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A pretty interesting take on the Skill Challenges is over this way and well worth a read.  Rather than segments or rounds it’s more of a gestalt thing where there are forces at work against the party.  As an example to use an skill challenge I’m working on for my upcoming session(s) to find the Zizzor lair (the first SC in the planned occurances) the party will be working against getting lost in the swamp, avoiding the standard dangers of the swamps (sinkholes, snakes, poisonous plants), avoiding the patrols of Zizzor’s that will be in the swamp and fighting the physical exertion issues in such a draining environment (insects, heat, humidity). Â  Under Conflex these would all be ‘conflicts’ that are working against the party simultaneously and each one would have consequences for failure.

The downside is the system is more complex although he does have a nice worksheet.  More complex for the DM of course, as is usual for the players they simply get told the situation and roll their dice.

My current skill challenge looks something like this and is using a modified Obsidian System.  Three segments which are titled “Navigate the Swamps”, “Avoid the Dangers of the Swamps”, “Approach Undetected” and the whole SC is entitled “Find the Zizzor Lair”. My main modifications to Obsidian are the DM rolls an opposed check on each segment and that modifies the base DC for the segment.  I like rolling dice too.

The penalties for partial successes will be a cost of healing surges when the party reaches the lair (full success will of course find them there untaxed). Partial levels of failure will incur encounters with Zizzor patrols with the party down either 3 or 4 healing surges, or in the worst cases of failures they’ll take so long to get to the lair that this will have the end result that some of the kidnapped will be dead by the time the party gets to them.

All the results from perfect success to utter failure will result in the party reaching the lair, just the consequences or condition they arrive in will vary. They have to reach the lair eventually or it’ll be a very short adventure and there’s no real point in making them re-do the skill challenge in such a case.

Since I’m awarding experience by ‘quest turn in’ rather than by ‘monster killed’ the extra encounters will only serve to drain resources from the party and thus will be something to avoid rather than something seen as a ‘easy xp grinding’ by the party. Â  I’m leaning more and more heavily on awarding XP that way completely and using monster XP solely as an encounter budget and as a rough rule of thumb for the level up process.

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