Skill checks

A prepped skill check is the thing you were going to improvise badly at 11pm: the skill, the number, and — the part that actually matters — what happens on a success and what happens on a failure, written before anyone rolls.

Skill checks are content blocks. Attach one to an entity, drop one onto a Scene Canvas, or keep a library of them in the world compendium.

Creating a check

Open Skill Checks in the world sidebar, or add a skill-check block from an entity or a scene.
Pick a check type from the category grid.
Set the difficulty.
Write the success and failure text.
Add GM notes for anything the table shouldn't read.

Check types

Nine categories, each pre-filling a sensible default skill for your system:

Type	For
🔓 Lock Picking	Bypassing a lock, latch, or mechanical security device
🥷 Stealth	Moving, hiding, or acting without being noticed
🏕️ Survival	Navigating, tracking, foraging, or enduring the wilds
💬 Social	Persuading, deceiving, intimidating, or reading a person
🧩 Puzzle	Solving a riddle, cipher, or mechanical contraption
👁️ Perception	Spotting, hearing, or sensing something hidden
💪 Athletics	Climbing, jumping, swimming, or forcing something open
📖 Knowledge	Recalling lore, arcana, history, or specialised expertise
⭐ Custom	A blank check for anything else

Difficulty by system

System	What you set
D&D 5e / D&D 2024	A skill and a DC
Daggerheart	An Experience and a Difficulty
Everything else	A tier — Easy, Medium, Hard, or Extreme

The card shows a compact badge either way — "Sleight of Hand · DC 15", "Navigation · Difficulty 12", "Stealth · Hard".

💡Tip

Write failure text that moves the scene, not text that stops it. "The lock holds" ends the beat; "The lock holds, and the guard's footsteps stop outside the door" starts the next one.

Generating a check with AI 👑 Runekeeper

Describe the situation in a sentence and get a draft back: title, skill, target number, and both outcomes, in your world's system. Edit it before saving — it's a starting point, not an oracle. Costs Runes; see Runes and AI art.

Resolving at the table

Skill checks resolve GM-side on the GM Screen. Open the check when the moment arrives, and the difficulty and both outcomes are in front of you — you're reading a prepared consequence rather than inventing one under pressure.

Mark the outcome as a success or a failure and it's recorded against the session. Rolling through the dice roller resolves the check for you.

Feeding a clock

When a check fails and there's a tension clock in scope, you're offered the chance to advance one. It's an offer, not a rule — dismiss it and nothing happens.

If you take it, the clock records that it was ticked by that check rather than by hand, so when the alarm finally goes off you can see exactly which failures got it there.

Troubleshooting

A check shows the wrong skill for my system. Category defaults are per-system. Change the skill on the check itself — the default is only a starting value.

The difficulty field looks different from a colleague's. D&D and Daggerheart get bespoke fields; every other system uses the four-tier shape. Both are the same feature.

No clock offer appeared after a failure. There's no clock in scope for the current scene or campaign. Create one and the offer appears on the next failed check.

Generated text doesn't fit the scene. Give the generator more context in the description. One clause about the location and the stakes changes the draft substantially.