So that "skill challenge" got downgraded to a simple skill check.
On the other hand, I may have thought " a party nature check to cross the desert, failure means loss of a surge for the fight at the oasis" but then players get all creative and excited, the Elven rogue wants to use perception to spot any plants, anywhere, the fighter wants to use athletics and endurance to dig quickly and efficiently, the wizard wants to use a cold attack power to condense water out of the air, etc...well, at that point I do the same thing, let them make their checks, etc. I keep track of successes, simply adding them up. If they get 12 success and it seems enough to "get across the desert" boom, they get the xp for a complexity 5 challenge. If only 6 checks, less xp of course. If they get three failures, well, they still get across the desert but they loose the surge. Or maybe, the fighter dug them into a buried building filled with undead (a combat encounter), whatever.
The bottom line is, I try to have it occur organically