Full Video Transcript

Hey friends, welcome to the table! I’m continuing my series of looking at how to get started with tabletop role-playing games. Today I want to talk about something that comes up in a lot of systems, and that’s the concept of a skill check.

Skill checks are essentially saying, hey, this thing is going to be hard to do. There’s going to be an element of luck involved. Let’s take your skill at this and a little bit of luck and see what happens. As an example, if I were to ask you to walk down a hall unobstructed, just a plain old hallway, you could do that right now. You would need no additional training or special adventure skills to be able to walk down a hall.

Now what if I were to tell you the floor has gone out in that hallway? It’s a massive hole with spikes on the bottom, and there’s a tiny little ledge to get around. Suddenly it’s a little tougher. This is where a skill check comes in. Your Dungeon Master is going to set how hard is this to do. Different systems do skill checks differently, but for this example, let’s talk about a simple d20 system, something like Dungeons and Dragons.

Let’s say the Dungeon Master picks a number like 14. They’re saying to get down that hallway on that tiny little ledge is going to need you to hit a 14 or higher. Okay, so doesn’t seem that bad. Your character is going to have a skill, a skill that will apply. Your Dungeon Master can help you and say, well, if you have athletics, you could try to jump along and grip onto things. Or you could use something like a kind of acrobatics to try to flip your way or balance your way along. Different characters might be stronger at different things, so you would find the skill that you think can help you beat that check. That skill is going to get added to your roll.

So let’s say I was gonna roll this die. And I take this. I rolled a two.

Yuck.

Now if my character has a +12, I’m fine. But if I’m just getting started, I probably don’t have that. So I have failed this check.

What that means is the Dungeon Master now has to decide, all right, if you don’t make that check, what happens next? And that’s where we get to see all the chaos that comes into these games. Is somebody going to throw me a rope? Is somebody going to swoop in and catch me before I fall? Am I falling to my death on the spikes? All of these things could happen.

And that’s where we get into the wonderful beauty of skill checks. You have encounters, you have risk, you have the excitement of what might happen. And you don’t have to necessarily have combat involved. So this roll adds a whole other part of the game where you get to really like have a random chance encounter and get to use your character’s abilities or have something cool happen.

For a skill check, what you’re gonna want to be doing is try to build up skills in different areas, learn what skills your character is good at, and when your Dungeon Master challenges you, be ready to know how you’re going to tackle that.

Remember folks, you’re always welcome at the table.