This is a skill challenge that I just ran in a play-by-post game. It's somewhat specific to that game, but perhaps you can draw from it.
Ghosts are terrorizing the town. They came to this place through a shadow crossing from the Shadowfell. The PCs must confront them, combat them, and convince them to leave through the shadow crossing that brought them to the town. Part of this must involve making them realize that they are dead.
Level: Any (I used 11, meaning a DC 16 for all of the checks) Complexity: 3 (8 successes before 3 failures) (I chose this because it was meant to make up for not actually defeating the ghosts in combat)
Arcana: (Moderate) The thin place to the Shadowfell may be detected and its draw on the spirits enhanced. Diplomacy: (Moderate) Appeals to reason, to their surroundings and appearance, can make some headway with them. Intimidate: (Moderate) They can be shamed into halting their squabbles, or snapped to a kind of attention with militaristic orders. Religion: (Moderate, trained only) Prayers to a deity of the afterlife, such as the Raven Queen (or her equivalent), for intercession on behalf of the departed seem to cause them to be drawn closer to the shadow crossing.
Victory: The ghosts realize their nature and then one, some or all of them cross into the Shadowfell, depending on the number of failur. One of them reveals the location of a hidden treasure. The rest flee. Defeat: All of the ghosts realize their nature and will no longer terrorize the town, but they flee and are loose upon the world.
My original intention for my game was that the PCs would defeat the ghosts first, then the ghosts would reform and one of them would talk to the PCs, providing some details about their circumstances and hints as to how to get rid of the ghosts altogether. In practice, the combat was taking too long (pro tip: avoid making all of your monsters insubstantial, unless the PCs have a way around it) so I made it apparent while they were still fighting that there was a non-violent way to deal with the ghosts. I prefer to combine skill challenges with combat anyway.
My game also had another factor that yours might not. The party acquired an artifact containing the soul of a dead friend. The artifact became agitated at the thought of the dead in the area being drawn back into the Shadowfell. This presented a second skill challenge which imposed a -2 penalty to skill checks until the artifact was "calmed down." (I also like to combine skill challenges with other skill challenges, especially since the combat died down soon after the first skill challenge began.) The artifact also limited the use of Arcana and Religion in the challenge to 1 check each. Further checks could be attempted, but with increasing agitation from the artifact. I'm not usually a fan of limiting skill checks in challenges.
The ghosts in my game were upgraded Phantom Warriors, so I made Intimidate a primary skill, to indicate their instinctive response to commands. A case could also be made for Bluff as a primary skill. History might also make sense, but as these ghosts would be familiar with the history of the Shadowfell, and not the world, I didn't make it a primary skill. Your game might differ on this point.
Of course other skills are available for use on a case-by-case basis per the rules on secondary skills in the DMG (Hard DC and/or one use only). Bluff could have been argued for, as could Insight and maybe Nature. As it was, my party focused on Diplomacy and Intimidate.
And they lost.
They had some early success and everyone contributed one at some point. The characters concentrated and using logic and commands to get the ghosts first to stop fighting and then to see themselves for what they were. As they gained successes, the ghosts lost some of their abilities and had different reactions to realizing they were dead. As they gained failures, those reactions became increasingly negative. They weren't pursuing the Arcana angle, so I had one of the ghosts hurl its weapon away and fly, coincidentally, through the shadow crossing. After 5 successes, they made their third unsuccessful attempt to convince the ghosts to pass through. I represented this failure as one of the ghosts denying his fate and not wanting to cross before proving himself in the world. He cowed the others into staying as well and they all departed.
I mention the above, because I've had it pointed out to me that part of what makes skill challenges hard to understand is that they are presented as just a list of skills, DCs, and other mechanics. The skill have short descriptions of their effects, but these don't always fit nicely into an actual game. It's also not always clear how to bring about the necessary events for a scene if the PCs don't truly understand what's going on. The NPCs themselves are a great way to convey or trigger the release of more information, or to just move the scene along. I had the advantage of running this as a play-by-post, which gave me time to think about how to move forward. I am hoping that even this slow, deliberate experience will aid me in running skill challenges at the table.
Incidentally, I wrote this challenge largely without reference to the PCs skill lists. I knew that several were trained in Arcana, and assumed that at least one was trained in Intimidate, but I don't know if any of them have Diplomacy or Religion training. I focused on the victory/defeat conditions, making sure they would be interesting and not grind the story to the halt. The latter was easy, as this was a bit of a side issue to the main plot, and I hope I made the results interesting instead of just frustrating for the players. I think it will be interesting for them to explain what became of the ghosts and it's possible that the ghosts will now be able to reappear in the story in some fashion.
Other notes: I did not specifically state that the players were in a skill challenge, though I'm not generally opposed to revealing that. I disallowed the use of Take 10 and Aid Another, but would have allowed them case-by-case with a convicing arguement. I don't believe that -2 penalty to skill checks I imposed wound up having an effect.
I'd be interested in any feedback you might have on this, and happy to answer any questions you have about it.
[N]o difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions. - L. Tolstoy
Interesting stuff, Centauri. My first reaction is that this isn't necessarily bad. I mean, there is no reason to treat this as a failure in an ongoing campaign - it is the story. Period. The story, told by you above, is actually very cool. It makes me want to know what the crestfallen heroes will do next. It isn't necessarily anything bad about design, skill challenges, etc. Stuff happens, and hopefully it has an effect on play and leads to cool story. What you described seems like what could be a cool twist rather than a true failure.
What do you think was the main reason for failure. Did they just roll poorly? Were they acting confused in terms of what to do or were they feeling good about the path they were choosing? (Sometimes I find they wrote a better skill use than I did, and I swap a skill for another on the fly, such as if they want to use history to really focus on what the ghosts did during life and then tell the events of their death instead of focusing on intimidate).
My first reaction is that this isn't necessarily bad. I mean, there is no reason to treat this as a failure in an ongoing campaign - it is the story. Period. The story, told by you above, is actually very cool. It makes me want to know what the crestfallen heroes will do next. It isn't necessarily anything bad about design, skill challenges, etc. Stuff happens, and hopefully it has an effect on play and leads to cool story. What you described seems like what could be a cool twist rather than a true failure.
That's a good point, but sort of a tricky one. I mean, say how it happened was how I had planned it from the beginning:
"The PCs fight the ghosts but the insubtantiality makes them too difficult to destroy. Words seem to have an effect, but even after the ghosts become aware of what they are and of the way back to the Shadowfell, the spirits ultimately reject reason and flee."
Same cool story, except that it's prewritten and I would expect the players to be unhappy if they learned that it had been planned and outright revolt if I had just forced them to keep rolling until they failed, or some other means to achieve my end.
And that's what I try to get at on my blog post about this: community.wizards.com/centauri/blog/2010... I can't prewrite defeat for them, or just decide that they're going to be defeated. Well, maybe I could, if I worked it out with them in advance. But if I walk in with defeat in one hand and victory in another and I let them fight for it on their terms, then I don't have to feel bad when they fail. Well, I don't have to feel as bad.
What do you think was the main reason for failure. Did they just roll poorly? Were they acting confused in terms of what to do or were they feeling good about the path they were choosing? (Sometimes I find they wrote a better skill use than I did, and I swap a skill for another on the fly, such as if they want to use history to really focus on what the ghosts did during life and then tell the events of their death instead of focusing on intimidate).
Each of their failures was due to a low roll with an untrained skill. On the other hand, a couple of their successes also came from untrained skills.
I think a big part of it was also my limitation of the use of Arcana. If I had allowed any number of Arcana rolls toward success and made it clear that Arcana could have an influence, I think they would have cleaned up to the point that I might have had to turn up the combat heat to keep it interesting (e.g. focus attacks on people attempting Arcana checks). So, I'm not utterly blameless in their failure.
Little story about that: The second skill challenge I ever ran, right on the heels of the first and very (I thought) successful skill challenge, was helping people escape from a collapsing structure. Also part of a PBP game, it was Complexity 3, and the DCs were hard, but they could use just about any skill they wanted and Aid Another. They racked up a quick failure and a few successes and then I was informed by one of the players that as it stood it was extremely unlikely that they would succeed.
I blinked.
Even though I had what I thought was a very interesting way forward if they were to fail, I reduced the Complexity from 3 to 2, greatly improving their chances, but still leaving it hanging by one failure. They ultimately succeeded, but I regretted easing up on them, since death wasn't even on the table. After that, I told myself I'd stand more firmly on skill challenges, at least in terms of their complexity. My focus would be on making sure that failure was interesting.
So, my general feeling is that if you make the skill challenge interesting for failure and success (while of course making it as interesting as possible in play) then the rest of the details almost don't matter. Pick a reasonable range of DCs and the skills you think make sense, a complexity that you think befits the scene or the amount of XP you want to give, and go for it. I suppose that on some level, perhaps unconsciously, a DM might still be inclined to make one outcome more likely. I hope that with more skill challenges under my belt I'll learn how to make them (or at least make them seem) more fair. Next time, I might do more to make it clear how close they are to defeat. I had told them the DCs to aim for, and the number of successes and failures were there for them to add up. But maybe the connection between their failures and the ultimate failure wasn't clear. Yeah, that's a big part of my bad feelings about this.
Uh, I'm not sure what happened to the formatting.
[N]o difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions. - L. Tolstoy
