Lately, skill challenges seem to be all the rage in the world of 4e commentary and advice. Within the last week or so, the most recent D&D podcast focused on skill challenges, the Dungeon’s Master blog has begun a series on skill challenges, the Fair to Middling Game Master has told a Mediocre Tale about skill challenges, We Need the XP has waffled on skill challenges, UncleBear has written on skill challenges, and on it goes.

A couple of days ago, I picked up a copy of Adamant Entertainment’s latest installment in their Venture 4th series: By Skill Alone, which purports to give advice on building skill challenges as well as presenting actual “drag-and-drop” skill challenges. I’ve used quite a few of Adamant’s products for earlier d20-based systems (3.5e/OGL fantasy and d20 Modern, specifically) and had high hopes for this product … but those hopes were rudely dashed when I got to the second actual skill challenge.

The Good: The skill challenges presented run the full gamut of heroic through epic tier, and some of them offer interesting and inventive situations. Even the typical or predictable ones would save a harried DM time designing them for himself or herself. The supplement’s concluding section suggests new uses for old skills, some of which are worthwhile.

The Bad: Author David Caffee ignores the errata on skill challenges, even though they were among the first errata issued for 4e. Many of the skill challenges presented are predictable; some are almost boring, and others might as well be combat encounters instead of skill challenges. Some of the new uses for old skills make no sense or lack all verisimilitude (for example, one suggests that you can dig a five-foot-long tunnel with an Athletics check as a standard action, that is, within six seconds).

The Ugly: The pages lack numbers, and the writing exhibits noticeable grammatical errors. Artwork is scarce, stock, and cartoonish.

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I almost want to advise you simply to ignore this product, for one overwhelming reason: the author seems almost completely ignorant of the errata to the skill challenge complexity table. This hit me full force when I got to the second skill challenge, which was marked as “Complexity: 1 (requires 4 successes before 2 failures).” But that’s not right. Per the errata, a complexity 1 skill challenge requires four successes before three failures. Per the errata, all skill challenges require n successes before three failures. At first, I wanted to believe the typist had simply struck the wrong key—but all of the skill challenges (except, inexplicably, “High Crimes,” p. 6) are written with the failure threshold as 1/2 the success threshold, following the printed, pre-errata table in the 2008 Player’s Handbook.

Admittedly, this rules misstep so colored my perceptions that I found it hard to like anything else about the product. If you can’t use the product without rewriting the skill challenges presented, why spend $5.00 on a supplement full of skill challenges? If the author doesn’t even know the proper failure thresholds, what else might he have flubbed?

As it turned out, the rest of the content was not quite so bad, though I did find several of the skill challenges pretty bland. Curiously, the introduction billed skill challenges as a great way to engage non-combat encounters, but several of the challenges presented—Pit Fight, Tavern Brawl, and The Gauntlet, in particular—are just combat situations abstracted into skill challenges. But if you’re playing 4e, you’ve invested a lot in your character’s combat abilities. Why would a DM as you to set all that aside and resolve combat with Endurance checks instead? It’s also telling that failure for many of these skill challenges results in a combat encounter.

The Arcane Door and Puzzle Trap are just puzzles substituting PCs’ skill checks for players’ wits. I wouldn’t use the Arcane Door challenge as written, though its skill descriptions might give an enterprising DM good ideas for “get a clue” skill checks (as recommended in the DMG) to be used in conjunction with puzzles. I urge DMs not to just use these skill challenges as written, but to flesh them out with appropriate storyline. For example, instead of the standard Arcana result (“You attempt to decipher the runes inscribed on the floor tiles, realizing that their meaning gives you a clue to the appropriate pattern”), devise actual meanings that could suggest the proper alignment (“You decipher [some of] the runes on the floor tiles, realizing that each one names a common farm crop”) and allow the players themselves to take the next step (“We try to arrange the tiles in the order in which those crops are planted during a typical year”).

Even though I don’t personally drink alcohol, I did like the Under the Table challenge (p. 12), but does it really make sense for one drunkard who fails an Endurance check to cost each member of the party a healing surge? The Jailbreak challenge looked promising at first (and I love the show Prison Break), but on closer inspection I think it would take some work to smooth out the rough edges. I also rather liked the Shipwreck! challenge, since I am currently running a nautical campaign, but a skill challenge designed to avoid a shipwreck would have been even more useful.

I’m more likely to use the last few pages of the supplement, in which the author describes new uses for old skills, than any other part of the PDF. But even here, rules problems crop up. The very first entry recommends an “opposed check” of Acrobatics vs. Reflex—but by definition, an opposed check is check vs. check, and there’s no such thing as a “Reflex check.” The “dig” application of Athletics allows a character to dig a tunnel 5′ long as a standard action. Ridiculous! Even the fastest digger could only move a couple of shovefuls in six seconds.

The last two pages present three new rituals. The blurb for By Skill Alone mentions that the results of these rituals “are based on skill usage”—in other words, your Arcana, Nature, or Religion check affects the outcome, just as with many of the core rituals. The rituals presented here are neither particularly objectionable nor particularly exciting.

Being me, I can’t end this review without mentioning, once again, the need for third-party publishers to invest in quailty editing and proofreading services. This PDF exhibits quite a few problem sentences, at least two or three per page. I won’t list them all here, but I’ll offer this bit of advice to all prospective authors and publishers: your spell checker doesn’t always know whether you’ve used the right word. “Bloodthirsty,” for example, is properly one word, not two (as it appears on p. 9 of By Skill Alone). Even if your word processor or page layout program has a grammar checker, it won’t always catch erroneous phrases. You need a careful, skilled human editor to correct your use of “try and” to the proper “try to,” for example.

Overall, this is a very disappointing supplement. ★★