Roll for Chaos

Mixing Combat and Skill Challenges Is Both Amazing and Risky

Apr 12, 2025

D&D is generally comprised of three pillars—exploration, roleplaying, and combat. Every table out there values a different mixture. I’ve played in games that were almost exclusively combat and other games that hardly ever saw a sword get drawn. It is all about what the group prefers and it can even change from one session to another.

And sometimes the best encounters come when we blur the lines between these pillars.

During Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, there is a scene where the party needs to rescue King Theoden from the spell that Saruman has him under. When the group enters the great hall, the guards loyal to Wormtongue start attacking. As this fight goes on, Gandalf begins his task of exorcising Saruman from the king.

This is a great example of combining the pillars. In this case, it is the combat of fighting the guards along with a skill challenge to free King Theoden. Such combinations can make the resulting encounter much more interesting and engaging for all the players.

But before you rush off and start merging your entire campaign down into a single encounter, there are some things you should consider to avoid creating a convoluted mess of things.

Let’s take a look…

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Do These Encounters Belong Together?

Don’t try to ramp up the tension in your negotiation skill challenge by randomly throwing in a couple rabid goblins. Merging a skill challenge with a combat encounter should feel natural. Each component should complement the other, not compete for attention.

Ask yourself a few questions…

Why are these things happening at the same time?
How does one affect the other?
Does it make narrative sense for these two encounters to come together?

There are several ways that goblins interrupting the negotiations might make sense. Has it been established that the mayor has a loyal following of goblin thugs? Do these goblins not care about the mayor at all, but they are interested in the golden amulet your cleric is wearing? Or maybe this meeting is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and the goblins have spotted an opportunity to rid the town of the mayor and these righteous adventurers.

Whatever the reason, make sure you think it through. Even a loose connection will help make it seem more real as you are running the encounter for the players.

Are There Enough Actions to Go Around?

Combat is hard. Other than minions, there are not a lot of monsters that will go down with a single hit. Combat encounters should require the entire party to strategize together and contribute to the outcome.

The same is true for skill challenges. You don’t want five characters sitting around throwing rocks in the lake while the wizard and the dwarf try to decipher the ancient runes. You need to include ways that all the characters can offer something.

Simply merging together a combat encounter and a skill challenge will not work. You will quickly find that the characters do not have the bandwidth to take on both tasks. They will likely just ignore the skill challenge until the combat is resolved, which defeats the purpose.

The encounter needs to have clear dividing lines between the two activities with just enough difficulty to make each approachable.

Characters doing the fighting should feel as though they are on the verge of defeat, but not so overwhelmed that they need to call for help. And those completing the skill challenge should have to work hard for a solution, while recognizing that those doing the fighting probably do not have much to offer them.

You could go as far as having a single character that is needed for both parts to make it more interesting, but resist the urge to involve everyone in everything.

Can You Run It Smoothly?

In case you had not noticed, being a Dungeon Master is hard. You never get a break. When you are not running the monsters, you are adjudicating a player’s dice roll. During a skill challenge you often have to roleplay multiple NPCs and monsters. The more complex your encounter, the more you need to streamline how you track and run it.

An epic battle that takes place in a collapsing dungeon that can only be escaped by solving an ancient puzzle sounds like an amazing encounter. But, what sounds great in your imagination could quickly become impossible to run in the real world.

Whatever you add to the encounter, make sure you think through how you will run it.

The Shattered Bridge

This is not a ready to run encounter but a view of how you might combine combat with a skill challenge to create something special.

Scenario: The party is escorting a caravan across a narrow stone bridge that spans a ravine. Just as they reach the center of the bridge, a group of flying creatures unleash an ambush. To make matters worse, all this activity is causing the bridge to destabilize.

Combat: Some of the monsters attack the travelers in the caravan, while others attack, and further destabilize, the bridge.

Skill Challenge: As the fight unfolds, sections of the bridge begin to break away.

Use History or Nature to understand the structure of the bridge and how best to hold it together
Use Athletics to wedge stones and support weakened areas
Use Acrobatics to hang over the edge and secure a key piece of the structure
Use Dungeoneering to identify which sections are most at risk
Use Heal to save injured caravan members
Use Bluff to misdirect an attacking monster away from a weakened section

Outcomes

Each successful check helps to stabilize the bridge and grants a +1 bonus to the next skill check
Failed checks cause the bridge to become more unstable and raise the difficulty class for the next check by 1
Winning the challenge stabilizes the bridge enough so that the caravan can be moved to the far side, even if the combat is still active
Failing the challenge results in the bridge collapsing. The caravan, and everyone on the bridge, falls into the river twenty feet below.

The final piece of advice when building such complex encounters is to be flexible.

Do not let the time you spent putting it together influence how rigid you are with it playing out the way you wrote it. The most important thing is that you are presenting the party with an obstacle. How they work through that obstacle is completely up to them.

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