Skill Challenges: Difference between revisions

When one of your players attempts something that has a chance of failure, ask them for an Attribute check to determine their level of success.  

Players can use Attribute checks and [[skills]] to attempt all manner of [[actions]], from spreading rumors in a tavern to sneaking through a dungeon to foraging for food in the woods.

As an MC, when you consider how difficult an Attribute should be, use these [[Guiding Principles|guiding principles]] and adopt them to the specific circumstance in question.

It is narratively rewarding to set up an Attribute Check with different tiers of success. Using the above example, if Marcus is attempting to persuade a local official to lend aid to the party, then perhaps there are four possible outcomes, depending on how high Marcus rolls:  

4. The official might even give the heroes a formal writ that lets them act with the official’s legal blessing, giving them more access throughout the city.  

When designing a skill check, it is important to keep in mind that even failure should lead to progression in the story. For example, if characters are trying to sneak into an enemy stronghold, then failure might lead to [[combat]]; this still moves the story forward in a meaningful way.  

There will, of course, be the rare instance in which failure is just failure - provided that it does not lead to an outright dead end in the story’s progression. In the example of the manor’s hidden room, perhaps the heroes are investigating a larger mystery throughout the town. Just because they can’t find a hidden room in the manor does not mean that they can’t keep pursuing other leads.

Here are some guidelines that you can use when determining the difficulty rating of a skill check. You can use these guidelines to set different tiers of success; for example, outright failure might be a roll of 5 or less; failure with some consolation might be a roll of 6-9; success, a roll of 10- 15; and fantastic success with a best-case-scenario outcome if you roll 16 or higher. These numbers should change dramatically based on the difficulty of the task undertaken

|Outwitting an archfiend

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Here are a couple situations where you might ask your party to make some skill checks. The Difficulties in these examples assume a party of four Adventurers that are all level 3 or lower.

The heroes have heard that there is a roving pack of bandits in the area, so they take it upon themselves to investigate. In order to quickly find the [[bandit]] group, the adventurers need to ask traveling merchants and local farmers and hunters if they’ve gotten word of the bandits or seen anything suspicious of late.

Conversely, if the adventurers collectively get more than 6 successes, then when they find the bandit group, run the battle with one fewer bandit as the group has realized that they are being investigated and one of their less committed members decided to abandon them

When the heroes try to camp, they can roll AWR checks to try to make camp. They might add Foraging or Sheltering bonuses.