Challenges & Work

Not everything can be solved with a sword. Sometimes you have to dig a tunnel under a bank vault, stop a renegade ritual, do days or weeks of research to find some long-forgotten information, or craft a masterpiece. While many non-combat things can be overcome with simple skill checks, some require more work.

“Challenges”, as they are called, have a certain amount of “work” that must be done. It’s best to think of work as hit points for a challenge. To do work on a challenge you make a relevant skill check and the result of that skill check is how much work you get done on it. (If “work” is analogous to “hit points”, the skill check’s result is analogous to damage.) Challenges also have a DC to them that the player must beat to do work on a challenge. When enough skill checks have been made, the challenge has been overcome!

Failing a skill check during a challenge has one of 2 outcomes that depends on the kind of challenge:

• Failing the Challenge: The challenge is totally failed and you must either start from scratch again if you are able to restart at all.
• Recovering Work: The challenge recovers twice the DC of the challenge in work (this is essentially “work you must do over”). Some challenges of this sort have a certain number of failures before you just fail the challenge.