Exploration & Social Skill Challenge Rules for ALL TTRPGs

so you want to level up the exploration and social pillars of your game with some actual game systems that support it I got you covered you might have heard of skill challenges but what are exploration and social skill challenges this is not your standard get a certain amount of successes before three failures type of situation this is a new rule where everyone gets one check one chance to make an impact on what's about to happen and see what you can do so I'm here to deliver you a system for the neglected pillars of the game social and exploration to be able to have you deliver cinematic moments for travel resting dungeon exploration social encounters talking to NPCs convincing others debating there's just so many ways to use these but in this video I'm going to talk about overall ways to use them when you would actually use them how they work rules wise how to run them off and then some examples also if you're not familiar you can absolutely use this system in a game like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder or really lots of tabletop roleplay games it is a game system with dice and skill checks Etc but this is a core system in my new tabletop roleplay game dc20 and along with a lot of improvements the combat with action economies and systems and character creation and all these other things yes that's right dc20 is massively supporting the exploration and social pillars of the game dc20 is an alpha right now so a lot of the rules have been focusing on combat because that is a huge very important pillar to make sure you nail correctly and the most difficult pillar to balance and stuff which is why I released it first but now this is a little sneak peek into what's to come and speaking of what's to come is the Kickstarter Kickstarter launches June fourth y'all and if any of this stuff in this video interests you check out the video in description for all more videos on dc20 if if you're if you can't really wait for the kickstarter there is access to the alpha for just five bucks at this point now you can pick up the alpha for yourself get a little access to see what's going on and then the kickstarter on June 4th the bigger and better the kickstarter does the bigger and better the dc20 and this community and all the content is going to flow out for so the link for the kickstarter and everything else I said is always down in the description so what are these things skill challenges in general I see as another mode of the game you have the standard mode where you just kind of make checks and players say they do stuff and they role play and they talk and they say they do things and you might make them make checks at certain points where you don't know if they're going to be able to succeed at the thing they said that they did cool and then there's combat you're in combat there's turns there's a turn order all that kind of stuff right this I see as a third version of the game a third mode of the game where there is a moment there's a challenge in front of you whether it be social combat exploration there's something in front of you that you want to codify in a gamified mechanic to add some Stakes add some levels of of rewards setbacks other problems that could arise based on how well those roles go in this isolated moment so this is not certain rounds every round represents a check this is not a set amount of time this is a moment how big and long this moment is depends on what you want to use it for it could be something really quick for a short period of time of meeting an NPC for the first time trying to make a good impression work last hours as an entire party delves through a dungeon trying to find all the nooks and crannies making skill checks where they creatively try and come up with ways in which they could use their skills to explore this dungeon better but the big picture is everyone gets one roll they're going to creatively try and think about look at their character sheet look at their skills what are they good at what would their character do in the situation maybe it's more of a roleplay Choice instead of a what's my highest dice roll choice either way players are all going to make one check against a certain DC to try and beat it and if they beat it they get success points and the more they collect the more success points the better things go more rewards you get the less setbacks you get all that stuff so now when would you use these I kind of started alluding to it in different ways if there's a moment that you actually want to set up on a pedestal a little bit and separate it from just the normal run-of-the-mill I'm making checks I'm doing things I'm saying I do stuff I make checks cool a quick little example would be a rickety Bridge maybe there's a rickety bridge and you want to run that off normal to where like players describe what they do and at certain moments you stop and they make a check and see what happens you could absolutely run it off live like in live mode where everybody's kind of live doing whatever they're wanting sometimes players make more checks than others which is another benefit of a skill challenge system where all players make one check instead of one player doing a whole bunch of checks sometimes and other ones just kind of sit back so for this rickety Bridge you could run it off normal and just have all the checks be made sure or you could turn this rickety Bridge traveling across from one point to the other into a skill challenge an exploration skill challenge where everyone has the problem in front of them there's a rickety Bridge with some ropes sprayed over here there's some wood planks that are about to crack and break it's really windy and it's starting to rain what would you do to help this situation what type of check would you make to be able to help did you have a certain spell ooh make a spell check do you have a trade skill in basket weaving and you're really good at tying ropes and Knots oo what a great time so now you set up this moment of this bridge as this Challenge and players creatively talk back and forth if I do this and oh if you do that maybe you could stand on my shoulders and do this and then I will jump off and do that and then either way all the players are going to think about what that one check is they're going to make but I don't want to get into the rules of all this stuff and how that will work out I'll come back to that bridge analogy here in a second but other ways you could use this for exploration you can do some traveling through unknown lands if they're going through a desert or traveling through a forest trying to find something a great thing if you're trying to find an object you're exploring through an area how do I know if we find it or not well you need a certain amount of success points to find it and maybe if the challenge goes poorly and you don't get enough success points and not enough people roll high enough maybe you stumble into a combat oh no you found this monster lizard or maybe you get there to the site of the thing you were looking for but it's already taken other examples could be resting where you're setting up camp and you're you're in a dangerous area a tundra a super cold is about to get really cold how how well can you prepare the campsite exploration skill challenge I'm going toy prepare this and I want to try and tie this down and we're trying oh let's try and get some Supply keep us warm or one of my more recent favorite examples is exploring through entire dungeon we've all had some moments where you want to explore through a dungeon and then you have to go through the the moments where you're like okay do you want to go left or right down this hallway and it's these two non-descript cave hallways and you're like uh I'm going to go left I guess you can actually use exploration skill challenges to travel through the entire dungeon I'll use the example at the end for social examples you can see how well an NPC receives the party how impressed are they by a certain display of skills that they show they can go have to make them have to jump through hoops and perform some sort of initiation to be able to get into the group just recently I ran a social skill challenge for my group had to try and get their way into a Thieves Guild didn't go so well but the scaffolding and game system I set up for them to have the skill challenge really made it clear of how well they were doing it set some Stakes up gave them a bar to reach of trying to get a certain amount of success points and see if they could roll high enough to get it and they didn't but the story keeps moving forward and we'll talk about that in a second you can even run entire courtroom scenes or debates with a king trying to win favor or trying to convince somebody of something all right but now how they work the big picture is every PC is going to make one single check there's no initiative here so it doesn't have to be a certain one in the table or certain order there is a problem you set in front of them whatever it may be and they all get to talk and think about what they would do in that situation sometimes that certain checks might be made before others depending on how the sequences of a story are example just comes to mind where I ran an exploration social skill challenge almost allinone where the party was outside of a town they had to sneak into the town and rescue a hostage what do you do now you do have to give more information than just that as a game master that's comes up in the in the next step here but that is the problem that's the challenge now who's going to make what checks and what's going to happen who goes first it doesn't matter it depends on when you make your dice roll depends on where you say you do what in the story so if you want to say something about oh I want to do this thing before we go in okay cool then you'll roll your dice right now or oh let's say once we're inside and see how this goes I'm going to do this here or if this happens I'm going to do this you tell this possible outcome of what could happen if everything goes well but then that's where the fun part comes in when it doesn't but the big picture is everybody makes that one check and they're making that check against the skill challenge DC whatever that number is and you're trying to meet or beat that DC if you hit that DC you get one success Point awesome but here's the cool part and this is a standard uh protocol in dc20 across the entire game system every buy five you get another success point so let's say the DC was 15 all right and if you got a 15 cool you get one success Point 16 17 18 19 at 20 who you rolled super high added all this numbers and you got a 20 something or what 21 what Ah that's two success points because you beat the DC by five and it happens every five and if you get a natural 20 that adds plus one as a bonus on top of everything but now for the failures what happens on a failure you get a setback now this setback is going to be wildly dependent upon what it is you're doing are you traveling across a rope Bridge are you breaking into try and get a hostage out are you traveling through a forest what are you doing and that's the great part for game Masters is we can really set the stakes of how dangerous is this how threatening how risky is this thing you can have each and every failure have some negative penal penalty for each person that fails so if you fail this happens if you fail this happens or could be applied to the overall group where each failure makes the NPC more upset with you or each failure takes you more and more time to try and get to your destination and then of course there's the overall failures and the overall amount of success points that you get and that's the big picture here so let's say there's a party of four and you have the DC set at 15 four players DC 15 and they each start making rolls somebody ah somebody fails they don't get it oh no that's no success points somebody succeeds awesome yes cool one success Point somebody rolls out of their mind super crazy 20-some oh my God two more success points the group now has three with one final player ready to roll they make their check let's say they exactly hit it for the sake of Simplicity and they get those four success points they needed four success points they got four success points they succeed Bing and if they had gotten three success points they fail a right that's as simple as you can make it and if you want to have just one threshold one bar for them to try and hit of getting this amount of success points you win you lose and have some sort of benefits some sort of uh setbacks or whatever happen cool or you can make it as complex as you want and be able to be like okay now if you get three that's it but at two it's not as bad and they still like you but they still uh and at one oh it's only one failure you're just a little bit behind and at the same time which is my favorite part of this is you can have higher and higher and higher rewards I've set up up skill challenges to where man all right they need four skill chall they need four skill points but if they get eight what crazy stuff would happen if they get eight you know what if they get eight I'm going to give them another little companion that's going to help them travel through the forest they're going to get this little like weird dog Beast that helps them guide them through the forest that'll be fun and then turns out the skill challenge that go crazy somebody gets a Nat 20 somebody uses inspiration dice cu the skill challenge just means so much to them and they get they get this wild number and they hit eight and I'm like oh my gosh this is what you get but I'll talk more about rewards and setbacks at the end so now the biggest picture I can paint for you and this might be the most important thing I say in this video to get you really to understand this is you set a problem in front of of them they think about how they can do it they can talk to each other at the table they collaborate be like I might do this I might do that oh if you're going to do that I can do this cool and at the same time some players might be like oh we're going to do this thing and you might have an idea that's way off this way y'all can still do it because the beautiful part is you're all just trying to make a role that's high enough to beat the DC and then you get to tell the story of what that success looks like so if you're trying to break into you're trying to do a break in an entering break into somewhere and steal an object right and these three players have this crazy awesome idea and they work together and they have all these checks that intertwine and work off each other cool and this one player is like I'm going to try and go around the back and they just do something completely different roll the dice because this is the potential story before any rolls are made it's just all hypotheticals of what potentially might happen and then you roll the dice and they get to help tell the story and then you get to tell the story of what actually happens does that person going around the back do they get caught and they have to run around the alarm sounds and that's wow oh everything starts going crazy or do they sneak around the back and actually turns out that's actually was the best way because this way oh there's guard dogs and you can start adding to the story and you can also collaboratively do this from game master and players coming together to tell the story you already know where the dice rolls are you already know how many success points they got and you can go through that whole process that's the beautiful part is as you go through one check at a time and you start to see and build up and set that tension building up towards how many success points they need all that kind of stuff you now see are we going to about to are we about to succeed or are we about to fail you can start telling that story and after you have all the dice and all the numbers you know the end result are but now in the very fun moment maybe the most fun moment about this whole thing is you get to tell a story of what that result looks like what's the actual story that happened okay now how you actually run these things some little tips for running them off and examples at the end also sorry this video might be a little bit longer than usual but I'm trying to be as useful and helpful as possible so if you do like this video like it comment below all that kind of stuff it really does help the video uh especially these dc20 videos help spread them out there get them to more people and while you're at let them know about that Kickstarter coming up okay tips on running skill challenge this is for also combat skill challenges along with exploration social you have to set the stage you have to give them things to interact with you can't just say all right you want to break in and get the gym from the safe all right what do y'all do wait what you need to give them things to interact with give them pieces to give them uh uh things to let them start chewing on how can I interact with this this challenge in front of me going across that rickety Bridge give them pieces about the the Rope on the far left is untied uh the entire section of the middle on the left is is loose and hanging off to the side even simple things like it's raining add some elements to where maybe the Druid wants to try and cast some sort of situation to lighten the rain oh great that would help the situation and also be cinematic and cool for a thing that they do to help the team maybe there's certain tall trees they could try and think about falling or vines or give them stuff to interact with IA had an exploration across a desert sort of environment where they're traveling across the desert you can't just say that you got to give them some stuff so I describe at some point in long this travel there's these massive sand scorpions that come out of the ground they start snipping and snapping at you guys like again that's oh is this combat are we rolling combat against these scorp no I am providing things in different flavor bits and moments for them to to to get across so I described in this journey across this desert there are going to be certain types of hurdles or challenges to be able to interact with if you want to give them choices get let this story breathe so there's a there's a sand wall there's this sand tornadoes that kind of swirl around through this one section you go to another section there's sand scorpions that jump out of the sand you see way off in the distance there's an oasis is it an oasis or is it a mirage you don't know and then finally there's one big massive Hill but you know on the other side of it is the sanctuary of the city damn look at that that's a whole bunch of stuff that four players or however many players you have could interact with maybe that maybe the Barbarian really wants to go mess up them scorpions maybe the ranger wants to help travel up those sand dunes and mcgyver some sort of way to kind of put on people's feet to be able to help them walk through the sand better maybe the spellcaster wants to help cast do some sort of wind spell to push back the sand tornadoes to break them up to get let them be able to pass through what about the Mirage what about that Oasis over there these are all things to interact with and let them let see what players do I I'd be shocked maybe all of them interact with the Oasis and that's entirely what they do and then they they make all their checks towards that thing and we'll see what happens and then you tell that story and you can kind of handwave the parts of the wind storms it's Sandy and you just kind of Blaze through those sections cuz they're they're adventurers they're fine they would be able to fight off the Scorpions you don't have to run that off as a combat you could just say you trudge your way through the sandstorm as it stands beating your face getting your eyes you fight off all the Scorpions but you see that Oasis and then you start telling the story of what they wanted to interact with and a lot of times usually players tend to kind of spread themselves out like okay I want to mess with this and you mess with that I'll mess with it and then cool you tell that story and you make the checks one at a time go and that's another thing for a tip here is when you ask each player to make the check in general how I run this is I get everyone to say what they're going to do no dice have been rolled yet everyone's just going to say what the what the potential plan is right of what they're going to do and then they have them lock in their number okay you're going to make this check okay cool let's lock that in what are you thinking okay cool you're going to make this kind of check lock that in all right all right everybody good okay let's see what happens and then I usually have them roll that out what makes sense in order of time like sequential timeline type things but then sometimes if there's one player that does something crazy and we don't we want to see what that is to the end I might let them save that to the end and I've also try doing it where everyone just makes their checks at the same time and they all have their numbers and then now everybody's sitting on their number knowing if they did high or low or not and everybody can kind of chitchat and oh man I I botch this one or oh yes I got it yeah and they don't know what this DC is cuz that's another tip here is I don't always tell them what that DC is let's say for example it was 14 if I if they get a 13 I'm like ah you just missed and it starts to be a description we're familiar with from Dungeons and Dragons where if a creature's Armor class is a certain number you start to describe and once they hit it players start to get a feel for like what that number is which also is kind of a way that I run off these skill challenge DCS but at the same time I've also just said it at the very beginning this is a dc14 skill challenge baby here we go and that might be a tactic I use if I want to set that bar of tension of like oh wow we've never done a DC 14 before wow and at the same time we also have how many success points you need how many success points do you need to be a success and the players also don't know what's those levels of success maybe maybe three is a success maybe two is a success what could we get at four or six seven oo so once you start using these systems you'll start to get familiar as a game master and your players will start to get familiar as well with how what the stakes are how many success we could have a low DC and a high number of success points needed or vice versa or keep it really simple or make it really hard but the default formulas that I have as my starting Baseline which I recommend for you to start off with with your starting Baseline of what would be a medium challenge is the following formula for the DC it's eight plus the player Prime modifier which in at level one is just three and the plus your combat Mastery combat Mastery in dc20 equals half your level so it's just one so a super simple out thegate level one skill challenge for dc20 would be a dc2 8 plus 3 + 1 12 so that's a nice DC okay cool medium DC 12 gotcha and then the number of success points needed would be the number of players at the table very simple number how many player characters you got four player characters that's four you got five it's five and now it sets the standard of if everyone rolls super average like a 50/50 shot like down the middle if everyone rolls normal everyone needs one success Point that's their normal Baseline and a final tip for game Masters before getting into examples is uh you can give Advantage out to these roles also these roles they these aren't like class features or I'm going to use uh I'm going to Rage or I'm going to use my Arcane sigils and all these other types of features this is a skill challenge this is not a combat we are not using certain features in spinning Mana you are describing whatever it is you want if you want to describe another thing I should also be clear on here is if you want to use magic and describe magic you don't spend Mana points if you want to use these cool whatever features you don't spend charges that this is all cinematic and this is not meant to do any of that now if you want to have this wear down resources a lot of times I do that in combat skill challenges where it costs a Mana or it cost health whenever you're certain if you fail and stuff like that I get into that in the other one as well and you can choose for this to wear down resources as well that's is another benefit another use of skill challenges now anyway as game Masters you can give out Advantage for Creative uses and ideas of like oh that is so cool wow yeah that absolutely makes sense and that's a really creative use of a class feature or a situational thing or you're using something I said from another session that you knew about this NPC and you're saying it here wow all right advantage on that check I even had this happen very recently in my last session where I ran off this exploration skill challenge of there was a creature this crazy weird Beast that was attacking a Farmland and taking some cattle and I they ran an exploration skill challenge to try and set up to try and find the creature hunt them down another use of exploration skill challenges and we're getting down to the wire we're having each person make a check and they were making checks across different things in different locations one was looking for the uh the den of the creature the other ones were kind of setting up some stuff at the actual Farm site and then one player we already there's only four players in the group we've already made two checks and we're getting down to the final descriptions and this player right here making their third check they they describe something that was so so cool so so outside the box I was like what if the thing they're doing what if I have this player who has this item that they picked up from this cave that they would be useful here what if they Ed that item and and they pour it over you know cow that is the bait that we're using I was like wow that is so cool how do we reward that I don't I didn't think it was good enough to just say okay you can make your check at Advantage which also in some ways wouldn't make sense because they were making some check and they came up with this cool idea for this other player who' already made their check to do something cool I was like you know what this is the this is my best on the Fly game master solution for this and I would recommend this for yall as well if players come up with some outside like oh my gosh wow I gave them another check I gave them a bonus entire check right now they could succeed or fail in the check which you know could be a wash but they could get one success point they could roll really high and get another one so I actually had that player that already rolled I brought them back into the mix I had them make another check thanks to this other player's creative idea they made another check they got one success Point ah cool yeah yeah yeah all right now let's keep going so these can be as fluid and flexible and locked in as open as creative and as high stakes and as low stakes fun as you want it to be and again I I got to stop and talk about this this is the entire Vibe goal and Direction and focus of dc20 is to provide you guys cool cinematic moments game systems dice mechanics to be able to set up your game and put it up on this pedestal to create these moments and these scenes that you can impact your players with setting the bar High making them go for it making them think creatively making them think together and that is the spirit of dc20 and all of its game systems so if again if this one thing interests you there is so much more about dc20 we're much less character creation and combat and all these other types of systems so really check it out talk with your friends share about it cuz it's it's about to get big all right now examples I really feel like examples help really solidify and clear up how these can actually be used and how you can start to think about using them in your games literally next session so my smallest example that I love doing in one shots at the very beginning of one shots I you I I notoriously love writing this in there is the parties together here we go and we are at the place that we just got our Quest from and the questgiver sends us to the equipment shopkeeper that's going to get us all loaded up with healing potions or gear and equipment and the map to go to our destination for this one shot this Quest that we're doing right so I send them over to the NPC and then I say we're going to start a social skill challenge we are going to try and see how good of an impression you leave on this person this person is designed to kind of evaluate you and kind of see what you're needing what you're missing uh and if they're not impressed they're going to be like get out of here and here's the map go uh but if you can impress them win them over win some favor make them like you uh speak their language and make them impressed or something maybe they give you a little bit more so now the type of NPC that you put in front of these players and maybe some of the backstory nuggets about information about what what this NPC's core motivations or goals are as far as if they like nice people or if they want to see you be tough really changes the skill challenge of where this could go cuz I've had a rough and tough show me how strong you are can you break that thing over there let's go I've also had a sweet little old woman that was oh darling come come come what do you need de so now the PCS get to think about how they want to engage with this NPC do they want to showcase their powers in some way do they want to create ly trying to get them a gift of some way one time I mentioned that the NPC was like lonely or something so the Druid went outside tried to find an animal and that's what their check was an animal check to go try and find some little Forest creature to bring back and give to them now funny story they ended up failing that check but we told the story and how we all decided collectively to tell that failure was they found a little squirrel and they brought the little squirrel over handed it to the old woman and it jumped on her face and started biting her there's your failure and also a flashback I just had to this at Gen Con was a group of like six players were all starting to describe what they were doing and they were trying to impress this person and in this case they were trying to earn the contract in the first place which is another important moment uh the the skill challenge the social skill challenge was they had to earn the contract full disclaimer at the end regardless regardless of how many failures and how many success points they had they were going to get the contract that's also part of this failing forward situation so the skill challenge set up to try and impress the person to earn this contract to go on this Quest that that wasn't the r oh if they don't get the success if they don't meet the threshold now they can't go on the quest no no no that's not it but we'll get into the rewards of that example here in a second so all these players were trying to impress this person I think how it went was there were six players so the first person succeeded and then we had a failure and a failure and a failure and it was looking pretty bad and then we had the last person succeed and then we're like wow okay uh y'all have two success points and you need six and I at that point fully pulled back the curtain I was like y'all need six success points so uh good luck La last person so the last person goes they were a barbarian and they wanted to smash a pillar and they wanted to just go to this pillar and just absolutely mess it up so in the middle of everybody saying all this stuff he just smashes the pillar he gets a natural 20 plus five from his Athletics gets it to a 25 he beat the DC twice over Beat It by 10 which means you get one success point he beat it by 10 which Beat It by Five Beat It by 10 and he critically hits giving him one player got four success points bringing that total to the six they needed and they succeeded huge moment we then got to re I just got chills reliving that moment we got to Revel in that moment and that Barbarian smashed the pillar the whole freaking things collaps everyone's Blown Away W take take the contract before you break something else here just take the map and get out of here here take these potions take this one too just go so their success in that moment gave them another Baseline of what the standard success was of an amount of healing potions equal to the number of group members you have right and so every success below that is minus one healing potion every success above that oh they could unlock a limited potion of invisibility extra rewards for another example in a bigger picture and I literally mean bigger picture I ran this in my campaign I'm running is they wanted to do a dungeon exploration they went down into this cave and this cave was filled with these like uh Gloom wasps this massive monstrous wasps with this Gloom honey and this sap and sticky things all over the cave different places in the cave that are described as large gaps that would be very difficult to jump across keep that in mind for a second huge walls lined with honey that' be difficult to climb sections of the cave that I started to describe and see where these players would interact with again I set the stage of what types of things they could interact with different bugs and wasp all over the place that walls jumps gaps sections of little pockets to be able to try and look and explore maybe they want to do investigation checks to kind of look and explore through some of these little empty pockets and nests so I set the stage to explore this dungeon with an exploration skill challenge I described the entire uh kind of layout of the dungeon just theater of the mindwise and then they all started to describe what they wanted to interact with now the setting was there was an encounter that they were going to encounter come across there was a group of NPC squatters that were already in this cave but how many success points they got determined how I described they found these people so if they succeeded and they absolutely like regular succeeded they would be able to explore all the things you explore here I would describe whatever they interacted with of course and then you stumble across you hear these NPC you hear some people in the other room and they would now have the jump on these people they'd hear they know this going on and I would be able to also as a game master plop them exactly where I wanted to in the story beat of where this cave is and you describe all this stuff you guys we also describe the party splitting apart one went this way some went that way which in general if you ran off the game normally you wouldn't be able to have those type of cinematic moments so if they got the exact amount of success points you hear the NPCs around the corner but if they got very very high which they did and they actually got seven success points oh my gosh I had seven successes as you find a magic item through the exploration of this cave uh and the person that did it was a monk character who wanted to jump across this Gap you jump cross the Gap and you land and you find like some Lo like some skeletons some bones and you find a necklace around one of the skeletons and you can pull it off it's stick it's sticky with honey all over it you pull it off this is a magic necklace so they actually got a magic item from an exploration skill challenge cuz they did so well another tip there for those dungeon Masters is yes you should have setbacks and it should matter for the you know they don't want to fail type situation good story moments keep the prop progressing Etc but you can also manage those failures to the point where you can be as punishing as you want it to be to keep the story moving but then also really get some of those rewards in there sometimes let them go crazy they found a m they lost their minds when they found a magic item wait what but now for this same cave dungeon exploration if they had failed if they failed the skill challenge they would have triggered a trap they would have triggered the Trap that this NPC group of squatters is set for them so they're exploring I would have described you know you go off this way you go off that way and then you all kind of converge back together and you're going through this doorway and and then I could run off a trap scene I could plop them I could as a game master and it's huge boom game Masters I can plop them down right where I need them to be for the sake of the story of whatever happens right and it's based on the checks and the dice that happened before and they failed the skill challenge so they are putting them down right in front of the Trap and then now they still have a chance to interact with the Trap see what's going on and all this stuff and if they fail if they had zero or like one success and absolutely botched it the Trap would trigger on them and something would happen and they have to go in there scrambling around there the Trap Triggers on the Honey's all over them bees start swarming in the NPC group attacks them let's get in combat another example I want to give cuz we talked about travel like traveling across Bridges or traveling across entire deserts or whatever you can also have some of the setbacks be losing rest points in D and D this is hit dice that you can L make people lose rest points are the dc20 equivalent and if you fail minus one rest point you are just really struggling to trudge through this desert you're getting exhausted ah you could give them a level of exhaustion as well you can apply that exhausted condition on them that would o ouch you know also in dc20 exhausting is not as wildly punishing in comparison so exhaustion or minus one press point is a nice little little Notch a little setback to that individual player struggling in that moment so sometimes I have individual failures be individual you know setbacks for that player or sometimes they have pack the entire group to where you're trying to get to this certain spot to get this certain item before this opposing group gets to it every failure is minus 30 minutes oh no we got to get there we got to go now you've taken travel across distances and turned it into something that has Stakes feels exciting all that stuff so there's the individual failures you got to think of about as far as what happens on when one player character fails also keep in mind there's a buy fives to failures too you could add if you wanted to you don't have to you can make failures as punishing or not as you want but failure could be one thing you lose one rest point but every five you lose another rest point if you get a natural one you lose another one or you could run a stealth mission to where y'all are trying to sneak into a place and you have the guards are looking around it's like a stealth Mission instead of a make a group stealth check and everybody just makes a generic group stealth check and that's it you could run a a secret stealth Mission and everyone has a exploration skill challenge to try and get into this spot are you detected do you see does anybody see you all that stuff and you could just simply say and this would set a huge amount of tension anyone gets a natural one immediately alerted baby okay okay let's go also as a side note something I am play testing right now is that on a natural one you actually take away a success point from the overall total cuz Hey natural 20s add one absolutely so natural one balance so that's for the individual failures of if you fail and on the successes if you succeed you get success points and that's already going to be inherently good for depending on what the overall outcome of well how many success points you get for whatever but you also could give individual rewards out too to that person in the skill challenge I just ran for my group about the there was that Beast that was hunting down the cattle and the farm every success point they got they could apply towards the thing they did so if they did when one of the players was hunting the beast at the spot and they set a trap for the Beast so they succeeded and their one success Point dealt damage to that creature earlier on so now the creat creature is wounded as it runs away to its layer and now when they actually engaged it in combat it was a little bit wounded and they actually dealt damage to it before the combat started cool use of a success Point towards what they said they did another player in the pre before that check happened maybe I should have said this once first is they wanted to walk around the town and ask about this creature what do they know about this creature this creature that's attacking it looks like this what can I know about it so they got a success point and I actually told them yes they got a success Point towards the overall success of things but their success point also gave them information information about this creature it runs really fast it's resistant to acid damage it has a CTIC spit in its mouth it can spray it out of people so now they have some information before they get into this combat so successes and failures can get individual Rewards or penalties to the players that make them and then there's the overall big picture of ah how many success points does the group need what happens if they hit that what happens if it's above what happens if it's below so then there's the overall thing which you can make it as simple as setting that one bar how many success points do they need the number of player characters I have cool maybe you want to add plus one as like a general rule as well to have it just be a little bit harder than usual whatever that bar is you just have to figure out what happens if they succeed what happens if they fail done if you want to add extra layers of like o if they really fail if they really succeed of course you can so I genuinely hope that this game system from dc20 uh can either be used and play in dc20 or you can use the inspiration of it for any tabletop roleplay game you're making or a game that you're making yourself at home and you're making your own rules up for speaks to me love it if you like this you want more you know where to find all the stuff you know the kickstarter's coming support for the kickstarter would mean a ton to me and this community there's a ton of people that getting behind dc20 and I am been blown away by it so honestly thank you all and as always stay creative think us at the Box peace

Channel: The Dungeon Coach

Views: 10,938

Keywords: Dungons and Dragons, D&D, dnd, dnd 5e, D&D 5e, dungeon master tips, Dungeon Masters Guide, dm tips, dm tip, D&D homebrew, dnd homebrew, dnd 5e homebrew, D&D 5e homebrew, The Dungeon Coach, dc20, dc20 rpg, dc20 Alpha, DC20 alpha 0.5, dc20 alpha 0.6, game master tips, gm tips, gm tip, DC20 homebrew, exploration skill challenges, social skill challenges, DC20 Skill challenge, DC20 Skill Challenges, skill challenges 5e, Skill challenges dc20, skill challenge dc20

Id: 36ZPmB79WZw

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024