Reading through the comments, the main criticisms of skill checks seem to be:
- they’re too punishing (on average, the hero suffers)
- they’re too random (or swingy; the results can vary dramatically)
Both observations are, to a large extent, true. They’re deliberate design choices.
Before condemning the humble Ziggurat skill check, I’d encourage you to play a few quests. Make note of the moments when your hero feels unfairly treated by the dice, then consider how those moments fit into the adventure as a whole. There should also be times when fortune smiles on your hero and the odds suddenly swing the other way.
We’re aiming for roughly a 60% win rate. Heroic failure should be almost as satisfying a story as heroic success.
Skill check difficulty
Attrition.
At its heart, every adventure game is about managing one precious resource: your continued existence.
You get injured. You recover. You decide whether to push on or retreat. That ebb and flow is what gives an adventure its tension. If exploring the next room never costs you anything, it isn’t much of a decision.
In the Ziggurat, combat is often optional. Fortunately, the dungeon has plenty of other ways to make your day worse. Many peaceful encounters still involve skill checks, and failure can extract a price. Every expedition should leave a few scars.
The difficulty of skill checks is tuned to create that steady attrition. By the end of a successful quest, your HP and other resources should feel hard won and closely guarded.
Finding the right balance is surprisingly difficult. Too little adversity and victory feels inevitable. Too much, and the adventure starts feeling like unpaid overtime.
The sweet spot is when every new map tile feels part opportunity, part regret.
Skill check randomness
Drama.
A good Euro is about fairness, optimisation and clever play.
Adventure games chase something different. They live or die on memorable stories: impossible victories, desperate escapes, and heroes surviving by the narrowest of margins.
The Ziggurat skill check is intentionally swingy. Success is never guaranteed, and failure is never far away. Those wild highs and crushing lows are what create the stories you’ll remember long after the quest has ended.
At first glance, Burn Grit looks like a safety valve for bad luck. In reality, it exists to create more spectacular moments in the hero’s favour. The randomness creates the drama; Grit lets you decide when to bend fate.
You can spend Grit early to turn ordinary failures into ordinary successes. But it’s far more delicious to hold onto a healthy reserve and burn it when everything hangs in the balance.
The game is generous with Grit. Missing skill checks always builds your resolve, but you’ll also gain it through exploration, secret doors, encounters, Hit matches and many other sources. The challenge isn’t collecting Grit. It’s deciding when to spend it.
Death.
Swingy systems inevitably produce spectacular failures.
Many adventure games compensate by giving heroes larger health pools or increasingly elaborate defence mechanisms. The Ziggurat takes a different approach.
When your HP hits zero, you don’t immediately die. Instead, you Endure.
Endure turns your remaining determination into one last chance. Your hero gets back on their feet, but at a permanent cost. Every time you Endure, your reserves shrink, bringing you one step closer to a final defeat.
The result is that heroes rarely die because of one outrageously lucky denizen roll. Instead, death arrives after a chain of desperate recoveries, impossible decisions and increasingly questionable life choices.
After all, that’s exactly how a respectable sword-and-sorcery hero ought to perish.