It’s the year 2025, and everybody is obsessed with this ttrpg called Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Can’t get enough of it. There’s no shortage of games that cite 4e as inspiration for their own mechanics, and many of them came out this year!

In this blog post, I want to talk about one 4e mechanic in particular: the Skill Challenge. We’ll look at what it was in 4e, and then we’ll look at how games like Draw Steel, Cosmere RPG, Lancer, and Daggerheart used and improved upon the framework.

First, a few disclaimers:

• I haven’t played 4th Edition. Or Lancer. I have very little experience with Daggerheart, some experience with the Cosmere RPG, and a lot of experience with Draw Steel. Take what I’ve got to say with a grain of salt, or two!
• I’m going to be referring to it as “4e” from now on. Calling it 4th Edition or D&D 4th Edition inflates my word count, which is a cardinal sin.

Skill Challenges: The Basics

What is a skill challenge? What design problem is it trying to solve?

The focus of 4e is primarily on its tactical combat. But adventuring is more than just fighting—it’s escaping a burning building, chasing an adversary through the streets, negotiating with someone who is powerful enough to have you beheaded in front of their throne. The tactical combat rules of 4e are (predictably) very bad at modeling all of these types of scenes. I guess you could roll a Diplomacy skill check to determine if the duke will entertain your request or execute you for even asking. But leaving a full scene, and one so consequential, to one single roll—typically a mechanic that is mapped to one single action—feels anticlimactic and kind of unfair. It also leaves this pivotal moment up to just one player, which feels antithetical to a cooperative game.

In comes the Skill Challenge: a way to help facilitate non-combat scenes with high stakes. Instead of one skill check, the players can make many. And different checks, all in service of the same goal.

The one-sentence pitch from the 4e Dungeon Master’s Guide itself:

“To deal with a skill challenge, the player characters make skill checks to accumulate a number of successful skill uses before they rack up too many failures and end the encounter.” — 4e DMG Chapter 5: Noncombat Encounters

From this, my definition of a skill challenge, or skill challenge-derived mechanic, is a framework for non-combat scenes that require multiple skill check successes to accomplish some kind of goal. Keep this definition in mind when you start disagreeing with me over what counts as a skill challenge-derived mechanic.

The parts of an original skill challenge are:

• Description: What are the PCs doing, and how long of in-game time would it take the PCs to do it
• Setup: The goal you’re trying to accomplish.
• Level: A number that determines the DCs for the skill checks
• Complexity: A number that determines how many successes and failures determine the outcome of the challenge.
• Primary Skills: A list of applicable skills and what happens when you succeed or fail on them.
• Secondary Skills: A list of applicable skills with harder DCs
• Success Outcome: What happens if the players succeed
• Failure Outcome: What happens if the players fail

Using Skills

This is the meat of a skill challenge – what skills are players supposed to use and how do you communicate that to them? How do you adjudicate skill selection?

When building a skill challenge, a Dungeon Master comes up with a number of Primary Skills that are appropriate for the challenge. If you’re scaling a mountain, you might choose Athletics, Endurance, and Nature. When you bring the skill challenge to the table, you’re supposed to tell the players what skills you have in mind. If the players have a different skill in mind, however (”Can I use Dungeoneering? To forage for food on the mountain?”) they can still make the check. But they’ll use a higher DC for it.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide is also loose about when or how to reveal the list of skills to players. Under “Running a Skill Challenge,” it says you “describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results.” A few paragraphs down, under “Informing the Players,” the book says “You can’t start a skill challenge until the PCs know their role in it, and that means giving them a couple skills to start with.” So, you give them a few, explicitly, when you start the challenge, and allow them to discover the rest through play.

In the play example, which outlines a party negotiating with a duke, the DM unlocks a new Primary Skill (History) as a reward for succeeding on an earlier Diplomacy check:

Some published adventures were completely prescriptive about what types of skills to use and how to use them. In Revenge of the Giants, some skill challenges asked for group skill checks of a specific skill each round. It looks like the players didn’t get a choice.

There are also samples in the DMG that impose special restrictions or rules. The “Lost in the Wilderness” skill challenge requires at least two characters in the party make Endurance checks each round to “resist the debilitating effects of wandering in the wilderness.”

What is interesting to me about this skill prescriptivism—the idea that there are Primary Skills the DM comes up with, and any other skills the players might want to use are still good, but harder to use (or just ignored in the Giants example above)—runs counter to what I thought the Skill Challenge was trying to do. I thought the point of a Skill Challenge was to get players to think creatively about their own skills and how to use them. The DMG even encourages the DM to “reward creativity” in players who choose unique skills, but the way they work in play is anything but rewarding. Why is the DC harder when I try my cool idea than it is when I do what the DM tells me? Who’s piloting this character?

I think my misconception comes from how I first learned about Skill Challenges, and if you have mainly been a 5e player, you might be in the same boat. My first introduction to the idea was Matt Colville’s Skill Challenges video, where he specifically calls out getting the players to think creatively about their skills as the design intent behind his version of skill challenges.¹

The Back-And Forth

One thing this prescriptivist style does well, I think, is nail the back and forth of the scene. In other words, I know exactly what to do if a player character succeeds or fails on a check. The world state changes, and it might even give players a clue as to what they can try next. When you try to leap over a rushing river and fail, you should fall in and get wet. When you persuade a stranger to open up to you and succeed, you should learn new information.

Check out this example from Scott F. Gray’s “Heathen” in Dungeon Magazine Issue 155. In this Skill Challenge, the PCs have to earn the trust of a group of cultists by pretending to be part of the group:

That’s really comprehensive! Dare I say… too comprehensive?

I could implement any one of these Skill Challenge examples I found in Twine with basically no extra design on my part². Not that that’s a bad thing, but it does demonstrate that skill challenges are pretty much a dialogue tree—rigid, machine-like, and restrictive for people who like to play to find out.

Critical Reception

The Alexandrian, writing in 2008, was not a fan of the Skill Challenge. He talked a lot about 4e’s “Dissociated Mechanics,” or mechanics he felt were far too abstracted from the story beats they were trying to model. He describes a few situations in which the mechanics of meeting a threshold and ending the scene might not work based on what the last skill check was:

• What if the players fail their final check using a skill that is more cerebral (like an Insight or Knowledge skill)? How does that translate into a failure in the story?
• What if the players ONLY use cerebral skills to do something like infiltrating a castle where something must be done

I think there are ways to square both of these examples with the story you’d want to tell, but they do illustrate an interesting point.

Alphastream writes that what was in the DMG wasn’t clear enough, and errata was released right away. For one, we no longer had to do skill checks in an initiative order. They also changed the bit I mentioned hating above about player-suggested skills. Now, instead of automatically assigning those skills a hard DC, the DMG suggests you assign them the “appropriate DC,” which is “usually hard or medium.”

Also, the failure thresholds changed pretty dramatically:

Adventure writers experimented with different formats and structures (which we kinda looked at), but even now people argue over whether they were good or bad. As Sly Flourish writes, “While some of us had great success with [skill challenges], others had trouble fitting the rigid mechanics into a flowing narrative.”

Even well after 4e was laid to rest and 5e became king of the fantasy role playing world, 4e Enjoyers were still trying to figure out how to take this good idea, shake it loose of its baggage, and make it work. Many tried to make it work within their own games. How’d they do? Let’s find out.

But first, another disclaimer:

• TERMINOLOGY: Everyone has a different noun for the same thing. A skill check is an ability check is a power roll is an ability test is a blah blah blah. I’m going to try to use the nouns defined by the game, but don’t get mad if I mix them up! There’s too many nouns goddamn!

Lancer

Like I said before, I’ve never played Lancer³. But when people mention 4e-inspired games, this is one of the first that comes up. Lancer has something called a skill challenge, but it feels more like a group check. Everyone rolls one skill check, and if there are more successes than failures, the group check is a success. If there are more failures than successes, it fails. If the number is equal, it’s down to a coin flip (literally). Everyone gets to make a “relevant” skill check, implying that the players get a choice in it, and not everybody has to do the same one.

For larger scenes, they have something called an “extended challenge.”

And that’s it! It’s basically the example we saw before, from Revenge of the Giants, but with more player input. This is the simplest and cleanest way I’ve ever seen to represent a skill challenge mechanic. If you’re confident in your ability to improvise a back-and-forth in a scene like this, I think this is perfectly fine! Not to sound like Goldilocks, but I think this is a little too sparse for me.

Draw Steel

Draw Steel wears its 4e inspiration on its sleeve. It’s not a surprise that the MCDM team took a stab at updating the skill challenge for the modern era. The first thing they did was separate social scenes into their own thing. Whereas 4e said you negotiate with a duke in a skill challenge, Draw Steel gives you Negotiations.

For everything else, there’s the Montage Test.

A Montage Test has these parts:

• Description — What is this test about?
• Setting the Scene — Read-aloud text that introduces challenges to your players
• Difficulty — The number of successes and failures required, based on how many players are in your group.
• Challenges — A list of obstacles and suggested ways for how to get by them
• Outcomes — What happens if you achieve total success, partial success, or total failure.

Draw Steel shifts the entire perspective of a skill challenge between the Setting the Scene and the Challenges sections in a way that totally fixes the prescriptivist problem.

Focus on the Challenge

In the 4e Skills sections, designers mapped a skill to an action. The implication was a player would select a skill, and then perform the action the designer or DM expected them to want to do for the skill. Sometimes, the design would make an assumption about how the player would want to use that skill in a situation that turned out to be incorrect, causing friction in play.

In Draw Steel, the designers give you read-aloud text that details the obstacles of the scene. It then lists those obstacles out for the Director explicitly, along with what type of skills most pertain to clearing that obstacle. The player’s job is to hear that read-aloud text, identify the obstacles, and decide to perform an action to clear an obstacle.

By focusing on the obstacles (or “challenges” as they’re called in the text), Draw Steel lets players be creative with their solutions and skills—which is what Draw Steel’s Design Director believed was the strength of the skill challenge in the first place!⁴

However, the way the Challenges section is written still feels prescriptive to me, and it is one of the hardest parts of writing a montage test for publication (something I have done more than pretty much anybody in the world besides two other people at the time of me writing this)

Here’s an excerpt from a montage test for The Fall of Blackbottom, where you have to sneak onto a ship and steal an item. There’s a contingent of the City Watch on the docks, and there’s a drunken sailor on the ship.

The general setup is this:

Verb the Obstacle: Describing the obstacle. Suggested Characteristics: One or two. Suggested Skills: Two or three.

The problem with both of these obstacles (the Dock’s Watch and the Drunken Sailor) is that you can handle them in many ways. I wrote Avoid the Dock’s Watch, but some of the characteristics and skills feel more in line with lying to them. You could sneak past them, or you could go up with fake papers and say, “Hi, that’s my ship. Nothing to see here!” Or you could create a diversion and let the other players go on board. There really isn’t a good verb descriptive enough to encompass all of these methods. Avoid is a really bad choice. Who the hell wrote this?⁵

Which is why for the Drunken Sailor, I chose “Handle.” Why is Might in there? Maybe you want to knock him out (there’s no “knock him out” skill in Draw Steel). You could also empathize with him to, again, distract him. Or sneak past him. But you gotta deal with him somehow.

I hate the verb. Maybe this is a nitpick, but it does feel prescriptive and unnecessary. I think Draw Steel did something good with Montage Tests by framing them as “Here’s the problems — YOU figure it out. We have some suggestions.” The “verb the noun” framing contradicts all that, and really messes me up when I’m trying to write a montage test.

Directors will just ignore it anyway! These are all suggestions! The only action that matters is the one your player pitches and you approve. And that’s fine. This problem isn’t that big of a deal. My next one is.

Where is the back and forth?

Montage tests are literally meant to evoke a montage sequence in a movie. The passage of time gets a little more wibbly-wobbly in a montage than it is normally. While it generally trends toward linearity, with the characters working towards a goal and incrementally achieving success, sometimes these events can happen out of order. The events or obstacles certainly don’t have to depend on each other.

In 4e, there were dependencies. Successes on one skill unlocked the ability to use another. Failures created new challenges. The world was reacting to what the players were doing in a skill challenge. In Draw Steel, there’s no guidance at all. In fact, the game seems more concerned with getting you through the montage as quickly as possible:

The default suggestion for consequence is gaining Malice—a resource that Directors can only use in combat to create additional effects.

The world feels like it is a little dead during montage tests sometimes, or in power save mode, waiting to come back online once we’ve ended the second round and tell us how the world reacts to our number of successes vs failures — as detailed in the Outcomes section.

There are a few examples in the book that make use of the “Optional Twist” feature that do make the occasional test feel more responsive to players. In the “Fight Fire” example, a new complication arises at the end of the first round to put more strain on the players. A character who incurs a consequence on certain challenges takes damage ⁶from the fire. But not enough of the montage tests have these special rules and options!⁷

I’m not saying this is bad design—it’s a design choice the team made that I disagree with. My read (and maybe I’m wrong!) is that they wanted these to feel amorphous, that these acts didn’t have much dependency on each other, and to make things feel like they were moving along quickly. Having the world react slows down the pace of the montage, and then you can’t fit it within the length of a banger needle drop.

BUT, there are games with consequence mechanics that do use those mechanics to their advantage in their skill challenge system:

Cosmere RPG

The Cosmere RPG plays like a d20 fantasy system with extra steps, and I really like some of those extra steps. But it fits right in with all the games here, and that includes their stab at inheriting the Skill Challenge crown with the Endeavor.

Like Draw Steel, Plotweaver has its own set of rules for conversations, aptly named “Conversations.” For everything else, there’s the Endeavor, which is what we’ll focus on in this section. In an Endeavor, players take turns making skill checks to advance their progress toward a specific goal. Players can act once per round, and the GM logs their successes and failures.

The parts of an Endeavor are:

• Setup — Describes the objectives and circumstances surrounding the objective, including potential read-aloud text
• Potential Approaches — A list of potential ways one can solve the problem.
• Special Rules — A special circumstance that is true for just this Endeavor.
• Opportunities and Complications — A table listing new bespoke ways to use the Plot Die mechanic.
• Resolving the Endeavor — A section that describes the Endeavor Threshold (how many successes or failures needed to end the endeavor), and what happens if the players achieve either success or failure.

Approaches

An Endeavor recognizes that there’s more than one way to solve a problem, and it lists those things up front. This example from the Stonewalkers Adventure presents a goal (pulling a wagon free from Sanderson-branded mud) and then presents potential directions the players can take. They can brute force it, rescue the chull (a crablike beast of burden), or try to engineer something to pull the wagon out.

The “Resolving the Endeavor” section says that the players need 3 successes before 3 failures, but you might notice in this image that these “potential approaches” only supply two skill tests. I guess you could make the argument that you could try multiple approaches. Flip the Chull over (DC 14 Athletics), remove the wine barrels (DC 13 Athletics), and then you and the chull can now pull the lighter wagon out of the muck together (DC 18 Athletics).

This approach gives a lot of power and responsibility to the players and the GM to weave a narrative around the approaches and how they fit together. To be honest, I think this example might not have been the best one to show, because truly I don’t think this dilemma (pulling a wagon out of the mud) is suited for the types of scenes that a “skill challenge-like” is supposed to model. You could do this with one Athletics check, especially since most of the suggested approaches require Athletics anyway. And to the game’s credit, it often tells you that if you as the GM think the players have already solved the problem before meeting the success threshold, you can end the endeavor early.

I wanted to show off another example with a little more to it, but this one was the most straightforward endeavor in the Stonewalkers adventure. Almost every other endeavor is a major variation on the theme—in one, you have a set of challenges you have to overcome in order, like the 4e example above. Another uses the pursuit rules instead of the endeavor threshold. A third has the players assisting an NPC in one of two hyperspecific ways, which feels more railroady than the initial pitch of the endeavor framework. Each one of them feels like a completely different set of rules. Which, I think, is the point.

A Framework, Not a System

In the Stormlight Handbook, the Endeavors chapter “offers specific guidance for four types of endeavor: Discovery, Exploration, Mission, and Pursuit.” Of these four, only two actually use the “Endeavor Threshold” rule. Discovery endeavors have a characters following a flowchart of clues, and they succeed when they get to the final clue. Pursuit endeavors have a “distance gap” between the chasing party and the chased party, and the endeavor ends when that number hits 0 (the chaser catches up) or the “Escape Distance” (the chased escapes)⁸. Each type comes with its own special rule.

The book also states that the “possibilities are endless” when it comes to Endeavors in the system. The only true commonality between them, as far as I can see, is it’s any non-combat scene (or collection of scenes) where the PCs are acting in rounds towards a clearly-defined objective.

I actually really love this, and I think it means we’ll see how Brotherwise stretches the framework they’ve set in the future. Truly I think the best thing they can do is keep writing more endeavors, to give GMs and players alike a more complete picture of what is really possible with them.

My Favorite Part

One of the major mechanics in the Cosmere RPG is the Plot die, a special d6 that the GM can ask a player to roll when the stakes are especially high. You roll a plot die with your d20, and that determines whether you get an Opportunity (extra bonus for you!) or Complication (extra consequence to stir the pot!) along with this roll.

You can spend the Opportunity on something useful from an existing list — recovering a resource immediately, granting advantage on an ally’s next test, changing your hit into a critical. Your GM chooses a Complication from another existing list — grant disadvantage on a future test, expending a resource, or by “Influencing the Narrative” in some way.

Then at the end of both sections it says: “Some rules provide additional ways you/the GM can spend a(n) Opportunity/Complication.” The Endeavor is one of those rules. In published adventures, each endeavor has bespoke opportunities and complications for when the story needs to take a dramatic turn.

In our wagon example from above, a PC can get stuck in the mud as a complication, or learn that this was no accident on an opportunity (cluing you in to the possibility this may be an ambush). A complication on a stealth mission might add a new enemy to the map to deal with. An opportunity on an endeavor to scale a mountain might show you a new footpath and unlock the ability to make a different kind of skill test, in the same way that success unlocks more opportunities in the original skill challenge. Even by adding one example of how things can get better and how they can get worse makes Endeavors feel way, way more responsive than Draw Steel’s Montage tests.

But if we want to talk about responsivity, there’s one last system we need to look at.

Daggerheart

I’m going to lose a lot of you on this one. I get it. Technically, Daggerheart doesn’t have skill challenges. And I don’t think they’re trying to have them. But, I also believe they have the potential to be the best ones. Let’s talk about Environments.

An Environment in Daggerheart is a lot like an Adversary—it’s a stat block that gives the GM moves they can make when the players generate enough fear. Environments and Adversaries are meant to be used together, but you can use an Environment even when there’s no enemies to fight. And Environments are named after the thing you will most likely want to do in them: Explorations, Socials, Traversals, and Events. You’ll probably want to traverse through a Traversal Environment, or speak to NPCs during a Social Environment. But the book is explicit about you being able to mix and match: “Don’t be afraid to plan a social encounter in a dangerous Traversal environment, or a duel to the death in a Social environment.” And an Event Environment is an unusual thing indeed—it’s not about the location, but about the thing that is happening there.

The major parts of an Environment are:

• Description — A one-sentence description
• Impulses — The “tactics” of an environment. The book says “places don’t have volition, but the people and forces that comprise an environment gravitate toward certain goals and actions.”
• Difficulty & Potential Adversaries — A difficulty score and list of Adversaries (monsters) you might find in that environment
• Features — Potential GM moves you can use when running this Environment.

Now you might say, “Leon, there’s nothing here about an obstacle or what the players are supposed to be doing here.” And I’d say, yeah! You’re right. And we’ll get to that. But stay with me here. Let’s look at some examples.

Is this a Challenge or Not?

Let’s look at a Tier 2 Event Environment: Cult Ritual

So here’s what I like about this: there is a LOT here for GMs to help keep a scene moving. Impulses help keep GMs on track with the scene in just a few words. The GM moves are also really useful, because they give GMs things they can do both proactively and as a reaction to player interference.

Daggerheart’s Fear mechanic is also the unspoken strength of this system, because it helps GMs know when the moment is right to take the spotlight back and actually enact one of these things. The system itself has rules for how reactive a GM should be, and that’s true throughout every type of scene, not just combat.

Even though it never says this outright, I’m going to make a strong argument that this Environment is meant to be used in a scene where the players are trying to stop the cult ritual. This is because the abilities are based on empowering “adversaries” to “fight off interlopers,” and there’s rules for what happens if the PCs try to stop the cultists.

And how do you accomplish that goal? By trying things and making Action Rolls to see if they work! This even has a countdown (6) to tell you how long the PCs have until they fail their goal. Why, if you didn’t have Adversaries in here, this could be a skill challenge. ⁹Traversal stat blocks, like the Raging River, have a progress countdown — you have to get 4 successes to win. But you can’t exactly fail—you just keep getting knocked down by consequences (but you get up again).

My main issue with these stat blocks is that for however many tools they give the GM in terms of moves and coaching, there’s nothing to help set the scene and clue the players into what they’re supposed to do. I remember playing through an Exploration stat block and not having enough information about the forest in front of me to make a decision about what to do next besides making knowledge rolls and waiting for the countdown to reach 0. You could say that setting the scene is the GM’s responsibility, especially in an improv-heavy game like Daggerheart, but for all the work the game does to coach GMs on continuing a scene, I think it’s fair to expect them to help with starting it, too.

I also think that these Environment stat blocks suffer from being wishy-washy about what they’re meant to be. They can be the main piece of a scene, or a backdrop for your scene, or you could just choose to never use them (the Daggerheart Core Rulebook’s words, not mine). Objectives and success/failure thresholds are hidden in the Features section, to further drive home that, well, this might be something your players want to do when they encounter it, but if not it’s cool, no worries.

I think people are waking up to Environments having serious potential for the skill challenge crown, though, and I think we’re going to see them trend that way in the near future. Carlos Cisco’s Pistolheart supplement has two “set pieces,” which are environment stat blocks with clear objectives, success conditions, and consequences for failure. I think this is because Carlos is a designer on the core rules of both Daggerheart and Draw Steel, and he sees what I am now starting to see: we should all be putting a little chocolate in our peanut butter.

Final Thoughts

I wrote a lot about how I feel about these systems. If you didn’t want to read all that, or you did and forgot it all (there was a lot!) here’s a chart for you.

System	Name	Pro	Con
D&D 4e	Skill Challenge	Got us all thinking about this kind of thing in the first place; Thorough. Maybe TOO thorough.	Way too prescriptive about what players can and can’t do
Draw Steel	Montage Test	Great framework for when the players need to do different things that all loosely connect to the same goal; names obstacles and lets players be creative about how to solve them.	Not as responsive; very prescriptive in the text about how to clear obstacles that makes them difficult to write for (but doesn’t really change how you run them)
Cosmere RPG	Endeavor	Great integration of the plot die helps keep the scene moving; bare bones framework makes it easy to add or remove rules as needed for the scene.	“It can be anything” attitude of the design makes it hard for designers to visualize, and we need more examples!
Daggerheart	Environments	The most responsive by far; gives GMs a lot of tools to keep the scene moving.	Not up front about objectives or success/failure thresholds; provides no guidance for setting the scene or empowering players besides the GM.

Which one is the best? None, they all have some weak points. Which one is the worst? None! They’re all really good.

I think Draw Steel’s montage test is the one that does the best at fulfilling what it was meant to be. But being a rather fast-paced cinematic movie-montage style scene narrows that scope quite a bit, especially when compared to Cosmere’s “the possibilities are endless” attitude.

And, when I want to run a skill challenge-like, I want the scene to develop as the players put their hands on it. I want to help it unfold as they tug at the strings. Nothing and no one is stopping me from just doing that at my table—PBTA and FITD GMs have been doing it for years—but that kind of reactive improv is hard if you’re not used to it. Skill Challenges are and always have been an exercise in giving GMs the tools to do it better, or at the very least fake it. And I don’t feel that Montage Tests do this.

When I run Draw Steel (which, to be honest, is the system out of the four of these I am most likely to be running), I probably will want to incorporate some of the features from Cosmere and Daggerheart. The challenge there is that Cosmere and Daggerheart both lean on their full system to make their “skill challenge-likes” more reactive (the plot die and fear/spotlighting respectively). If I were to make montage tests more reactive, I’d have to lean on something similar for Draw Steel. Who knows? Maybe we’ll start seeing Malice ¹⁰in montage tests moving forward.

When it comes to writing one as opposed to reading and running one, I like writing Endeavors from the Cosmere RPG the best. They feel the most comprehensive, and I can really get all the ideas I have for a scene on the page. But is reading all that truly fun or easy for a GM? With opportunities and complications and a few potential special rules, the size of one can balloon easily, and you lose the simplicity that the structured Montage Test and the Environment Stat Block have built in.

The Future Is Bright

Way back when we talked about 4e, I mentioned how even years after the original skill challenge rules came out, people were still tweaking them and making them their own. Everyone seemed to have a different way of running skill challenges at their table, and even published adventures were breaking new ground monthly.

Well, get ready, because history rhymes. Draw Steel, Cosmere, and Daggerheart are all going to go through that same exact thing:

• We’re already seeing it with Daggerheart/Pistolheart.
• At the time of writing, MCDM is running a crowdfunding campaign for their third core book, Encounters, which will include a ton of new montage tests.
• I also have it on good authority that MCDM is working on some experimental montage test stuff for their Patreon.
• The Cosmere RPG is pumping out more adventure content, including Mistborn Legacy, which I worked on, and we’re going to see a lot more of Endeavors.

A year from now, we’ll see these frameworks totally transformed, each one of them carrying a piece of the 4e legacy with them while touching the boundaries of something completely unrecognizable. And everyone will just run them how they’ve always ran them, based on how their GM did it, because they never read the core book and aren’t going to start now.

1. Hold this thread in your mind; we’ll come back to it later ↩︎
2. Note for Game Writers and Future Me: potential portfolio exercise? ↩︎
3. Mutuals fix this problem I dare you ↩︎
4. see?! ↩︎
5. me 🙂 ↩︎
6. They technically lose a recovery, but I’m abstracting it to damage for people who don’t know the Draw Steel rules enough. It is effectively the same thing ↩︎
7. Mine don’t! I’m part of the problem. ↩︎
8. This is a gross oversimplification of these two types of endeavors, and I highly recommend reading this chapter, even if you’re not interested in the Cosmere. I think investigative webs in particular are really, really cool ↩︎
9. Another portfolio piece. Rewrite this as a Skill Challenge, a Montage Test, and an Endeavor ↩︎
10. Draw Steel’s combat-only GM resource that works a little like Fear if you squint ↩︎