First: Your system is awesome. I use it in place of the core system for three main reasons:
1. By proceeding in segments, the system forces each player to participate. I've noticed that in core challenges, the person with the best skill makes most of the checks, and people with weak skills tend to sit it out.
2. I'm more confident in the math. I have a fairly typical group and they seem to succeed and fail at a reasonable rate. Using a single DC, and including "partial success," helps a lot.
3. Because the math is so solid, the only way to get ahead of the probability curve is to get +2 bonuses from the DM. This encourages players to think about their
actions more than their skills. (The times when my party fails, it's because they weren't thinking hard, and were just blandly declaring obvious actions. The times when my party gets a total success, it's when they are doing creative, effective things, with good role-playing and teamwork, getting a lot of +2 bonuses.)
I have total faith that whatever the next version holds will maintain these strengths and build upon them.
2) At least for my group, I think players want to use their best skills. One of my original founding principals of Obsidian was that you should use certain skills for certain challenges. After a lot of playtesting, I'm starting to lean away from that. The primary skill system softens the blow a little, but the reality is the difference between a wizard's arcane skill and his athletics is so large that a +2 doesn't make the player feel much better. Ultimately its a question of choice versus requirement. If the DM decides everyone needs to give him an athletics roll, well the wizard has to roll. But if the wizard is choosing his skills, but his choices are limited to skills he considered weak for him, then the player feels shafted.
Rather than labeling some skills as appropriate vs. inappropriate for the challenge, I've come to think in terms of expected skill use vs. creative skill use. Both are fun for different reasons:
- Expected skill use (using social skills during a social encounter) is fun because it reinforces your character concept. Someone who has good social skills picked them because they want to play a socially skilled character, and during a social challenge they should be allowed to shine by using all their social skills.
- Creative skill use (using mental or physical skills during a social encounter) is fun because creativity itself is fun. Unexpected things are more interesting and allowing players to use unexpected skills lets them apply a bit more problem-solving to the challenge.
Should either type of skill use have the edge? Should they be identical in how they are applied?
In my opinion, one thing that is always boring is: repeats. If you're chasing someone, and Athletics is primary, saying "I run faster" every single segment is kind of boring. I think the Primary Skill rule encourages this sort of game play, so I tend not to use it. I think changing the Primary Skill every round is great, though, because it
discourages repeats.
Conversely, the advice to only allow a nonstandard skill once per encounter seems overly restrictive. If a player can be creative twice per encounter, why not allow it?
I think part of the conflict is rewarding effectiveness vs. creativity. The expected skill use is expected because it is known to be effective; Primary Skills get the bonus because they are effective. OTOH, creative skill use often seems like kind of a long shot; if that skill were known to be effective, then it would be one of the expected skills. So it seem natural to want to penalize or disallow unexpected (less effective) skill use, but this has the side-effect of penalizing creative skill use.
7) I may need a way to handle ability checks. I did find there were times when the player wanted to do something that for all rights should be an ability check, not a skill check...which Obsidian does not handle well. Its something to look into for the future.
I just give players a +5 bonus to ability checks, to retain parity with trained skills. Unfortunately, this breaks down somewhat when you consider skill focus, racial bonuses, magic items, etc. Since the group is only level 6 now, it hasn't been a problem, but at higher levels it might be.
8) All in all my playtesting showed that Obsidian is a solid, easy to use, reliable system...but also that there's definite room for improvement. Which is good for me, I always love to tweak
Definitely! The system is extremely tolerant of the DM handing out +2/-2 modifiers. This allows for a wide variety of subsystems and play styles.
FWIW here are the tweaks I use:
1) I rarely use a specific Primary Skill, but try to be liberal about giving a +2 bonus for doing something that seems particularly effective or makes good use of circumstances (such as building on what they did last segment).
2) Teamwork gets a +2 bonus to BOTH participants. This seems more fair than "aid another," where one character takes a back seat (and that guy always seems to roll higher than the main skill user...).
3) I allow unusual (creative) skills if they are interesting, entertaining, and make sense, and often give a +2 bonus for them as well. However, I disallow a "creative" skill use if it doesn't make any sense to me, or seems like too much of a stretch.
4) If someone is repeating an action from a previous segment, I don't explicitly penalize them, but they get no bonuses; if you want any bonus at all, try something new. (I might disallow repeats of an unusual skill use.)
5) Because of the way my campaign works, the party often faces encounters that are higher or lower in level than they are. It seems to me that the difficulty of higher- and lower-level skill challenges scales at the same rate as the difficulty of higher- and lower-level combat challenges. For example, my 6th level party facing an 8th level combat encounter will win, but it will be tough; facing an 8th level skill challenge is similarly difficult.
6) Because they are quicker and have less penalty for failure, I award skill challenge encounters with XP equal to half of a combat encounter for their level. For example, a group of five defeats a level 6 skill challenge, I award them 1/2 the XP they would get for defeating five level 6 monsters. For a partial victory, I cut the XP in half again, but often with the option to earn the other half later when they complete their overall goal.
-- 77IM
