Ari Marmell is a novelist and freelance RPG writer who would be even more productive if he could stop writing multi-hundred-word replies to threads on EN World. A gamer since 1983 (the Red Box, of course), he studied creative writing at the University of Houston and began writing professionally in early 2001. He’s written RPG materials for numerous companies, including Paizo, Green Ronin, Necromancer, EN Publishing, White Wolf, and Wizards of the Coast. His fiction credits include, among others, Agents of Artifice for the Magic: The Gathering line, and The Conqueror’s Shadow (forthcoming from Bantam Spectra).
Ari currently lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife George, two cats, and a litter of neuroses.
Ari currently lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife George, two cats, and a litter of neuroses.
DM ex Machina
Posted 25th September 2009 at 08:36 AM by Mouseferatu
I have a confession to make1. Despite the fact that I've been working as an RPG writer since late 2000, and playing RPGs since 1983, I'm really not all that interested in "gaming theory." I don't follow the Forge or subscribe to their theories or definitions, I'm not really into the experimental indie games, and I'm not interested in innovative mechanics for their own sake.2 Obviously, I want everything I work on to be interesting both mechanically and in terms of game-play, but I prefer to judge on a case-by-case basis, rather than labor under any Overarching Theory o' Everything.
1 Dear ENWorld: I never thought this sort of thing would happen to me...
2 I'm thinking of starting a betting pool on how long it takes for someone on teh interwebs to quote this out of context, saying "Ari Marmell doesn't care about mechanics!" Anyone want to participate? I've got my money on "7 seconds."
On the other hand, over the past two years, I've been learning a new system for both professional and personal use.3 And in so doing, I've pretty much by default been thinking about--yep--some RPG theory. Specifically, the notion of "agency."
3 Yeah, there was a small RPG released a little over a year ago. A few of you might have heard of it in passing.
If you’re anything like me, you get at least a faint twinge of dislike any time your DM brings in an NPC to save you from a bad situation.4 I understand that sometimes it's necessary--the DM is introducing an important NPC, or else he's realized that he badly miscalculated the difficulty of a certain situation and, since it was his own mistake, is taking steps to prevent a TPK. I understand that, and thus I do my best to tolerate it--but it still drives me nuts. I want to succeed or fail based on my own actions, and my own luck. 5
4 If you're a lot like me, you're sitting at home in your underwear right now, writing a column about player agency in RPGs. But please don't tell me if you are; that's just creepy.
5 Well, okay, and the actions and luck of the other players. Bunch o' attention-hogs, stealing my spotlight...
It's part of the same feeling, I think, that causes most players to object when the DM takes control of their characters, or has the PCs sitting on the sidelines while the NPCs kill the villain. It's all about agency.
Dictionary.com defines agency 6 as "a means of exerting power or influence; instrumentality". In other words, it's an individual's ability to influence or affect his own circumstances.
6 After nine other definitions, granted.
I firmly believe that it's the sense of personal agency that causes players to become involved in, and to care about, the events of a game session. Success or failure is less important than the sense that "Hey, I made a meaningful choice, or at least had the chance to."
This, of course, is news to almost none of you. I think anyone who's played for any length of time is aware of this, even if they haven't really given it any thought. So what's my point? What am I getting to?
Two words: Skill challenges.
I can see through my monitor that some of you are starting to turn away at this point. I'd ask you not to. Even if you're playing Pathfinder, or an earlier edition of D&D, I think you'll find the suggestions below to be useful.
I think the creative motivations for adding skill challenges to D&D should be commended. It's a notion that, in theory, works for all sorts of players. For people who want the immersive RP, it encourages DMs to include more such scenarios into their adventures, and to give them a greater impact on the success or failure of said scenarios. For people who prefer just to roll, it gives a mechanical framework for accomplishing non-combat goals.
But it was a new framework to D&D, and I don't think I'll offend anyone at WotC when I say that a lot of people feel it needs tweaking. There have been a lot of threads on various forums about exactly that. I think, however, that even those threads have been a bit off-target, because ultimately, the problem with skill challenges isn't mechanical7. It's conceptual.
7 Not saying the numbers are necessarily perfect. I'm saying that, for purposes of this discussion, they're irrelevant. Numbers can be tweaked.
Boiled down to their absolute simplest, combat and skill challenges are the same, right? Players rolling dice to determine success or failure. And yet, lots of people feel that skill challenges are "just die-rolling," whereas combat is far more interesting.
Why? Agency.
It may sound heretical or foolish to say, but the rolling of dice is, on a conceptual level, ancillary to combat. What matters most--and what usually occupies the most time--are the choices. Do I move here or there? Do I cast this spell or that one? What sort of attack do I make? Who do I attack? Is it worth not making an attack this round so I can heal Mongo before he bleeds out like an ice cube in a bonfire? Do I risk the opportunity attack from the orc next to me so I can shoot the wolf who's turning the wizard into hors d'oeuvres?
Choices. Meaningful choices. The DM has set a goal--in most cases, kill or be killed--but how you go about achieving that goal is all you.
And that, I think, is where skill challenges (and, for that matter, traps and hazards with specific listed countermeasures) fall down. Where's the fun in a situation where your only meaningful options are "Roll either Diplomacy or Intimidate"? If it's a one-roll check, that's one thing, but for a whole scene? Is it any wonder that at least some players drift out?
And yes, the DMG specifies that the DM should allow for multiple secondary skills, to expect for the PCs to try funky or creative solutions, and to allow them to do so. But it's a passing mention--one that's only emphasized in a smattering of the published skill challenges--and, more to the point, it presents such creative uses as a lesser option. It makes them less effective or harder to use than the skills the DM has already identified as "primary," since they cannot, in themselves, grant successes. Essentially yes, they're permitted--but they'll never do as much good as the ones the DM (or author) decided on ahead of time.
I think that's a mistake, in terms of emphasis, and I prefer not to run skill challenges that way. Very simply, once the PCs know what they're trying to accomplish, their job is to tell me how they're doing it, with few if any preconceptions--and almost no prior decisions as to what will or won't work--on my part. Now, I don't pretend this idea is original to me. It comes in part from friends, in part from stuff I've seen online, and possibly--I honestly don't recall--in part from some suggestions put forth in 4E playtest material.
In one of the first 4E games I ever ran, the PCs were attempting to rescue the children of a town from a band of redcaps (Feywild goblins). These redcaps were lairing in the sewers beneath the town--sewers that didn't actually exist in the real world, as they were part of a Feywild planar overlap with the real world. So once the PCs had killed the Big Bad and had the kids in hand, the sewer (of course) began to disappear.
The skill challenge was to herd this band of panicked kids back through the winding passageways of the sewers and to the exit, before the entire thing vanished from the mortal world. And during that skill challenge, I saw:
At no point did I tell any of my players what they had to roll, and several of the skills they decided to use, I'd never have thought of including in advance. Every single action they took was their own decision. And every skill they wanted to use, I let them--if they could explain to me why it was useful in that situation. And that's the key to making this work--a reasonable, believable explanation.
Does that mean all skills are equally useful in all circumstances? Of course not. The Insight check and Religion checks didn't gain them any successes--but I decided they granted a substantial bonus on the next Diplomacy or Intimidate check, and if the players had suggested different uses for those skills, uses that seemed to have a more immediate impact, who knows? I might have allowed them to grant successes.
And some skills might not have been useful at all; I'm hard pressed to think of a way that the PCs could have used Streetwise under the circumstances. But if someone had tried and offered a convincing reason, I'd have considered it.
The difference? Agency. It was the players deciding what their characters were attempting. They had choices to make that weren't limited to options I'd determined with in advance: What skill do I use? They had creative/tactical decisions to make: How can I best make use of what skills I have? Would I rather keep using a tactic that I know works, or try to come up with more creative options and possibly face easier DCs, or gain the DM's "creative thought" bonus? (Obviously, they have to know there is such a thing, but I strongly recommend it.)
Of equal importance, it reduces or even eliminates the "This is Bob's scene, because he's good at Diplomacy, so the rest of us will stand back and twiddle our thumbs for half an hour" hurdle. It guarantees everyone a way to participate, gives them a reason to do so, rather than hang back in fear of adding to the collection of failures.
And damn if it didn't work. Not only was everyone as emotionally involved in this challenge as they'd been during any combat, but when one of the PCs badly failed a check and they lost one of the kids, the players were actually upset at me.8
8 That's "upset" in the RBDM sense, not in the "I actually want to hurt you outside of the game" sense. I think.
Yet the actual mechanics--roll a skill against a DC set by the DM--hadn't changed in the slightest. It was all about who was making the important decisions.
There's nothing wrong with the DM designing a skill challenge where he expects certain skills to be used, or where certain skills are the obvious choice--just like the DM might design an encounter where, perhaps due to terrain and positioning, he expects controllers and ranged strikers to be more effective than melee combatants. If you're trying to convince the duke to lend you an army, Diplomacy almost has to play a part. And, similarly, this isn't about making all skills equally useful in all situations, any more than all attacks are useful against all opponents. If the skill challenge is about climbing a cliff during a hurricane, Thievery is just not likely to help. But just like a good DM wouldn't prevent a melee combatant from meaningfully contributing to the aforementioned fight if she found a way to do so, a good DM shouldn't prevent a PC from fully contributing to a skill challenge with an unanticipated skill. This is about giving every PC an opportunity not only to contribute, but to decide how to contribute.
I think every good DM knows that s/he needs to let the players have an effect on the adventure, and to make meaningful choices. But I don't think a lot of DMs apply this knowledge on the small scale, to things like skill challenges (or other grouped skill rolls, for systems that don't use the skill challenge framework). I know that, until relatively recently, I often failed to do so. Yet I've seen firsthand just how big a difference it makes, for the players to really feel like they're doing something, rather than just rolling whatever die they've been told to roll, or using whatever skill seems to be the DM's preferred option.
If you've had little luck with skill challenges so far--or are playing a different system, but are interested in running a non-combat scene where PC capabilities still have a major impact--I'd encourage you to give it a shot, explain to your players what you're doing, keep an open mind when it comes to what they want to try, and see what happens. 9
9 Since completing the first draft of this column, I've had the opportunity to read through the section on skill challenges in DMG2. I think they've done a great job of improving on the skill challenges, of further emphasizing the need to allow creative solutions, of showing them as far more than just collections of skill checks, and even increasing the degree of player agency. They've clarified or eliminated nearly all of my prior objections—except, unfortunately, what is ultimately my primary issue: that I feel making skill challenges more freeform needs to occur at a baseline, fundamental level. As long as skill challenges predefine "primary skills" that are the only way to gain successes, then "outside the box" thinking continues to be a less effective, and therefore a less attractive, option.
1 Dear ENWorld: I never thought this sort of thing would happen to me...
2 I'm thinking of starting a betting pool on how long it takes for someone on teh interwebs to quote this out of context, saying "Ari Marmell doesn't care about mechanics!" Anyone want to participate? I've got my money on "7 seconds."
On the other hand, over the past two years, I've been learning a new system for both professional and personal use.3 And in so doing, I've pretty much by default been thinking about--yep--some RPG theory. Specifically, the notion of "agency."
3 Yeah, there was a small RPG released a little over a year ago. A few of you might have heard of it in passing.
If you’re anything like me, you get at least a faint twinge of dislike any time your DM brings in an NPC to save you from a bad situation.4 I understand that sometimes it's necessary--the DM is introducing an important NPC, or else he's realized that he badly miscalculated the difficulty of a certain situation and, since it was his own mistake, is taking steps to prevent a TPK. I understand that, and thus I do my best to tolerate it--but it still drives me nuts. I want to succeed or fail based on my own actions, and my own luck. 5
4 If you're a lot like me, you're sitting at home in your underwear right now, writing a column about player agency in RPGs. But please don't tell me if you are; that's just creepy.
5 Well, okay, and the actions and luck of the other players. Bunch o' attention-hogs, stealing my spotlight...
It's part of the same feeling, I think, that causes most players to object when the DM takes control of their characters, or has the PCs sitting on the sidelines while the NPCs kill the villain. It's all about agency.
Dictionary.com defines agency 6 as "a means of exerting power or influence; instrumentality". In other words, it's an individual's ability to influence or affect his own circumstances.
6 After nine other definitions, granted.
I firmly believe that it's the sense of personal agency that causes players to become involved in, and to care about, the events of a game session. Success or failure is less important than the sense that "Hey, I made a meaningful choice, or at least had the chance to."
This, of course, is news to almost none of you. I think anyone who's played for any length of time is aware of this, even if they haven't really given it any thought. So what's my point? What am I getting to?
Two words: Skill challenges.
I can see through my monitor that some of you are starting to turn away at this point. I'd ask you not to. Even if you're playing Pathfinder, or an earlier edition of D&D, I think you'll find the suggestions below to be useful.
I think the creative motivations for adding skill challenges to D&D should be commended. It's a notion that, in theory, works for all sorts of players. For people who want the immersive RP, it encourages DMs to include more such scenarios into their adventures, and to give them a greater impact on the success or failure of said scenarios. For people who prefer just to roll, it gives a mechanical framework for accomplishing non-combat goals.
But it was a new framework to D&D, and I don't think I'll offend anyone at WotC when I say that a lot of people feel it needs tweaking. There have been a lot of threads on various forums about exactly that. I think, however, that even those threads have been a bit off-target, because ultimately, the problem with skill challenges isn't mechanical7. It's conceptual.
7 Not saying the numbers are necessarily perfect. I'm saying that, for purposes of this discussion, they're irrelevant. Numbers can be tweaked.
Boiled down to their absolute simplest, combat and skill challenges are the same, right? Players rolling dice to determine success or failure. And yet, lots of people feel that skill challenges are "just die-rolling," whereas combat is far more interesting.
Why? Agency.
It may sound heretical or foolish to say, but the rolling of dice is, on a conceptual level, ancillary to combat. What matters most--and what usually occupies the most time--are the choices. Do I move here or there? Do I cast this spell or that one? What sort of attack do I make? Who do I attack? Is it worth not making an attack this round so I can heal Mongo before he bleeds out like an ice cube in a bonfire? Do I risk the opportunity attack from the orc next to me so I can shoot the wolf who's turning the wizard into hors d'oeuvres?
Choices. Meaningful choices. The DM has set a goal--in most cases, kill or be killed--but how you go about achieving that goal is all you.
And that, I think, is where skill challenges (and, for that matter, traps and hazards with specific listed countermeasures) fall down. Where's the fun in a situation where your only meaningful options are "Roll either Diplomacy or Intimidate"? If it's a one-roll check, that's one thing, but for a whole scene? Is it any wonder that at least some players drift out?
And yes, the DMG specifies that the DM should allow for multiple secondary skills, to expect for the PCs to try funky or creative solutions, and to allow them to do so. But it's a passing mention--one that's only emphasized in a smattering of the published skill challenges--and, more to the point, it presents such creative uses as a lesser option. It makes them less effective or harder to use than the skills the DM has already identified as "primary," since they cannot, in themselves, grant successes. Essentially yes, they're permitted--but they'll never do as much good as the ones the DM (or author) decided on ahead of time.
I think that's a mistake, in terms of emphasis, and I prefer not to run skill challenges that way. Very simply, once the PCs know what they're trying to accomplish, their job is to tell me how they're doing it, with few if any preconceptions--and almost no prior decisions as to what will or won't work--on my part. Now, I don't pretend this idea is original to me. It comes in part from friends, in part from stuff I've seen online, and possibly--I honestly don't recall--in part from some suggestions put forth in 4E playtest material.
In one of the first 4E games I ever ran, the PCs were attempting to rescue the children of a town from a band of redcaps (Feywild goblins). These redcaps were lairing in the sewers beneath the town--sewers that didn't actually exist in the real world, as they were part of a Feywild planar overlap with the real world. So once the PCs had killed the Big Bad and had the kids in hand, the sewer (of course) began to disappear.
The skill challenge was to herd this band of panicked kids back through the winding passageways of the sewers and to the exit, before the entire thing vanished from the mortal world. And during that skill challenge, I saw:
- Diplomacy and Intimidate used to keep the kids moving in a halfway orderly fashion.
- Bluff and Religion used to reassure them that they would be okay, and thus make them easier to handle.
- Insight to determine which kids needed the most attention to keep from falling apart.
- Perception and Arcana to determine which parts of the sewers were likely to fade out.
- Dungeoneering and Perception to find their way back the way they'd come.
- Athletics to get the kids past obstacles, and to physically herd them together when the stragglers began to drift.
At no point did I tell any of my players what they had to roll, and several of the skills they decided to use, I'd never have thought of including in advance. Every single action they took was their own decision. And every skill they wanted to use, I let them--if they could explain to me why it was useful in that situation. And that's the key to making this work--a reasonable, believable explanation.
Does that mean all skills are equally useful in all circumstances? Of course not. The Insight check and Religion checks didn't gain them any successes--but I decided they granted a substantial bonus on the next Diplomacy or Intimidate check, and if the players had suggested different uses for those skills, uses that seemed to have a more immediate impact, who knows? I might have allowed them to grant successes.
And some skills might not have been useful at all; I'm hard pressed to think of a way that the PCs could have used Streetwise under the circumstances. But if someone had tried and offered a convincing reason, I'd have considered it.
The difference? Agency. It was the players deciding what their characters were attempting. They had choices to make that weren't limited to options I'd determined with in advance: What skill do I use? They had creative/tactical decisions to make: How can I best make use of what skills I have? Would I rather keep using a tactic that I know works, or try to come up with more creative options and possibly face easier DCs, or gain the DM's "creative thought" bonus? (Obviously, they have to know there is such a thing, but I strongly recommend it.)
Of equal importance, it reduces or even eliminates the "This is Bob's scene, because he's good at Diplomacy, so the rest of us will stand back and twiddle our thumbs for half an hour" hurdle. It guarantees everyone a way to participate, gives them a reason to do so, rather than hang back in fear of adding to the collection of failures.
And damn if it didn't work. Not only was everyone as emotionally involved in this challenge as they'd been during any combat, but when one of the PCs badly failed a check and they lost one of the kids, the players were actually upset at me.8
8 That's "upset" in the RBDM sense, not in the "I actually want to hurt you outside of the game" sense. I think.
Yet the actual mechanics--roll a skill against a DC set by the DM--hadn't changed in the slightest. It was all about who was making the important decisions.
There's nothing wrong with the DM designing a skill challenge where he expects certain skills to be used, or where certain skills are the obvious choice--just like the DM might design an encounter where, perhaps due to terrain and positioning, he expects controllers and ranged strikers to be more effective than melee combatants. If you're trying to convince the duke to lend you an army, Diplomacy almost has to play a part. And, similarly, this isn't about making all skills equally useful in all situations, any more than all attacks are useful against all opponents. If the skill challenge is about climbing a cliff during a hurricane, Thievery is just not likely to help. But just like a good DM wouldn't prevent a melee combatant from meaningfully contributing to the aforementioned fight if she found a way to do so, a good DM shouldn't prevent a PC from fully contributing to a skill challenge with an unanticipated skill. This is about giving every PC an opportunity not only to contribute, but to decide how to contribute.
I think every good DM knows that s/he needs to let the players have an effect on the adventure, and to make meaningful choices. But I don't think a lot of DMs apply this knowledge on the small scale, to things like skill challenges (or other grouped skill rolls, for systems that don't use the skill challenge framework). I know that, until relatively recently, I often failed to do so. Yet I've seen firsthand just how big a difference it makes, for the players to really feel like they're doing something, rather than just rolling whatever die they've been told to roll, or using whatever skill seems to be the DM's preferred option.
If you've had little luck with skill challenges so far--or are playing a different system, but are interested in running a non-combat scene where PC capabilities still have a major impact--I'd encourage you to give it a shot, explain to your players what you're doing, keep an open mind when it comes to what they want to try, and see what happens. 9
9 Since completing the first draft of this column, I've had the opportunity to read through the section on skill challenges in DMG2. I think they've done a great job of improving on the skill challenges, of further emphasizing the need to allow creative solutions, of showing them as far more than just collections of skill checks, and even increasing the degree of player agency. They've clarified or eliminated nearly all of my prior objections—except, unfortunately, what is ultimately my primary issue: that I feel making skill challenges more freeform needs to occur at a baseline, fundamental level. As long as skill challenges predefine "primary skills" that are the only way to gain successes, then "outside the box" thinking continues to be a less effective, and therefore a less attractive, option.
Total Comments 40
Comments
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I totally agree with this. The best way for a DM to run a skill challenge is to simply ask the players what to do and then ask them to explain why/how they do it.Posted 25th September 2009 at 09:52 AM by MichaelSomething
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I agree with that as well Mouse.Quote:The best way for a DM to run a skill challenge is to simply ask the players what to do and then ask them to explain why/how they do it.
And, an interesting article overall.Posted 25th September 2009 at 01:49 PM by Jack7 -
Agency?
We dirty hippie indie gamers* call it protagonizing, and deprotagonizing is what the DM does when he brings in Elminster to save the day.
(The protagonists are, of course, in general, the PCs. In some games it may not be quite as simple.)
Having a prepared skill challenge out in the open does not deprotagonize the PCs, but letting the players help decide, overtly or improvising as you did, empowers the players.
Good article!
* Well, I'm just a part-time dirty hippie indie gamer.Posted 25th September 2009 at 05:43 PM by Henrix
Updated 25th September 2009 at 06:46 PM by Henrix -
I agree. I've ported much of the Skill Challenge mechanic across to my SWSE campaign, and it works very well. Pretty much the first thing I did was to shift to a very freeform way of determining which skills would be useful (probably laziness rather than inspiration on my part; I just couldn't be bothered doing the detailed prep in advance!).
I do wonder if perhaps the fixed primary skills are perhaps intended to make Skill Challenges easier for a newbie DM to run - 4e does seem to be the first edition in a long time that is actively geared to bringing in new people, including new DMs. I'm not complaining if this is the case, of course!
Finally, I'm really not keen on them 'fixing' Skill Challenges in DMG2 - that feels awfully like paying for errata to me. But that's probably another topic for another time.Posted 25th September 2009 at 06:22 PM by delericho - That's a very interesting and insightful column. But, isn't the answer just saying use skills as they've been used in Traveller or Call of Cthulhu for years?
I suppose another point is that once you've boiled down the skills to a short list, each skill deserves or requires to interpreted in liberal and interesting ways that reward player invention.Posted 25th September 2009 at 06:28 PM by Anselyn -
I've found it's easier to ignore the skill challenge structure, and simply use a skill challenge block as a page of advice on running an encounter which involves some skill rolls - and then wing it. The whole thing then becomes much more fluid, active, and personal. Even the successes vs. failures I merely use as a guage on how long the skill challenge should be - I end it as a success or failure at a point where it narratively works.Posted 25th September 2009 at 07:15 PM by Morrus -
I agree with just about everything here. I do my best to create situations for my players that are evocative of the scene I'm trying to create, but that also leave them options. I create a wide variety of variations on the skill challenge mechanic to meet those needs, and I wish that the DMG2 had presented much more flexible ideas for using the idea of skill challenges -- it's a step in the right direction, but there's a ton of variety and potential there.
But, really, giving the players meaningful choices -- and even allowing them some sort of way to gauge their possibility for success -- is key to creating exciting, interesting skill challenges.
My fear, every time these discussions come up, is that there's a prescription that will be handed down that tries to be the "right" answer for all situations, all challenges. And I think that such an idea is laughable. No single set of rules or best practices is right for all situations; there are a lot of ways to give players agency and choice. What matters is flexibility in design, and flexibility in application.Posted 25th September 2009 at 07:24 PM by Radiating Gnome - I can see how the Skill Challenges work well for authors of adventures to be published, but in practice, this really comes down to what Morrus wrote: it simply attempts to codify the process many people use to "wing" role-playing. I also find the three failures arbitrary.
As an aside, the way these articles are being posted on the main websites front page is both unappealing and hard to read.Posted 25th September 2009 at 07:25 PM by Elrith -
First, let me say that was an interesting read. However, I think the major problem with skill challenges as opposed to combat isn't necessarily choice in and of itself. Skill challenges can involve numerous choices but are those choices ultimately very binary and lacking in tactical depth. I think so.
You see in combat you're choices are varied, but also have tactical depth, and (depending on the actions taken, opponents, etc.) are often dynamic and meaningful beyond just finding the power with the highest to hit bonus. Movement, positioning, secondary effects, etc. all give choices tactical depth and thus are more intriguing and interesting to make.
Skill challenges are for the most part tactically binary. The best tactic is always to try and use your skills with the highest bonuses. So while you may have a wide range of choices in skills that are available... many of those choices aren't tactically sound or interesting in play. This, I think, is ultimately the problem with skill challenges... they really aren't much more interesting than making a single skill roll (from a mechanical and tactical PoV) but can take up much more time in gameplay.Posted 25th September 2009 at 07:38 PM by Imaro -
That was an excellent article, and I very much agree with it. The best skill challenges that I have run were very free form; even if I have a list of skills that earn successes in front of me, if the players don't know what's on the list, it seems to be more fun for everyone.Posted 25th September 2009 at 07:48 PM by the Jester - 1. I generally agree with the idea that skill challenges work best when the players just come up with whatever they want to do, you let them try it, and you follow the basic "X success before 3 failure" template to determine overall results.
2. One of the themes of the article is that skill challenges as originally written somehow constrain this creativity. But the mechanism by which this creativity is constrained is... what? A general *feeling*? The only actual way in which people are supposedly being constrained seems to be the fact that some skills are designated as "primary." Is that all there is to this? A connotation of the word "primary?"
3. There are good reasons to spell out in advance how some skills will work. It lets the author of the skill challenge spell out clearly how some possible decisions are likely to go. Its important to tailor a skill challenge to the actual circumstances, and this seems to be the best tool available for spelling it out.
4. So to the extent this is arguing that you shouldn't assume that only the skills described are worth allowing, well, yeah. To the extent that this is arguing that you should let the players figure out what to do rather than forcing them to choose from a predetermined menu, well, I thought that was already the rule. But to the extent that this is arguing that skill challenges shouldn't have prewritten descriptions of skill DCs and likely outcomes, I disagree. There's not much value in an adventure telling me to have a skill challenge if it doesn't give me some guidance on the options available to the players during the challenge, and the likely results of the most likely decisions the players will make.Posted 25th September 2009 at 08:18 PM by Cadfan 
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I prefer a mix of free-form skill challenges and what Piratecat describes as 'minigame' skill challenges. Both can be equally rewarding, though each plays out differently. The former can be enjoyable as an exercise in creativity and the players in my game don't always even know they're in a skill challenge when it happens.
On the other hand, the 'minigame' challenge, where most (but not all) of the options are spelled out for the players, presents them a different approach to the challenge (and turns it into a subset tactical game of the main one). While it might not work for some groups, my players loved trying to figure out the best options and how to combine skills as things began to become more difficult and simply depending on your best skill proved to be not enough to succeed.Posted 25th September 2009 at 08:23 PM by WizarDru -
Cadfan:
I wasn't saying that skill challenges couldn't have prewritten DCs and likely outcomes. I have no problem with those--as suggestions and guidelines. My problem is with those being the only truly meaningful options.
As I said, the way the skill challenges are written now, any skill not on the list can only be used to supplement the listed skills; but it's still the primary skills, and only those, that grant successes (or at least the bulk of successes). That is where the limitation comes in--not that the skill challenges forbid "outside the box" skill uses, but that said skill uses will never be as effective.Posted 25th September 2009 at 08:28 PM by Mouseferatu - By the way, are you folks happier with the footnotes between paragraphs, as I've done here? Does that make them easier to read than they were in the prior column?Posted 25th September 2009 at 09:31 PM by Mouseferatu
- Yeah this guy nails it. I'm finding more and more a good skill challenge is a combination of haggling with the DM and cooperative storytelling.
It's (often) the heart of good RP in the game - and because of that it resists hard structure.Posted 25th September 2009 at 09:42 PM by Stormgaard - I like what skill challenges strive to do (make traditionally non-combat situations as dynamic and uncertain as combat), but I'm still a little iffy on the implementation. Even with all the excellent advice in DMG2.
I think part of the problem for me is that the 4e skill system is still too much like 3e or SWSE. Much like how they rethought combat from the ground up to make it more tactical, dynamic, and team-based, I feel the need to do the same thing with 4e skills. I don't know of any direction they could go, but one place to start might be treating skills as more like weapon proficiencies. The bonuses to skill proficiency would be smaller than the current trained skill bonus, but they would be more in line with defenses and the like. Another thing to think about is making non-combat challenges "tactical." Like, figuring out what social equivalent of flanking when making an argument is.
As far as the layout of the column, I feel footnotes in the text break things up too much. I don't think footnotes at the end are much better, though. In my opinion, a sidebar would be the best way to display your notes. But that may be tough to do from a coding perspective.Posted 25th September 2009 at 10:08 PM by Jonathan Moyer -
So here's an idea... Rather than coming up with specific skills, you just note down the easy, moderate, and difficult DCs appropriate for the level. Then you let the PCs do whatever they want and based on their description you figure out, say, "Ok, that's not going to give you a success, but if you pass an easy DC I'll give so-and-so a +2 bonus on their next check."Posted 25th September 2009 at 10:12 PM by Asmor -
I agree with Ari and the general consensus. I was pondering this very thing, albeit less eloquently, a few months back. My conclusion was, essentially, skill challenges are the same way we've always played D&D, except with some targets and guidelines to keep in mind: Steve's Gamer Blog: Give Me a Reason to Give You XPPosted 26th September 2009 at 12:13 AM by Drammattex -
Best stuff on skill challanges I have read so far.
As for the footnotes, if you are going to put the comments in the body of the column, then make them part of the column and use font and style to distinguish them otherwise keep them as "footnotes".Posted 26th September 2009 at 12:42 AM by ardoughter -
I _always_ thought that was the way skill challenges were supposed to be used. However, the skill challenges as presented in the first DMG and in adventure modules looked completely different.
Imho, they just give too much (mechanical) details. Skill challenge writeups should focus more on the objectives and consequences of different degrees of success/failure than on defining primary/secondary skills and DCs.
Actually, DCs should be completely undefined. Suggesting that some skills may be harder to use than others would be totally sufficient for me.
I haven't read the DMG2 section on skill challenges yet (just skimmed over it), but it seems to make some steps in the 'right' direction.
I really, really, want to like skill challenges but in their current implementation they're too easy to metagame - something my admittedly limited playtesting seems to support.
P.S.: I like the footnotes better this way than having them all at the end.Posted 26th September 2009 at 12:58 AM by Jhaelen
Updated 26th September 2009 at 01:04 AM by Jhaelen
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