Excerpt: skill challenges

[Nightchilde-2]

I never really understood this select easy/moderate/hard part. What's stopping a coward like me to always go for easy + my highest skill modifier. Fine, I don't get the bonus to the next roll for making a high check, but since I am only going low DC vs. my best skill, I don't need it anyway

I say if you roleplay it right, you can use your highest skill modifier.

What I plan on doing is, instead of going "roll this skill and then roleplay what you do" is to go "roleplay and we'll decide what skill you need to roll based on that."

Like so, so many things in 4e, it's all in how you look at it.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Actually the example annoys me specifically for that Intimidate prohibition. Why? Why is this guy immune to getting leaned on? Offer to feed him to your pet demon and he just laughs? Threaten his family, and he just responds with 'Go ahead'?

You can intimidate the Duke. But it doesn't bring you closer to your goal. That's the idea. You get him to fear you, but that doesn't mean he will lend you troops or whatever you wanted to do. It makes it just likely that he will send his family to safety, ask his mage to improve the magical protection barriers, and, if all that doesn't seem enough, he will have you arrested or betray you at a later point. The NPCs role and personality just doesn't fit being intimidated in this context. That's the idea.
You have to keep in mind that if you need his help, that means you depend on him. This gives him power over you.

Imagine trying it in the real world. Go to your mayor, and threaten to kill his family, if he doesn't send his sheriff to help you in taking out a biker-gang. Don't you think this will make him work against you at a later time? He will use every opportunity to hinder your efforts.

Remember that failing the skill challenge doesn't mean that you are unable to continue. Depending on what happened during the roleplaying part of the challenge, it means you are not in the perfect situation. If you failed barely, maybe the Duke lends you a small and weak unit, but since you threatened him, they have orders to leave you to die if you face real opposition.

It feels too artificial and just a quick band-aid replacement for actual role-playing.
'Come on guys, roll high 8 times, and we can just hand-wave the whole thing and get back to killing'.

If you're not interested in Roleplaying, that's what you can do. But if you want to role-play, you can use the system as a guide "what" to roleplay. it structures what you do, and you can measure the progress and flow of the roleplay situation. It is more then just fancy-talk and convincing the DM. It's also more then just rolling a single dice and telling a story with them.
It allows you to tell a story based on the decisions the character make and their skill or success in following their decisions. It provides a more complex structure then "roll a single check against a fixed DC", and you can use this structure to base your roleplaying on, or can use your roleplaying to create the structure.

I don't have a problem with 'find the temple in the jungle' example, because that makes sense- it isn't something the players and DM can actually do, so you game it out with dice rolls. But faking a role-playing session seems to defeat half the point of a game. Go down that road, and you really are playing a board game.

I disagree. You're really playing a dice game, at least during the skill challenges. You don't need a board, just your skill checks.
Edit: But if you want to roleplay, but either feel a little overwhelmed by the possibilities, or just want to know what your roleplaying means in mechanical terms and how it all worked out, the skill challenge is ready for you.

 

[WhatGravitas]

It allows you to tell a story based on the decisions the character make and their skill or success in following their decisions. It provides a more complex structure then "roll a single check against a fixed DC", and you can use this structure to base your roleplaying on, or can use your roleplaying to create the structure.

Yep - that's the important point. Free-form role-playing is all fine and dandy, but sometimes isn't actual "role-playing" - it's sometimes acting and using your own ingenuity and charisma to convince the DM of your idea and character.

This system allows you to quantify your character's (not only social) skills in a formal and codified system, allowing people with less ingenuity and charisma to get thing done in accord with their character (basically when they do the no brainer skills, like using diplomacy), while giving the inventive players a way to play their character in accord with their character AND having fun to find a way to use their skills.

Hence, it's a good tool: I have a player who is less good as impromptu conversations - but plays a character with high diplomacy. What now? Just roll?

But I also have a player who is inventive and bent of getting things done - but has crappy skills for that situation. And now he should get things, just because he has good ideas, without fitting the character? What now? Let it slide? Have him giving the other players "tips"?

Skill challenges help in this regard - the improptu-stiffled player CAN indeed say "I try to convince him with the facts" - blam! Diplomacy. While the creative player can say, "I use my understanding of history to show him similar examples that happened before and the crucial importance of his task and how future historians will remember his help!" - blam, History.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Voss]

You can intimidate the Duke. But it doesn't bring you closer to your goal. That's the idea. You get him to fear you, but that doesn't mean he will lend you troops or whatever you wanted to do. It makes it just likely that he will send his family to safety, ask his mage to improve the magical protection barriers, and, if all that doesn't seem enough, he will have you arrested or betray you at a later point. The NPCs role and personality just doesn't fit being intimidated in this context. That's the idea.
You have to keep in mind that if you need his help, that means you depend on him. This gives him power over you. .

It might, if you do it right. Sure, it can have repercussions down the road, but the idea that you can't do it at all is fairly ridiculous. There is leverage you can apply to force help out of someone. If they send someone after you later, well, thats all part of the game.

Its funny, if they had just done the 'find the lost temple in the jungle' example, I doubt it would have sparked all this. For example: make 4 Nature checks, after one successful Nature check, the party has their bearings and can substitute a single Relgion check and a single History check for Nature checks as they draw on religious lore and the history of the temple to find landmarks and important features of the area. That would make sense. 'Neener, neener, you can't intimidate this guy because we say so', doesn't.

 

[Simon Marks]

It might, if you do it right.

But it might not.

Anyway, it's a template - designed to be altered.

 

[Propheous_D]

It might, if you do it right. Sure, it can have repercussions down the road, but the idea that you can't do it at all is fairly ridiculous. There is leverage you can apply to force help out of someone. If they send someone after you later, well, thats all part of the game.

Its funny, if they had just done the 'find the lost temple in the jungle' example, I doubt it would have sparked all this. For example: make 4 Nature checks, after one successful Nature check, the party has their bearings and can substitute a single Relgion check and a single History check for Nature checks as they draw on religious lore and the history of the temple to find landmarks and important features of the area. That would make sense. 'Neener, neener, you can't intimidate this guy because we say so', doesn't.

Ok people this is amusing and all but lets have reality set in. Breath stop and think.

One name I will spout and if it doesn't solve this inane arguement about why intimidate should not work on some individuals then you are obviously an individual who logic should resort to automatic failure when I put you in a skill challenge.

Martin Luther King

How many good ole white boys do you think tried thier intimidate skill on him? I can bring up MANY more examples of people who are just not gonna let you intimidate them. However, I think this one pretty much proves my point.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It might, if you do it right. Sure, it can have repercussions down the road, but the idea that you can't do it at all is fairly ridiculous. There is leverage you can apply to force help out of someone. If they send someone after you later, well, thats all part of the game.

You can use Intimidate. It just will always count as a failure. Maybe that's just semantics to you, but it is important. A PC can attempt to go for Intimidation, and he might never see how this was what was caused the two soldiers attempting to assassinate him during their travel to the borderlands.

It might be similar to someone using his daily power for triple damage against a simple Minion in combat (or a 3e example - firing a fireball at a single enemy with some fire resistance). It is a choice you can make, and it has a consequence (you won't have the power available again until the next morning). It still wasn't a useful action. If you had bothered to check that the guy was shivering the whole combat or that he just failed to deal any noteworthy damage, you would have had the chance to avoid losing your daily power for nothing. But you did not, and now you live with the consequences.
In the skill challenge, you could have made a Insight check first, and might have noticed that intimidation isn't going to work in this case.

 

[Celebrim]

Why are ppl getting so hung up over Intimidate?

It's just an example. It's showing the parameters for designing a skill challenge, and one of these parameters is that the DM can rule out any skills they consider to be not useful for the situation. In this particular case, such a skill is Intimidate.

The key point is that you, the DM, are empowered by the rules to say that skill X is inapplicable for challenge Y, for whatever values of X and Y you deem appropriate. Quite possibly, you might never say that a skill is inapplicable. It isn't that this specific skill, Intimidate, can't be used to bully barons around or whatever.

I think people are commenting on the fact that Intimidate - being a social skill - is seemingly well suited to a social challenge. It may be true that the Duke is difficult to intimidate (because he is a stern, proud, honorable, and patriotic person), or particularly difficult to intimidate by the PC's (who may be his social and legal inferiors, who may be of lower level, and so forth), and naturally people react badly when you try to intimidate them but fail. But, suggesting that something is very difficult is quite different than suggesting that it is impossible. 'Impossible' is a word that generally means, 'the plot is on rails', as in, 'You can't march through these woods, its impossible.... No, you can't chop a path through the woods either, its impossible...no you can't go over these mountains except on the road, its impossible'

 

[hcm]

I disagree. You're really playing a dice game, at least during the skill challenges.

But it's not much of a game if you can't choose between easy, moderate and hard checks, imo. From the excerpt, it seems that DCs are hidden -- otherwise the players would know intimidate had no chance of success.

It seems that all the player does is choose a skill, roll and then ask the DM 'do I succeed?', which is the equivalent of 'I attack with <weapon>, do I hit the dude?' followed by 'did we win the challenge?/get the dude's hp down to zero?'. I hope I'm wrong, but this looks like the same kind of boring design that 4e is meant to move away from.

If I'm right, I'll houserule so that the player can say: 'I choose a hard history check. This is why history applies to the situation, and this is why the check should be considered hard'. (And the DM can approve, deny, help out, listen to more arguments from other players etc.) This is still not a super interesting dice game, but it's better than what the excerpt suggests, because it gives the player an actual tactical choice, besides providing the same challenge/support to creative RP. The only problem I can see with such an approach is that it makes immersion potentially harder. But if I wanted deep immersion I wouldn't play DnD anyway.

 

[Thyrwyn]

The example does not say "the Duke cannot be intimidated". The example says that each attempt to intimidate the Duke makes him less likely "to provide reasonable assistance to the characters." (ie: gaining the benefit of succeeding at the challenge).

Again, it is a general template for a skill challenge. Arguing that "given specific situation x, with circumstances y, z, and q - giving the duke blanket immunity to Intimidate is silly" is inappropriate. There are always going to be specific circumstances that require modification to general guidelines (or rules or templates).