Man, the rose-colored glasses about #dnd 4e skill challenges. It was like doing income taxes or SATs. Here’s a spreadsheet of skills and actions you can take. Fill out seven of these before three of these. No you can’t do that thing you want to do, it’s not on the spreadsheet! The solution was to make skill challenges flexible so players could choose which skills they wanted to use through in-game fiction. I called this "playing D&D". I never understood what skill challenges brought to the table and I tried hard for years.
— SlyFlourish.com (@SlyFlourish) February 2, 2021
I see folks try to bring skill challenges back into 5e and while it lacks the tax form aspect, I still usually don’t like it. I prefer environmental interaction over that forced character sheet-based improvisation. It can work when played for laughs, like a sledding chase. The "skill challenge" concept that 4e introduced was a great idea implemented poorly and without proper design/development. It's something that DMs had been doing for years, just without giving it a name. It invites DMs to take a bit of time to develop RP/exploration encounters.
— Shawn Merwin (@shawnmerwin) February 2, 2021
One issue with its implementation was that rather than instructing DMs on how to integrate the mechanics with the narrative/RP, it relied solely on mechanics. Experienced DMs could do that translation on their own, but too many did turn it into a skill tree rather than a story. Escape from Sembia by @christulach was a great adventure that laid out a fun scene series that was facilitated by a skill challenge. Many great stories unfolded from that. But you had to understand the checks in the challenge were story pieces and not pass/fail gates.
— Shawn Merwin (@shawnmerwin) February 2, 2021
Thanks Shawn! My purpose in writing that adventure at the dawn of 4E was to demonstrate differences between 3.5 and 4 and showcase how adventures can take advantage of the mechanics of skill challenges. I’m glad someone remembers! The tables I ran that adventure for had an absolute blast. Both tables, at the end of that last encounter, were totally blown away with adrenaline and excitement. And then I said, "Remember, that was just first-level characters…"
— Shawn Merwin (@shawnmerwin) February 2, 2021
