Player Skill in Skill Challenges

This is sort of a spin-off from the Storytelling vs. Roleplaying thread where I think an interesting question came up. What do you (as in responders to this thread) view as being the part of skill challenges where player skill comes into play? As a follow-up to your answer, do you view the room for player skill as being sufficienct, insufficient, or too much? Can an experienced player rock skill challenges harder than someone playing D&D for the first time?

As far as I can tell, player skill comes into play mostly in figuring out what skills your character has that are applicable and/or making a case to the DM of how your character can make his best skill applicable, even if it doesn't seem so at first. ("Yes, here is how I can use Acrobatics to negotiate with the barbarian leader!")

There's also the matter of figuring out what skills the DM has marked down as being easier or impossible to use (citing the famous 'Duke can't be intimidated' example of the core rules) and what skills might be able to unlock other skills. How hard this is would seem to depend more on the DM than any player skill, though. I know some DMs announce such things outright during skill challenges.

There are a lot of things I like about skill challenges, but I find this lack of tactical depth to be kind of frustrating. If I start to play a new character class, then I as a player can grow more skilled at playing that class in combat. I become more familiar with its powers and limitations and how best to use the class's abilities in conjunction with the rest of the group. I can get better at playing the game of D&D.

When it comes to skill challenges, though, there's much less room for me to improve as a player. I don't have a lot of ability to learn to affect the outcome by making better choices. And I want to stress, I'm not talking about making a really good IC speech not backed up by my Diplomacy rolls. I'm talking about the same sort of tactical gameplay offered by combat.

Anyone else feel this way, and if you do, what have you done about it?

Wolfwood2 said:

...Can an experienced player rock skill challenges harder than someone playing D&D for the first time?
...
There are a lot of things I like about skill challenges, but I find this lack of tactical depth to be kind of frustrating.
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When it comes to skill challenges, though, there's much less room for me to improve as a player. I don't have a lot of ability to learn to affect the outcome by making better choices.

Anyone else feel this way, and if you do, what have you done about it?

Click to expand...

I think a big part is the Skill Challenge itself, but, as is often the case with D&D, and Skill Challenges in particular, it is all about the DM.

I think that there is not much in way of tactics in a skill challenge, but more strategy. You have the long-term Skill Choices, and your party hopefully has most things covered. In the short term, a Skill Challenge needs to accommodate some options or it isn't really a good one. This is the age-old "Skill Challenges don't work as written in the DMG", and it is totally valid. If you are in a SC that is fluid, then your choices as a player would be able to shift the direction of the challenge, putting your party in a position to use skills that benefit them.

As a hypothetical example: You need to convince the King to move his guards from the East Gate to the West Gate. This SC would obviously need Diplomacy and other social skills, but it would make the most sense to start it well before the party even meets the king. If your party is heavy on Charisma classes who are gifted with a silver tongue, you could talk your way through the whole thing. I imagine this would be a SC from the DMG would look like. Instead, you generate your strategy on the fact that your party is much more physical-skill-oriented. Your "skill" as a player lies in knowing that you won't be able to talk your way past three levels of guards, and instead setting the party up for an alternate path. You could climb over a wall to get past the outside guards, battle the King's Guards and then Intimidate the King into obeying your military orders based on the state of the guards.

Basically, I think player skill in a Skill Challenge has to do with you knowing your party and the goals, and convincing the DM that what you want to do is valid.

I use a dynamic system where the players describe how they're using the skill, and I'm not afraid to adjust DCs slightly for clever choices. For instance, in a recent skill challenge the PCs had to get across town quickly. Many DCs dropped by 2 points, and a mandatory endurance check was eliminated, after they stole horses and a carriage with a difficult thievery check.

I'm finding that this keeps the players thinking and adds more player skill into the equation.

Wolfwood2 said:

Anyone else feel this way, and if you do, what have you done about it?

Click to expand...

Here's a list of things I'm going to do (coincidentally, my turn as DM is just coming up in our round-robin campaign).

• Add automatic successes. If the player describes the perfect action, don't even roll a skill check, ie let's pretend we're playing OD&D.

• Use a lot of modifiers to skill checks. Encourage player participation/description of actions. Reward reasonable actions, or highly entertaining unreasonable ones. Penalize spamming and limited participation (a little -- I'm not a big fan of penalties that arise from legitimate play style differences).

• Dynamically change the primary skills used in the challenge in response to what the players do. If you go the Intimidate route, you gotta back it up with some Athletics, ie a beating.

• Give bonuses for using skills in a logical order. If the player before you flattered an NPC using Bluff, try following up with Diplomacy, not a history lesson. Do anything to encourage the creation of an organic narrative, as opposed to dry dice game, ie plot-Yahtzee.

• Encourage the use of powers to produce conditional modifiers.

I came up with some research rules that work pretty good (Maddman75 - Research), and think that it is applicable to skill challenges.

One thing that helps IMO to add tactical depth is options to do something other than get successes. Now successes are big, but these other options will allow players who aren't experts at whatever actions is going on to help and contribute. So you might allow checks to

- Grant everyone involved a +1 bonus
- Remove a failure
- Lower the DCs
- Open new skills (roll at a lower DC to open skills for others to use. Successes don't count, but neither do failures)

Another part of my research rules are the assumption that each roll represents about a 4 hour block of time. Each character only gets one roll, and only one person can take a given action. Otherwise you just get in each others' way.

I also have a rule that if the characters break, they lose a success while they rest up. However, one of the actions keep that from happening.

It has the benefit of being a special case, as well as success levels which make this kind of thing much easier to figure out than a binary system like d20.

Here's the setup for what may have been the first skill challenge I ran:

The PCs, early on in my game, found a note that indicated cult activity. They showed it to someone in power (Lord Padraig); he burned it and told them to get lost. They started a fight and tore him apart.

Then the captain of the guards came. That's where the skill challenge started.

One of the actions a PC took was to cast Make Whole on the scraps of the note that survived the burning. That was an automatic success.

I think that's a good example of player skill in a skill challenge. I think it applies as good tactics, for a loose definition of tactics (smart use of your resources against an opponent).

I've never considered removing a failure; that sounds like a neat option, though I don't know what kind of action would do that.

Tactics in combat come from a couple sources: terrain/hazards, a suite of power options, and inter-party strategy.

In a skill challenge this translates as the "story" of the SC (how it develops and responds to the PCs), what you can do with skills, and inter-party strategy (e.g. "I'll bluff the guard so you can steal the keys off him").

Most of the advice I've seen is of the SC terrain type, as in have every check lead to a repercussion/plot twist/new option, include ways powers can be used, provide auto successes for great role-playing or creative use of utility powers, house mini-SCs within SCs, break up a SC with encounters between rounds of the SC, create a path of least resistance with a different end result, establish what failure/partial success/success mean in the context of the SC, etc.

However, at a certain point I think you're going to run into the limits of the D&D 4e skill system - there just aren't as many options with how to use skills (all of which may not be applicable in a give SC) as there are for powers. I think SCs just aren't meant to be tactical challenges in the same way as combat.

Mallus said:

Give bonuses for using skills in a logical order. If the player before you flattered an NPC using Bluff, try following up with Diplomacy, not a history lesson. Do anything to encourage the creation of an organic narrative, as opposed to dry dice game, ie plot-Yahtzee.

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Plot-Yahtzee? Man, I think you just coined my new favorite rpg term.

Our group has done a lot of skill challenges, and like many of you we have had some good ones and some not so good ones from a design point of view.

We have done a lot of negotiation type skill challenges and after a while I noticed a pattern that kept happening. My players would only try to use the Diplomacy check over and over until they were told they couldn't use it anymore. I thought about the reasons why they always took that approach and then it hit me. From the players point of view, if they fail a bluff check, the perception is that they have done something bad while failing a diplomacy check just meant they weren't successful in negotations. But thats not how skill challenges are supposed to work. A failure is a failure and the feeling that certain skills have more negative connotations should be removed from the players minds.

Once I realized this was the case I spoke to the players and explained that no matter what skill they chose, it was no worse or better of a failure than another skill (excluding special circumstances where auto failures happen on some skills or a double failure is counted).

As the players got over this mental hurdle, they started to be more imaginative in the challenges and the challenges themselves are getting more interesting due to player involvement.

Hope someone can use this advice for their game!

Quickleaf said:

Tactics in combat come from a couple sources: terrain/hazards, a suite of power options, and inter-party strategy.

In a skill challenge this translates as the "story" of the SC (how it develops and responds to the PCs), what you can do with skills, and inter-party strategy (e.g. "I'll bluff the guard so you can steal the keys off him").

Click to expand...

This. The skill challenge mechanics simply lack the tactical depth of the combat mechanics. Honestly, this situation is probably for the best. Any attempt completely to codify mechanics for the broad range of situations currently covered by skill challenges would be seen as replacing "role-playing" with board-game mechanics.

IMO, an ideal skill challenge engages the "creative problem-solving" player skill. It's less about efficient squad tactics and more about encouraging players to think outside the box or to get inside their characters' heads. It's when D&D is more like a text adventure than like a war game (but where each command line you enter has a chance of failing, determined by your skill bonus).