D&D-4-like Skill Challenges in Savage Worlds

This is a first sketch how you do skill challenges in Savage Worlds. Definitely worth a test run and could be a better way to handle music performances in The Band.

Depending on how complex the task is, a certain amount of successes is needed. My test run decides difficulties on number of participating characters, but that could be too metagamey.

Easy: [number of participating characters] successes
Normal: [number of participating characters x 1.5] successes
Hard: [number of participating characters] x2 successes

Players in general can choose the skill they want to use by themselves. The GM can veto skill use, that is not described well. But why not using your Knowledge(History) skill to get the band mimic the famous performance of the Sex Pistols in Winterland? ;) Obviously repeating the same shtick over time becomes stale.
Each Raise counts as 1 extra success.

When they got 3 failures, the characters finally lost... (Maybe scale that too?)

Savage Worlds: The Band

This was the setting of my first planned Savage Worlds campaign. We only played it once... But there are (German) notes for much more.
I once posted its Savage Worlds drug addiction rules here in the blog.

The music performance rules were kind of broken, because I did not use the support rules from Savage Worlds. Those are not a perfect fit anyways... But the bigger the band got, the better it got with my rules and they would totally break down above 8 members.

Savage Worlds The Band Map

Reprise: The Band - Savage Worlds and drugs

I handled hard drugs in my cyberpunkish game that way, that they would give you bonuses, but once you were on them, forced to buy certain drug-related edges, and skills like Knowledge (Drug scene) when you were leveling up. Somewhat like a drug skill/edge path...
The edges had mainly negative effects, so players really tried to get rid of their addiction as they could not get any positive character development while on it. But going turkey was not easy either...

I looked through my old notes.
Actually it was even simpler than I remembered.

There was this drug that gave you +2 on songwriting (it was a campaign about the PCs having a band in a postapocalyptic city), but as long as you were on it, you had to raise your Knowledge (Drugs) skill every time you leveled up, as this was the main thing on your mind: where to get the drug, when, and from whom...
So people became real pros with the whole drug trade and had to give up other character development. For people with high Smarts it was a little bit better, as they were longer able to raise at least another skill too.
Obviously everyone wanted to kick their drug habit quite early, which could be achieved by a Spirit test, you could try once a week.
But if someone offered you the drug later on, you still needed to pass a Spirit test not to fall back into your old habit. Especially nasty, when you would soon get your next possibilty to level up...

I was inspired by reading "Please kill me", the book on the 70ies NYC punk scene. :-D

As none of my players' characters had the skill before taking the drug or wanted to raise it by him-/herself, I simply ruled that at Knowledge(Drugs) d8, your skin would turn greenish, even greener on d10 and d12, and at Knowledge(Drugs) d12+1 you would be able to buy the edge "Complete Memory" and remember the time before the Orange War (don't ask..).Obviously you could streamline this basic system and make it more elegant, with real paths for different drugs.