Transparency in Skill Challenges

The group I DM for had its first real Skill Challenge last week and we encountered significant problems. Now, I don't know about your players but mine are the kind who see someone making a skill check then grab the dice themselves to see what *they* can do with it! That's not normally a problem (indeed, sometimes it's useful) but I find it to be a critical issue in Skill Challenges, where the whole thing lives or dies by the numbers of successes and failures.

First off, we use a VTT (Fantasy Grounds 2) so it's not like I can just ignore this behaviour as dice-rolling to pass the time.

Second, and this is my key point really, I later received a whole heap of complaints that I "hadn't told them this was a Skill Challenge". No, I hadn't. And I had resolved not to do so. Moreover, I had explained as much in a lengthy e-mail prior to the session. I had explained how I would tell them what is expected of them and ask how them how they mean to achieve it. The actual instance from the session was presented along very similar lines to the example given in the e-mail.

Of course, they started grabbing for the dice. One player said "I will look for a path" (they were trying to locate a remote mountain monastery ... yeah, okay, it's Siege of Bordrin's Watch) so I called for a Perception check - done, one success. What else? Erm, someone asked if the monastery might have some cultivated land nearby for food. Good, says I, roll a Nature check ... everyone rolls a Nature check. Then everyone rolls a Religion check, a History check, an Endurance check (although I actually called for this last one). Things had pretty much fallen apart by that point. With five characters each rolling every single check, we ended up with about 20 successes and 8 or 9 failures at the end (not technically possible, I know, but you see what I mean).

I called a time out at that point and explained that they had completely misread the situation, completely failed to realise that this was a skill challenge and that they *must not* just keep rolling their dice willy-nilly. A protracted and rather aggressive argument ensued.

I will concede the fact that this was the first one they had played through, but temper that with the fact that I had spelled things out very clearly in an out-of-game e-mail beforehand.

I was told that I should make it clear that we are doing a Skill Challenge. In short, they said I should be telling them "This is a Skill Challenge ...". (They stopped short of actually asking for the numbers of successes and failures required, but I get the feeling they would like that too.)

The thing about them all rolling the dice each time was explained away as perfectly normal behaviour. "Say we want to figure out something about this monastery," they said. "Our characters would talk amongst themselves to see who knows. That means we all make the skill check." I appreciate the argument but I counter it with the fact that they should simply compare skill check bonuses to decide who is most likely to know something in a given field; *that* person then makes the actual skill check. That didn't go down too well though.

Another thing about our group is that we generally do not like didactic DMs. (You know what I mean here! There is one in the group who regularly makes my life a misery!) I am on the verge of writing out very clear house rules of how Skill Challenges will be run in my game, but I just know that this will be met with opposition, amendments will be sought and if I try to use the old "my campaign, my rules" approach, I will be facing open rebellion, probably. Deary me!

I think what I am asking here is how other DMs run their Skill Challenges. I really want to avoid anything like "Okay, this is a Skill Challenge. You need to convince the gate guard to let you in. What skills are you using?" That would be the worst case scenario for me (well, except for declaring how many successes they need).

i run mine just like an encounter. everyone rolls initiative and rolls one skill check on their turn at the end of each round they all rolled endurance. ran the same adventure actually and they failed horribly.

I don't think you should revert to being transparent. I know I never do that, and it works out fine. It's a pleasant surprise for the players when they get XP for what they thought were just some skill checks and roleplaying!

Here are some of my thoughts as to how you can adapt to your players in medias res. When they all want to roll the same skill check, you can approach it in a number of ways. If they want to talk about it as a group, you can have them all roll, then give them a success if at least half the group succeeds or a failure if less than half succeeds. If you want only one player to make the check, you can discourage others from trying as well by saying that making a bad check could lead the group in the wrong direction, subtley hinting that a failed check gives the group a failure. For example, when a character makes a Nature check to find the farms, and another character speaks up saying he'd like to do the same, tell him, "You could, but you don't know as much about Nature as the other character, so if you were to speak up, you might confuse the group by arguing with the other character, which might result in you not being able to find the farms." The character would hopefully rethink his actions after that.

You told your players ahead of time how skill challenges would be run, and they agreed to it, so there should be no arguement about it later. If everyone agrees that, in practice, such a policy is not ideal, then maybe you should consider changing it. However, don't change your rules just because the players want it to be easier to win. Change the rules so that your players will have more fun.

The Dungeon Master's Guide 2 builds a lot on skill challenges from the first DMG. I highly recommend it for DMs and players alike. It will help you design skill challenges to avoid situations like these and give you tips to combat unruly players while still letting them have fun. The best is the "Yes, and..." trick. When a player asks if she can make a check that you don't want them to make, let them make it, but instead of adding a failure, maybe make the group stumble across a monster's lair, or have them lose healing surges for getting lost. Or, let them complete their goal, but it doesn't turn out how they expected. "Yes, you find the ancient ruins, however, all the treasure has been stolen or moved, and kobolds now live here." Feel free to stretch your skill challenges out over long periods, even interrupting them with combat or other skill challenges.

I've rambled on long enough, so I think you get my point. I hope I was of help. Good luck with your game!

Maybe I missed something, but who empowered the PC's to decide when it's appropriate to roll a skill or not? I think if you simply tell them to only roll when you agree a roll is required then most of your problem will be solved. In other words, do the players tell YOU when to roll for initiative? I think not.

talarei07 said:

i run mine just like an encounter. everyone rolls initiative and rolls one skill check on their turn at the end of each round they all rolled endurance. ran the same adventure actually and they failed horribly.

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That can work sometimes, depends on the Skill Challenge, but it doesn't work generally. It throws up all kinds of issues like having the PCs delay and so on. I think it was largely written out in the errata/updates and I agree with that.

Camelot said:

The Dungeon Master's Guide 2 builds a lot on skill challenges from the first DMG. I highly recommend it for DMs and players alike. It will help you design skill challenges to avoid situations like these and give you tips to combat unruly players while still letting them have fun. The best is the "Yes, and..." trick.

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All good advice here, thanks. I have the DMG2 and it *is* a very good book; I guess I need to revise the relevant chapter and be sure to put their advice into practice.

Infiniti2000 said:

Maybe I missed something, but who empowered the PC's to decide when it's appropriate to roll a skill or not? I think if you simply tell them to only roll when you agree a roll is required then most of your problem will be solved. In other words, do the players tell YOU when to roll for initiative? I think not.

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I refer you to Ari Marmell's excellent article on this site about having the players control Skill Challenges. It caused me to have an epiphany on the whole thing (although this was evidently not sufficient!). That said though, I take your point on making sure they only roll when it is agreed they should (mostly when I say so ) but fear that thing about didactic DMs.

In addition to the 'Hey, don't roll like crazy' premise that frankly is good to have in any VTT regardless of skill challenges (people will just drown out the RP, descriptions, etc with stupid rolls sometimes), there are a few possible solutions:

1) Whenever the group mass rolls a skill check, turn it into a group check for the skill challenge in which you need a majority of the group to pass to actually garner a success
2) Ignore all rolls after the first, but apply the die roll # to everyone's bonus who joins in
3) Treat extra rolls as assist attempts - though I'd suggest not just allowing going for 10s, since that encourages the 'barrage the DM with dice' method but instead have them go for, say, the base DC - 5 and have failures give a -2 to the roll.

Either way, make sure to describe as people are hurling dice about _even when not in a skill challenge_ the ways in which they are both helping _and_ hurting. So it's not just that someone rolled a 5 knowledge check so doesn't remember while the guy who rolled a 20 knows, good for him. The guy with the 5 _knows the wrong thing_ and confuses the issue.

So if the group says 'What do we know about vampires?' and rolls 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 for example, you might include truthful and false information. 'Well, you've heard many stories and rumors about them. You know that they are vulnerable to sunlight and radiant energy, but after that you've a muddle of campfire tales and myths (etc)'

And depending how mean you were, that could include things like 'Vampires' domination gaze is so powerful that the only safe approach to fighting them is with a blindfold' and 'Vampires are resistant to all weapons, except for wooden piercing weapons such as stakes and crossbow bolts. You could easily prepare some improvised weapons' (and let them use shoddy spears, dagger, and crossbows to fight instead of their usual stuff, until they realize it doesn't seem to help)

I'm not really that mean myself, but I am putting together a VTT game to run at some point and my intent is actually to tell people 'Assume that every roll is part of a skill challenge and that there will be rewards for success and complications for failure. I'll use passive/take 10 results for basic information that you know and mundane tasks'

I'd much rather have them just keep RPing along and when they ask what they know of something answer, perhaps even prompt them in advance via whisper, rather than break away to a pile of rolls.

++Infiniti

Basically, I think this is a holdover from prior editions that needs to be stomped out.

In the old days, you've got a problem, everyone tends to roll to solve it. Maybe they're just rolling to aid, maybe they're making separate rolls -- but it's often infinite retries, so why not?

But skill challenges have initiative, just like any other encounter. You can have a lot of transparency (personally, I think it should be obvious to players that it's a skill challenge after the first roll or two, but not because of anything particular in play -- but if all scenes are either "roleplaying", "skill challenge", or "combat encounter", then it becomes obvious to even semi-skilled players without too much cueing), but they don't get to break things by having their characters roll for everything -- for the good of the party ("I help with everything!") or ill ("I try every skill check!").

If needs be, just switch to a table rule of "if I don't know what the roll is for, it doesn't count".

Regarding the attempts to assist issue, we tend toward requiring a description of how the other PC assists. This tends to eliminate the extraneous rolls rather quickly when the ideas are lacking, or obviously detrimental to the cause. "I help to convince him to make a deal with us by hovering over the Cleric's shoulder and glowering menacingly." That's a -2 there, good fighter.

Our SCs tend to be fairly free form, but there is no question when we're in a SC. The appropriate skills are announced and it's up to us, to role play how we make those checks. Being the most "courtly minded" player in the group I tend to lead the negotiations. When the 9 CHA fighter or Ranger pipes up, you know that things are unlikely to go well. The same can occasionally be said of our 16 CHA cleric though

The main thing is that we aren't just tossing out dice, because that's not our SC 'formula.' A skill role that isn't preceded or followed by an explanation as to how it was accomplished is no skill roll. The good thing about this is that appropriate use of powers or exploits can result in an effective automatic success, if intelligently played. We aren't bound by the tyranny of the dice.

There's just something to the "mini-game" feel about a transparent Skill Challenge that I really like. Hence so far I have always told the players they were about to begin one.

This past weekend the group I was DMing for was in a skill challenge and got their first 2 failures right away! (6 success, 3 to fail) But they really wanted to complete the challenge badly as there was most assuredly loot and treasure if they pulled it off! It was like a TV game show for a while as the party was urging the Rogue to make the rest of his rolls! (he was trying to disable a trap)

Point being, as a player knowing you are in a SC seems to be half the fun.

I'm liking a lot of what I am reading here ...

keterys said:

Whenever the group mass rolls a skill check, turn it into a group check for the skill challenge in which you need a majority of the group to pass to actually garner a success

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Yeah, I had actually thought of that. What I like about it is that it actually punishes the frivolous rolling, or it can do, without being too heavy-handed. You can even point out the folly of the approach when it all goes wrong and yet it was not the DM being mean!

keterys said:

it's not just that someone rolled a 5 knowledge check so doesn't remember while the guy who rolled a 20 knows, good for him. The guy with the 5 _knows the wrong thing_ and confuses the issue.

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Oh I like this! That one is in! Yes, where possible I will throw in misinformation but another approach is to apply penalties to other skill checks in the challenge.

mneme said:

But skill challenges have initiative, just like any other encounter.

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I don't think they do now, do they? Not since the update.

mneme said:

"if I don't know what the roll is for, it doesn't count".

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That sounds like a useful rule ... only I can imagine arguments along the lines of "It's obvious what the roll is for - you called for a Religion check. And anyway, it says it right there in the chat window!" (VTT, remember.)

Ryujin said:

The main thing is that we aren't just tossing out dice, because that's not our SC 'formula.' A skill role that isn't preceded or followed by an explanation as to how it was accomplished is no skill roll. The good thing about this is that appropriate use of powers or exploits can result in an effective automatic success, if intelligently played. We aren't bound by the tyranny of the dice.

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Absolutely, Ryujin. That applies in my game too, always has. At the least, "the DM's little helper" (the old +2/-2) is applied but yes, automatic success or fail is also in the offing.

Snowbird said:

There's just something to the "mini-game" feel about a transparent Skill Challenge that I really like. Hence so far I have always told the players they were about to begin one. ... Point being, as a player knowing you are in a SC seems to be half the fun.

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M'yeah but doesn't it kind of break the fourth wall or something like that? I suppose a lot depends on your group's style and I think my own group would be happy with it, tbh (we have no problem with breaking play for lengthy rules discussions, for example). But it really rather ruins it for me.

Thanks for all this.