Skill Challenges and Action Points

Garthanos · Mar 7, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
CaW is, of course, completely unsupported by 4e.

Proceeds to go around that by creating a McGuffin situation and playing a Skill Challenge to bring the McGuffin in to play to enable something a Classic 4e battle that couldnt have occured in story without that CaW preparation

darkbard · Mar 7, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
Without getting into too much backstory....

...no, nevermind, here goes:

They do, with much effort take down the Stasis Vault, releasing both hoard and dragon. However, 5 rounds (and 200 hps of unavoidable last-moments-of-life-damage later, The Great One has put itself back in stasis - but not the Hoard, the matrix of high-epic magic items that anchor it were tampered with).

So the walk off, or, actually, transport via multiple trips walking a portable hole through a teleport circle, with a dragon horde. A little over a hundred tons of it, nearly the cargo capacity of their ship, after replacing their ballast with it, as well!

That 'we made off with a Dragon's Hoard without having to fight the Dragon because we were just too clever by half' bit, that's CaW. (Really, the plan to kill it like that was CaW, but even CaW plans don't survive contact with a high-Epic caster.)

CaW is, of course, completely unsupported by 4e.

What an epic tale of epic sessions!

pemerton · Mar 8, 2017

Manbearcat said:
Extreme DC I believe is Hard DC +5.

darkbard said:
Is the extreme DC a house rule element from pemerton's game?

Manbearcat is correct, and yes, I think this is a house rule. (Maybe it's canvassed somewhere? It doesn't come up all that often, but is there in reserve in the event of a pacing emergency!)

darkbard said:
I've seen similar usage (sometimes called a critical success), where high skill rolls will carry an additional benefit (e.g., count as two successes).

We allow a nat 20 either count as two successes, or as a Hard success even if the result falls short of that. I think [MENTION=15800]Hellcow[/MENTION], back in the same post/blog I mentioned earlier, suggested this.

I see it, again, as analogous to the role of a nat 20 in combat, which (roughly) doubles damage dealt.

Garthanos said:
Sounds like some of the pure mechanical usages of a Fate Point... though a full reroll when you dislike the results is basically more like a +4 almost 5 to effective skill

A player who is only 1 or 2 short will take the +2 to guarantee success; otherwise they take the reroll.

MwaO said:
I'd be careful about awarding APs in skill challenges unless you plan to have 4 combats in a day and the PCs are not strongly optimized. That then gives 3 APs for 4 combats.

If you have less combats than that or the PCs are optimized to gain APs elsewhere, then you can easily end up having APs for every combat. Which is not really an intended result.

I think this worry assumes that players won't be using APs during skill challenges. But at least in my game, that's not the case.

One thing that is relevant to this, I think, is making sure that each success or failure in the challenge changes something in the fiction (DMG2 stresses this, and before it came out [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] on these boards used to make the point very clearly and forcefully). So if, say, the player of the fighter fails a social check in the challenge (not terribly unlikely for a typical fighter build), the reason for spending an AP to try and turn it into a success is not just the overall context of succeeding at the challenge, but that particular context of the player not wanting his/her PC to be ignored or not get his/her way or look like a fool or whatever other consequence, in the fiction, is going to follow from the failure.

This is more-or-less what happened in the Yan-C-Bin and Marut SCs I mentioned upthread, which is why 3 (I think - maybe even 4) of the players came into the tarrasque combat without APs.

pemerton · Mar 8, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
CaW is, of course, completely unsupported by 4e.

Well, some internet posters said it so it must be true!

thanson02 · Mar 8, 2017

pemerton said:
DMG 2 talks about using APs in skill challenges - though the suggestions are pretty sketchy..........

In combat, an AP is - in effect - a retry. So that's more-or-less how we use it in our game. Here are the details:

A player who fails a skill check in a skill challenge may spend an action point:

*to add +2 to the skill check result;
*to reroll the skill check;
*if an advantage is used, to step down the difficulty of the check (extreme to hard, hard to moderate, or moderate to easy);
*if an advantage is used, to cancel the failure.
If another PC fails a skill check, a player may spend an action point to make a secondary skill check as an immediate interrupt:

*to add +2 to the skill check result: moderate DC;
*to reroll the skill check: moderate DC;
*if an advantage is used, to step down the difficulty of the check (extreme to hard, hard to moderate, or moderate to easy): moderate DC;
*if an advantage is used, to cancel the failure: hard DC.
The rule that no more than 1 action point may be spent in an encounter applies.

You know, I guess I never thought about using action points in regards to skill challenges. Where in DMG2 did they give ideas?

Most of the time we use action points it's in regards to combat. One thing I did notice at my table is that my players have a tendency to use action points to give them strategic additional options and give them more flexibility in what they can and cannot do during combat sequence. A good example is that one of my players needed to use to move actions in order to get close enough to attack an opponent I had at them. So they burned at the standard action to get two move actions and then used an action point so they could take for standard action. I've not seen my players at least use action points for redos of bad rolls.

Love the ideas above, btw. I'll have to chew on them and see what my players like.

Sent from my XT1096 using Tapatalk

pemerton · Mar 8, 2017

thanson02 said:
Where in DMG2 did they give ideas?

DMG 2, p 86: "You might allow a character to spend an action point to reroll a failed skill check."

MwaO · Mar 8, 2017

pemerton said:
I think this worry assumes that players won't be using APs during skill challenges. But at least in my game, that's not the case.

One thing that is relevant to this, I think, is making sure that each success or failure in the challenge changes something in the fiction (DMG2 stresses this, and before it came out [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] on these boards used to make the point very clearly and forcefully). So if, say, the player of the fighter fails a social check in the challenge (not terribly unlikely for a typical fighter build), the reason for spending an AP to try and turn it into a success is not just the overall context of succeeding at the challenge, but that particular context of the player not wanting his/her PC to be ignored or not get his/her way or look like a fool or whatever other consequence, in the fiction, is going to follow from the failure.

This is more-or-less what happened in the Yan-C-Bin and Marut SCs I mentioned upthread, which is why 3 (I think - maybe even 4) of the players came into the tarrasque combat without APs.

Right. You're spelling out what I was saying. Because your PCs don't have an AP for every combat, that's exactly what's supposed to happen. But if your game likely means that PCs have APs for every combat, then there's an issue.