A talk on the concept of "failures" in a skill challenge (no math, comments welcome)

[Saeviomagy]

Don't give them the option...

While Gandalf and Gimli considered the significance of the dwarven tome, Merry got curious about a skelton sitting on the edge of the well...

Whta would happen if the fighter stood around scratching his butt while the party's bard (yeah, we wish) convinced the King to do whatever...

In social encounters make everyone participate... the heroes will have intended and unintended contributions to make. Choose a skill if you must, but make everyone contribute at least one roll

Except that's a perfect recipe for the fighter to do his best to avoid skill challenges all together. One of the best ways to do that is to just cut to the combat, and that attitude willl seriously derail things.

I think that not penalising the long-shot is a good thing. It works to make exciting combats, and I believe it would work to make exciting skill challenges.

That said, it would be nice if you could CHOOSE to risk more, again much in the way you can in combat: you decide to risk those 4 attacks of opportunity to get that final flanking blow on the boss in the hopes his buddies will surrender when he goes down.

However doing so should not cause your buddies to die: you took the risk, you take the penalty. So the penalty can't be failing the challenge, it has to be something that only applies to you (and also not contributing to success at the challenge).

 

[gonesailing]

I just plain like Skill Challenges.
This is a design/execution problem. Not a systemic one. The design of the Challenge should encourage a variety of skill use and anticipate a percentage of failures. The DM must execute the Encounter in such a way as to engage all the party members. And by engage I mean keep 'em rolling and interested in the outcome.
In Skill Challenges Failure is an option. And sometimes a durned good one. In a Skill Challenge/Combat Scenerio I am writing I think the Combat will be tougher if the party Wins the challenge, but overall the situation will be worse off.

That is one reason I like Skill Challenges. They allow the real possiblility of defeat in a way that straight combat does not. Save the Children and you're a hero. Fail Heroically, People still might respect you, but not love you. Kill the Giant and you're a hero! Fail Heroically, you're dead or the village only remembers you as those guys who ran scared.

 

[Hussar]

I think you have hit on the fundamental flaw in the skill challenge system (regardless of math). Skill challenges should be a game of resource management (get a failure, lose a healing surge as you loose grasp of the rope and fall, lose 10 gold as you find you cannot charm your way pass, but must bribe, etc....). In this way failures are not limited to a certain number (4 or 6 or whatever) but are instead determined by how much the party is willing to lose, give up, sacrfice or otherwise spend to try again to achieve sucess.

This also models skill challenges more closely to combat. Combat is very rarely a matter of complete sucess or complete failure, and rather a measure of how many resoures the party had to or wanted to expend in order to succeed.

Y'know, that's not a half bad idea.

I'm not sure what metric we could use for resources, but, I do like the system. Action points? I don't really like Healing Surges - the party just has too many, and, why should a high Con party be better at solving problems than a low Con party?

Hit point damage? Ew.

Not sure...

 

[Twinbladez]

Y'know, that's not a half bad idea.

I'm not sure what metric we could use for resources, but, I do like the system. Action points? I don't really like Healing Surges - the party just has too many, and, why should a high Con party be better at solving problems than a low Con party?

Hit point damage? Ew.

Not sure...

I agree, its what I was trying ((obliquely)) to get at, theres no choice in skill challenges, its pick your best applicable skill and roll

 

[Ipissimus]

This is a good point. I think, more than any other mechanic I've seen, Skill Challenges will require superior design work.

If the fighter's sitting around scratching his butt during the negotiations that's partly the fault of the challenge and a little bit of fault goes to the player for being lazy. Ok, no, the fighter doesn't have skill training in Diplomacy, so he's not much good at the table, but if the fighter has bested the Duke's champion in a game of physical skill then the Duke is going to give the party more respect by association. The wizard without Athletics is going to hold back the party in a chase sequence unless he uses Mage Hand to tip over an apple cart and block the passage of his persuers.

I'm not advocating the 'pick any skill as long as you've got a good reason' style, though that had some merit it could quickly get ridiculous. But I think it will pay when designing a skill challenge to build in as many factors as possible and maybe even non-skill related bonuses, which will also partly eliminate the 'guess what the DM is thinking' aspect. Quest items, for example, could give bonuses on future skill challenges with certain people. The example challenges I've seen so far are far too simplistic, I think it'll behove most DMs to tailor challenges to his players more than we're used to with combat.

Back to the original question though, yes, as a player I severely dislike failure. But then I like RPing for the ability to waltz around being cool and competent. Failing, particularly in one of my core skills, is a blow to the ego. I think that 3e might have spoiled us all in some respects, though the only evidence I can point to for that is that I remember back in 1e players (myself included) seemed to take failure in our stride. I've also noticed that we've gotten into alot of hot water in 4e because we're much less willing to run away.

 

[FormerlyDickensC]

OP brings up a good point...but it might have more to do with player dynamics rather than system/mechanic dynamics.

In any event, the primary difference b/t combat and skill challenge is that combat has no role-play override whereas skill challenge does. That is, in combat I can't act out the way I swing my sword in order to garner a bonus on my attack roll. But in a skill challenge, I can role-play (through 1st/3rd person narrative or whatever) my actions in such a manner that would garner a bonus to my skill check.

This difference is the key aspect that no other D&D edition introduced (for the most part).....it allows role play to have a direct and calculable effect on game play. At the very least, the skill challenge allows quantifiable rules for linking role play and game play. This is the nucleus of the system.

I'm not saying the skill challenges are perfect or even all that good as is. But the underlying goal in their creation is important. This ought to drive a lot of development for the tabletop rpg world (not that it hasn't already in indie publishing and house rules) by making this affect more mainstream.

In any case, we need to be careful in our attempts to link skill challenges and combat. Each plays a different part in the conduct of the game. Ultimately, I think 1) partial success mediation and 2) role-play bonus determination will determine the effectiveness of skill challenges in any given game session.

Once we start seeing some good premade modules with good skill challenges in them, I think we'll all be better off and perhaps better understand where the system can be taken. ...having said that, there is much room for modification in the existing system.

 

[Zurai]

That is, in combat I can't act out the way I swing my sword in order to garner a bonus on my attack roll.

You can't? I'd better tell some of my DMs that they're not playing D&D then.

 

[FireLance]

While skill challenges and combats are presented in similar ways, at their core, there's a big fundamental difference.

In combat, generally the worst thing a player can do is....do nothing. Sure a wizard could fireball the whole party, but in general a person's biggest failure is missing their attack roll, and not contributing to the eventual defeat of the monsters. However, most of the time other players aren't angry when you miss a roll, they feel the pain with you, and everyone continues to work hard to beat a challenge.

However, in a skill challenge there's a difference. In a skill challenge, a player can do worse than nothing, he can get a failure. He can actually provide a penalty, a drawback, to the entire party. The most obvious example is a one person (with high skills) in a skill challenge. With his high skill, he would normally succeed easily. Now add a second person with weaker skills. If that person tries to participate and make skill rolls, he's actually hurting the group's chance.

I thought about this after Sunday's playtest of my current skill challenge system, and my dm agreed with me. Further, I asked some of the players what they thought, and people mentioned they were scared to fail. They wanted to make sure they found a way to use their best skills, and one openly admitted he would have felt better if he could have "bowed out" of the challenge instead of roll his lower skills and possibly create failures.

I've been thinking along the same lines and in fact, for the last day or so, I've been working on an alternate skill encounter system which works more like a combat encounter I've just posted here.

Would appreciate any thoughts and comments.

 

[FormerlyDickensC]

You can't? I'd better tell some of my DMs that they're not playing D&D then.

haha..wow. LARPS anyone?

 

[shadowguidex]

I am really enjoying skill challenges; my players seem to really get into them, and they are coming up with some amazing uses for their skill checks - my groups fighter seems to find just the perfect use for his three skills (Streetwise, Athletics, Endurance), which is quite extraordinary what he can do with such a limited list - particularly when one tends to look at the list itself; moreover, I tend to award clever use of skills with the +2 bonus suggested in the DMG, so my players who use creativity even for skills that aren't necessarily optimal, will at the very least gain a +2 bonus.

Beyond my players creativity in their use of skills, and my rather generous use of the +2 bonuses, I am designing my skill challenges to allow my players to use a wide variety of skills. I really brainstorm my interaction with their skill uses, and I often give out subtle hints that can bring unexpected skills into play (lost in the forest, the heroes try to get their bearings - the wizard seems lost with no applicable skills - the ranger uses nature and finds tracks - I suggest that the tracks might be mundane animals tracks, or they could follow mystical ley lines, further investigation might be needed). The wizard took the cue, and used his Arcanna to orient himself with the mystic ley energies of the forest.

I think that skill challenges are really a test of the creativity of your groups. If your group has the ability to use their 3-6 skills in very unique ways and you're able to take all of their creativity and build upon it for focused use of those skills as they relate to the challenge, you'll find that the skill challenge system is highly rewarding and very very fun.

We have done several so far, my favorites were the "chase through the streets", where my group continually tried to use wolf pack tactics to corner the chasee, and she eluded them until the final Athletics check to tackle her, and the "putting the ghost to rest" challenge where my heroes had to decipher the babbling of a mad greedy miser ghost, and eventually laid him to rest by placing a bag of gems inside his coffin after a final Athletics check to dig up his coffin and break it open.

The list of skills used in those for successes was impressive:

Chase (8 successes / 4 failures) - group had 3 failures, so it was a close one.
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Athletics x2 - Early attempt to catch her / final tackle.
Acrobatics - Rogue jumped from a wagon and onto a roof.
History - Wizard wanted to know where the busiest marketplace was located.
Streetwise - Warrior wanted to know what directions the crowd would be moving on different streets to force her to make bad decisions.
Stealth - Rogue hid behind a corner and tried to nab target as she rounded it.
Diplomacy - Cleric asked the crowd to slow the target down.
Intimidate - Warlock taunted and mocked the target, causing target to look back over her shoulder and stumble.

Ghost (6 successes / 6* failures) - I think the group got up to 2 failures, and I had designed it to be really difficult, so I had the failure rate set for 6 failures which they crushed.
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Thievery - Rogue opens the ghosts vault (empty), causing him to speak more coherently.
Heal - Cleric determines the cause of death, based on appearance of ghost, was likely old murder.
Religion - Warlock knows that ghosts sometimes linger on until things, in their minds, have been set right.
History - Wizard knows that the inhabitants of the mansion were murdered by thieves who plundered many riches.
Insight - Rogue understands that the miser ghost is acting greedy, and desires something, he unveils the bag of gems that he found in the chest and the ghost tries to grab at them.
Athletics - The fighter digs up the coffin, opens it, and places the bag of gems inside, and the miser ghost evaporates into the winds.