4th Edition Revolutionized Non-Combat Encounters

Part 1 of a Deep Dive into 4e’s Most Controversial Mechanic

This is one of those topics that I thought about and was like, hey, let me write a quick post on how to make skill challenges more interesting. I’ll put together a few of my ideas for running them. Add a couple examples. Boom! Nice new blog post.

That is how it started. But like a group of adventurers exploring the Halls of Undermountain¹, every time I peeked around the next corner, I found more and more stuff that I should include to really do the topic justice. My post was already too long before I even got around to the original intention of providing a few tips.

So, rather than a single post, I am committing to the rabbit hole and expanding this into a multi-part series. I will still offer my tips, but I have some other ground to cover along the way. This series is part tutorial, part analysis, and part Dungeon Master aid.

Let’s get to it…

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What are skill challenges?

While I am confident that most reading this already know what skill challenges are, I did not feel I could have a discussion about them without providing an introduction to the concept and some of my personal thoughts.

At the most basic level, a skill challenge is a mechanic for managing non-combat encounters. They are a way to determine whether the party succeeded or failed at the encounter and to help you award XP for that encounter. If the group achieves a certain number of successful skill checks during the encounter before they fail three checks, then they ‘win’ the challenge.

Winning the skill challenge brings with it some sort of reward, while failure results in a penalty. The reward might be that the party convinces the noble to allow them to stay in the castle for the evening, but failure might result in the noble arresting the party and throwing them in the dungeon.

Just as combat encounters have difficulty levels, so do the skill challenges. By requiring more successes before getting those three failures, you make the challenge more…well…challenging. You, the DM, get to decide if the encounter is a major obstacle, like a chase through the city, or a minor inconvenience, such as a negotiating for a cheaper price on a sword that you know is rare artifact but the seller does not.

In addition, just as combat encounters are more interesting when you add unexpected obstacles like traps and difficult terrain, skill challenges work best when you introduce complications along the way. During that chase, a street vendor might roll their cart directly in front of the fleeing party, forcing them to make a quick decision. Or the seller of that rare sword decides to consult her Blue Book of Sword Value to make sure she has not mislabeled the weapon.

If all of this sounds like fairly typical non-combat encounter stuff, you are correct! Skill challenges are just rules to help build and run non-combat encounters. Nothing about them impacts or diminishes the creativity of the players or the Dungeon Master.

Bringing Structure to Storytelling

For all the talk about how 4th edition is nothing but combat, let us not forget that this is also the first edition that introduced actual codified rules for how to build and run non-combat encounters. While earlier editions had rules for different ways that skills and abilities could be used, they did not have a set of rules for how to bring them together into a cohesive encounter.

Imagine if the rules of the game included details about how all the weapons worked, but no monster stat blocks. Each DM would be on their own to determine what monsters could do and how to build a combat encounter. Some might like this, but I think most would agree, this is an unnecessary burden for the Dungeon Master. Having predefined stat blocks and tools to create combat encounters are a cornerstone of any Dungeon Master’s Guide.

4th edition introduced the notion that non-combat should be at least as important as combat when building an adventure. Not only does 4e have some of the best tools to help DMs build combat encounters, skill challenges provide a framework to help DMs structure what happens outside of combat as well.

XP for combat encounters is awarded based on the monsters that were defeated. XP for non-combat encounters is awarded based on the difficulty of that challenge. No need to just make a guess on how much XP to award for earning the favor of the mayor. It is now right there in the encounter building tools.

Debunking the Myths

Right after complaining that 4th edition is all about combat while simultaneously complaining that the non-combat rules are too restrictive, many critics will argue that skill challenges take away the creativity of the players. This is true, IF you are running skill challenges incorrectly.

First of all, skill challenges are not a replacement for every skill check. If a character needs to perform a task that would require a skill check, that is NOT a skill challenge. The player would describe what they want to do and roll a check just as they always would. Even more complicated actions that might require multiple checks or a group check from the entire party are still not skill challenges.

Actions only become skill challenges when the complexity reaches a point where the entire party must work together to achieve the goal. A character slapping a pesky goblin on their way into a tavern is not a combat encounter. It only becomes a combat encounter when the goblin’s friends show up to exact revenge. The same holds for skill challenges.

And, secondly, skill challenges do not impose any limits on the creativity of the party. I will cover more about this in a later post, but the skill checks you see detailed in a published skill challenge are merely hints for some of the most common actions a party might take. They are a guide for the DM, not a restriction on the party.

D&D Honor Among Thieves SPOILER ALERT

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Remember when Xenk the paladin is describing the complicated pattern needed to cross the bridge in the underdark? While he is describing each step, Simon accidentally triggers the trap and the bridge is destroyed. But Simon then discovers the Hither-Thither Staff that Holga is carrying and the party reaches their destination without incident.

In game terms, this entire sequence was meant to be a skill challenge, but the party ‘ruined’ it by unintentionally destroying the bridge and finding an alternate solution.

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Imagine you are the Dungeon Master who spent a full day planning out a skill challenge for how to cross this complex bridge. But, before you could finish setting the stage during the session, the party finds a different solution from the one you had anticipated and they are able to reach the other side without all the complexity.

As the DM, you would not, and should not, arbitrarily force them to proceed with the skill challenge just because that is how you wrote it. They solved the problem and should be rewarded accordingly. There is NOTHING about skill challenges that says otherwise.

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One additional point. The skill challenge rules did not spawn from nothing. They were defined based on tricks that Dungeon Masters had been using for non-combat encounters for many years. If you look at any DMs preparation notes for non-combat encounters over the past 50+ years, it is entirely likely that you will find many that look remarkably similar to what was captured in 4th edition.

This is similar to the complaints about character roles. These roles are not unique to 4e. They represent how those character classes had been played in the game for many years. 4th edition merely put a label on them, just as it formalized the non-combat rules that had existed for a long time.

In the next post, I will talk about the debate over Rollplaying vs Roleplaying.

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