Using Chessboards for Skill Challenges
One of the things I’ve been brainstorming is a way to turn skill challenges into their own little minigame, and my current line of thinking is creating a pseudo-boardgame.
And that lead me to this silly little thought. Picture this:
The PCs have to navigate an underground river through the underdark with no light. You announce that it’s time for a skill challenge and you…
…
(wait for it)
(wait for iiittt……)
…break out a chess board and start setting some pieces on it!
Things look bad for white. Black is 3 moves away from checkmate and still has most of its pieces, while white’s forces are anemic and under assault.
Now, every time a PC gets a success in the skill challenge, that player moves a piece for white. Every time a PC gets a failure in the skill challenge, the DM moves a black piece. If White is checkmated, the PCs fail the challenge and if black is checkmated the PCs succeed.
Interesting way to bring a visual element of risk into the challenge. It doesn’t really change the core of the process, but drives home the fact that the challenge has real impact. A variation could be a map, with troops in place to assault a friendly town, the skill challenges could be directly tied to the movement of the player sides troops, with misses allowing the bad guys to assault.
I find the image very interesting. However, I don’t know about you, but it’d take ages for me to pull out and set a chess board during a game, which is why I won’t be doing it.
On a side note, I’ll be using your dwarven dice game this Sunday. I’ll let you know how it went!