Part 2 of The Martian UI work by the ever incredible Territory Studio, (ui reel)
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Part 1 of The Martian UI work by the ever incredible Territory Studio, (ui reel)
Puzzles as Skill Challenges
Here’s a link to the PDF on Patreon, which has a bonus Dragonchess puzzle plus relevant DCs for all puzzles!
If you have trouble making puzzles for your games or if your players don’t particularly enjoy solving puzzles, make puzzles that are skill challenges instead! This way, gameplay doesn’t slow to a grinding halt and players don’t get confused. It will also take a ton less planning on the GM’s part. You can make more convoluted puzzles that you normally couldn’t do in a tabletop game without a ton of props, and you can do puzzles that would normally be impossible for a theater-of-the-mind group using this method.
How it Works
A skill challenge is essentially combat, but for a noncombat encounter. Players roll skill checks to attempt to hack away at the “hit points” of the encounter in the form of successful checks against a set target of total successes. If the party reaches three failures, however, the skill challenge fails.
Since it’s a noncombat encounter, failure can instead mean a partial success or a less favorable result.
I can go into more detail, but this article at Critical-Hits.com does such a fantastic job at explaining skill challenges (a 4e concept) for 5e that I will recommend reading that instead:
https://critical-hits.com/blog/2016/08/16/skill-challenges-in-5th-edition-dd/
Check out the example puzzles below!
macanleister