D&D 4E 4e skill system -dont get it.

[Pelwrath]

I remember a very well done FRP game from the early/mid 80's. I loved it but it was so complicated, my friends were never into it that much. It was Chivalry&Sorcery by FGU.
Why does it look like D&D is going the sam edirection?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

So then... Challenge: Ship runs into a ferocious elemental-water storm. Can the party help, direct, inspire, bluff and intimidate their crew into pulling out of it alright? Or will the ship capsize and dump them all out to find themselves alone and half-drowned on the beaches of Treasure Island? We'll see next week.. thanks for the idea!

You'd better give us a report on that. Sounds like a great challenge.

Count me in on the high praise for the solo mass-combat challenge, that sounds really great.

I think I'm really gonna dig this.

Fitz

 

[Ahglock]

The way I explained this is that where before we had two 'game modes' - Exploration and Combat - We now have three, Exploration, Combat, and Challenge.

The whole 'Challenge time!' could seem weird, but is it really all that different from 'Roll initiative!'? They are game modes, each 'mode' tells players what to focus on. Exploration is walking around looking at stuff, very few dice rolls if any, Combat is combat obviously, and Challenge is the rolling of skills to solve a speficic problem or situation.

Great now I got final fantasy theme music in my head.

I'm cool with the idea of this but I don't think I'd introduce it in such a fashion as challenge time. It is a bit too gamist for my tastes.

 

[Hussar]

Yes, but you do not resolve combat by making multiple rolls and hoping to achieve x successes before y failures. You just roll once each time/round: each roll is different-for a different task. And things among your task resolutions may change.
In 4e skill checks things do not change: you either escape the guards or you do not. Yes, you may critically succeed or fail but you still need only one roll to check it out.

Stepping back a bit. Your description of combat is actually 100% true. You make multiple roles, hoping to hit and deal damage before your opponents do the same. If you fail enough times, then you die.

This is applying the melee model to skills. You try X skill and hope that you succeed. Each success brings you closer to a goal, and each failure leads you closer to, well, failure.

Could you do this in 3e? Perhaps. But, it was certainly not called out. Look at diplomacy. By RAW, you roll ONE and only one diplomacy check in a given rp encounter. Retries are not allowed, by RAW. Now, you can ignore that and roll several diplomacy checks, season it with intimidate and bluff perhaps and go from there. But, 3e does not tell you to do that. It's a binary pass/fail system with almost every skill check.

Disable Device - fail by 5, trap goes off. Roll until you pass/fail. And this is usually how most skill challenges were presented. Roll a diplomacy check, achieve a certain score, and you succeed. Looking at modules this is precisely how skill checks are presented.

Celebrim, can you give me an example from official sources where you could do a series of skill checks like what Harr has presented?

 

[Spatula]

To the OP, why, because it makes it less swingy. Nothing sucks more than having 20+ ranks in a skill and rolling a 1. Too bad you fail. Likewise you can make an atomic bomb if you roll a 20 on a Int check for engineering...

Natural 1's and 20's have no special significance on skill checks (only on hit rolls and saving throws).

 

[JesterOC]

I listened to the Tome podcast today and the host interveiwed Andy Collins. This skill check mechanism came up and he gave some more details.

First was that the players did not choose the difficulty level directly. The players come up with solutions, the DM determins if the proper use of that skill would be easy medium or hard. The DM then checks a table to look up the DC for the given Difficulty and then the roll is made.

Also a failure should never end with a total loss for the players. The example he gave is if they fail to convince a King of something, that a total failure would never end with "and then the PC's are locked in the dungeon forever. The End" Instead if they do fail they will either not gain a reward, or get some story based penality later on. The example of this was if the players exiting from Sembia failed, they still got out of the town, but when they later encountered the next event, the encounter would be harder due to the earlier loss (in the example he said the monsters got some dice or other bonuses).

Everything else sounded like the PC lite version, DM sets up scenario deterimnes how many successes will trigger a success and who many failures will trigger as failure. The players come up with their best ideas and the DM figures the difficulty, a table determines the exact odds. And it is a go.

I would ASSUME that players will get feedback on how difficult their attempt was and thus would likely be able to change plans mid way through the contest.

OK hope that helps.

Go here http://thetome.podbean.com/ to listen to it.

JesterOC

p.s. he also gave a little more detail about the fireball spell (not much crunch) All in all a pretty good interview.

 

[Magus Coeruleus]

Yeah, I would never tell the players it's "challenge time" or ask them to set the difficulty. I would make it as seamless as possible for them, with the mechanics of it secretly in my head, tracking successes and failures, determining which ones actually count toward the thresholds and which are irrelevant, and what difficulty each action qualifies for, telling them none of these metagame values. I would rather encourage players to explain what exactly they want their PCs to do and why than to let them just pick low/med/high diving board. If they know the easy/med/hard distinction and want to take a smaller/larger gamble then it's up to THEM to roleplay and explain an action that reasonably qualifies as relevant to the challenge and either easy or hard. If they can't think of something that would be higher risk AND higher return as a result of that increased risk, then hard DC is not an option; likewise if they feel cautious but can't think of something that is low risk but still marginally helpful then they get stuck with a med/hard DC all the same.

Either a failure on an easy check gives everyone a -2 to all future checks, and a success on a hard check gives +2.

I think easy should be low risk low return and hard should be high risk high return. I would not penalize so badly for failure of an easy check; the consequences should not be so dire else why try easy in the first place?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yeah, I would never tell the players it's "challenge time" or ask them to set the difficulty. I would make it as seamless as possible for them, with the mechanics of it secretly in my head, tracking successes and failures, determining which ones actually count toward the thresholds and which are irrelevant, and what difficulty each action qualifies for, telling them none of these metagame values. I would rather encourage players to explain what exactly they want their PCs to do and why than to let them just pick low/med/high diving board. If they know the easy/med/hard distinction and want to take a smaller/larger gamble then it's up to THEM to roleplay and explain an action that reasonably qualifies as relevant to the challenge and either easy or hard. If they can't think of something that would be higher risk AND higher return as a result of that increased risk, then hard DC is not an option; likewise if they feel cautious but can't think of something that is low risk but still marginally helpful then they get stuck with a med/hard DC all the same.

I think easy should be low risk low return and hard should be high risk high return. I would not penalize so badly for failure of an easy check; the consequences should not be so dire else why try easy in the first place?

I think the interesting part is that you can use the basic framework in many ways.
You can go "Total Gambling" and have the players set the difficulty values, and even tell them their number of successes and failures.
You can hide the whole system, and think of every or most possibly skill uses ahead and build them into your adventure. If the players find enough of the options, and succeed or failed at enough of them, you will give them their resolution of the challenge.
Or you do something in between.

 

[loseth]

I vote that Harr's example go into the PHB Lite v1.2 as an unofficial example of how to run a skill challenge. If you haven't seen a good example, it's not really obvious how to go about it, and I don't think it's too easy to figure out just from Rodney Thompson's comments (already in the PHB Lite v1.2).

 

[Magus Coeruleus]

I think the interesting part is that you can use the basic framework in many ways.
You can go "Total Gambling" and have the players set the difficulty values, and even tell them their number of successes and failures.
You can hide the whole system, and think of every or most possibly skill uses ahead and build them into your adventure. If the players find enough of the options, and succeed or failed at enough of them, you will give them their resolution of the challenge.
Or you do something in between.

Agreed. I certainly wouldn't fault a system that gives you the option to make it transparent, and I mean no disrespect to who make that choice. My preference for DMing and I suspect playing, though, is to keep the system as hidden as is practical, and use narrative rather than metagame speech to preserve immersion. It's a credit to the system if it can work either way. Incidentally, I'm not a hypernarrativist or whatever you would call it. In combat, I think the system is too fine-grained to practically keep it all narrative (I mean, what can you say that conveys a number of hit points without referring to a number?). The skill challenge sounds quite doable in narrative mode, however.