Skill Challenge Variant: Skill Combat
One problem with skill challenges is that roleplaying can hurt the party. A talkative player with no diplomacy is a real problem in a way that a unskilled player in combat really isn’t. In combat the unskilled player does less damage than other characters which slows the combat down, but that is their only real drawback, in a skill challenge a failed ‘attack’ hurts the party, sometimes very badly. This got me to thinking about a variant, the skill challenge as a social combat.
This is not very polished as a concept, and it requires an acceptance of abstraction in a way many people may not like, but I have to admit to me it doesn’t seem much more abstract than most of D&D. The basic idea to a skill challenge is that it should be a challenge and have a chance of failure. Failure costs potential xp and can change the story path. So lets assign HP to each challenge, the more HP the harder the challenge. Each Primary skill success does 20hp damage to the challenge. Each secondary skill success does 10hp damage and each minor skill success does 5hp damage. Useless skill successes do nothing. Assign each challenge a time limit or number of rounds before failure.
- Simple challenges might require only one or two primary skill successes:
Talk a guard into letting you enter the city after the gate has closed for the night.
40hp challenge, 50xp three round time limit.
If the party fails they can’t get to their meeting with the mysterious wizard at the inn until the morning, giving the goblins more time to prepare for the ambush.
Primary: Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate
Secondary: Streetwise, History, Religion Minor
Minor: Insight (Insight increases the effect of the next success by 10hp)
- Harder Challenges can be much trickier:
Find the Bandit Hideout in the city.
160hp Challenge, 600xp, 2 rounds
If the party fails they tip off the bandits they are after them and they jump the party in the street as an extra encounter. If the party wins the encounter they either follow a ganger as he flees back to the sail shop or they find something on a body that leads them to it.
Primary Skills: Streetwise, Perception, History, Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate
Secondary Skills: Insight, Stealth, Athletics, Acrobatics.
Minor Skills: Arcana, Nature
Start of challenge, until the PCs check the docks.
Streetwise: Player asks seedy looking types for info they say ‘Trouble can be found down in the lower city’
Perception: Player notices many seedy looking types heading towards waterfront.
History: Player remembers rumors of undercity near waterfront area.
Diplomacy: Player convinces seedy looking guy to guide him to the waterfront.
Once at Waterfront:
Streetwise: Player realizes that an awful lot of people are coming in and out some shops that normally wouldn’t be that busy.
Intimidate: On success a street urchin tells you some good info, on a failure the urchin laughs at you and says ‘Their are going to get you!’ (Heal the challenge 10hp on a failure.)
Etc for each skill available in challenge.Some skill add to bonuses, some could heal the challenge on failure.
- I need to put some thought into the exact timing of each challenge and hit points used, but this method gives us everything we get right now from challenges, uses similar mechanics to combat and doesn’t automatically penalize the party for every miss. I will post up fuller samples after I test this a bit, what do you think?
I like the concept. I have a problem with the primary and secondary skills lists though. It seems that by including them, you’ve limited the potential of the players.
In combat, we don’t say which weapons or powers a class is allowed to use to damage a monster, so I don’t see why we limit the skills allowed. Having the primary and secondary skills suggestions can help steer the DM, but if a player comes up with a creative use of Athletics, then I would let it count as an attempt.
Also, I assign modifiers to skill checks based on the player’s RP. If the player is precise in if the player is more precise in describing the action, I give a bonus. If their action is particularly relevant, then I give another bonus. Each bonus is generally +1, though I have gone as high as +4.
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I see this idea having a lot of potential. I like the idea that successful use of a skill deals damage towards the overall skill challenge’s Hit Points.
Rather than have primary and secondary skills do different amounts of damage, why not let the difficult dictate damage? So a skill with a hard DC will do more damage than a skill with an easy DC. This should impose fewer limitations on the PCs and it rewards their creativity since the crazy stuff usually has a much higher DC than the obvious answer.
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