D&D 4E Heavy Concrete Data on 4e's Skill Challenge System (long, lots of tables)

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Saeviomagy

Adventurer
Cavalorn said:
Aren't all secondary skill checks supposed to be against Hard DCs? If there's potential for a secondary skill check not to default to Hard, doesn't that make the system far more susceptible to players' inventiveness?
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Personally I don't see how that's a bad thing.

Mind you, it is just one more example of how the rules differ with... well, themselves.
 

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S

silentounce

First Post
saitir said:
Yeah, all those hidden messages that are encoded in a funky secret language called 'english'. You should learn it sometime. Oh, and learn to take the rules as a whole rather than isolating parts from others and screaming 'but if I have to allow my players to roleplay, that means the system is broken'!
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When calling someone out about their grasp of the English language it's best not to make mistakes of your own. For example, note the capital "E" for the proper noun in my previous sentence and compare it to your own. You also have grammatical errors in your last sentence. And it's ", not '. By the way, I may have errors in my own as well, but I'm not the one who told someone else to learn 'english'.
 

S

silentounce

First Post
Dungeon has another example of a Skill Challenge in its most recently released adventure.

http://wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dufe/20080613a
page 31 (4 of the pdf)

The DCs are 18, 22, and 26 which fits the table exactly for 5th level characters. 13, 17, and 21 +5 each. So, that should put that to rest, although I doubt it will.

There may be other skill challenges in the adventure, but I was just reading through it and I thought I'd point it out.
 

C

Cavalorn

First Post
Saeviomagy said:
Personally I don't see how that's a bad thing.

Mind you, it is just one more example of how the rules differ with... well, themselves.
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Exactly. Player innovation is great, but this looks like a walloping great inconsistency to me.

I've been trying to reason through the situation presented in the example, and it doesn't help that we're not told what the challenge in question is. It looks like the challenge is 'Find the Temple'.

The idea might be to allow a form of implicit 'piggybacking' in Skill Challenges. This would mean that the first attempt to use a secondary skill would always be at Hard DC, but other one-off uses of secondary skills that built on the result of the first needn't necessarily be Hard themselves.

Case in point: the cleric uses outside-the-box thinking to see if the cultists would have built their temple near a river. That gets a Hard DC. However, that roll having succeeded (and presumably having yielded the information that yes, they would) the fighter is then able to use Athletics to climb a tree and look for a river, which is an Easy DC.

So if this were the way it was meant to work, there would be a potential way for otherwise non-contributory characters to help. If the mages and clerics are all in a huge library doing important arcane research, they might use History (Hard DC) to come up with the title of a particular book with much of the needed information in it, and in the event of success, the fighter could use Perception (Moderate or even Easy DC) to search among the shelves for it.
 


Tilenas

Tilenas

Explorer
Hi all!
I've been following this whole skill challenge debate pretty much from the beginning and given that the original 4e system isn't quite feasible, I set out to modify it.
Now I'd like some help with the probabilities. Is there a straigt formula for this? (I've been grinding out the values manually all day long and it gets tedious once a certain amount of rolls is reached)
So you'd have event X (no. of successes reached) and event Y (no. of failures reached), each with their respective probabilities (i.e. [DC - skill modifier] x5%).
If the way you calculate this has already been discussed elsewhere, I apologize.
 

Daniel D. Fox

Daniel D. Fox

Explorer
To the OP -

With this data in mind, how would you readdress the Skill Challenges successes/failures and how would you adjust the tables for Skills by character level/ease of success?
 


Ydars

Ydars

Explorer
Hey Stalker; can you re-post your challenge system mod because the link in your post on this page doesn't work; one of the joys of the shift-over to EN2 I expect.
 


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