Actual play examples - balance between fiction and mechanics

[Quickleaf]

Hi pemerton, I've really enjoyed your posts in this thread. I want to ask a question about this comment you made.

... by setting a total number of checks required, they pace this whole thing in the context of the game.

This has been an area of confusion for me, as the preset #successes/failures has been jarring in the context of our game's pacing. IOW they've imposed "artificial" pacing, except when I largely ignore those numbers save as the loosest of guidelines (which is all the time now).

It doesnt seem to matter whether I spend an hour designing an awesome SC with lots of bells and whistles or I run one on the fly with notes jotted on a napkin - there have consistently been moments where players have been irked that (a) their incredible idea didn't resolve the issue or (b) they are cut off from making further checks because they've failed the SC. Which is what led to me largely abandoning set #successes/failures in my game.

 

[pemerton]

Quickleaf, obviously I can't really speak to the pacing in your game.

But what I had in mind with my pacing comment is this: in 4e combat, now matter how awesom the players' ideas the combat can't end in one round (no SoD, for example) but, equally, it can't go on forever, as monsters generally have no way of recovering hit points, and PCs have only limited ways.

So the mechanics of the systems build a certain dynamic into 4e combat.

I see skill challenges the same way - there is no one-shot win (if you like, there is no SoD outside of combat either) but nor do things drag on forever. One way or another the situation comes to a resolution.

For an example that is quite different from the two mentioned in my OP on this thread, have a look at the description of an overland skill challenge in this post. It shows how I like to use skill challenges as a pacing device - in that example, the overland travel had interesting stuff happen, and the skill checks introduced a dynamic into the travel that otherwise might have been missing, but it stops the whole thing dragging and taking up too much time at the table.

 

[Hussar]

Quickleaf - I honestly agree sometimes. It was very frustrating when I first started playing 4e to see what I thought as a good idea relagated to "just another success". Looking back on that, I think the main problem was the DM refused to differentiate when something was a skill challenge or just a straight up skill roll and then didn't provide a great deal of information to tip us off that we needed to do more. It was more, "Well, you did that, but, nope, you haven't reached your goal yet!" It wasn't very satisfying.

Something I've learned since then, after reading a number of Pemerton's and other people's posts and seeing other DM's do skill challenges much better than I did them (heh) was that the DM really has to engage in narrating the events much more than you might have to in other situations, like say combat. In combat, it's "Whack, it hurt, keep going" and it's pretty obvious that the event hasn't finished because the monster's still trying to burrow into your spleen.

If the skill challenge is narrated well though, then decisions tend to gain a logical flow. You've done X, and that leads to Y or possibly abandon this line of attempts and try Z.

 

[Fox Lee]

This is where the skill challenge game mechanic loses me. So it's been decided that to get rid of the weird is a particular difficulty regardless of player tactic?

How is that bad? The challenge rating/encounter level of a combat encounter doesn't raise or lower depending on the party's tactics. They don't get more or less XP if they come up with a clever plan and score an easy victory (unless the GM arbitrarily decides they should).

Just like CR/EL, these numbers are a reflection of how difficult the encounter is expected to be, not of how much difficult the party actually has. This is completely in line with how the system normally works.

 

[pemerton]

Hussar, I think the problem you identify in your first sentence is a real one. And I think it is a major flaw in the 4e rulebooks - that persists into Essentials - that there is almost no advice on this aspect of the game. It compares very badly, for example, to the discussion in HeroWars/Quest about how to go for a simple vs an extended contest, or to the discussion in Burning Wheel about when to use simple conflict resolution and when to use the heavy duty stuff like Duel of Wits or Fight.

In 4e it can come up in combat to. In a session towards the end of last year, the PCs were fleeing the temple as it collapsed around them (a classic "you stopped the ritual but now the untamed magic energies are bringing down the house" scene). As they ran, the player of the wizard wanted to kill the tiefling devil-worshipper NPC, whom the party had rescued/captured (it was a bit ambiguous) from the gnolls whose temple they were destroying. The player called Magic Missile. I resolved it as a simple Arcana check (can't remember the DC - probably Hard). He succeeded, and the tiefling died with a MM through the throat.

One way of interpreting this is that I Minionised the NPC on the fly. Not quite, though, because MM is now an auto-hit, but I still wanted a chance of failure so that, if it came up, the other players could have their PCs intervene. But it seemed to me that using the actual combat rules, and making the wizard player hack his way through the tieflings 60 or so hit points would completely ruin the pacing of the escape scene, and add nothing to the game - what was at stake in this little episode was the wizard portraying an incredible callousness in his hostility to the devil worshipper, and the tension and dynamics of that around the table. A 10-minute combat resolution would have just killed all that stone dead.

The 4e rulebooks would really benefit from more discussion of how to handle this sort of thing.

 

[mxyzplk]

Well, if my players move outside the scope of the rules, I gladly follow.... The buzz of people puzzling their way through some outside the scope of the rules challenge is music to my ears.

Agreed; I hate it when a player has an idea but then says "Never mind, I can't figure out how to do that according to the rules." If it's something that makes sense as being possible in the fiction of the world, I say "man up and try it!"

 

[Kannik]

You use the analogy of first learning to drive a car. I'd like to use a different example - learning to ride a bike. At what point do you lose the training wheels, especially if the system never presents the concept of a "bike" to move on to?
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So, I would argue presentation is extremely important regarding whether skill challenges necessarily support a rules-first mechanic or not.

Exactly. It pays to distinguish between the system itself and how WotC presented it. And it is an issue that comes up quite universally with all RPG rule systems, when to Rule as Rule, and when to Rule 0. Especially for something as framework-y as SCs, they needed a far better discussion of how to use (and abuse) them (and how not to use them) than was presented originally in the books.

I got my gut feel for them from reading a report on an SC used by one of the WotC DMs in a game held during 4e’s launch. Including a few scenarios and examples showing how the SC framework can be used in a myriad of ways would have proved useful, methinks. It’s why I don’t begrudge SCs nor think they are a poor mechanism, nor even see them as eliciting one style of play vs another.

To get to your second point, of how will a DM ever know to move on from the rules to create the fantastic (and here I’ll switch that to GM for this applies to many rule/game systems) I say one big thing: lead by example. Be for something, rather than against something. By sharing our stories, sharing how we run things, sharing the good times we have, sharing those awesome moments, sharing the scenarios we developed, how the players handled them, how we handled them, the in-game RP moments, sharing all of those it lets novice GMs (and heck, experienced ones too!) and players see other ways of approaching things, gives them ideas to try, new directions to ply and opens up the breadth of experiences. And that’s just cool.

3e IMO encouraged a crop of rules heavy players that found it hard to accept things that weren't in a book somewhere (because the rules appeared to have an answer for even the smallest minutae) and a group of DMs that were so innundated with rules that adding anything else was a chore. I've seen this displayed with players at my table and through a host of comments on this message board and others. If it wasn't in the rules, they firmly believed (or decided out of expediency) that it could not happen.
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I mean, can you seriously describe a rules transparent 4e combat? It was hard enough with 3e, but I think it is simply not possible with 4e.

I saw this effect on my group too – I’d throw out “crazy thing happens!” and they’d go “how is that possible?” as opposed to “yikes!” Just the fact that again DM stuff doesn’t need to be designed by the same rules as the PCs let them get back into a 1e and in-world mindset and we’re back to “yikes!” All that said, I still find (and it shows up) that using SCs hasn’t straight-jacketed things at our table. 4e has greatly had the effect of the world coming forward, and the rules going into the background.

After a few combats, of course. Things were very meta- at the beginning as everyone was figuring out their new characters (albeit no worse than when we started this game in 3e at 16th level, oy). Now combat flows very well, and is very flavourful. My group has always been a very tactical group to begin with, mind you, so I’ll put in my own YMMV.

I don't know what ultimate rules transparency may be, but I can say that our 4e fights have gotten more rules transparent than our 3e fights. Likely not as transparent as our 1e/2e fights, but it’s been so long I am hesitant to make any comparisons given the groups were different, our ages and experience were different, and so on.

peace,

Kannik