This is going to be an unpopular opinion in some parts of the internet, but dealing with skill challenges (even if they don’t get called that) in non-D&D games has shown me that 5e’s unstructured approach to skill challenges leaves room for things to go well. This is going to take a lot of explanation, so please save your fulmination for the end.

In this post I’m going to talk about my experience with three different games (4e D&D, 5e D&D, Mage: the Awakening 2e) and discuss my observations from Brennan Lee Mulligan running 5e Actual Plays. My central argument is that any skill challenge system that doesn’t involve meaningful change in fictional position for all successes (and preferably all rolls, but that’s sometimes not feasible, I’ll get into that) winds up bland. Sort of mealy.

For those of you who aren’t going to read the rest of the post, I’ll spoil the argument now: successful rolls need to change the PCs’ situation or understanding in a way that acts as a new prompt for action. Failure needs both a clear cause and a clear meaning, and you need to trust your story and players enough to let the failure matter.

4e

The longer I’ve had to think about it, the more I’ve realized that the fundamental problem of 4e skill challenges is how arbitrary the successes and failures feel. Not that DCs—you can justify that any way you want. Just the number of needed successes and the number of failures that present a problem: those don’t have any grounding in the fiction in any of the examples. When the successes feel arbitrary and meaningless, that creates the situation where players just hunt for the best bonus and roll that, or do nothing but Aid Another.

The consequences of failure likewise need grounding, ideally in what it is you’ve done that has failed and what the action was attempting. It’s hard to explain how failing an Arcana check to find out what you already know (or can remember at the moment) matters, beyond a loss of time.

Yes, I know that someone is scrolling right to the Comments to tell me that it gives the players bad information that they act on. That feels terrible in actual use and I don’t recommend it at all. You’re so much better off, when it comes to information checks, treating failure as revealing only common knowledge and success as offering something deeper. This is at least adjacent to the fail-forward principle, but the critical part is providing a new prompt for action. (Maybe that’s the critical part of fail-forward also, but there are better theorists than me for that question.)

I think you can express a lot of the failure in 4e skill challenges with the tedium of each player rolling an Athletics check and the DM just tallying successes and failures, with no new narration for each result, or with the each player frantically justifying using only their best skill and the DM treating it as not really mattering. (The rules also make it difficult for players to use non-skill capabilities, such as powers or magic items, to make progress.) Better creators than me have pointed out that tabletop games are a conversation above all else, and the DM’s narration offering something new in response to player choice is the essential give-and-take of conversation.

So when you’re planning a skill challenge, you want success and failure to reveal new problems and opportunities, each with multiple approaches and solutions, in the same way that you want enemies in combat to take actions that present new tactical or emotional threats or vulnerabilities.

Mage: the Awakening 2e

I’ve been running Awakening 2e for Kainenchen. It’s my first 2e Chronicle and we’re both learning the rules from scratch because there are so many changes from 1e. Now, I liked 1e, ran two reasonably long Chronicles with it, but it had a lot of problems. As far as I can tell, 2e has firmly embraced Problem Adjusted. In this specific case, what I’m talking about is Focused Mage Sight and magical Scrutiny.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mage: the Awakening, one of the pillars of play is investigation, particularly of magical mysteries. I would suggest that it’s quite a lot more important than combat, and only social interaction is arguably on par with it. Focused Mage Sight isn’t the only mechanism for investigating magical strangeness, but it seems to be intended as a primary go-to.

To frame it briefly (and yes, I’m sort of assuming you do know 4e’s system and don’t know Awakening 2e), Mysteries have an Opacity rating that could technically be any whole number, but for practical purposes is 1-5. (The book mentions that 6+ is not a great idea.) PCs have two actions they can take here, Revelation and Scrutinize. Revelation gives you information – surface information if there’s any Opacity, and deep information if not. Scrutinize removes Opacity: you need a number of Scrutinize successes equal to the Opacity to remove one level (so to go from Op 4 -> Op 3 takes four successes). You can risk Mana when you roll, and if you have any successes, you add one per Mana spent.

The essential problem is that it’s just rolling dice over and over again. You burn through resources each time you roll, and if things start going badly they get a lot worse fast, as you can wind up increasing Opacity. The text’s description of what you’re doing is just staring really hard, and maybe using Mana to poke in an unclear way. There’s not a lot of interesting decision-making on the player’s part and I don’t know what there is for the ST to narrate. The system proposes using multiple Arcana for Scrutiny, but this has only costs, no obvious benefit.

This is a general problem across many forms of Extended Actions in Chronicles of Darkness, but particularly noticeable because (in theory at least) you should(?) be using this system more than others. It just needs more ways for the mechanics and narrative to feed into each other. It’s inexplicable to me that the PCs’ other practical skills, especially the Mental skills, don’t factor in here.

D&D 5e: Brennan Lee Mulligan GMing

There are a lot of things Brennan does that I’m never going to be able to match, but I’m happy to say that I independently came to the same conclusions about the best ways to handle investigation scenes mainly using Arcana, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, Nature, and Perception.

A curious thing about the Rules As Written: there’s very little there in the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide for what skills do. The rules describe these skills and the Search and Study actions, but these descriptions are brief. All of the implementation guidance comes from adventures, where we get a sense of how the adventure’s writer (and editor) thought you should use those skills and actions.

Even if you’re not very much into Actual Plays, try to find a few scenes of how Brennan runs investigations in Critical Role, Dimension20, or The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One. The core of it is that players are using spells, class features (such as Bardic Inspiration), and skill rolls pretty fluidly, they have effects that follow naturally in the story, and Brennan provides information after every meaningful action.

One thing he does that I think most DMs don’t is that he announces DCs before the roll a lot of the time. I first saw him do this in Dimension20, with the Tower of Doom rolls. It’s particularly helpful with the new design of the Lucky feat in 5.5e, where you have to decide whether you’re using it before the roll. This shifts the tension moment completely onto the roll, rather than distributing it between the roll and the DM announcing whether it’s a success or failure. I think it lets him create a stronger sense of DM impartiality—which is especially helpful in the high-tension environment of Aramán.

He also uses group skill checks in a way unrelated to the official rule, mainly for Stealth checks. In the official rules, everyone rolls and you need successes equal to half the number of characters, but technically this rounds down on odd-sized parties. Needing one successful roll for three PCs to succeed, or two for five PCs, never felt right to me. Instead, Brennan uses the median value, and I think that solves the feel of the thing for me.

The last big thing that I see in how he’s using skills: he’s comfortable with setting high DCs and having PCs fail, sometimes with significantly delayed consequences. The PCs have a lot of ways to apply bonuses, reroll failures, and so on, but they still have failures that stick. In general, he’s either factoring these failures into the ongoing increase of tension in the world, or the PCs need to scrap their plan and come up with a completely new approach. The net effect has been to support victories feeling hard-won. I have been standing in my kitchen cheering when a clutch roll goes the PCs’ way, because he has pushed them hard. The kinds of mysteries that stay locked behind failed rolls… will just come out a different way, soon enough.

Anyway. The core of all of this is that he’s giving them information and something new to react to, and the big difference between success and failure is all on the spectrum of “no, and/no, but/yes, but/yes, and.” I think this comes out of a baseline understanding that the characters are competent people with agency in the world. “You know nothing about this at all” doesn’t make sense for them, in most situations.

It’s a much lighter system than the skill challenges of 4e or the extended tests of Awakening 2e, but I’ve come to feel like the extra weight isn’t visibly accomplishing much. 4e and Awakening never gave PCs tools to engage with the deeper structure, beyond the skills and skill checks that are cognates to 5e’s.

To put that another way, 4e and Awakening have the same player inputs for simple checks as for complex ones, but the DM/ST offers less feedback for complex situations. In principle, you could approach that by giving players deeper ways to engage with complex challenges. In practice, that would lock the GM into running complex challenges more often. D&D and WoD very much resist that level of story structuring—since even combat is far from guaranteed in D&D.

So as I said at the beginning: the answer is for the GM to provide a meaningful response for players after each success, and as much as possible, after each failure as well.

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