Skill Challenges from the Tomb of Horrors…
We’re down to playing once every couple of weeks in our group, but the Tomb of Horrors is so darned satisfying I hardly even notice. To be frank, I have shied away from skill challenges in my game up to this point because I haven’t felt too inspired to create them on my own.
Luckily, there were a few great ones available in the first section of the Tomb of Horrors to try. Despite my group’s penchant toward not getting started early, I found that the addition of the skill challenges really helped to make them feel accomplished.
My only complaint is one of my own creation… if I would have read up on the challenges ahead of time I would have been able to come up with some additional flavor text so it wasn’t so repetitious and didn’t devolve into blatent statements of success or failure. Despite the repetition, I found them fun to run and the players found the challenges at the very least interesting.
Maybe a bit of additional preparation next time will make them even better!
How structured were the skill challenges? Did they instruct you tell the players “This is a skill challenge, you may use skills x y and z”, or were you secretly tracking successes and failures?
Ok, so I was on the fence with this adventure, but now I’m definitely buying it!
As a DM, they were a mixed bag for me in Tomb for sure. The “series of doors” one was really repetitive, while the elemental vent one was everything I want to see in a skill challenge (even if my PCs did survive it, curses!)