Skill Check Challenges are done a little differently at this table than what’s written in the books. Rules as written are a unnecessarily complicated while limiting player autonomy, so at this table we’ve adopted the Lord Kensington’s ruleset for 4th Edition skill check challenges. Basically, the rules are as follows:
1 – Everybody rolls initiative. This acts as the turn order for the entire skill challenge.
2 – Players can use any skill they want, as long as they can justify its use. You can’t really use Diplomacy to make your horse run faster, but you probably could with Nature, as an example.
3 – Players cannot use skills that:
– They used on their previous turn
– The player just before them in Initiative order used
4 – Get enough Successes (passed skill checks) before a certain number of failures, and everyone succeeds. Get too many failures, and the party suffers some sort of consequence.
And that’s about it. This ruleset is really simple, easy to adapt to almost any circumstance, and gives the players a greater sense of ownership over the story and their part within it. Afterall, the party are the heroes of the story – they deserve to have the spotlight every once in a while.