The Wizards articles have some very good points in them. I've taken a few ideas from them, and they turned out very well.

ENworld has a lot of discussion on different ways to make skill challenges fun, and they implimented some of them in their War of the Burning sky 4E modules.

Another place that I found good skill challenges is the Critical Hits podcast. They did a game masters episode that I think they covered the custom skill chalanges that they do... Those work out pretty well too. The link is

Awesome feedback. Thanks. I will hit up the podcast now and listen to it while preparing.

UHF, those are all valid concerns and ones that have kept me from running skill challenges in my games. I just figure that I should try and give them a fair shot if they are done right somewhere and easily translated to my game.

For instance, the party is a group of inquisitors. It would be nice to work some of the investigation into skill challenges (they find a body carrying the McGuffin that drives the plot / negotiations with criminals and city watch related to unscrupulous dealings / etc. )

Any specific suggestion on where to go to see decently done examples?

Somewhere else pointed me here: http://gloomforge.livejournal.com/12135.html

It is Keith Baker's blog and that is an article he wrote on the matter. While nice, I would love to see some decent examples. I can't get a hold of WotBS stuff without buying it (and that isn't cheap). I will check out the EnWorld forums and the Living Forgotten Realms stuff to see if any of it is worth anything.

I guess you could say that I'm more old school.

I haven't run into many in 4e that I've liked. In some cases, the players just weren't into asking questions or trying to 'convince' anyone. You know what its like... "What do you want us to say?"

I would start by saying don't do anything just because they say you could or should. Do what you're comfortable with. Its about having fun...


By far my best has been running the Freeport adventures in 4e, and I just role played those sequences. There were consequences for their role playing and decisions. For me this was just right because the role playing seamlessly comes from the play.

The 3rd adventure for Freeport involves a huge ball where the five players questions and role play with 20 guests, and try to extract a story line for their future adventure. I numbered and named everything on a chessex map, so they could take notes and move their minis to where they wanted to go. I then role played each little vignette, and moved from one player to the next. (I actually managed to keep it all straight.)



Hmm... the one adventure that lots of people liked was "Cross Town Race". Its a series of skill challenges. Each failure looses you some valuable time... to win the race. Another adventure was "Dead by Dawn". The players are trying to complete skill challenges during combat. They do so by pushing back and sealing off holes in the wall while zombies are trying to fight their way in. That one was actually quite excellent. (Good luck getting experienced players into a broken down old church just before sun set.)

I'm not that big on skill challenges... I spent well over an hour preparing one for my girls, negotiating with a band of mercenaries not to sack a village. Two rolls into it, my littw one decided the time for negotiating was over and charged the leader. It was an intentionally overpowered encounter, if they failed and had to fight it was meant to cause them to use some Daily powers and send them running. As it turned out, one angry dwarf girl with a big axe managed to defeat the better part of the company herself (my daughters roll crits like they're water or something.) I've also run a few in my adult game, but they havem't been nearly as satisfying as combat and killing things.

In general I have a problem with the 4e breakdown with combat and skill challenges. It seems to me like their are two possible routes the system allows for.
1) railroading players through an encounter so the skill challenges are just another opportunity for players to not gain XP (or gain XP depending on how you see your cup)
2) Forcing the DM to do a lot of prep in order to make the skill challenges to mean anything. Also most of this prep will rarely be felt by players who are used to being railroaded and assume that's what's still happening.

One of the problems with the adventure paths is they tend to boil down to very simple paths 1) your character dies, 2) your character doesn't die. Maybe this is my dearth of experience, but that's what I've seen so far.

I've been working on designing a system based on one of my DMs who was the latter kind of DM (tons of prep time), but toning down the prep time and allowing the system to be more modular.

1) recurring villains - failure to negotiate with a person makes that person and all their allies your enemies. Embed these kinds of things so that some members of The Wild Purses" gang want's you dead while others are willing to help you.
2) Give your characters cool stuff - castles, great beasts, powerful weapons (way too powerful), etc. by doing this skill challenges allow you to take their best stuff away.
3) every character needs to have something they will by default go after - a jewel that's their proof of royal blood, a nephew they love better than anyone, etc. this allows them to be in danger by proxy. it also allows you to make their jewel a fake or make them fight their beloved nephew.


The other thing I think is a good idea is railroading your players into positions where they have to do things they wouldn't normally do. If the party has a paladin whose character prevents him from entering a bar - start an adventure in a bar where the paladin has already knocked out one member of a party in the bar for insulting their god. If there's a thief in the party start the adventurers in the dungeon of the castle where they wer put because that thief tried stealing the princes necklace. Most players I've played with are mostly adults who know relatively well how to stay out of trouble, sometimes they need to be forced.

The Gumshoe system has a great concept that solved much of my difficulties with skill type challenges (I've not played 4e, but the concepts are universally applicable).

Gumshoe is a system for investigative RPGs where players need to find clues to be able to progress to the next part of the adventure - botch a roll to find a crucial clue and the whole adventure could come to a grinding halt.

Gumshoe solves this by specifying that finding clues requires only three things:
1. The investigator has to get to the scene containing the clue
2. The investigator must have a skill relevant to finding the clue
3. The investigator has to say they are using the skill at that scene
Do these three things and, regardless of any roll, the investigator finds the clue, always. If several investigators have and use relevant skills (clues can generally be found several different ways), the one with the highest skill/roll finds the clue.
With this approach, there is no chance of a failed roll derailing the entire adventure.

Applying this to D&D (or any system for that matter) is straightforward: Provided the characters get themselves to the right place or the right encounter, and providing they take some form of appropriate action, then the crucial adventure-continuing 'thing' will always work out.

Taking this approach, the GM just has to work out how to describe what happens so that the core result will work out even if the party roll badly. (e.g. Need the party to rescue the girl, then make sure the guards holding the girl run away when the party attacks - even if every attack roll is a miss, the party still gets the girl.)

If you want to embellish the scene (what GM doesn't?), decide how to handle things if party does especially well or especially badly at the time:
- Great rolls or inspired action can be rewarded with some sort of additional benefit.
- Bad rolls or especially stupid actions can incur some sort of additional penalty (e.g. something that will make things harder later on in the adventure).
- But the essential result (or equivalent) will always happen (in some way).