Skill Challenges: How Much Have They Improved?

Starfox said:

The problem here as I see it is the massive number of successes that needs to be garnered. It is not enough that each player makes the skill roll for their schtick once, they have to do it over and over, which is what leads to skill spamming.

Click to expand...

Skill challenges of course range from 4 successes to 12 -- I don't see how 4 or 6 are spamming. Unless it's a very complex situation, I don't think you should make a social challenge more difficult than 6 successes required.

One very good advice in DMG2 that I've personally used a lot is how it suggests that you divide the SC into three parts, just like a story: the beginning, the climax, and the ending (this is naturally easier with longer challenges). Gives it more structure and makes help the SC more dynamic.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Sorry, I find this line if inquiry very odd because what I see in the system as it exists now in DMG and DMG2 addresses every one of these points. Some are given more consideration than others but the SC system as it exists IS what you're looking for.

Click to expand...

I was going to write down the procedures for skill challenges in a nice point-form format from the DMG, DMG2, and the DDI articles but got sidetracked with another project. I'll probably get around to that still; that'll probably help me see where skill challenges are at these days.

Kingreaper said:

Armand:"I use diplomacy to get past the guard; telling him how we need to get to a friend because his family are in danger"
"Okay, you did well, he lets you past, and your friends"
Brutus:"I try and intimidate the guard"
"He just let you past already, wtf? Seriously. Ok, now you're entering into the city, the streets are crowded, seems like there's some sort of event going on, what're you going to do?"

Click to expand...

"Brutus: I use Intimidate to clear a path for us to get to our goal."

No matter what the situation is, the trick for Brutus is to make the solution involve the Intimidate skill. It doesn't really matter if its the same situation.

Starfox said:

"Brutus: I use Intimidate to clear a path for us to get to our goal."

No matter what the situation is, the trick for Brutus is to make the solution involve the Intimidate skill. It doesn't really matter if its the same situation.

Click to expand...

If Brutus can come up with a way to make intimidate work in every situation, fine, but an awful lot of situations won't be applicable, and in many it will have a hard DC while stealth, or acrobatics, might have an easy one.

For example, if it's Brutus' turn when they get to the flooded district in town, intimidate won't work without a lot of lateral thinking, and possibly a minor sub-challenge
And even successfully intimidating a massive crowd isn't going to be easy, Brutus might actually have a better chance just using Athletics to push his way through the crowd.


If you don't vary the difficulties according to how difficult a skill would be to use, of course you'll get spamming, but if diplomacy is a hard DC to get past the half-blind ogre, while stealth is an easy DC, even Armand might decide that stealth is the better choice.

Starfox said:

"Brutus: I use Intimidate to clear a path for us to get to our goal."

No matter what the situation is, the trick for Brutus is to make the solution involve the Intimidate skill. It doesn't really matter if its the same situation.

Click to expand...

Yeah, really, a player that simply tries to intimidate everything? I'm thinking he's going to spend a lot of time locked in a cell somewhere or running away from the consequences of his actions.

Remember, every PC has a number of skills. In a typical party any given character will have at least 2 skills he's going to excel at. A challenge should generally have a variety of conditions the party encounters which give them the chance to decide what they're going to try next.

Spamming happens when the SC is too narrow or the DM fails to have the environment react to the players.

Lets imagine a puzzle challenge, the characters have to work some gizmo within a time limit. This is a pretty narrow situation, but it can trivially avoid spamming. The first obstacle is getting the gizmo open, which can be accomplished by thievery. Next arcana is required to understand the magical runes revealed. Next Endurance is required to keep winding the key fast enough the runs the gizmo. Next History is required to pick the right setting for the levers on the gizmo. This can be extended for as long as the DM wants to make the SC. Three failures at any point means the PCs fail to accomplish the task in the required time limit. No spamming, pretty much everyone will get to participate.

Notice that the challenge reacts to the PCs actions, the situation evolves. It could even evolve in different ways depending on what choices the PCs make. Each increment of progress unlocks different skills. Its a pretty simple linear example, but I think its illustrative of at least one general pattern of SC design that works well.

An interesting discussion.

To Firelance (and LostSoul): you've suggested to LostSoul that many things a DM has to use judgement for in a SC (what skill to use, outcomes, modifiers, etc.) should be based on what is logical, what flows naturally out of the situation and the game world. That's definitely part of the story, but not all of it. I think you should also pay some attention to mechanical considerations, the "fiddly bits" of the SC to be used.

Take selection of skills to be used. I think Mearls wrote in one of his early skill challenge articles that you should look at the skills your specific players have, and tailor your list to that. (to the extent that you have a hard and fast list of skills, which you might not, as discussed.) Not that every skill on the list must be one a PC has trained, but you should have an eye towards them.

Similarly, when it comes to setting DCs. If one PC has a monstrous skill bonus on a particular skill, you have to be aware of that. It can literally break a skill challenge if they can auto-succeed against the standard DC (and the players realize they are in a skill challenge, etc.). You'll probably at least want to cap the number of uses of that skill. To avoid punishing him or devaluing the choices he made to obtain that bonus, you can provide extra benefits on extreme successes, and/or optional, obviously extreme difficulty options where successes convey extra benefits, that the player can choose tackle and get a chance to shine (more Mearls suggestions).

We don't want to throw logic and verisimilitude away, by any means. But we have to balance them against what will make for a fun skill challenge mechanically. This is more art than science; really just a specific case of the general balancing act a good DM has to carry off.

If the only logical skills for a challenge are all untrained by the PCs, perhaps that is not a good challenge for your party.

Or, add to or change the situation, and/or the game world, so that your desired fiddly bits do fit naturally. An example I used in discussion on WotC forums was a wilderness travel challenge, where the PCs were stuck in ruins deep in a desert and wanted to get back out to civilization. The obvious, logical choices for skills are probably Endurance, Perception, and Nature. In my group I think only one PC had Endurance and Nature trained, and no ability or other bonus on Nature at that. Now, it might be fine for a brief challenge to have him roll Endurance over and over while the others aid or roll Perception.

But what if I wanted something longer? OK, let's add something to the situation that will allow the scholarly mage character to participate. There are remnants of enchanted roads built by the lost empire buried under the desert. Now he can use Arcana to help navigate. What about the cleric? There is a curse on the ruined city that makes travelers walk in circles and inevitably return to the city. Religion becomes another usable skill - indeed, a critical one, since failure to gain a success each round is an auto failure, as the curse draws them back in. Will this seem "gamey" to the players? Perhaps... but it might just make the setting seem more alive and interesting, especially if you plant clues about the roads and the curse in the ruins for the players to discover before they set out.

Regarding another specific issue... I don't think a success in a skill challenge should always produce the exact outcome the player was shooting for. What's important is that the success move the party closer to the goal.

"I use Athletics to bust the door. "

"You're unable to break down the steel door. But your repeated battering has knocked off the accumulated dirt and dust, revealing a mystic inscription."

"I use Diplomacy to convince the king to give us the artifact."

"The king is impressed, but not fully convinced. What if you are unable to protect it from the demon? He asks for more proof of your prowess."

LostSoul said:

The reason why I bring this that I'm wondering how this interacts with skill challenges. If you want to get past the guard to get into the spice den so you can murder a smuggler and his shifter companion, resolving the single action or task in that manner will resolve the entire skill challenge - and that's something we don't want.

Click to expand...

(OK, as suggested getting past the guard might not be an appropriate scope for a skill challenge, but for the sake of argument let's say it is.)

In this case, unless it's the final success in the challenge, success at telling the guard to go away will not cause the guard to go away immediately. Maybe it will make the guard say, "I'd love to head down to the pub, but the captain's gonna come by on inspection rounds any minute and I'd lose my job. I can't leave until my relief shows up." The success still moves the challenge along, presenting new avenues for the players to proceed. Now they can try a Bluff check - "Oh it's okay, I spoke to the captain, he said to take the night off." Or they can follow up with the captain, convince him to make his inspection immediately, after which they can leave. Or disguise themselves as the relief. Or use Streetwise to let him know about another employment opportunity with better pay and better hours, so who cares about this job?

But anyway, except in very exceptional cases, a single success shouldn't be able to short circuit a skill challenge. (and again, if it seems like it easily could, perhaps you should rethink the scope of the challenge.)

ryryguy said:

We don't want to throw logic and verisimilitude away, by any means. But we have to balance them against what will make for a fun skill challenge mechanically. This is more art than science; really just a specific case of the general balancing act a good DM has to carry off.

Click to expand...

How do your suggestions for balancing a fun skill challenge interact with player choice - especially their strategic/long-term choices?

My thought is that, if you are constantly tailoring the skill challenge to fit these PCs at this time, the choices that the players make that lead into the skill challenge aren't as important.

ryryguy said:

But anyway, except in very exceptional cases, a single success shouldn't be able to short circuit a skill challenge. (and again, if it seems like it easily could, perhaps you should rethink the scope of the challenge.)

Click to expand...

One of the reasons I was asking the question is because it leads to this: skill checks in skill challenges are not the same as skill checks outside of skill challenges. A normal skill check resolves the action of the PC; in a skill challenge, it doesn't. (Well, maybe; I'm not sure it ever says what a skill check resolves.)

What does it resolve?


So it adds to the tally of successes or failures in the skill challenge. Does it do anything else? Apparently not! We'll have to look elsewhere for that.

The DMG2 has some better answers.


I could look at the Skill Challenge articles in Dungeon/Dragon. Maybe later.

One big thing jumps out at me: the action the character takes doesn't seem to have any affect on the outcome.

Here's something to contrast it with:


This tells us what the player does (describes the actions of the PC), when this mechanic comes into play ("seize something by force, or to secure your hold on something"), what mechanics to use ("roll+hard"), and the result of success or failure ("On a hit, choose options.")

That one block of text tells us a lot about how to play the game.

Bookmarked.

LostSoul, if you do get around to compiling the Skill Challenge info, I will be very interested in reading it.

RC

I don't know if skill challenges have improved these past two years, but I do know that my understanding of them has improved.

Here's the way I view skill challenges: skill challenges are a way to build failure tolerance into a goal that otherwise may not have any. Skills challenges aren't viewed that way for three reasons: 1) early threads show that the math, as interpreted by the poster, didn't favor successful completion of the challenge by a wide margin. 2) The DMG didn't have any examples. 3) Many of the DMG 2's examples are simple pass/fail in outcome.

Lets examine these:

1) Frankly, I'm not sure what happened here. My personal experience is that skill challenges don't seem to be that difficult. Nor have I seen a lot of posts saying that they rarely succeed in skill challenges as written.

2) The lack of example was bad for the system. This changed over time, but the DMG should have included a series of examples to help people. Its fairly well known that when you try to teach people new things and new skills, you should include examples.

This left people to make-up their own and I'm not ashamed to say that I got it wrong the first time I included a skill challenge. In fact, based on what I know now, I wouldn't even call it a skill challenge. My first real skill challenge was as a player in the game day adventure Journey Through the Silver Caves. I was the Barbarian, and I used Athletics to get us through the rapids (high bonus + rolling twice = lots of success) When we got to the caves and needed to find which one was the correct one, we managed to reduce it down to two. At that point I piped up and said "I use dungeoneering to figure out which path leads to a dungeon?" The DM allowed it. (It's reproduced on pg 95 of the DMG 2)

My second exposure to skill challenges was H2, but this time as a DM. This skill challenge had a degrees of success. The more success the PCs got, the more information the NPCs gave. (Pg 93, DMG 2)

3) Looking through the DMG 2, however, I see a lot of skill challenges that don't have degrees of success. I think this causes people to view skill challenges as failure intolerant.

So why, then, do I think that the skill challenge system is a way to add failure tolerance to the skill system? By creating a failure threshold greater than one for goals that require more than one skill check to achieve.

Consider a system without skill challenges. Lets take D&D 3.5, since I'm actually familiar with it.

To handle a situation like in the Restless Dead from DMG 2 and H2 in 3.5, it's tempting to reduce it to a single diplomacy check. (RAW, diplomacy takes a minute.) The DM would likely require some amount of in character dialogue, if only to keep the situation from being over with to quickly. Another way to handle it would be skip the check and handle it all in character. When I ran 3.5, I handled it both ways, depending on the situation and what the PCs wanted to do.

But that's one check. (RAW discourages retries on diplomacy.) If the PCs screw-up, that's it, they don't get any information. There's defiantly the potential for it to be boring.

Another way to handle it in 3.5 is to unpack it. Each NPC gets their own diplomacy check. Even if the others hate your guts, maybe you can the information for one of them. This is better, but then each NPC seems like just another crack at the check (i.e. way to get around the discouraged retries), rather than a fully fleshed out entity its own right.

Of course, you give each NPC it's own skill check, fleshing out the NPCs a little more.

There still really isn't a degrees of success in this system because the NPCs either spill everything or not. Unless the DM decides either before hand or on the fly that PCs can get less than all the info. Such a thing isn't in the 3.5 rules, but it's not against them either.

Or you do have a skill challenge just like you would in 4th.

All 4th does is say that some times, when you fail at a skill check, you may still succeed at your goal, but you've had a temporary set back. In 4th, for example, diplomacy is explicitly stated to be something that might happen in a skill challenge. Set DCs aren't given. Retries are built into the system.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but that's pretty much how I ran 3.5 diplomacy skills. (There seem to be a handful of skills that, for whatever reason, I never used RAW like diplomacy, craft, and profession.) In 3.5 (now in 4th) if a person failed a diplomacy check, I'd let the PC continue to try to persuade the NPC, but get enough failures and the success was no longer a possibility via diplomacy.

LostSoul said:

How do your suggestions for balancing a fun skill challenge interact with player choice - especially their strategic/long-term choices?

My thought is that, if you are constantly tailoring the skill challenge to fit these PCs at this time, the choices that the players make that lead into the skill challenge aren't as important.

Click to expand...

Are you talking about the mechanical (character-building) choices they make, or the action/narrative, in-character choices they make?

With regard to mechanical choices - yes, from one perspective it does make the players' choices less relevant. If you train Religion you get one sort of skill challenge, if you train Intimidate you get another, so it doesn't matter which you train. That is true to some extent. It's a bit of a glimpse behind the curtain, where the DM is employing a bit of "forced choice". But viewed another way, it's actually being more responsive to the player's choices, in that you are giving them what they want. If the player chooses Intimidate over Religion, why force him into a skill challenge involving deep theological discussions? He wants his character to bust heads, so give him that. (Not all the time, of course - but you want to lean in that direction.)

It's not that much different than if nobody is playing a controller - you won't use minions as often. Not never, but less often.

With regard to narrative choices - I think there is a danger of what you describe happening, but it doesn't have to be that way. You do want the challenge to feel tied organically into events. The character's background and history can carry advantages and disadvantages into the challenge. As an example, in a challenge I ran last session involving an urban investigation, a PC had previously established connections with a group of street urchins. Asking them for information gave him an automatic success in the challenge.

Pulling back a bit, it feels like maybe you are too focused on the mechanical process of the skill challenge, gaining successes and failures, and overall success and failure in the challenge. (This may seem like an odd comment since I brought up the need to consider mechanics during design, but here I'm not talking about design, I'm talking about why you do it at all.)

Like this statement:

One big thing jumps out at me: the action the character takes doesn't seem to have any affect on the outcome.

Click to expand...

A big part of the fun and "value-add" of a good skill challenge is that it produces an interesting, directed yet non-deterministic group narrative. Of course success or failure in the challenge is important to "what happens next" in the big picture. But the journey is also part of the fun, and part of the point!

So yes, whether a character achieves a success by Diplomacy or by Intimidate it still adds a success, so on those narrow terms, "the action the character takes doesn't seem to have any affect on the outcome." But the choice still made a difference to the story. It made a difference to what it says about who the character is.

Furthermore, beyond also affecting what might come next in the challenge itself (what other options are opened, etc.) choices made during the challenge may have longer lasting effects. That Intimidate success was a success, but if the PC meets the intimidated NPC later on, the NPC is going to remember that. If the group chose a direct approach over stealth, others will hear about what they did (for better or for worse).

One of the reasons I was asking the question is because it leads to this: skill checks in skill challenges are not the same as skill checks outside of skill challenges. A normal skill check resolves the action of the PC; in a skill challenge, it doesn't. (Well, maybe; I'm not sure it ever says what a skill check resolves.)

Click to expand...

I agree with this statement, but I don't see it as a problem. Skill challenges are more freeform and less well defined than combat on the grid. On the grid, you need to know exactly how many squares that Athletics check lets you jump, because the pit stretches a specific number of squares. In a skill challenge, that's not relevant. The skill check still resolves the PC's action in the sense that it resolves success or failure, and informs "what happens next", but the details of the resolution are going to vary from check to check, from challenge to challenge.

*edit* Oh, I do think it would be good design to build in some player choice over the skill check resolution, a la your chart... After a Diplomacy success, the NPC offers to do one of two favors - which does the PC choose? (Maybe one choice gives something outside the scope of the challenge; choosing this option doesn't grant a success. Might be an interesting choice for the player.)

Also, I may have unintentionally implied that the player's stated intention for a check is irrelevant. Actually, most of the time when a player says "I use Skill to try to do X", and succeeds, then X is what will happen. But sometimes only part of X, or something close to but not exactly X, or every once in a while, Y. Again, this is more art than science, but one specific case where you'd probably get Y instead of X, is where X would derail the challenge.