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I've been asked to link to a blog entry about one of the techniques I use to make combat in 4th edition faster, more dynamic and more interesting. I'm honored that anyone would be interested, but first, some caveats:

First of all, while I arrived at the idea independently, I have seen it posted in other places. I've just never seen it gain much traction.

Second of all, it doesn't matter very much anymore. The designers have changed the monster "math" to deal with the "problem." I'm only still thinking about it because I haven't moved to the new monster math (partly because I have a solution I prefer) and because questions about combat speed still show up on the "What's A DM To Do?" forum, which I frequent.

With that out of the way, here's the basic idea with details and background to follow: Use the monsters' HP and defenses as resources to enable it to move where it wants on the battlefield, and attack with impunity. The PCs will do more damage through opportunity attacks, defender marks, zones and the like; the monsters will be more of a threat to the party as a whole (and certain members in particular); there will be more movement; and combat will be faster, more dynamic, and more interesting.

The basic issue with combat in 4th Edition is that it takes longer than many people prefer to spend to fullfil the baseline assumption of D&D combat, which is to reduce the monsters to 0 HP. This is largely due to the fact that monsters originally (and some would say still) have relatively high HP and defenses, so that even a party's encounter powers are not enough to finish the monsters off and, unless dailies are used (which I believe is the intent, but that's for a different article) the PCs are quickly reduced to "grinding" the monsters down with at-will powers.

Compounding this is the relatively low amount of damage monsters used to do. This doesn't itself increase the length of combat, but it makes it more frustrating for certain DMs and groups, because despite all the time spent in combat, the monsters don't seem to be much of a threat.

I became fully aware of these issues during one particular combat with my group and it dawned on me what I could do about them.

I first discussed this in another blog entry: community.wizards.com/centauri/blog/2010... Basically, I decided in that encounter, that the monster would quickly (if not prior to the battle) realize how physically tough it is compared to the PCs attacks. However one imagines HP to be represented inside the game, it's plausible that a creature knows how hurt it is, so, if a character's attack takes off only a small fraction of its HP, the creature would come to think of the attacks as not much of a deterrent. If the PCs are having a hard time hitting the creature's defenses, it would also probably conclude that the PCs aren't an immediate threat.

A creature would also probably draw some conclusions from how much of a threat its own attacks seemed to be toward the PCs it was attacking. HP are abstract, but if the creature has unleashed a barrage against the fighter and wasn't able to bloody it or drive it off, it might reasonably conclude that the fighter is too hard a nut to crack, and look for targets that seem softer.

What this all adds up to is provoking more opportunity attacks and defender marks from monsters, in order to allow the monsters to put their damage where it will have the most effect. Creatures might also brave damaging effects, either staying within them, or moving through them, to deal damage to the right targets.

I think part of why this idea has trouble gaining traction is that I think there's a general perception that if a monster is provoking opportunity attacks then something has gone terribly wrong. It's never necessary to provoke them, and accidentally doing so is, I believe, taken by many as a mark of inexperience, and, yes, doing so will cause the monsters to die sooner. But monsters don't necessarily know any of that. They would plausibly come to think both that they are relatively safe (at least for a while) from PC attacks, and that sustaining a few extra hits might be worth it to chomp on the guy in the robes at the back. I think even mindless or dimwitted monsters might reach that conclusion, or be guided to it by some internal or external imperative.

This technique is not guaranteed to make combat more dangerous. After all, a marked creature might still have a hard time damaging other targets. It also might not be more dangerous if the PCs realize the threat, realize that opportunity attacks and defender marks aren't enough to deter the monsters from attacking their softer allies, and step up the defense. But in that case, the PCs are probably using up more resources to improve their defensive line, and using up resources in one battle means later battles will be that much more challenging.

And it doesn't need to be used if it just seems too improbable that a creature would take that approach. I switch back and forth during battles, as the creature becomes more wounded, and the softer targets get out of the way, or as other conditions change, making the tactic more or less effective for the creature. Monster goals might also change. Not all monsters want to take risks, not all monsters have the goal of killing PCs at any cost. In fact, I encourage DMs to give their monsters more interesting goals, but it's common for people to run monsters as if all of them have dreams of TPKs in their horrible little hearts.

It's worth noting that some defender players will not like it if monsters ignore their marks, especially if the mark has an effect than can miss, such as Combat Challenge, and if the attack always seems to miss. Be mindful of this, and remember that the point of this technique is to make the game more fun. If it's not achieving that, don't use it.

The technique also requires attentive players, as they will be making attacks off their turn. I find that players quickly get into the swing, so to speak, of their basic attacks, and can be quick about them, once they see that the attacks will often be provoked. Having the players roll more attacks means more critical hits, which is always fun. Combat also tends to be more dynamic under this technique, because monsters are harder to "lock down" merely with the threat of damage. There is more movement of monsters to get at targets, and more movement of PCs to protected those targets.

I recognize this technique is not for everyone, and as I said above, the time of its larger relevance and usefulness has mostly passed. Despite this, it's a useful thing to keep in mind not just for 4th Edition games but for other editions, and even other games, in which monsters have resources that they can use either to stay alive, or to make the most of what life they have left.

The blog entry "Run Away!" (community.wizards.com/dndnext/blog/2012/...) opens with speculation as to why the Morale rules disappeared from the last few editions of D&D. I assume a poll of some kind was taken when those editions were created, to decide if the rules were worth keeping on the books and that the results convinced the designers not to bother. I didn't miss them, myself. I created a poll below to see if anyone else had a relationship to the morale rules that was similar to mine.

I don't think Morale rules are inherently bad or problematic, and wouldn't mind seeing them on the books again, but I do think they need to some with good, clear advice on how to use them, why one might use them, when not to, and how to adjust them to suit one's preferences.

I don't know about you, but the example Bruce Cordell described in community.wizards.com/dndnext/blog/2012/... does not reflect how my sessions with the early editions of D&D proceeded

Most of it's fine, until this point:

Me: “Well, I guess we shouldn’t look a gift horse in—”

DM: “Around the corner of the room come four orcs! ‘Surface dwellers! Kill them! Cut them to mincemeat! Pound them to hamburger!’ they yell. The first two catch you by surprise and attack. [The DM rolls dice.] One misses. One rolls a 17 and hits you for 5 points of damage! The other two go around you and charge the wizard.”

Me: “By Moradin’s tangled beard! I attack the closest one. [I roll dice.] An 18!”

In my groups this would have been:

Me: “Well, I guess we shouldn’t look a gift horse in—”

DM: “Around the corner of the room come four orcs! ‘Surface dwellers! Kill them! Cut them to mincemeat! Pound them to hamburger!’ they yell. The first two catch you by surprise and attack. [The DM rolls dice.] One misses. One rolls a 17 and hits you for 5 points of damage! The other two go around you and charge the wizard.”

Group: "Wait, we didn't see them?" "Hold on, how are they going before me, I'm super quick?" "I should have been able to cast Sleep before they attacked!" "I didn't say I entered the room." "Wait the room's 20 feet wide, and we're lined up in front of the chest, so how did they get past the front line?" "I disbelieve the illusion!" etc.

All of which essentially boiled down to the group questioning the fairness of the DM's move, regardless of how much of a threat it was. I really doubt I was the only person to have this kind of experience, and have it repeatedly.

I don't know the exact reasons behind the creation of tactical, grid-based combat rules, but I do know that I was relieved to find that 3rd Edition used them and had finally begun to clamp down on so many of the questions that could arise during a fight. Players could, by and large, figure out for themselves who was where, who had what advantage, what was at risk, how to defend, where was safe. There were still arguments, I won't say there weren't, but the grid minimized a lot of these and allowed the game to move on, even if people didn't like the situation.

The core issue is trust. My groups didn't trust their DMs not to adjudicate in such a way as to kill the characters. The DMs didn't trust the players not to claim some sort of unfair advantage over the monsters. Was the thief really in a position to backstab? The DM thought not, the player thought so. Some DMs and players also don't trust themselves and enjoy being freed from having to state that their character actually IS in the blast zone of the fireball. It's there for anyone to see.

Bruce's group probably trusted their DM. I hope most groups did, but I'm sure not all of them did. Grid-based combat was a blessing for groups like that, and the use of the grid has nothing to do with the ability of those groups to use their imagination.

I play and enjoy 4th Edition. My groups generally use a grid, but because I trust them, I tend to handwave a lot of movement and range and say "Yes, and..." to the cool ideas they come up with. As DM, I try to avoid handwaving anything for my monsters, because I don't want to lose what trust I have with my group. Sometimes I have to strain that trust by asking them to let my monsters do something cool, and by putting the PCs in unforseen trouble, but their trust is important. When I play, I also try to build trust with the DM, abiding by rulings even if I disagree or don't like them, pointing out advantages he can gain, abiding religiously to my characters limits. This isn't because I lack imagination but because I value my DM's trust. Given enough time with a DM, I'll strain that trust a little and ask to try something that might not quite be in the rules, but I am careful not to seem like the kind of player who damages and unravels games. Despite all that conservatism though, no one who knows me would ever say I lack imagination.

So, the key is trust. If you want us to have the courage to run games without a grid, because you think that's some sort of ideal, great: give us advice on how to build the necessary trust. I don't think advice is enough; I think it takes trust between friends, which takes time either before or during play. Give us the tools to build that trust. Give us tactical, grid-based play as an option and ALSO advise us how to begin to step away from that. I'm doing that now, loosening the grip on the security the grid gave me, after my horrible early experiences, but it's because I'm trying to prove gridless or grid-light combat can work in 4th Edition, not because I think it's the ideal that some people think it is.

Trust.

I ran Dungeon Delve 1 for two people on 11/14. Their characters were level 1, a shardmind dark pact warlock and a half-orc brawler fighter.

Given the unusual party size, I had planned, even before I knew what the characters would be, to keep the monsters roughly the same, but to give them goals other than killing the PCs. In the first encounter, a removed one of three kobold slingers and kept the minions mostly busy moving two prisoners and a McGuffin into a tunnel in the floor of the encounter. The slingers and two minions did all the fighting.

The monsters' goal was to move their prisoners and another item into their tunnels. They moved one prisoner in quickly; there was not meant to be a way to prevent this. The other prisoner and the item took more time, as I wanted the PCs to be ablle to stop one or both. They did stop the prisoner from going down the hole, and were rewarded with two potions of healing (as well as the quest XP for rescuing her).

There followed a chase through the kobold tunnels. I modeled this as two concurrent skill challenges, with plenty of description. One challenge was the chase, and one was general navigation through the underground environment. However, due to my descriptions the two challenges wound up basically being sequential instead of concurrent. But the point of concurrent challenges is to prevent the best skill from being spammed, and this was not an issue. I described the environment, including some "gotcha" traps, and they tended to deal with these in ways that made sense and worked to their strengths, without the most skilled character simply doing all the work.

They succeeded on both challenges. I disobeyed my own advice and did not have a good success and failure in place for the navigation challenge. I think I meant for this to give them a surprise round, or an alternate means of approach. I offered them an alternate means of approach, but it probably wasn't a great alternative. They got a surprise round anyway.

The creaturers were 6 minions, a slyblade, the slinger who survived the first encounter, and a white dragon wyrmling (I used weaker minions and one fewer slyblade than written.) The goals of the monsters in this encounter were less clear, probably because I neglected to put as much thought into it as I should have. Basically, the white dragon wyrming wanted to get a door open. The prisoners and the item could each enable this, but he had the kobolds get all three to be sure. I didn't set a timer of any kind for how long this goal would take to achieve. Instead, I used it as a way to govern whether or not the dragon joined the fight.

And it was a pretty tough fight. They cleared out the minions pretty well, but their shiftiness allowed the slyblade to get combat advantage on the fighter, which was enough to take him down. The warlock dosed him with a potion, but then rolled three 1s for damage with her daily and was subsequently dropped herself. The half-orc got up and missed twice with his reliable daily before taking out the slyblade. Then he took out the slinger.

The dragon made an appearance, but I made him appear hesitant to join in and very interested in the doorway, which I placed around a corner. With the warlock down, when the dragon's turn came back up, I had the door open and the dragon fly through, with the book.

The sharmind failed three deathsaves while the fighting was on. I felt like the fighter could have helped with a Heal check, but taking out the slinger was probably best. The fighter rescued the last prisoner and got the treasure and a level 4 item (left behind in the dragon's haste). He is interested in raising the shardmind.

This didn't go as well as I'd hoped. The player who lost the character was quite cheerful about it, talking about making a new one, or getting the old one raised - which she wasn't even sure was possible. It was the other player who seemed a little bummed. It's possible that he felt like I pulled my punches

What I almost immediately realized after the game is that I needed to make the characters aware of the monster's goals. In the first encounter, the fighter stayed behind cover, waiting for the monsters to pass him on their way to attack the party. I gave him one kobold, but the others fell back, so he essentially wasted two turns waiting.

I also didn't give the PCs much in the way of alternate goals. They new they needed to rescue the hostages and the items, but the only obvious way to do that was to kill all the monsters. I'm terrible at map design so I fell back on the ones provided for the encounter. These, of course, were designed only with combat in mind, so there were no real ways to sneak around to where the prisoners and items were.

Or maybe there were. Maybe they just weren't looking. They're new players. I can imagine a group that might have been more inquisitive about the areas I'd described and more eager to avoid a straight fight.

So, I still need work with skill challenges and alternate goals.

I ran three Living Forgotten Realms games this weekend, a first (and second, and third) for me. It was an interesting experience. My first two games went reasonably well, with players engaged in the story and having a reasonably challenging time with the combat. I'm no tactical genius myself, nor do I wish to be, so I generally rely on the monsters to have an interesting variety of powers to make life hard for the players.

In my third game, things took a turn, and I was taken to school. Everyone was pretty well optimized, and even with the "harder" batch of monsters they carved through them quite handily. One fellow had a brawling fighter. I'm fine with that in theory, even if the monsters can't escape (which these couldn't) because at least the monster can keep attacking the fighter. This guy, though, had some sort of sash that let him maintain the grab even when he wasn't adjacent. Turns out he wasn't playing it exactly right, since he loses some of the abilities of the sash while it's grabbing things, but it was frustrating enough that I called all three of the fights early once the most effective monsters were grabbed.

Another guy had ranger with a mount, a dire wolf. I hate mounts. They play havoc with many of the assumptions of the games, a key one being that the PCs generally don't have mounts (another being that grabbing won't be a common play tactic, so no need to train monsters in Athletics). The bottom line is that I wasn't prepared for it and it frustrated me. Part of the frustration was getting repeatedly corrected on the effects of the unfamiliar rules.

It was also frustrating that I lacked the courage to step back, think, and deal with these problems. Part of the reason for this is that I was feeling like I wanted to take these characters (and their players, to be honest) down a notch or two and so I didn't trust myself to say "No" to them. I would have been completely within my rights to tell the ranger that his mount was unsuitable for the mission they were on, for instance.

I thought about complaining about my problems to the Community boards, but that reminded me of posts I've seen about over-optimized groups. I've given advice to those posts, and I stand by my suggestions, but I found myself unable and unwilling to implement them during this game. For instance, I'm an advocate for adding alternate goals to combat so that the PCs can't focus entirely on destroying the creatures. One such goal is to have an NPC that the monsters want dead and the PCs want alive. In an LFR game it might be hard to add something like this on the fly, but this adventure even provided an NPC that I could use for this purpose and in my haste, frustration, and fatigue, couldn't think of how to go about doing it, though I'm glad to say that the idea did at least occur to me.

I'm willing to DM Living Forgotten Realms again, if the fellow who recruited me is willing (and I think he is). Honestly, I'm not sure I'll be able to do much better against a similar group in the future, except possibly to stick out the fights a little longer (I might have been able to knock over one of them, or kill the ranger's beast companion or mount, if I'd stuck with the second fight), and to end them more graciously. I have a feeling that it might not be according to Hoyle if I were to add to the pre-written encounters hard-to-reach skill challenge that buff the monsters, or other alternate winning conditions, but I'll be on the look-out for any small advantages I can give to my monsters to make the encounter challenging and enjoyable for everyone at the table, not the just the optimizers.

This thread, community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758... got to list out a handful of my basic thoughts about skill challenges. I keep doing this, so I've decided to plunk them into a blog. It's not polished, but maybe I'll edit it later, or expand on certain points in later blogs. Enjoy.

Combat is not the opposite of roleplaying. Skill challenges (which many people equate with "roleplaying") are designed to fit right into combat, should you so choose. See Dungeon Delve 11-3 for an example. If they get into a fight in the city, add a skill challenge element to it, such as having to protect innocent by-standers, or having to negotiate during battle. Have failure complicate things and success simplify things.

Embrace the abstract: Don't worry about exact locations or timescales. Don't model every action; not everything they do will require a roll, and not every roll needs to matter directly to the challenge. Jump-cut to when and where things get interesting. Transition between separate teams at tense moments.

Focus on success and failure and the rest will follow: If your adventure will stay interesting if they succeed and gets even more interesting if they fail, then you basically can't go wrong with any other aspect of the challenge. Pick the skills, DCs, and complexity that you think make sense and go. Players are players and they won't do what you expect, so don't plan only for victory or defeat. Make sure both are interesting. As a default, make defeat the same as victory, but with a twist.

Put the skill challenge on the offensive: Keep the world dynamic and give the players things to react to. If they're neglecting a challenge, or aren't sure what to do next, make something happen that makes it clear that events are unfolding and that they must get involved or the events will go against them. You can also use this to sting the party when they put their most skilled member at the front of every check. If it's diplomacy, have an NPC ask a question directly of the strong, silent one. Have the runaway ox-cart be bearing down on the bookish PC. Don't force players to roll when they don't want to, allow them to narrate their way out if they want, but throw the glove down and see who takes up the challenge. Anyway, having an active challenge is just more fun to describe anyway.

Three related pieces of advice.

Don't worry too much about engaging every character with every challenge. At best, you wind up with challenges that have shoehorned in extra skills for no logical reason, just so every character can contribute. Stick with skills that are easy to justify, and then let the PCs justify the use of other skills which you can allow for a Hard DC and/or once per challenge, per the DMG. Most challenges only require a handful of skills in their write-ups.

Stay focused. Don't make a single challenge about staying incognito and searching the city. Make one challenge for each goal, or else they will, for example, wind up finding what they need by just staying hidden, or avoiding detection by looking around. It is possible to explain this sort of thing away, but some people find it jarring. Multiple smaller challenges help alleviate this, and you can have success or failure in one challenge modify another. Make the party engage the challenges sequentially concurrently or risk failing one of them, especially if all of the challenges involve a skill that only one PC is best at, so the second-stringers have incentive to step up.

Give everyone one or more things to do. This may seem to run counter to the first bit of advice, but as I said these are all related. If you keep the challenges simple and focused then you can have more than one challenge active at one time, which increases the number of skills that can plausibly be brought to bear on the situation as a whole. Some PCs can be arranging the meet with the buyer, while others are trying to trick the local gang into being in another location. Etc.

There. In future, I can just reference this when someone asks for advice. I welcome feedback and I invite you to join the 4E Skill Challenges group, community.wizards.com/skill_challenges_4...

A blog inspired by Greg Bilsland's post about dungeons: gregbilsland.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/my...

I hate drawing dungeons.

I don't have a head for layout, or what kinds of distances make sense. I stand little chance of being able to create a dynamic, realistic set of denizens. It's an exercise in futility and frustration. Furthermore, exploration and extermination aren't always the goals I have in mind when I imagine a dungeon. Therefore, I've been trying a new approach: skill challenge dungeons.

There's no map, just a general idea of the kinds of environments and hazards the PCs might encounter. To give the sense of exploration, there's an ongoing skill challenge that is meant to simulate navigating and exploring the structure. To give the sense of danger, there's a concurrent skill challenge that is meant to simulate some pressing threat. In my two attempts at this, the pressing threat has been pursuit by the denizens of the dungeon, but it could be an environmental danger, traps, a competing group, or anything else.

This lets me put in rooms and features that I could never draw. The dungeon can become larger and more complicated than a sheet of graph paper could portray. There are no hard boundaries to the structure; the party could literally never explore it all, nor clear out every last monster. The dungeon will never be safe, and completely known. Fortunately, their quest is usually not just to explore and clear but to get to perform a task within the dungeon and get back out. I can still put in empty or interesting rooms if I want, but they're not taking up room on a map. I can also take a seemingly empty area and complicate it greatly, based on the actions the PCs take in (or out of) the skill challenges.

This even works for pre-written dungeons. The path to the next room is no longer just a 5 foot hallway, but a winding branching tunnel, potentially full of hazards. If I want more monsters to come to a noisy fight, they still can, but now it's understandable if monsters from the next room don't come to investigate.

I understand the idea of exploring a dungeon, and why people might like drawing dungeons. The technique I describe has different goals, one that I don't feel standard or "old school" dungeons can really meet.

I was going to post this as a comment to NewbieDM's blog on this subject (newbiedm.com/2010/05/05/errata-more-erra...), but it turned into its own blog entry.

First of all, thanks to the designers for the regular updates. It's nice to play a game with such great support.

Second of all, a rant.

By and large, if you're reasonable, and you play with reasonable people, the errata don't matter a whit. I'd estimate that a good 90% of them consist of clarifications to things that no reasonable person was misunderstanding anyway. I don't need the errata to tell me that I can push a target up or down an incline - yet I read a comment (which I hope wasn't serious) that wondered if the wording of that erratum meant that targets couldn't be pushed off ledges!

There are several breeds of players that make these updates necessary, even apart from those who engage in organized play. One breed are the type who scrabble for every mechanical benefit they can find for their characters, whether it's during character construction or during the game. This breed will take the most powerful options they can every time. This is not bad in and of itself except this this breed does it without regard for whether a feature or combination of features contains a mistake or is an outright abuse of the system. I read a tweet about someone grumbling that the latest update would be the third time one of his players was having to update his character sheet. Get a clue! If something in this game seems overpowered, guess what: it is.

This is also the breed that, finding their characters of their monsters shoved around on a staircase, will paw rapidly through books to find the forced movement rules and stab their fingers at whatever it was people were seriously using to block non-horizontal movement. Then these same players will turn around and teleport a target high into the air.

Incidentally, it's all for nothing anyway. The game simply isn't so hard that one must squeeze every last erg out of the rules. Character optimization is probably a fun thought experiment, but I hope no one seriously thinks such measures are necessary for a character to survive and thrive in the game.

Another breed, not necessarily entirely exclusive from the first, is the group that believes that the rules of the game are like a program and that they are merely the computers into which it is loaded. Sure, we all like to shut off our brains to a certain extent when we play, and it would be nice if the rules could only be exercised in an utterly impartial manner, but some interpretation is required. Here's a hint, a corollary to the above clue: humans don't have to get stuck in infinite loops.

There's the breed, of which I must confess to being a member, who feels that the designers of the game really don't make mistakes and if something is a certain way, however odd the results it might lead to, it was intended. I admit it, I love this game, I've invested a lot of money into it, and I get defensive when someone (even the designers!) state that some part of it was not the inspired word of an infallible and omnipotent being handed to the designers in a revelation. I have written many long posts explaining how solos, skill challenges, and Aid Another don't need any changes from the original, and how the Expertise feats are entirely unnecessary. I still think those (well, not Aid Another now) are areas for civil discussion but this same mindset led me to tell a player that his monk couldn't use Flurry of Blows after a charge, and him (when he was DM) to tell me that Divine Challenge can only damage once per use, period. My apologies to that player and all D&D players in general on behalf of my breed for the updates we make necessary - but please do clarify Divine Challenge....

We're all unreasonable at times. We're all human. This is a game with rules. We strive to do right by those rules and the designers, bless their hearts, strive to have the rules do right by us. The updates will continue, and we can all hope that things will settle down sometime before the next edition is released. In the meantime, please just follow Wheaton's Law, and if you see me, please remind me to do the same.

I just ran through a skill challenge in a play-by-post game I'm DMing. I picked the primary skills with consideration as to what would make sense to the challenge and with any eye toward its simplicity (of design, not of the PCs accomplishing the challenge), rather than what skills the PCs were good at. I picked a Complexity of 3, which I thought reflected the lowercase-c-complexity of the actual situation, i.e. convincing three ghosts that they are ghosts and need to pass back through a shadow crossing into the Shadowfell. I used moderate DCs for their level. I discouraged the use of Take 10 and Aid Another for what I think were valid reasons, and imposed another -2 penalty on all checks due to another event taking place. They went ahead and used skills they weren't trained in.

And they failed. They would have failed even without the -2 penalty or if the complexity had been 2 (though maybe not if both).

I'm still a bit shocked by this. I'm used to PCs powering easily through any problem they face with the loss of nothing more than some daily powers and some healing surges. I'm feeling like I was too hard on them. I didn't make it clear that they were in a skill challenge, for one thing, so perhaps they didn't know they would run out of chances. There are things I could have done differently. As the shock fades, though, I'm seeing that this is a key strength of having a framework for skill-based obstacles: taking the decision on success or failure out of the hands of the DM.

I don't mean that the dice should be the only determiner of where the story goes. What I mean is that sometimes defeat is the more interesting (or at least equally interesting) outcome to a scenario, but that it's hard for me to decide that my PCs merit defeat and to stick with that. You can see that even with the rules in place, I'm still second-guessing myself, so there's no way I could just railroad them into defeat even if it was far more interesting to me and the story. If I wasn't "required" to give them only three failures, things might have gone very differently.

For instance, the second roll of the challenge was a natural 20 for a total of 30 in Diplomacy. I know that there are no rules for special effects on a skill roll of 20, but I like to reward such a high roll. If this had not been a skill challenge, I would definitely have felt that such a high roll deserved at least a partial victory, if it didn't resolve the situation then and there. The skill challenge framework kept me grounded. It forced me to keep in mind that as high as that check was, it represented only a part of the solution to the scenario. In my reply to the player I did my best to respond to reward the player's roll with more hints about what was really going on with the ghosts, but the check remained only an eighth of the necessary effort.

Part of what makes all this work, is having a defeat condition that is interesting and keeps the game moving. If defeat meant that the PCs would not get what I considered a vital piece of information, or the death of an important NPC, or that they themselves would be killed, then I might not let the skill challenge framework overrule me and my story. As it was, I entered into the skill challenge what I think (and what I hope the PCs will come to think) were two interesting possibilities and very little attachment to either one.

I've witnessed games in which the DM/GM/Keeper/referee had a firmly vested stake in the PCs success at an activity. The PCs would fail roll upon roll and the referee would keep offering them chances until they finally succeeded. I could tell that this was because the scene was set up so that failure would grind the game to a halt or take it in a boring direction. The trick, I now realize, is to make sure (at least to one's self, if not also to the players) that there are no boring directions, that as long as they make an honest effort they might "lose" but that the game will still be engaging.

Whether or not you use the exact guidelines in the DMGs, if you need a way to feel okay about potentially handing a loss to your players use some sort of a skill challenge mechanic that limits the number of chances they have. Then, to ease any concern about trying to use the mechanics of the challenge to give the PCs a precise and tailored percentage chance of success, decide on victory/defeat conditions that are interesting and move the game along no matter what the outcome of the challenge.

Here's a link to the discussion in the community.wizards.com/skill_challenges_4... group in which I discuss the skill challenge in more detail: community.wizards.com/skill_challenges_4...

@Level30yinzer mentioned on Twitter that her PCs regularly blow past even the Hard DCs she puts in front of them. That got me thinking.

I have the same situation with my PCs. I have actually made a point of not scouring their character sheets for their weak and strong skills but for just run-of-the-mill skill checks I think there's a good chance their bonuses were already above the DCs. Part of how I deal with this as a DM is simply not to mind it. They built their characters well, made choices on which races to take, and which skills to train, and so I'm happy for them to be good at what they're good at and for me to focus on just narrating how they handily accomplish what they put their efforts toward.

Still, at some point I might want there to be an actual chance that my PCs will fail at a skill check. So, what I can do to make it harder for them to succeed?

The obvious one is to increase the DCs. If the skill checks are part of a trap or skill challenge, this is not necessarily a good choice because it will mean throwing a chunk of experience at them that is 3 to 9 levels above the PCs - not to mention the possibility of inappropriately high damage output. However, for individual skill checks that don't have XP directly tied to them, there's no reason the DC can't be increased. I wouldn't make every climbing surface into a sheer glass wall, or require every set of arcane symbols to be a never-before-seen code, but when you want it to matter and it's a one-off check, go ahead.

Circumstantial penalties can have the same net effect as just increasing the DCs, but it's not strictly necessary to dole out experience points for them. Toss in bad weather, extremes of temperature, obscured visibility, faulty intel, or any other complications you want, each with a penalty to the DCs. The PCs should be allowed to try to mitigate these penalties if they have the means, or they can show just how awesome they are by climbing the ship's rigging during the ice storm.

Whenever possible, have more than one thing going on, so it's not possible for the trained, talented PCs to cover everything that involves their specialties. Don't just have a single skill challenge in isolation, but combine it with combat, or a few other skill challenges. For instance, the wizard can help the party by blasting minions, or he can focus on deciphering the runes on the obelisk that's sinking into the lava. The fighter can defend the strikers, or he can enter the burning building to rescue the villagers. The bard can negotiate with the king, or he can try to figure out who the assassin's next victim will be. Some skills such as Arcana and Perception can be expected to be trained by multiple party members, but if you can figure out a way to need two or three arcanists at the same time then the second-stringers might have to step up. Furthermore, the skill challenges themselves might be intertwined in such a way that each imposes a penalty on the skill checks for the other one.

The abstract nature of skill challenges can be a boon here. Whereas it's normally a great annoyance to split the party, it's rather simple to have two skill challenges on opposite ends of a city - perhaps each requiring a skill challenge just to reach them. If the physical skill challenge requires mental skills to reach, and the mental challenge requires physical skills to reach and no one can deal with both, who do you send to tackle which problem?

I can't think of many monsters that induce skill check penalties directly, but there's no reason they can't exist. A particular attack can cause a penalty to certain skills or across the board. An aura can be another way to spread out skill penalties. Of course, these penalties might only last for the duration of the encounter, so there would need to be a crucial need for skills in the encounter in order for the penalties to matter. Bear in mind though that certain diseases can cause skill check penalties....

Outside of combat, there's no reason why NPCs can cause skill check penalties. Gandalf was having a hard time negotiating with Theoden until he managed to get Wormtongue out of the room. This can involve just a skill check or two to deal with the NPC, or it can be a variant of the idea of combining skill challenges with each other or with other challenges. Or, the PCs can shine and just risk taking the penalty.

I have not, by and large, directly tested these tips. Do let me know if you have or do try them.