Skill Challenges
A Skill Challenge is an encounter in which Player Characters' skills, rather than combat abilities, take center stage. In contrast to an obstacle that requires one successful skill check, a Skill Challenge is a complex situation in which Player Characters must make several successful checks, often using a variety of skills, before they can claim success in the encounter.
Each Skill Challenge has its own guidelines and requirements. In one Skill Challenge, a Player Character might use a Persuasion check to entreat a duke to send soldiers into a mountain pass, a History check to remind him what happened when his ancestors neglected the pass’s defense, and an Insight check to realize that having their fighter companion lean on the duke with an Intimidate check wouldn’t help their cause. In another Skill Challenge, they might use Nature checks and Perception checks to track cultists through a jungle, a Religion check to predict a likely spot for their hidden temple, and an Endurance check to fight off the effects of illness and exhaustion over the course of days in the jungle.
Regardless of the details, the basics of a Skill Challenge are simple: Player Characters make skill checks to accumulate a specific number of Successes before they rack up too many failures and end the encounter.
Designing Skill Challenges
More so than perhaps any other kind of encounter, a Skill Challenge is defined by its context in an adventure. Follow these steps to design skill challenges for your adventures:
Goal and Context
What’s the goal of the challenge? Where does the challenge take place? Who is involved in this challenge? Is it a stand-alone Skill Challenge or a skill challenge as part of a combat encounter?
Define the goal of the challenge and what obstacles the characters face to accomplish that goal. The goal has everything to do with the overall story of the adventure. Success at the challenge should be important to the adventure, but not essential. You don’t want a series of bad skill checks to bring the adventure to a grinding halt. At worst, failure at the challenge should send the characters on a long detour, thereby creating a new and interesting part of the adventure.
Give as much attention to the setting of the skill challenge as you do to the setting of the rest of the adventure. You might not need a detailed map full of interesting terrain for a Skill Challenge, but an interesting setting helps set the tone for the encounter.
If the challenge involves any kind of interaction with nonplayer characters or monsters, detail those characters as well. In a complex social encounter, have a clear picture of the motivations, goals, and interests of the NPCs involved so you can tie them to character skill checks.
A Skill Challenge can serve as an encounter in and of itself, or it can be combined with monsters as part of a combat encounter.
Level and Complexity
To deal with a Skill Challenge, the player characters make skill checks to accumulate a number of successful skill uses before they rack up 3 failures.
The complexity of a Skill Challenge determines the number of successful checks the characters must accumulate before failing three checks. In combination with the challenge's level, it also determines how hard the challenge is for the characters to overcome and the XP award they receive for completing it.
Skill Challenge Complexity
| Complexity | Successes | Failures |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 | 3 |
| 2 | 6 | 3 |
| 3 | 8 | 3 |
| 4 | 10 | 3 |
| 5 | 12 | 3 |
A Skill Challenge's level determines the DC of the skill checks involved. As a general rule, set the challenge's level to the same level as the player characters, and set most of the DCs in the challenge to moderate difficulty.
Skill Check Difficulty Class By Level
| Level | Easy | Moderate | Hard |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | 5 | 10 | 15 |
| 4-6 | 7 | 12 | 17 |
| 7-9 | 8 | 14 | 19 |
| 10-12 | 10 | 16 | 21 |
| 13-15 | 11 | 18 | 23 |
| 16-18 | 13 | 20 | 25 |
| 19-21 | 14 | 22 | 27 |
| 22-24 | 16 | 24 | 29 |
| 25-27 | 17 | 26 | 31 |
| 28-30 | 19 | 28 | 33 |
Set the complexity based on how significant you want the challenge to be.
If you expect it to carry the same weight as a combat encounter, a complexity of 5 makes sense. A challenge of that complexity takes somewhere between 12 and 18 total checks to complete, and the characters should earn as much experience for succeeding as they would for a combat encounter of the same level.
For quicker, less significant challenges, or for challenges that work as part of a combat encounter, set the complexity lower. (Figure that each complexity is the equivalent of that number of monsters of the challenge’s level.)
Skills In a Challenge
When you're planning a Skill Challenge, think of ways that characters might use skills to achieve the goal of the challenge.
A variety of skills, a broad range of subchallenges and obstacles, and a series of different, incremental tasks can make a Skill Challenge much more interesting. Engage multiple PCs by making a spread of skills relevant.
It makes some sense for one character Proficient in Persuasion to do all the talking, but it’s no more fun than one character doing all the fighting.
Instead, make multiple skills relevant in every Skill Challenge. In a Skill Challenge, every character should have something to do, so no player is bored.
In general, it’s a good idea to include a mix of interaction skills (Decption, Persuasion) , knowledge-based skills (Arcana, Nature) , and physical skills (Athletics, Acrobatics) in the challenge. These general sorts of skills play to the strengths of most characters.
As a starting point, build a long and diverse list of relevant skills for the challenge. First, aim for a number of skills equal to the number of characters in the party plus two. If there are more PCs than useful skills, you're potentially leaving a few characters without any way to make a meaningful contribution outside of using the Help action.
Be mindful of your the Player Characters you are designing your Skill Challenge for, and make sure you don't hinge any crucial check on a skill that none of them are proficient in.
Additionally, some Skill Challenges may benefit by allowing Player Characters to make attempts with their Tool proficiencies, if they are relevant to the task at hand.
Furthermore, each skill check in a Skill Challenge should accomplish on of the following goals:
- Introduce a new option that the PCs can pursue, a path to success they didn't know existed.
- Change the situation, such as by sending the PCs to a new location, introducing a new NPC, or adding a complication.
- Grant the players a tangible consequence for the check's success or failure (as appropriate), one that influences their subsequent decisions.
Other Conditions
A good Skill Challenge also allows for other actions outside the framework of the skill system to contribute to the party's success.
For instance, using spells or abilities might contribute successes or even remove failures from the running total.
Prepare for Failure
Make sure that failure still leaves the characters with something to do. If the characters must get past the ninth ward before they can move onto the next part of the adventure, then the challenge should assume that they do get past the ward. If you're creating a Skill Challenge to move the PCs through this part of your story, the point of the challenge should be to determine how quickly they get past the ward, or whether they alert the monsters on the other side of the ward, or whether they get through it with all their Hit Dice intact.
In short, the Skill Challenge doesn't really measure whether they succeed or fail; it measures how well they succeed.
Also, be sure to distinguish between what the characters find desirable and what the players enjoy. The characters probably don't like being attacked by drow assassins in the middle of the night, but the players will probably have fun playing out the encounter. Failing a Skill Challenge can create plenty of problems for the PCs, but the best kinds of problems are the ones that lead to additional fun encounters.
Consequences
Whether characters succeed or fail at the Skill Challenge, the adventure must go on.
Penalties for failure in a Skill Challenge might include the loss of Hit Dice or some other lingering penalty, making a later encounter more difficult.
When characters succeed on a Skill Challenge, they receive experience points equal to the level of the challenge multiplied by the complexity of the challenge, where the level of the challenge rewards experience points equal to a monster of an equal CR and the complexity of the challenge is equal to the number of monsters.
See the table below for an example of the experience rewards a Skill Challenge of Level 1 might reward.
Skill Challenge Experience by Complexity
| Level | Complexity | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 200 |
| - | 2 | 400 |
| - | 3 | 600 |
| - | 4 | 800 |
| - | 5 | 1000 |
In addition to Experience Points, characters should earn rewards specific to the challenge. They could also gain treasure, bonuses or advantages in future encounters, or information useful later in the campaign.
Beyond those fundamental rewards, the characters’ success should have a significant impact on the story of the adventure.
If the characters fail the challenge, the story still has to move forward, but in a different direction and possibly by a longer, more dangerous route.
In addition, failing a Skill Challenge might make some future encounters more difficult. The angry baron might throw more obstacles in the characters’ path or, alerted to their plans, increase his defenses.
Consider these options as consequences for failure in a Skill Challenge:
- Increase the difficulty of the characters' next encounter, or throw an encounter at them that's a clear result of the failure.
- Expend a Hit Dice, or take damage
- Impose a lingering effect, such as a disease or a curse that works like one, that hinders the characters for some time.
- Impose story-related consequences: The characters are too late to save the captives, they lose the duke's favor, or they fail to gain some key information to help them in the adventure.
- Require the characters to attempt the Skill Challenge again.
Running the Skill Challenge
An effective way to make a Skill Challenge lively is to provide immediate consequences for each failed check in the challenge
Running the challenge itself is not all that different from running a combat encounter. Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge.
Every player character must make skill checks to contribute to the success or failure of the encounter. The order in which players take their turns is irrelevant, but once a player takes their turn they must wait until every other player has had a turn before they can make an additional attempt.
When a Player Character's turn comes up in a Skill Challenge, let them use any skill they want, as long as the Player Character has Proficiency in that skill, and they can come up with a way for it to play a part in the challenge. But, if that skill isn't on the list of primary skills consider increasing the DC for that skill check.
Sometimes, a player tells you, “I want to make a Persuasion check to convince the duke that helping us is in his best interest.” That’s great -- the player has told you what she’s doing and what skill she’s using to do it.
Other times, a player will say, “I want to make a Persuasion check.” In such a case, prompt the player to give more information about how the character is using that skill.
Sometimes, characters do the opposite: “I want to scare the duke into helping us.” It’s up to you, then, to decide which skill the character is using and call for the appropriate check.
If a player comes up with a particularly clever use of their skills, you should give them advantage on the roll.
Then, depending on the success or failure of the check, describe the consequences, and go on to the next Player Character.
Informing Players
In a combat encounter, the players already know a great deal about how to overcome the challenge. They know that the monsters possess defenses and hit points, and that everyone acts in initiative order.
Furthermore, they know exactly what happens when their own attacks hit -- and after a few rounds, they have a good sense of the likelihood of their attacks hitting.
But a Skill Challenge is a different story. When the PCs are delving through the Underdark in search of the ruined dwarven city of Gauntlgrym, they don’t necessarily know how the game adjudicates that search. They don’t know what earns successes, to put it in game terms, until you tell them.
You can’t start a Skill Challenge until the PCs know their role in it, and that means giving them a couple of skills to start with.
It might be as simple as saying, “You’ll use Athletics checks to scale the cliffs, but be aware that a failed check might dislodge some rocks on those climbing below you.”
If the PCs are trying to sneak into the wizard’s college, tell the players, “Your magical disguises, the Bluff skill, and knowledge of the academic aspects of magic -- Arcana, specifically -- will be key in this challenge.”
Skill Checks
Skill Challenges require the players to make rolls at specific times. Call for these checks according to the pace of the narrative and the nature of the challenge.
This might be each round on their turns, during each short or long rest, or some other time frame as determined by the challenge in question.
Skill checks usually count as successes or failures for the challenge, but sometimes a specific use of a certain skill in a challenge just provides a minor benefit or penalty.
Always keep in mind that players can and will come up with ways to use skills you do not expect. Stay on your toes, and let whatever improvised skill uses they come up with guide the rewards and penalties you apply afterward. Remember that not everything has to be directly tied to the challenge. Tangential or unrelated benefits, such as making unexpected allies from among the duke’s court or finding a small, forgotten treasure, can also be fun.
Group Skill Checks
Sometimes a Skill Challenge calls for a group skill check.
For instance, when the party is climbing a cliff, everyone needs to roll an Athletics check to climb.
In this case, allow one character to be the lead climber. This character makes the actual check to gain a success or failure.
The others make checks to help the lead character, in effect aiding that character, but their checks provide neither a success nor a failure toward resolving the challenge. Each ally that gets a result of 10 or higher provides a +2 bonus to the lead character’s check.
Reward Clever Ideas
Thinking players are engaged players. In Skill Challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. Instead, let them make a roll using the skill but at a hard DC, or make the skill good for only one success. This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth and engages more players by making more skills useful.
However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks, “Can I use Persuasion?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing to help the party survive in the uninhabited sandy wastes by using that skill.
Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge.