Change the Situation (Skill Challenges)!

[Manbearcat]

Figured I'd start a thread on one of the pivotal principles for running engaging, functional Skill Challenges:

Change the Situation.

Something goes wrong. A new threat emerges. Danger escalates or a related twist surfaces. A difficult choice or a branching course with consequences is faced. An unwelcome truth is revealed. Etc.

I'll post examples now and again (starting with the one below) and folks can discuss and add examples as they'd like.

The situation:

The PCs are desperately trying to escape a burning, collapsing manor with sprawling, winding corridors and massive state rooms. Its a Complexity 1, Level +3 SC (4 successes all at L + 3 Med DC before 3 failures) and they're at 1 successes and 1 failure.

The triggering move:

The Fighter, quick on his feet, decides to smash through a heavy timber wall to lead his group free of a corridor that is burning at both ends and choked with smoke! Medium Athletics DC. He somehow fails to achieve the required number.

The result:

The Fighter Unstoppable Juggernauts through to the other side but loses a Healing Surge. The load-bearing wall completely fails, triggering a partial collapse of the ceiling. The Fighter emerges in a familiar room, smoke-free, right near the grand foyer. However...:

1) The Fighter is separated from his allies who are on the other side of the heap of timbers.

2) The other PCs are stuck in a smoke-choked hallway, with a ceiling that is collapsing...and now they're facing down a level +2 encounter with Fire Elementals, Collapsing Floor Hazards, and some Challenging Terrain that is on fire and Difficult Terrain. To complicate matters, at the end of their turns, each PC's Fort is attacked by a Choking Smoke Hazard with a Saved Ends effect that gives them a Disease if they fail that save.

This will be a nested combat for 1 success in the SC if they defeat the encounter before round 4 ends and 1 failure in the SC, 1 Healing Surge lost for each PC in the corridor, and with the floor collapsing completely for a whole new situation.

 

[Manbearcat]

Alright, so lets take a quick look at the above and see where a new or Skill Challenge-...challenged GM might struggle:

1) The player of the Fighter declares that s/he wants to barrel through the timber wall using Athletics so as to get their pals out of the smoke-choked hall and closer to ultimate egress.

GM says something akin to "...no, running through a heavy timber wall isn't realistic!"

<insert buzzer sound>

That is exactly what we don't want to be doing. Remember, 4e wants to encourage just this sort of archetypal stunting (DMG 42). (a) It is a genre logic system (where maybe Heroic tier Fighters are smashing through heavy timber walls, maybe at Paragon its stone, and maybe Epic you're talking about thick, hewn stone walls) and (b) one of its fundamental principles is equivalent to Vincent Baker's "say yes or roll the dice."

2) The GM says yes, but when the Fighter fails, the GM adjudicates the fiction as:

"Ok, you barrel into the wall with all your might and bounce off the heavy timbers with a resounding thud (you lose a Healing Surge and accrue 1 Failure in the SC). The cobwebs clear in a moment and you're still in the smoke-choked hallway. What do you do?"

<insert buzzer sound>

Nosiree. The situation remains fundamentally status quo. Nothing interesting happens. No new decision-points have opened up. No new obstacles have emerged. The current situation hasn't escalated or become more urgent/dire/desperate.

 

[Garthanos]

Fun this reminded me... of an idea.

Alongside a martial practice I may include a blurb called 'Without Practice'

which demonstrates what a character might do similarly without the martial practice. I have a Martial Practice based on Dungeoneering that allows one to spend time to analyse a wall/structures weakness and allow an athletics check to split asunder the barrier in a predictable fashion which exceeds the normal limits of strength. (and is functionally similar to pass wall - ie athletics check affects the depth of the generated crack. )

Without the practice outside of a SC one might use Dungeoneering to do an aid other on someones Athletics check to damage a wall.

Your interpretations of the kinds of things even a regular athletics check by the heroic figures
demonstrates one of the issues with Martial Practices...

Making sure they actually enable a more extreme effect than is achievable by DM interpretation.

 

[Garthanos]

ie making sure the MP mechanics do not commit <bzzzzzzt> number 1

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Figured I'd start a thread on one of the pivotal principles for running engaging, functional Skill Challenges:

Change the Situation.

Something goes wrong. A new threat emerges. Danger escalates or a related twist surfaces. A difficult choice or a branching course with consequences is faced. An unwelcome truth is revealed. Etc.

I'll post examples now and again (starting with the one below) and folks can discuss and add examples as they'd like.

The situation:

The PCs are desperately trying to escape a burning, collapsing manor with sprawling, winding corridors and massive state rooms. Its a Complexity 1, Level +3 SC (4 successes all at L + 3 Med DC before 3 failures) and they're at 1 successes and 1 failure.

The triggering move:

The Fighter, quick on his feet, decides to smash through a heavy timber wall to lead his group free of a corridor that is burning at both ends and choked with smoke! Medium Athletics DC. He somehow fails to achieve the required number.

The result:

The Fighter Unstoppable Juggernauts through to the other side but loses a Healing Surge. The load-bearing wall completely fails, triggering a partial collapse of the ceiling. The Fighter emerges in a familiar room, smoke-free, right near the grand foyer. However...:

1) The Fighter is separated from his allies who are on the other side of the heap of timbers.

2) The other PCs are stuck in a smoke-choked hallway, with a ceiling that is collapsing...and now they're facing down a level +2 encounter with Fire Elementals, Collapsing Floor Hazards, and some Challenging Terrain that is on fire and Difficult Terrain. To complicate matters, at the end of their turns, each PC's Fort is attacked by a Choking Smoke Hazard with a Saved Ends effect that gives them a Disease if they fail that save.

This will be a nested combat for 1 success in the SC if they defeat the encounter before round 4 ends and 1 failure in the SC, 1 Healing Surge lost for each PC in the corridor, and with the floor collapsing completely for a whole new situation.

Man, you're vicious! That must be worth a whole level's worth of XP in DMing just for the nasty! hehe.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Fun this reminded me... of an idea.

Alongside a martial practice I may include a blurb called 'Without Practice'

which demonstrates what a character might do similarly without the martial practice. I have a Martial Practice based on Dungeoneering that allows one to spend time to analyse a wall/structures weakness and allow an athletics check to split asunder the barrier in a predictable fashion which exceeds the normal limits of strength. (and is functionally similar to pass wall - ie athletics check affects the depth of the generated crack. )

Without the practice outside of a SC one might use Dungeoneering to do an aid other on someones Athletics check to damage a wall.

Your interpretations of the kinds of things even a regular athletics check by the heroic figures
demonstrates one of the issues with Martial Practices...

Making sure they actually enable a more extreme effect than is achievable by DM interpretation.

Well, its the 'curse of mundanity'. You REALLY do need to constantly remind yourself that Martial is a magical power source, not 'just doing real-world stuff'. Now, ONE way to deal with this would be to actually scale your allowances for what skills alone with improvisation can do.

Let me make a philosophical note here. This is NOT a violation of tenet #1. In any situation there WILL be things that both the GM and the players will decide are simply not feasible. If this wasn't so then the fiction would be essentially meaningless in terms of guiding the course of play. So, there ARE limits imposed by the scenario on the PCs. There are two factors which are come into consideration with your questions about practices vs skills and whatnot. That is what can a skill do, and what can a practice do? So, you could distinguish them as I've outlined, where the skill won't get you through the wall (or at least you'd better get the dwarf to tell you where its weak first, etc, and maybe use up some 'hero points' or something). Now your practice, as you've described it, is quite magical, it cracks you through that wall, accomplishing an IMPOSSIBLE FEAT (you might need to roll well depending your level and the specific wall in question, the dwarf may well still come in handy here).

Now, This is not to say that this is the only way, or even the baseline 4e assumption way, of parsing this. 4e didn't assume there were anything like practices when it was written. Skills were your access to improvised doings of stuff, giving you power-like and ritual-like capabilities as long as you could imagine a way to solve a problem. So, maybe there's a different way to handle practices. Maybe they allow doing things using surges instead of having to roll dice? That would be interesting. Your 'Wall Cracker' practice now means you can batter through some maximum strength of wall at the cost of a surge (IE get an auto-success in [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s SC). Some practices could 'up the ante' in other ways, causing negative effects or raising the ire of NPCs, etc. I'd note that these alternatives might play better with skills that can achieve equally impressive things than my initial concept. There's a lot to possibly think about.

 

[Manbearcat]

[MENTION=82504]Garthanos[/MENTION] and [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] , I think the easiest iteration of something like an Unstoppable Juggernaut Martial Practice would be to handle it just like Rituals in Skill Challenges.

So he has this MP that lets him smash through or shove down solid obstacles. In the above SC, the mechanical advantage the Fighter would have would be that they don't have to roll dice. Just like a Ritual Caster would pay their gold and get an auto-success, the MP Fighter would pay his Surge and earn his auto-success.

Instead of the above result, you'd have:

1) 2 successes and 1 failure (rather than the inverse).

2) The entire party has egress from the smoke-choked hallway, no dangerous and combat that can snowball adversely against their goal, and now they're in a familiar room near the grand foyer. Now we would have to introduce a new obstacle so the fiction would change in some manner. I would probably go with something like:

The tinder of the tapestries and large area rugs that span the massive room have burned away here and the subfloor has wholly collapsed, leaving only narrow, charred joists to walk along to access the foyer beyond. Given the cinders and soot everywhere, its difficult to tell what is ready to collapse and what is stable enough to cross! Nearby, the spiral stair that leads up several floors to the balcony appears to be in reasonable enough condition, but the heavy smoke venting from this room billows up with horrific substance. Over the crackling, crunching sounds of the fire and failure of the structure, you can faintly hear the cries of servants who must have taken those stairs to flee the inferno here, only to be suspended sixty feet from the safety of the earth.

Decision-points open up various avenues of approach which will inevitably lead to new obstacles until the scene is won or lost.

 

[Garthanos]

The Martial Practice item I am making has that rituals/martial practices take time issue (its a dungeoneering one where the vulnerabilities get spotted)

Two other 4e mechanics that would lack that limit making it workable within the confines of time constrained activity would be a Skill Power or a Feat.

 

[Garthanos]

Well, its the 'curse of mundanity'. You REALLY do need to constantly remind yourself that Martial is a magical power source, not 'just doing real-world stuff'. Now, ONE way to deal with this would be to actually scale your allowances for what skills alone with improvisation can do.

Sure sort of like using a take 20 plus a bonus.. except I am not sure we always know where the top is. If Manbear is DMing, in this case a heroic manifestation of "breaching ram" could enable breaching on scale a paragon grade wall and at paragon an epic wall. So far as a paragon level MP it didnt need a top end... , just like pass wall must be a coincidence

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure sort of like using a take 20 plus a bonus.. except I am not sure we always know where the top is. If Manbear is DMing, in this case a heroic manifestation of "breaching ram" could enable breaching on scale a paragon grade wall and at paragon an epic wall. So far as a paragon level MP it didnt need a top end... , just like pass wall must be a coincidence

It only HAS to be consistent (well, maybe not even then if you want a sort of surreal game) across a single campaign. SO I don't actually care if [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has level 7 PCs leaping across 200' chasms and [MENTION=82504]Garthanos[/MENTION] has it 20' chasms. The rules themselves are perfectly happy to produce either result. In effect its nothing but reflavoring.

I'm not sure I understand your reference to Passwall here, sorry. I do definitely think that both Passwall and Breaching Ram should be pretty equivalent. In my version of things I'd simply have them both allow breaking through the wall without needing a check (IE auto-success on that check in the SC).

Now, a POWER IMHO generally has a check associated with it, but it produces a specific known effect at a generally high level of effect. A page 42 improvisation has a check, but it produces a limited effect, at best. Sometimes that effect may be just what you need, so you go with it. Skills simply add proficiency bonus to uses of a page 42 type action, or they may have associated skill powers.

Feats, well, they are equivalent to boons in my system, but they can provide a power, which is just like any other power, or they might grant a ritual/practice type effect (expend a cost and get an automatic result).

Again, though, I never have ANY checks outside of challenges/combat, so I've carefully structured things that way. If you happen to use a power or a practice or whatever in a 'casual' way (just to do something, not to win some conflict) then it 'just works' or maybe 'just fails' as is narratively appropriate. These kinds of uses can only take place in an interlude because I've defined the game's structure as challenge scenes interspersed with interludes. I guess I've become a bit extreme in my stance, but it works. As I said in the disease/wound discussion though, I can see an argument for a 'resource consumption' concept that could lead to checks that aren't strictly part of any one single scene. For example a ritual to resist extreme cold could cost some residuum and have an associated check. Its effects could be gated by a check that determines how many points of freezing damage you resist as a result. I'd note though that the check isn't strictly needed here, but the expenditure vs savings are still a thing.