How I Learned to Love the Skill Challenge
AKA: Creating My First Skill Challenge Recently, I was working on an original adventure for my gaming group. My goal was to try and apply the principles from Wolfgang Baur's excellent Adventure Builder article series from the WotC archives but something unexpected occurred as I was reviewing my work. As I looked over the adventure, and the party's goals, it started to occur to me that I had unwittingly left myself open to incorporating a skill challenge into my adventure. Needless to say I was quite shocked... especially since I'm running a 3.5 edition D&D game! When I first heard about the Skill Challenges concept, my initial thought was this was the death of "Role" Playing; that the new edition was trying to codify and distill some of the most exciting, spontaneous, and free-form moments from my games into a series of dice rolls. The more I thought and read about Skill Challenges, as well as listening to several different podcasts from the communi...