The Best D&D Mechanic You’ve Never Heard of.

several dozen hobgoblin rers Converge on your position there are too many of them what are we going to do I've never run from a fight but maybe just this once okay if you choose to flee I'm going to run it as a skill challenge a skill challenge what's that basically you just need to succeed on three skill checks before failing in order to get away you'll catch on pretty quickly wizard you see a river up ahead of you what do you do I cast control water to part the river okay that's success barbar

on you notice there's a whole lot of trees around I use my Athletics to knock over a tree behind us blocking the path all right that's two successes Noob do you have an idea for a skill to use what is happening right now perhaps you should cast a spell throw a rock what are you guys even talking about what what where in the rules is that sorry you're probably going to need this one actually that was a skill challenge skill challenges are a really useful tool for creating cinematic and engaging s

cenes in a skill challenge Success is Not determined through literal strength of arms as in combat but through creative thinking and luck the way I run them is pretty simple the DM first describes the challenge that must must be overcome a ricked Old Bridge is the only way to cross the wide Ravine the DM then determines how difficult this particular challenge is going to be this is the number of successes the party needs to accumulate before accumulating three failures an easy challenge would ha

ve three successes while an extreme Challenge might require 12 with many falling somewhere in between based upon the specific situation the players volunteer different skills they have that might help them progress if you are running a skill challenge for the first time i' suggest you provide at least two specific examples of skill that could apply that way helps sparkk creativity for all of the other players there is some disagreement online whether the best way to run a challenge is to make it

explicit there is a challenge occurring or to have it all be narrative with only the DM aware of the mechanics I personally prefer the former over the latter mostly because I as a player like to be informed as to the mechanical significance of what's going on knowing we are only one bad roll away from total failure really ratches up the tension and I've never found that making mechanics explicit has impeded my ability to roleplay but but I know it can for some people so do whatever you think fi

ts for your table I give the players a lot of creative latitude to use their skills to come up with interesting ideas for how a particular skill might apply and might help them progress in this scenario I typically ask for somewhat detailed descriptions that way it's easier for me to build on success or failure and add detail to the building narrative because ultimately it's up to the DM to determine if a skill can be attempted and how difficult that attempt will be the difficulty of each check

should be reasonable based upon character level and how obscure the skill they're trying to use is so for levels 1 to 4 DCS of 12 to 15 are good for anything typical while something easy might only have a DC of 10 and something more obscure might have a DC of 17 I'd be sure to let a player know approximately how difficult the skill they trying to use is before they roll you don't need to give them the DC but at least the use language like easy moderate and difficult any character can attempt any

skill but each individual can only attempt each skill once the other thing a player might do is use an ability spell or feature to modify the results they might cast a spell like charm person which if successful would grant that player advantage on say an intimidation check against a guard trying to let them into the gates additionally some abilities can be used to cancel out a failure or Grant an automatic success based upon context and what you think is reasonable if the wizard casts a situat

ionally relevant highlevel spell I'd probably just Mark that as an automatic success if the spell is relevant but doesn't seem like it would guarantee a success you can also have them roll a spell casting check and treat it like any other skill another thing to note I don't allow the help action during a skill challenge and I'd limit how often a PC can cast spells like guidance guidance is such a great spell that unfortunately can be slightly problematic at some tables because it is basically ze

ro opportunity cost opportunity cost is the hypothetical loss from taking one action over another guidance costs nothing to cast aside from an action and your concentration it's a cantrip and in return you or someone else gets to add a D4 to an ability check with which as I explained in my math of D and D video is essentially a 12.5% increase to their role if every character in a skill challenge is getting that bonus it's going to become very easy for them so the rule that I use is that a charac

ter can only cast guidance once but can cast it once more after each PC has made at least one attempt at a skill an optional rule I don't use but you may want to use if you feel like one or two players are monopolizing a challenge is to go around the table in turn and have each player make one check some players may be a bit confused by The Challenge the first time you use it or they might be a slightly passive player so asking them to think creatively will be putting them on the spot this might

be able to get them out of their shell or it might make them uncomfortable so it's up to you and your table if that's the way you want to run it one of the great things about skill challenges is that they have several fail States built into the design if the heroes only succeed things go off without a hitch one or two failures means they succeed but with some consequences three failures though skill challenges are also a great way to run chases in a much more Dynamic way than literally counting

squares of movement like in a combat if the part is running away from an orc tribe for example failure would probably lead to them fighting their pursuers one failure means it's just the scouts they have to fight two failures means it's the scouts plus of Patrol and three failures means it's a whole War band and skill challenges can be used to model all sorts of things complex negotiations stopping a necromancer's ritual or even research to uncover some ancient secret now your reaction to that

might be dope what if everything was a skill challenge which I would caution against it might be exhausting to do more than about one per session although to be totally honest I've never tried and at the table there are a ton of sequences where without using these rules a group will make a series of skill checks in which an individual failure was not fatal and the DM weighed the outcome based upon the cumulative success which in truth sounds an awful lot like a skill challenge without technicall

y being one like in my friend Spencer game We snuck into the villains Mountain Fortress via a sequence of skill checks without using these rules or or in my other friend Evans game we did use these rules to sneak an orc through a human town but did not use them when we later fled from some other Orcs would those sequences have been better if we had or had not used these rules I don't know but I will say this skill challenges are absolutely a great way to organize and add mechanical crunch to tho

se seats yeah they make us conscious we are playing a game but so what we are playing a game challenges were first introduced in fourth edition but were dropped for fifth edition one of the reasons it isn't in 5e was that the version in 4E origin was a bit underdeveloped and a lot of my information for this video comes from Matt coville's video on the subject which is in the description along with some other resources I used I hope you guys have found this video useful please comment below with

any skill challenges you guys have used or plan on using in the future peace out