One of the all-new features of D&D 4E is the “skill challenge”. A skill challenges is, in effect, a non-combat mini-game the party plays using their skills, and thus, by making (or failing) skill checks.

The goal of a skill challenge is for the party to achieve a certain number of successes before suffering a certain number of failures. Typically the ratio of these is 2:1, so you may need 4 successes before two failures to “win” the challenge. It’s expected that the party members are choosing to employ skills that they are especially good at, so that the overall odds of success are fair to good.

Skill challenges are meant to be constructed in such a way that all party members might somehow contribute with their varied array of specialties: you might make an Athletics check to climb a tree for a better scouting vantage point if your perception isn’t too good or you don’t have knowledge of the local area.

As a DM putting together a campaign adventure, my experience with skill challenges so far is not a very positive one. They have a half-baked feel to them and will likely need to be overhauled or dropped from future revisions. Here are some of the specifics reasons why:

1. Is it a skill challenge, or just a check? You have a locked box, with a scribbled note as a clue to how to open it. There’s potentially three ways to crack this nut: smash the box open, use thievery to pick it, or figure out the clue to open it properly. Each choice might only take one skill check, but there are multiple choices available. Or should you try to complicate the proceedings (multi-stage lock with multiple clues) just to make it fit the challenge system better?

2. It’s like combat, but with less excitement. When combat is about to begin, the DM announces it. “Let’s roll some initiative.” We accept this break from narrative/exploration into turn-based excitement. Similarly with a skill challenge, it seems that the DM needs to announce, “OK guys, this is a skill challenge” as an explicit marker that we’re dropping into a rules-governed mini-game. This is a bit balky, especially if the point is merely to indicate that whatever it is we’re about to do will involve more than one character, and more than one die roll.

3. Was it a good experience for you? Skill challenges provide XP as a reward, basically on the same scale as a combat encounter. Fair enough. But then consider how making a single good perception check before a combat can provide the party with a great tactical advantage, and thus an easier victory. That success or failure has no XP affect on the value of the battle though, whether it turns out easy or hard. And then what if it’s a skill challenge to reduce the power of a construct’s protective force field before a key combat. How do you score that one? Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, “pure” puzzles carry no XP rewards.

4. So much for winging it. This is the biggest issue, I feel. It’s not hard to drop in a single skill check when a character wants to try something interesting. Often a DM will just look for a high or low roll, take the character’s skill into account, and improvise a result that helps moves the adventure forward. You are never going to achieve the same thing with a skill challenge. Maybe, just maybe, you will have a handy list of semi-detailed skill challenges on hand and try to squeeze one into place when it’s called for, but it’s not going to feel very comfortable. By comparison, a DM who wants to crank up the excitement a bit with a classic “wandering monster” drop can do so very credibly and with almost no prep – just enough familiarity with the Monster Manual to pull out an appropriate challenge in context to the setting. No such luck with skill challenges.

5. Prepping ahead of time isn’t much of a picnic, either. Putting together your combat encounters for an adventure isn’t too much harder than doing wandering monsters. Just a bit more planning involved. Skill challenges still feel like a lot of work, though. I guess if you start with a “canned” skill challenge from somewhere and go looking for a place to apply it in your adventure, that’s not too bad. But if you start with a particular (or unique) situation in the adventure that seems like it will lend itself nicely to a skill challenge, you’re still kind of starting from nothing.

I grudgingly admit that I would probably pay good money for a big book full of nothing but lots and lots of well thought-out and balanced skill challenges, which I could pick and choose from to use as needed in my adventures. Funny thing – prior to 4E’s excursion into Extra Super Duper Tactical Land Combat, I would have said I’d never need a similar kind of book to set up my combat encounters, but geez, now I’m not so sure. I think the future of 4E DM resources will be a huge codex of single-room encounters. Here’s how you lay out a brute with artillery in a natural cave, easily adjustable for humanoids to L1 though L8 encounters. And here’s a classic burial chamber and how to fill it with skirmishing undead of L3 through L10. And so on. Singin’ “I built it one room at a time”, to the tune of Johnny Cash.

A real-world example: while working on my adventure, I finished my map, doled out all my monsters, created a puzzle, made stats for a new trap, and um, have put off detailing all the skill challenges in favor of each of these other activities because it just feels like such a pain. Perhaps once I slog though it, I’ll feel a little differently. The only thing that seems to be even more of a headache is making a fully-detailed NPC!

One final note – MetalJim reminds me to remind you that if you are making skill challenges for your campaign,  to make sure you use the updated table of skill challenge DCs from our Wizards friends, found here.