Editing Unwritten: System Reference Document/Playing a Scene (section)

===Challenges===

A challenge is a series of overcome actions that you use to resolve an especially complicated or dynamic situation. Each overcome action uses a different roll to deal with one task or part of the situation, and you take the individual results as a whole to figure out how the situation resolves.

GMs, when you’re trying to figure out if it’s appropriate to call for a challenge, ask yourself the following questions:

Is each separate task something that can generate tension and drama independently of the other tasks? If all the tasks are really part of the same overall goal, then that should be one overcome action, where you use those details to explain what happened if the roll goes wrong.

Does the situation require different skills to deal with? Holding off the crazed animals (one skill) while pushing down a barricade (another skill) and fixing your broken wagon (a third skill) so that you can get away would be a good instance for a challenge.

To set up a challenge, simply identify the individual tasks or goals that make up the situation, and treat each one as a separate overcome roll. (Sometimes, only a certain sequence for the rolls will make sense to you; that’s okay too.) Depending on the situation, one character may be required to make several rolls, or multiple characters may be able to participate.

To conduct a challenge, call for each overcome action in whichever order seems most interesting, but don’t decide anything about how the situation turns out until after you’ve collected all the results—you want to have the freedom to sequence the events of each roll in the order that makes the most sense and is the most entertaining. Players, if you get a boost on one of your rolls, feel free to use it on another roll in the challenge, provided you can justify it.

GMs, after the rolls have been made, you’ll consider the successes, failures, and costs of each action as you interpret how the scene proceeds. It could be that the results lead you into another challenge or a contest.

If you have any boosts that went unused in the challenge, feel free to keep them for the rest of this scene or whatever scene you’re transitioning to, if the events of the challenge connect directly to the next scene.

====Advantages in a Challenge====

You can try to create an advantage during a challenge, for yourself or to help someone else out. Creating an advantage doesn’t count towards completing one of the challenge goals, but fumbling the roll could create a cost or problem that negatively impacts one of the other goals. Be careful using this tactic; advantages can help complete tasks more effectively and create momentum, but trying to create them is not without risk.