Help Me Make My Skill Challenge Fun

[Tequila Sunrise]

The key to "fail forward" adjudication is being ready to introduce new elements into the fiction - not because the internal causal logic of the gameworld tells you that you should, but because they frame the PC of the player who just failed the check into a new, dynamic situation of adversity.

The two obvious "relative" strategies are already known to you. The most obvious is the "+/- 5 increment" rule--beat by 5 or more, you get something extra special. Fail by 5 or less, and you get a partial success. Etc. The other is the one I mentioned, which is relative to the die rather than the target number, where most D&D games already implement critical success and many give critical failure as well, but adding additional shades. You can also combine the two. Perhaps 1/2/3 and 18/19/20 are all "special success," with critical success/fail being especially good/bad, while if you are within +/- 1 of the check value, you get a partial success that complicates the situation.

Thank you both for those explanations! I think from here, it's just a matter of me experimenting with fail-forward, getting feedback from the group, and then refining.

Rules-wise, I'll be using something like the +/-5 rule...except maybe for random combat encounter mini-SCs. I initially thought 'Oh, at-will attack bonus is the natural way to abstract all of a PC's combat abilities into a single check. But then I thought 'Wait, that unduly rewards the 'gotta have a 20 attack stat at 1st level' mentality.' So then I thought 'Well, why not 1d20 + each PC's highest two stats?' And then I was like 'Wait, the whole point of 4e is that everyone is good at combat! Why am I trying to apply specific stats to a combat abstraction?! Players might as well roll unmodified d20s, with the option to spend dailies for extra successes!' But then I thought 'Or I could use the DW 2d6...' And then I was like '...But that would make things inconsistent with the d20 system. Argh!'

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Here's my take on this: combat incentivises players to leave all the rolling up to the PC with the highest bonus, too.

Not really. Sending the fighter into combat alone without any help, will almost certainly end with a dead fighter.

On the whole incentivization topic, I see what pemerton means -- just about any situation can be framed to incentivize party-wide participation. But as an introvert, I think that framing situations like this on the fly would be exhausting for me. If I can plan a SC so that it 'naturally' incentivizes everyone to get involved, as combat does*, now that's ideal!

*Barring the occasional duel-of-champions.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=40398]Tequila Sunrise[/MENTION] If you need help with ideas or specific mechanics, don't hesitate to ask! I know that on several of my "off days" as DM (for whatever reasons) I have found inspiration from a fellow ENWorlder

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Thank you both for those explanations! I think from here, it's just a matter of me experimenting with fail-forward, getting feedback from the group, and then refining.

On the whole incentivization topic, I see what pemerton means -- just about any situation can be framed to incentivize party-wide participation. But as an introvert, I think that framing situations like this on the fly would be exhausting for me. If I can plan a SC so that it 'naturally' incentivizes everyone to get involved, as combat does*, now that's ideal!

*Barring the occasional duel-of-champions.

Don't worry too much. It's a perspective and a skill, which means it's something that becomes more natural and easier to do with time and practice. Like most GM things, really. My GM for Dungeon World was..."proficient" at it, for lack of a better term, when we first started playing--in part because he had already run other games Powered by the Apocalypse (Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, specifically). However, with another six months of weekly play under his belt, he's become superb at it. It's gotten to the point where he doesn't even prepare much for any given session, because he knows that the ways we succeed, and fail, and surprise, will generate entire campaign arcs all by themselves, some of them really awesome.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=40398]Tequila Sunrise[/MENTION] I managed to make a stab at the Yornhaven dungeon skill challenge. Hope it helps inspire your own!

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Just want to thank everyone again, particularly [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION], for helping me! Last night the party made its way through winding passages, traps, and horrors, and are now poised on the edge of the adventure's climactic encounter!

 

[Quickleaf]

Just want to thank everyone again, particularly [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION], for helping me! Last night the party made its way through winding passages, traps, and horrors, and are now poised on the edge of the adventure's climactic encounter!

Nice pacing! I'd be interested to hear how your skill challenge fared in play?

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Nice pacing! I'd be interested to hear how your skill challenge fared in play?

Well I had fun, and the two present players said they did too. We played through it a bit faster than I thought we would, mostly because the party navigator passed every single Dungeoneering check. (Despite not being trained!)

In structuring the overall SC, I set up four 'exploration roles' that the characters could volunteer for as they chose. (Navigator, scout, finder, lookout.) None of the characters were trained in the top-priority skills -- except for the ranger, who has a crazy Thievery bonus -- but the players got creative and a little lucky, and they made it through.

As for the mini-encounters, I ended up using a combination of randomized one-skill-check encounters and choice-driven set-piece encounters. Thanks to the former, the warlord's leg got mangled by a bear-trap, but the party also got a little richer. Thanks to the latter, the party encountered two complex traps, a failed necromantic experiment who begged for death, and found the BBEG's journal. They also heard a goblin singing a dirge, but opted to bypass that encounter.

From the player's side, [MENTION=6790260]EzekielRaiden[/MENTION] suggests giving players some choice in which set-pieces to encounter in which order, using some sort of fail-forward design. (I lined up my set-pieces in order, and the only question was "How many Dungeoneering checks does the party navigator need to roll before the next success, and thus the next set-piece?")

From my side, the exploration skill rolls were a bit awkward. The way I set up each exploration round was: Players roll exploration rolls, which effect possible random stuff, and then I roll to see if random stuff happens. So often, the exploration rolls didn't matter because nothing random happened. For example, the scout passed at least a couple of checks to forewarn the party of random combat encounters...but I didn't roll a single combat all session! So next time I'm either going to build the random-stuff rolls into the exploration rolls, or roll for random stuff before having players roll their exploration rolls. At least that way there's less for me to keep track of, and no purpose-less rolls.

All in all, it was still great fun and a good experience!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

All in all, it was still great fun and a good experience!

Completely agreed.

Also, an idea that struck me while reading through your post here: when relying on a lot of random-gen content, perhaps it would be useful to make a 'tree diagram' pseudo-map as the SC progresses. Here's a simple example done in Paint (most likely it would be done with pen and paper, IRL).

This way, there's a clear organization of "what's connected to where," even though it's not really a "map" per se. Things might get complicated if you actually do allow things to re-connect back to old nodes, but there really is no way to avoid some level of complication. This seems like the easiest way to handle it 'live.' Also, although I didn't include it in the image, the "find useful stuff" rolls would work more-or-less the way you handled the "alchemy lab" scene in Friday's Skill Challenge.