Fourward Path

[Garthanos]

Perhaps we could formalize it and call it

Revised Skill Challenges
Fourward towards an integrated conflict system

And I was only half joking about it - They had people on the team who could see a future for D&D 4 and that is another thing to make me sad or angry.

 

[pemerton]

And a most welcome outcome at that for yet another thing that I wish further development of 4E would have addressed: revamping the Ritual subsystem. Admittedly, my gameplay has been exclusively in Heroic tier, but aside from Comrades' Succor, rituals never saw much action at all.

We have had quite a bit of ritual use, beginning in the first or second session, I think, when Make Whole was used to help prepare a homestead to resist a goblin assault.

Rituals have been a mixture of direct mechanical action resolution (eg Delay Affliction, Phantom Steed, etc); changing the fiction to support actions within a skill challenge (eg Make Whole as above); and forcing the GM to expound new backstory (various divination-type rituals).

 

[Emryys]

Perhaps we could formalize it and call it

Revised Skill Challenges
Fourward towards an integrated conflict system

I'm in!

 

[yokiosakura]

duplicate

 

[C4]

My biggest gripe is with the [minor] action : it's the one that, IME, people tend to "look for something to do with it", which is incredibly time-and-tempo consuming.

The [bonus] action was a kinda-good idea, but it's not been well applied and creates all sorts of weird situations (especially between classes). The "do something extra, but do it only once per round" is such an attractive spot for so many abilities, items, etc that it gets all jumbled up pretty fast...

It's not something I've found a solid solution to...

You're probably already aware of my solution, but in my Points of Light game, minor actions exist exclusively to fuel class role-features. Every class has an at-will role-feature -- including leaders! Woot, leaders can be leaders every turn! -- and every role-feature requires a minor action each and every round. This has a few benefits: there is no 'minor action-hunting,' hybriding is built into the game's ground level and much more balanced, and lastly the daze condition is consistently useful due to minor actions being consistently useful.

/shameless self-promotion

 

[Garthanos]

You're probably already aware of my solution, but in my Points of Light game, minor actions exist exclusively to fuel class role-features. Every class has an at-will role-feature -- including leaders! Woot, leaders can be leaders every turn! -- and every role-feature requires a minor action each and every round. This has a few benefits: there is no 'minor action-hunting,' hybriding is built into the game's ground level and much more balanced, and lastly the daze condition is consistently useful due to minor actions being consistently useful.

/shameless self-promotion

Well if [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] can do it so can you

I like the idea of ground floor handling of many of the better ideas from later development.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I guess I'll have to read those articles. I think I DID read them, long long ago, but its hard to remember. Anyway, for all the other things I've tinkered with, I have not directly tinkered with the mechanics of the SC system much in HoML. Contextually it occupies a bit different place in the system than 4e's (it isn't EXACTLY an encounter replacement in my system, though you could think of it that way). So, if I really can find something that slots in fairly well and has concrete improvements, that might work.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wow! ... I mean... wow! That is some awesome work. I've recently been starting a "top-down" review of what I want from my "4ward" heartbreaker, and this is definitely going in!

Every time I see one of these things and see the date, I laugh and then cry a little (or a lot...). Where was I during those years? Wasn't I on the boards, and hunting for blogs, and all that stuff?

Also, yeah... it just re-affirms : Too soon!(tm)

I think it is a reasonable discussion. I'm not finding myself super excited by the concept, any more than I have been by Wreccan or other people over the years expounding basically the same thing. Its not that it doesn't work, but it seems mostly like SCs with bigger numbers. I mean, lets take Climbing the Mountain, you can clearly implement this with ease as a classic SC. I can see some argument for basically having an SC mechanic where it is scaled with hit points so you can directly inject them into play as a 'currency', but that's about the most cogent argument in favor. OTOH the virtue of the SC system is just SIMPLICITY. It involves a lot less dice rolling, fewer mechanical choices, etc.

I guess the question is, if you have a 'fighty' challenge, maybe the truth is it SHOULD be more of a variant of a combat encounter, outright. Perhaps this points more towards a better tool for making slightly more abstract 'combats'. So maybe the 'break into the castle' thing is run like a combat, but instead of a straight up grid to play on you have a map and the combatants move around in zones on the map, only getting into direct standard combat when they are in contact. Still, I think in this case you might well just count each 'success' in the challenge as one of the enemies/groups of enemies and run whatever happens with them as a mini-combat, with its effect becoming an abstract success/failure on the SC's tally.

I like this better in the sense that the SC system is already the best approach for most other kinds of situations, at least it generalizes well. While I take Rob's point that every tool has its place, the beauty of the single universal SC mechanic is that it becomes so easy to just keep deploying it again and again, even when the scenarios are vastly different.

 

[Garthanos]

Possible the first time I thought of using hit points as a direct output of skill use was for the use of Intimidation to induce the enemy to give up the fight if the enemy is bloodied (you effectively did half their hit points to finish it)... ie instead of being an all or nothing that could be measured in hit points. Stealthing in to a combat scene may get you surprise and that extra attack opportunity IS much like doing more hit points as well.

This is obviously about applying skills toward or in a combat scenario...

One of the advantages of casting all challenges in the same way could be as you arent deciding as much "this is a combat scenario and this is not"

 

[Garthanos]

I guess I'll have to read those articles. I think I DID read them, long long ago, but its hard to remember.

I think I did too but I think I was more impressed this time around