For those not familiar, shelf liner is a rubber material meant to line drawers and shelves and keep things from sliding around. The beauty of it is that it’s entirely based on the high traction of the rubber, no adhesives whatsoever.

It’s also very cheap, I just picked up a 1.5′x5′ roll for $4.17 at Target, which is enough to line two sides of a foamcore board with about an inch of “gutter” on either side.

From the moment I heard the idea, I thought it was awesome, but I only just got around to picking this stuff up and it’s absolutely incredible how well it works. The dungeon tiles stick so firmly to the mat that it’s pretty much impossible to move them around without picking them up completely. It’s like they’re glued to the mat.

And the tiles stay at extreme angles. I had to hold the board up at a right angle, completely vertical, before they finally fell off, and up to that point they didn’t budge at all.

One little tip: I had a hard time finding the shelf liner, and had to actually ask someone at Target for help. Turns out it was in the cleaning supplies section, of all places.

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.

One of the more unexpected surprised of Dark Sun was the introduction of character trees. In a nutshell, in a campaign using this concept as written, each player would roll up four different characters. They could choose which character to play during each session, and whenever the character they were playing gained a level they could also have one of the inactive characters (of a lower level) also gain a level.

The idea was two-fold; first, it would allow the players to have a stable of characters so that they could draw on the one best suited for a particular adventure or even their mood. Second, in the harsh world of Dark Sun, starting out at lower levels is especially bad (or so they make it seem), and this gives the players a bit of a buffer for when they lose their best character.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that I think could be successfully applied to modern games. So let’s look at some possible implementations.

Classic Character Trees

Exactly as described above, or similar at least. Each player gets a stable of characters, and gets to choose which to play during any given adventure. Whenever the active character gains a level, one of the inactive ones does as well.

Pros
This style would work for any system where it’s not uncommon or particularly undesirable for PCs to have differing levels of experience. Point-based systems in particular, such as Savage Worlds, White Wolf, or Shadowrun would work well here, although you’d have to adjust it a bit. For example, if a player earns 20 experience points, they add the full 20 to the active character and also get to distribute 20 points among the inactive characters however they want.

This approach is also nice because, simply by virtue of having several characters who each necessarily have “off-screen” things to occupy their time when they’re not adventuring, it ties the players more strongly to the game and to the setting.

Cons
In games like Third and Fourth edition D&D, a character who’s not close to the average party level (and, by extension, the level of the encounters they’ll be facing) is mathematically moot. At best they’re ineffectual and boring, and at worst they’re a liability to themselves in others. Simply put, this approach will not work in such a system (but continue reading…).

Fully-balanced Character Trees

As above, but all characters in the tree are always kept at the same power level, either by splitting up exp evenly or just advancing all inactive characters at the same time rather than one at a time.

Pros
This is a necessary fix to the concept for certain systems, such as the aforementioned D&D third and fourth editions. It also prevents an unplayed character from falling too far behind and becoming “unplayable” (or, at least, unpalatable).

Cons
The rapid gain of levels and powers among four separate characters may prove difficult for some players to come to terms with, particularly in the case of new players or even experienced players who are playing complicated classes or classes which they don’t have much experience with.

UA Gestalt

In the Third edition Urban Arcana book of optional rules, they presented a variant called gestalt in which players pick two classes and smoosh them together, gaining all the benefits of each class and, in cases like saving throws and such, taking the better between the two classes.

Pros
It’s fairly simple and organized. You only need to keep track of one character. The player always has access to all of their toys. It makes some character options much more feasible (e.g. fighter/mages in D&D third edition are usually fairly crippled unless you’re playing a class specifically designed as such. A gestalt fighter/mage, though, would be quite capable in both respects).

Cons
It absolutely requires a class-based system. I can think of no way to adapt this as-is to a point-based system (but, again, continue reading…). It represents a definite power creep, though not quite as much as you might think. Gestalt characters are just plain more powerful than non-gestalt characters, especially if they min-max their choices to minimize weaknesses and maximize strengths.

Final Fantasy Gestalt

I’m not sure if this is a concept or not unique to the Final Fantasy franchise, but it’s the only example I can think of off the top of my head. In essence, your character can have multiple different classes… but only one at a time, and they’re all kept separate and distinct. So for example you could be a level 5 fighter/6 wizard, and at the beginning of each adventure you’d choose whether you wanted to be in “fighter mode” or “wizard mode.”

Pros
This adopts many of the pros from the character trees above, since that’s basically what you’re doing. You have multiple different character sheets, but rather than each representing a different character they all represent the same character wearing a different hat.

It does have the obvious advantage over the character tree method in that it’s a bit simpler to maintain party cohesion if, story-wise, it’s always the same character.

Cons
That’s a double-edged sword, however. If you’re into verisimilitude, then this might not be the best approach as you have to figure out why your character was swashing buckles with the best of ‘em yesterday but today he can’t carry a sword to save his life.

Character Pool

The final option to consider is a pool of characters which don’t belong to particular players. Instead, each player chooses a different character each game. You could even take it a step further and have some extra characters, so that if you’ve got, say, five players you have seven characters and thus there’s a bit more choice.

Pros
It strikes me that this could be great for groups which have trouble with consistent turn outs. Bob’s not here this week? No biggie, Dan’ll play the cleric. If you go with the extra-characters-in-a-pool idea, this could also be a great way to gracefully “absorb” temporary additions, such as potential new players or friends visiting from out of town.

You also only have to worry about one character per player (or a bit more if you’ve got a pool), which is always nice.

Cons
This could make it difficult for players to become attached to characters and, by extension, the game itself. It also might end up a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it removes a bit of the social obligation to show up when you know the party won’t be completely screwed without you there.

See that gorgeous, hierarchical menu? How much time do you think I spent in building and organizing it? What if I told you none. No time whatsoever. That menu is generated automatically, and it updates whenever you add new stuff. It’s the magic of TagglyTagging!

MPTW is a flavor of TiddlyWiki, which are kind of like midget wikis on crack. A TiddlyWiki is entirely contained in a single HTML file and thus is great for keeping notes and such on a flashdrive or what have you, but it also means you can upload them to literally any webhost. Since it’s all done in HTML and Javascript, you don’t need anything fancy to run it. Actually updating it online can be a bit sticky, depending on your route, but let’s take this one step at a time.

Getting your MPTW

First, let’s get you started. You have three options here, assuming you want to display your MPTW online.

• The easiest thing to do is to go to Tiddlyspot and sign up for a free hosted one. Make sure you choose MPTW when you make it. You’ll be given an address along the lines of “name.tiddlyspot.com” from which you can update the page, and that’s also the address you give to people to view it.
  Pros
  • Easy, free and seamless to use
  • Update anywhere

  Cons

  • Can only use Tiddlyspot to host it.
  • Server can be slow sometimes.
• The next easiest thing to do is to just use the MPTW as normal and upload the HTML file to your webhost of choice. This isn’t quite as seamless as the above option, since you need to manually upload the file whenever you want to put up the latest version.
  Pros
  • Free
  • Works with any host

  Cons

  • Slightly less straightforward in day-to-day use
  • Worse chance of forgetting to update the live page, of uploading an outdated version, etc
• Finally, if you’ve got access to a host with PHP, you can set it up to upload to your own server. The initial setup takes a tiny bit of technical know-how, but once you’ve got it running it’s just as seamless as on Tiddlyspot and you’ve got it on your own server, which is always nice. If you’re interested in going this route, there’s an awesome tutorial at Tiddlywiki.org on getting UploadPlugin running on your MPTW and your server.
  Pros
  • You have complete control
  • Address is whatever you want it to be– you could even have www.mycampaign.com if you were so inclined.

  Cons

  • Requires a host with PHP.
  • Some technical knowledge required to get it running.

Please note that for the last two, you’ll need to download an empty MPTW. To download it, just open that page and save it to your local hard drive wherever you choose. Important note: Make sure you save as HTML only, not complete webpage.

By the way, you don’t have to call it “empty.html.” You can name it whatever you want, the only important thing is that it ends in .html.

And, of course, you could always just forego the online stuff altogether and just use a local copy. Particularly handy for playing around with things or for keeping personal notes.

Diving into the wonderful world of TiddlyWikis

So now we’ve got an empty MPTW. Kind of intimidating, eh, like staring at a test that’s just been laid out in front of you.

Well, what’s the first you do on a test? Write your name! Not strictly necessary, but whatever name you put in here will be recorded whenever you make changes to tiddlers. I like actually having my name there, instead of “YourName” appearing everywhere.

Now that we’ve provided our name, how about providing the MPTW with one as well? Clicking the “SiteTitle” link will open the SiteTitle tiddler, which is a special, magical tiddler. Well, not magical, but special nonetheless. As the name implies, this is where you put your MPTW’s name!

Now, just double click on that tiddler and it will change into an edit box. This works for all tiddlers, by the way.

So now it’s pretty straight-forward. Just type in a name, hover your mouse near the top of the tiddler and click done. Couldn’t be simpl–baWHA?!?

ZOMG THEY’RE HAX0RING ME! No, no, calm down. This is normal. See, JavaScript is a pretty powerful language, but traditionally it’s limited by the fact that it can only run in your browser. The TiddlyWiki uses some dark mojo to allow it to save itself, however, and this box is just warning you that it’s trying to write to your disk which is something you usually do not want JavaScript to be able to do.

So to recap, in general, be very, very worried about that message. Never take it lightly. In this case, just trust Ol’ Uncle Asmor when he says it’s safe.

(p.s. If you don’t see this security warning, that’s fine too. This will only appear if you’re editing it on your local hard drive).

So where were we? Oh, right, after you accept that message, the site’s renamed!

Now we’re done with this tiddler. Whenever you hover the mouse near the top of a tiddler, a menu will appear. Do that now and click ‘Close’ to close this tiddler.

Now go ahead and do the same thing with SiteSubtitle. You can always just make it blank, too.

Now we get to the good stuff. Go ahead and open DefaultTiddlers. This is a list of tiddlers that will be opened when someone comes to our MPTW. Usually I like to have one “home” tiddler that’s open by default, but you can have as many as you want or even none.

For now, just go ahead and edit the DefaultTiddlers so that it says [[Home]].

The double set of square brackets mean that this word should be treated as a link to a tiddler. You can also make tiddlers by CombiningWordsLikeThis. Personally, I find that really annoying, and I like the flexibility that the bracket syntax gives, such as allowing spaces in tiddlers.

You’ll notice that after you save this tiddler, the link to “Home” is italicized instead of bold. This is a visual cue that you’ve specified a tiddler which doesn’t exist yet. This is great for two reasons.

First, it makes it really convenient to do things freeform– say you’re typing out a description of some mountains, and you realize you should add in something about your Granite Dwarves. Just write something like “The Granite Mountains are also the home of the [[Granite Dwarves]].” Then when you save it, you can click that link to open a new tiddler called Granite Dwarves and start right where you left off.

Second, and equally important, it helps you avoid typos and maintain consistency. Say later on you’re working on the Pine Elves and you write something like, “The Pine Elves have an eternal enmity with the [[Granite Dwarfs]].” When you save that, it’s going to be italicized because that tiddler doesn’t exist yet. You do a double-take and realize that you used a different form of plural than you’d been using, go back and edit it, and everyone’s happy! YAY!

Let’s go ahead and edit that home tiddler so we’ve got something there.

Now’s a great time to save and try this out. If you’re editing this on your hard drive, it’s probably been saving automatically after you edit each tiddler. If you’re doing it online, it hasn’t saved anything yet. Regardless, now’s a great time to learn how to save.

Near the top on the right side, you’ll see a menu. Click save changes if you’re editing it on your hard drive; if you’re using TiddlySpot.org, click “Save to Web” (it might ask you to enter your password if you haven’t already). If you did this on your own site, follow the same steps as when you uploaded your MPTW before.

Go ahead and reload (F5) your MPTW to see how the default tiddlers work. If everything went according to plan, Home should be the only tiddler you see.

Let’s get some actual content in there. Hover your mouse near the top of the Home tiddler and click “new here.” This will create a new tiddler which is tagged as “Home.”

What I like to do is have a few top-level organizational tiddlers with little to no content, which only serve to provide a structure to the MPTW. Some common ones I’ll have include

• Campaign Journals
• PCs
• NPCs
• Races
• Geography

I’m going to call this new tiddler “NPCs” and leave it completely blank for now.

Now I’ll go ahead and add a couple more. I can always add others later.

Now here’s where some of the beauty of the TiddlyWiki really shines through… It’s infinitely expandable, and you can expand wherever you want as the mood suits you. Perfect for world building! At the moment, I feel like adding some info about the Granite Mountains and the Pine Forest, so I’ll open the Geography tiddler and add those two new tiddlers there.

Starting to get a bit cluttered, so hover near the top of the Home tiddler and choose “close others” to close all tiddlers except the Home tiddler.

Now it’s time for some magic! When you hover over the Home tiddler, next to “Tagged as ‘Home’” you should see a menu appear. The menu has six options.

• Title: This is selected by default and should have an up-arrow, meaning that the tiddlers are sorted by name in ascending order.
• Modified & Created: These two work just like title, allowing you to sort the tiddlers by when they were last modified or originally created, respectively.
• Group: This one actually changes every time you click it. It cycles through the various ways the tiddlers are displayed. Note that if you’ve been playing with your MPTW, this may say something different. That’s fine.
• Excerpts: Like Group above, this one cycles through a few different options. It changes how much of each of those tiddlers is displayed. By default, it just shows their titles, but you can go so far as including the entire tiddler!
• Cols: This is one you’re going to have to tweak a bit when you add new stuff. Every time you click it, it adds a column to the displayed tiddlers until it reaches a limit and goes back to one column. Basically, just keep pressing it until you find something you’re happy with.

For now, just click the ‘Group’ option until you get a sitemap. It should look something like this:

I’m going to go ahead and click cols a couple times to get the different tiddlers in their own columns, too.

By the way, don’t forget to save often. Don’t trust auto-saves or let them make you lazy!

Let’s say you’ve been working on this MPTW for a long time. You know you’ve had lots of ideas for tiddlers, which you threw in but haven’t gotten around to fleshing out, but you can’t remember what they were. Now, you could painstakingly trawl through dozens or hundreds of tiddlers trying to find those elusive and exciting italicized links, or you could let the MPTW do the work for you.

On the sidebar, there’s a big tabbed list of tiddlers. By default, it has “Timeline” open, which shows all the tiddlers by the date they were last modified. Click the “More” tab, and then click “Miss.”

This is a list of tiddlers which have been referred to somewhere, but haven’t been defined yet. You’ll notice that there’s a lot of garbage in there from various things. You can either ignore them, or even open them and save them as blank just to get them out of the list. I like to keep this list tidy, as it serves as both a to do list and also gives me ideas for what to write about when I’m stumped.

But for now, pretend all that garbage isn’t there. We notice there are two things listed which we referred to before– the Granite Dwarves and the Pine Elves. I’ll click the Granite Dwarves and start editing them.

Now, notice the tags below. Since I didn’t click “New Here” from another tiddler, I had to enter the tags manually. Tags are separated by spaces. For Races, I just entered “Races.” But since there’s a space in “Granite Mountains,” I needed to include the double square brackets.

I’ll go ahead and save that, and let’s see what’s happened to the Home tiddler.

Look at that, it added them under both Races and under Granite Mountains, even though Granite Mountains is itself a child tiddler.

Now, this might seem a bit redundant in this very anemic example, but I hope you can imagine how helpful this is in a more heavily-populated MPTW. Should you look for King Thatherton under NPCs or under the Kingdom of Thatherton? If he were only under one or the other, you might waste time searching, but this way you’re guaranteed to find him quickly and easily.

Let’s add an NPC. I’m going to open the Granite Dwarves, click new here, and make a new dwarf NPC.

Notice two things here. First, since I clicked New Here under Granite Dwarves, I needed to manually add the NPCs tag.

Second, you’ll see that I wrote //for a dwarf//. The double-slashes indicate that what’s inside of them should be italicized, like so:

Here’s some handy tips for marking up text in your MPTW:

• Bold: Double-apostrophes. ”This text would be bolded.”
• Italics: Double-slashes. //This text would be italicized.//
• Headers: Prepend the text with an exclamation point, e.g. !History
• Tables: Use pipes (that’s the | character you get by holding shift and pressing backslash) to separate each cell of the table, and put each row of the table on its own line. You can also make table headers by using exclamation points. Example:
  

  |!Table heading 1|!Table heading 2|
  |Contents of row 2, cell 1|Contents of row 2, cell 2|

Here’s a much fuller primer on TiddlyWiki Markup.

Well, there’s just one last thing to go over. I meant to go over it much sooner, but got a little caught up… Such is the danger of the TiddlyWiki!

Under your site’s title, you’ll see a link to the GettingStarted tiddler. Remember him? He was your guide in this scary new world of TiddlyWikis, and then after you got what you needed you just cast him aside like a weighted companion cube into an incinerator. But the GettingStarted tiddler isn’t quite done… The memory of him remains.

Click it again, and we can rid ourselves of his humble, helpful memory for good!

Now click on MainMenu. This tiddler is a lot like DefaultTiddlers; you put a list of tiddlers here. Rather than these being opened automatically, though, this is a list of tiddlers which will be displayed at the top underneath the MPTW’s name.

Go ahead and erase GettingStarted. Now he’s gone for good! In his place, put [[Home]], and optionally you can include other tiddlers as well. I frequently put all my “top-level” tiddlers which are tagged as Home in there as well, since they’re the things I usually want to be able to access quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Well, I hope you’ve found this helpful. I find the MPTW to be absolutely indispensible in world building, personally. You know how you can be reading Wikipedia and just get lost in references? Well, working on a MPTW is kind of like doing that in reverse. You write one thing which spawns ideas for two more tiddlers, each of which spawn ideas for two more tiddlers, and before you know you need to be up for work in an hour and a half.

Happy tiddling!

What’s a DM to do? As always, we take out the one tool every DM should know how to use, more useful than duct tape, a dremel, a swiss army knife and a leatherman combined: theft.

In this case, we’re stealing from video games. A common staple in video games is the large, multi-part boss fight that changes periodically throughout.

Let me give you an example. I’m coming up to the climactic ending of my campaign. The big bad in question is actually rather small; a halfling-sized warforged named Judgment who is (quite successfully) summoning an entity from the far realms to devour the world.

Now, there are three obvious ways to turn him into the big bad.

1. 1. Make him a solo lurker and hope I can craft the terrain such that it’s an interesting fight. Not bloody likely.
2. 2. Turn him into a hulking monstrosity “because of the far realms taint.” Not terribly desirable, since it radically changes the concept of the character.
3. 3. Make him an elite and surround him with a a more standard encounter. Yawn.

No, no, no. That just won’t do. You see, it’s important to me that the PCs get to fight Judgment as… Judgment. Without getting into detail, suffice to say that a couple of the PCs have a specific and personal (to the players even more so than the characters) vendetta against Judgment as he is.

I also want to make sure that the fight is different and interesting. And so I brainstormed, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

The fight starts off fairly normal. Judgment is just a plain old lurker, not even elite, with a couple warforged and illithids and maybe an umberhulk. When Judgment is destroyed, he shatters into dozens of shards. Hooray, they got to kill the real Judgment!

After the last of the enemies are defeated, however, and before the PCs can take a rest, the shards begin to regenerate into a small army of Judgments. In this form, Judgment is represented as a couple dozen minions, with the nasty ability that every round any one of the minions can deliver a very powerful attack.

Finally, after they defeat the split Judgment, all the pieces coalesce back together into a more abstract, crystalline form. This is Judgment’s final form, and his most difficult. He is now an elite controller who radically alters the way the battles go, drastically reducing healing, making PCs attack each other, and only being hit by rolling under his defense.

I hope this post has inspired you. Provided below are Judgment’s stats in each form.

Actually, as I write this addendum (which technically isn’t an addendum since as far as you’re concerned this all went live at the same time), I’ve just finished this fight. It worked out really well, minus some design issues with the last form of Judgment. The PCs were actually rolling too reliably and having a hard time missing him, and on top of that the basic attack thing wasn’t doing much damage. Turned it into a bit of a slog, so after a few rounds I decided to just end it there.

Other than that, though, I think the multi-part boss idea worked beautifully.

So the next time you’re just sitting around or bored, try this. Pick a class. Now come up with three different backgrounds for or examples of that class. You don’t need to restrict yourself to the exotic classes either; as generic as a fighter is, it can serve as a great jumping off point for defining a mercenary troupe, a military, or a nomadic desert tribe known for wielding their signature khopeshes.

That’s totally irrelevant to this post, but I think it’s a neat idea. The real point is to introduce another of MURPG’s awesome mechanics: lines of experience.

The idea is this: after each session, each character gets a couple lines of experience. Lines of experience might be things like:

Fought Namor underwater
Hijacked a sentinel

etc.

In other words, they’re one-line descriptions of things you did that adventure, and they serve three purposes. First, as the name suggests, they are your experience points. Get enough lines of experience and you advance your character. Second, they serve as a little campaign journal and help remind the players about all the cool things they’ve done. And third, and perhaps most innovative in my mind, they give you little bonuses later in the game.

For example, if you’re fighting some sharks, you might point out that time you fought Namor underwater, and how that experience would be really helpful here. If he agrees, the GM might give you an extra stone during the battle.

Now here’s the really cool thing: this advancement scheme can be ported to pretty much any system with little if any adaptation. It’s also really easy to customize the advancement rate. If you want to give people a line of experience for every encounter, average four encounters per session, and want people to level up every three or four sessions, then a level costs 12-15 lines of experience.

1. Come up with an idea. This is probably the broadest and least helpful part. Sorry! A skill challenge can really be almost anything short of combat, and it can take place over the course of days or weeks or it might be something the PCs need to deal with in the middle of a raging combat.
2. Figure out the limits. A skill challenge will have limits to the number of checks that can be made. These limits should flow naturally from the idea. Some examples might be…
   1. Time limit: Some vents must be disabled before knockout gas fills the room. A stuck portcullis needs to be closed before the marauding orcs reach it. Time-limited skill challenges are excellent opportunities for getting the whole group involved, since more people making checks means more checks get made in the limit amount of time available. Thus, when designing a time-limited skill challenge, try to throw in opportunities for a diverse set of skills.
   2. Failure limit: Maybe they only have three Magic Orbs of Xinthos and each time the warlock fails an arcana check one of them shatters, or the prince will become infuriated and send them away after five failed diplomacy checks. A challenge limited by failures will probably only be attempted by the character with the best check in the relevant skills, and smart players will make judicious use of the aid another action. If you want to encourage multiple characters to contribute to the challenge, make skills limited so that they can only add one or two successes. It might also be a good idea to make the DCs a little harder and encourage PCs to use aid another if they’re not already.
   3. Skill check limit: The PCs are trying to influence the ruling council, and get one skill check for each member. This approach works best for a challenge with levels of success and failure (see below). It also has many of the same features as a challenge with a limit on the number of failures, so all of that advice applies here as well.
   4. No limit: No limit? How can we do that! Like I said in the first rule of failure: failure is not possible if the PCs can keep trying until they succeed. Well, I also said there was some subtlety there, dammit. This works fine is there’s an open-ended penalty for each failure, such as being delayed a day.
3. Figure out the consequences. This is the most critical part. Decide what happens if the PCs succeed at every check, and what happens if they fail at every check. Depending on the circumstances, you might have a situation best served by a simple binary fail/succeed paradigm, in which case you’re done, or from there you might be able to branch out into degrees of success.
   1. Fail/succeed: The simplest option. Either the PCs fail or succeed, black and white.
   2. Levels of success/failure: Depending on how many successes or failures they get, different things happen. If they’re interrogating a prisoner, for example, each success might correspond to a different piece of information. When researching a demonic entity, each failure could mean being set back another day.
4. Choose skills. Some skills will follow easily from your idea, but don’t just take the low-hanging fruit. Look for opportunities to inject other skills in there, too, particularly skills not often used often. It’s also not as simple as just making a list. You should decide what happens with each skill, and any limits you might place on them. Here are some ideas to spice up your skills:
   1. Unlocked skills: A skill is not unlocked until some task has been fulfilled (frequently, making a particular skill check). For example, an arcana check may reveal that the runes are not magical, but they are of some historical significance, opening the way for history checks. You can, of course, come up with other ways for skills to be unlocked, such as killing a monster, failing a number of skill checks, or after a certain amount of time passes. The DC for an unlocked skill is frequently easier than other skill checks in the challenge.
   2. Give bonuses: One skill check might give bonuses to later skill checks. You might even have skills which don’t contribute directly to the challenge at hand, but do give significant bonuses to make the challenge easier overall.
   3. Allow extra failures: In a challenge limited by failures, this can give the PCs some breathing room.
   4. Add time: Similarly, in a challenge limited by time, this can also give the PCs some options if things are looking bleak.
   5. Limited successes: Sometimes, it makes sense that a skill can only get you so far into completing a challenge. It’s also a great way to help mitigate the problem of the group’s skill monkey treating the skill challenge as a solo affair.

So, do you have any tips for designing skill challenges?

Ultimately, it was just too ambitious. You can’t hope to make a framework that will cover all non-combat situations equally well.

That said, if we distill skill challenges to the most basic essence, it’s still a good idea. And that most basic essence is this: Make something dependent on several skill checks instead of just one.

Now, that said, there are three rules that I’ll go out on a limb and say do apply to every skill challenge.

1. There must be the possibility of failure. There’s some subtlety here, though. For example, failure is not possible if the PCs can keep trying until they succeed.
2. There must be a consequence for failure. In the most abstract terms, this means that the PCs are tangibly better off if they’d made every roll than if they’d lost every roll. This doesn’t necessarily mean something bad has to happen if they fail, though. For example, it might be that rather than something bad happening, something good doesn’t. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
3. Failure must be an option. Just generally good advice. If you ever find yourself planning something that the PCs simply can not afford to fail at, then you’ve failed at planning.

If there’s no possibility of failure, there’s no reason to roll the dice. If there’s no consequence for failure, there’s no reason to have the skill challenge in the first place. If failure isn’t an option, then you’re setting yourself up for having to choose between fudging things and railroading the PCs into what you need to happen or completely ruining your game.