Sudden Death Skill Challenge System

I tried some different variants of skill challenges, and this is what I'm currently using. It is still very much an unpolished jewel and not set in stones, but the basic premises seem sound.

First let me explain the troubles I've had with previous skill challenge systems.

• Punishes failure rather than rewards success: The official skill challenge system has ridiculously low difficulties. This is very unexciting; you are doing tedious routine tasks.
• Punishes Initiative: Because a failure is so much worse than a success is good, skill challenges punishes initiative, ideas, and out-of-the-box thinking severely.
• Grind: Having to roll 12 successes before three failures is very grindy and unengaging and takes a lot of time at the table.

Sudden Death Skill Challenge System
Edited this post so that this is the latest version. The original version is included below.

In this system, a skill challenge consists of only a few steps, but each step is difficult. The idea is to reward success rather than penalize failure. The overall chance of success is about the same as in combat of a similar level - that is you are almost assured of success, but there is some excitement on the way there. The penalty on repetitive skill use forces characters to diversify.

• Skills to Use: The skill challenge should have a few recommended skills that can be used, but if a player comes with a good explanation of how they use a different skill this should be allowed. It is also possible to use other values, such as attack rolls, where appropriate.
• Original DCs: The DCs are those given in the original table in DMG1, page 42, including the notes. All skills have the same difficulty, with the usual +/-2 skill modifier based on DM judgment.
• Standard Action: Making a roll in a skill challenge is a standard action. Sometimes you might need to move into proper position as a separate action.
• Accumulate Only Successes: To succeed at the skill challenge, the team needs a number of successes equal to the complexity of the task. Failures are not accumulated; see below for how skill challenges fail.
• One Success Per Round: A group can only score one success at a skill challenge each round. There is thus a minimum time to complete the skill challenge of 1 round per point of complexity.
• Initiative: The skill challenge has an initiative count just like a creature does but does not roll for initiative. It generally comes last in the round. If the actions of a creature started the skill challenge, its' initiative count is right before the instigator's (as if it has just completed its action).
• How to Fail: The skill challenge takes no actions on its turn, instead it fails if no success has been scored when the skill challenge's initiative comes up.
• Desperate Effort: Just before the skill challenge is about to fail, all characters can spend action points to take an action to make additional skill rolls on the challenge.
• Repetitive use of Skills: A character that has already scored a success with a particular skill in this skill challenge will find it harder to gain further progress, suffering a +5 DC modifier, cumulative with several successes. This is to prevent boring and repetitive use of skills, yet let specialized characters have the option of using their favorite skills again, if at a penalty. This does not impair your ability to Aid Others in this skill challenge.
• Aid Other: An attempt to succeed that fails but beats DC 10 (15 at paragon level, 20 at epic level) counts as an attempt to aid other, giving a cumulative +2 to later attempts to complete the task. This bonus resets each time a success is scored. You can perform the aid other action in a round where someone else has already scored a success; the bonus then applies to the next round.
• Complications: There should be some additional complication involved in the skill challenge. Maybe it attacks each round, or there is an ongoing combat. This is especially true if the skill challenge is of a level where the DC of the skill roll does not increase compared to lower levels.

Special Cases

• A "round" is an abstract measure of time in a skill challenge. Some skill challenges take place during combat, using normal combat rounds. others have rounds that are minutes, hours, or even years in length for momentous tasks. Short interruptions are acceptable in skill challenges with rounds of minutes or more.
• Powers and (where time permits) rituals an allow a character to use an unusual skill to aid the challenge, or might reduce the future DCs of the challenge by 2. In exceptional cases, such effects might complete the skill challenge right away, but this should be rare.

Closing Comments
So far, I've only done some basic testing of this system. Maybe the DCs are too low - since only a single success is required from a team of five and Aid Other is almost guaranteed to give a +4 bonus on the last roll, success is more or less a given.

Original Sudden Death Skill Challenge System
I reposted the original system here in case it becomes interesting later.

In this system, a skill challenge consists of only a few steps, but each step is difficult. The idea is to reward success rather than penalize failure. The overall chance of success is about the same as in combat of a similar level - that is you are almost assured of success, but there is some excitement on the way there. The prohibition against repetitive skill use forces characters to diversify.

• Skills to Use: The skill challenge should have a few recommended skills that can be used, but if a player comes with a good explanation of how they use a different skill this should be allowed. It is also possible to use other values, such as attack rolls, where appropriate.
• Original DCs: The DCs are those given in the original unpatched skill challenge rules in the DMG. All skills have the same difficulty, with the usual +/-2 skill modifier based on DM judgment.
• Accumulate Only Successes: To succeed at the skill challenge, the team needs a number of successes equal to the complexity of the task. Failures are not accumulated; instead failing to achieve a success during a round causes the skill challenge to fail.
• One Success Per Round: A group can only score one success at a skill challenge each round. There is thus a minimum time to complete the skill challenge of 1 round per point of complexity.
  • The skill challenge runs over complete rounds; announce the challenge at the beginning of a round and calculate failure at the end of each round.
  • Desperate Effort: At the end of a round, just before the skill challenge is about to fail, characters can spend action points to make additional skill rolls to complete the challenge.
• One Success Per Skill Per Character: One character can only contribute one success using a particular skill. A skill that has already contributed a success can still be used to Aid Other.
• Aid Other: An attempt to succeed that fails but beats DC 10 (15 at paragon level, 20 at epic level) counts as an attempt to aid other, giving a cumulative +2 to later attempts to complete the task. This bonus resets each time a success is scored. You can perform the aid other action in a round where someone else has already scored a success; the bonus applies to the next round.
• Complications There should be some additional complication involved in the skill challenge. Maybe it attacks each round, or there is an ongoing combat. This is especially true if the skill challenge is of a level where the DC of the skill roll does not increase compared to lower levels.

Closing Comments
So far, I've only done some basic testing of this system. Maybe the DCs are too low - since only a single success is required from a team of five and Aid Other is almost guaranteed to give a +4 bonus on the last roll, success is more or less a given.

Reserved - coming example.

Interesting approach. I think one "problem" might be that you now reward luck too much?
You don't need to use the right skill, you just have to find an excuse and roll high.

Of course, I like that it's never a bad idea risking to roll. So I think you succeeded in achieving your stated goal...

A second issue might be that your system works differently good for different number of PCs. If there are 10 PCs, it's highly unlikely that they will ever fail a challenge - someone is bound to roll well. If there are only 2, they might not make it far, because 2 bad rolls are easy to have. Maybe you have to set a fixed number of skill checks allowed per round? But that's bad, because it means some players might not get to participate at all.

Overall, I think a little missing in the concept of the "generic" skill challenge is the lack of flow or dynamics. By "RAW", it's just x succeses before y failures. There is no mechanical hint or design element that helps you add a dynamic to it. You can usually use the same skills over and over and nothing changes. That's also the problem with your approach. Once you know Diplomacy is your best skill and you can use it, you don't need to be smart, you just roll that skill.

Compare that to combat. Your best powers are dailies, but you can use them only once per day. You have at least two powers to select from every round, and the situation in combat determines which one is the be.

Skill Challenges by default are missing these elements. I like skill challenges that are designed as a real mini-game - a check with X opens up a check on Y. You can roll this type of check only n times for success. Repeating a check with Z increases the DC. But even that's probably still a little shallow...

Mustrum_Ridcully said:

...system works differently good for different number of PCs. If there are 10 PCs, it's highly unlikely that they will ever fail a challenge - someone is bound to roll well. If there are only 2, they might not make it far, because 2 bad rolls are easy to have. Maybe you have to set a fixed number of skill checks allowed per round? But that's bad, because it means some players might not get to participate at all.

Click to expand...

Well, since complexity is approximately equal to a number of foes, it SHOULD be easier for ten people to complete a challenge than it is for one person. But I see what you mean, the skill pool of a really large group is likely to make even a high complexity challenge trivial (if long).

Mustrum_Ridcully said:

Overall, I think a little missing in the concept of the "generic" skill challenge is the lack of flow or dynamics. By "RAW", it's just x succeses before y failures. There is no mechanical hint or design element that helps you add a dynamic to it. You can usually use the same skills over and over and nothing changes. That's also the problem with your approach. Once you know Diplomacy is your best skill and you can use it, you don't need to be smart, you just roll that skill.

Click to expand...

I have a limit that each character can only score one success with each skill.

Another problem is that you would probably run out of useful skills in more complex challenges before the challenge is resolved.

Consider a complexity 5 challenge. It will require 12 successes, which means you need to find some way to use 12 different skills out of the 17 available skills. Its difficult to envisage specific situations in which such a wide variety of skills would be applicable to a single situation. Now, admittedly a few checks could be accomplished using powers or maybe rituals, but again that would be situational and its hard to see where more than a small number of them would be applicable to a given challenge, so it only helps a little.

I'm also concerned about swinginess. A few bad rolls which happen to occur during a single round causes failure. The chances of success are thus not very much dependent on the number of successes required, but on the DC of the rolls and the skill bonuses of the PCs. The players could easily sink themselves right near the start by using their best skills and suddenly discover they have basically no chance of overall success (well, at least this can be seen as a reward for good strategy, so it isn't all bad). Moreover once you get those bad rolls the challenge just plain suddenly ends and aside from burning APs your just done and don't have an opportunity to consider your strategy and make adjustments (further restricted by the fact that you may already have burned your best skills).

In many respects what this system seems to be trying to do is pretty similar to what the Obsidian SC system does, but IMHO it does it in a mechanically more robust way that takes into account party size and doesn't suffer from the sudden death issue. I think Obsidian is also nice in that it fixes the total number of rolls to a bit more manageable number from the start. With Sudden Death you'd need up to 60 skill check rolls at complexity 5. With Obsidian you need 25 skill check rolls for each challenge.

Finally I think the main issue with skill challenges is too many degrees of freedom. Level, complexity, relevant skills, and variable DCs are too many knobs to tweak and the result is you don't really know how hard a given SC is unless you can crunch some very complex math. Obsidian has only level as a variable, making it MUCH easier to know the chance of success on a given challenge. Since success chance IS the actual desired variable you want to be able to tweak I don't see the value in all the extra degrees of freedom in either the standard system or the Sudden Death system, they are just extraneous.

Of course you may be able to address these faults and its always interesting to see alternate ideas tried out. I'm not sure how Sudden Death can be tweaked, but give it some thought. It could lead somewhere interesting.

I wanted a system with the same in variables as the normal one, for compatability.

Well, some translation of existing SCs will be needed whenever you use a different system I would think. Once you have to do that anyway, then why have more than one thing that is variable in the basic parameters of the SC? I really think that is the biggest flaw of the DMG system is it offers too many variables in a context where it really doesn't matter.

For example lets consider a hypothetical skill challenge and a party attempting it. If its a complexity 3 challenge at level 4 and you were to determine that the party has an 80% chance of success then what if its complexity 4 and level 3 instead? Lets assume that also yields an 80% chance of success. So what? Why are there two things you can vary here if all permutations of the two variables simply result in some success percentage? Why not have one variable, like Obsidian does, that you can use to vary the success chance to be what you want? In our example SC maybe dropping it to complexity 2 at level 4 gives a 90% success rate, but if making it complexity 3 and level 3 did the same, then I'm just as well off and there's no real point in having this choice to make.

Ideally an SC system would have one variable (call it level) and setting it to different numbers gives you a reasonable spread of success rates. Since Obsidian does that I'd say it is doable and at that point why go for anything more complex? Admittedly there may be different ways of running an SC and having the narrative flow through it which may make one system better than another for whatever reason.

Wow! This is really interesting. It has a lot to recommend it:

1) It strongly encourages full participation. There is no reason not to have everyone involved in the challenge.

2) It encourages a variety of skill uses. Once your skill-monkey succeeds at his best skill in one round of the challenge, he has to switch to something else.

Most of the flaws have been pointed out by other people:

1) It doesn't scale for group size. Maybe you can slide the base DC up and down if the group is above or below average size.

2) I think you need to fiddle with the math a bit to get it to scale right.

Starfox said:

Aid Other: An attempt to succeed that fails but beats DC 10 (15 at paragon level, 20 at epic level) counts as an attempt to aid other, giving a cumulative +2 to later attempts to complete the task. You can perform the aid other action in a round where someone else has already scored a success.

Click to expand...

This is one thing I disagree with. I think the players should have to decide whether to Aid Another before rolling. It makes this a real tactical decision: do you go for a safe bonus or do you take a crap-shot to win the round. The "best" strategy isn't obvious. Making a roll automatically count as Aid Another if it fails removes this strategic element.

Personally I LOVE rolls that are really important. Any time players are blowing on there dice and screaming "NO WHAMMY NO WHAMMY NO WHAMMY STOP!" things are going well.