Skirmishes are Turbine's way of creating enjoyable, repeatable, randomized, and story-driven encounters for all different sizes of groups to enjoy. The entire system has been created from the ground up with several different notions in mind. They need to be relatively quick pieces of content to enjoy, they need to scale for all play-styles and party-sizes, and they need to be dynamic enough and rewarding enough to encourage multiple play-throughs. And as I quickly learned, all three criteria were handily met by the developers.
In a camp on the edge of Mirkwood, Aaron and I opened up the Skirmish window to select which one we wanted to attempt. That's right, there's no need to go find some magic door or scrying portal in order to experience these new encounters. You need only open up your menu and pick the one you want to do. From that same window, you can select the level range of the enemies within (the first Skirmish becomes available at level 30 and all can be scaled up to the level cap of 65). You can also select the group size for the encounter (solo, small fellowship, full fellowship, and 12-man raid) so that you and your kinsmen are always fighting an appropriate number of enemies, or if you would prefer you could even make yourself vastly outnumbered. And lastly you can change the difficulty of each Skirmish. Playing solo but want a challenge? Up the difficulty from one to three, and so forth.
-------
There are tons of additional changes coming along with the Skirmishes, Soldiers, and new instances too. Combat has been made far more responsive. The auto-attack now runs in the background so that players' skills will always trigger as soon as they select them. Mounts have been totally revamped. They're no longer inventory items, but rather skills. Plus you can use e-motes from atop your steed! Huzzah! Even the Legendary Item system has been entirely revamped.