Houserules for Skill Challenge System

[Chzbro]

I've been kicking around some ideas to "improve upon" the existing skill challenge system and am interested in feedback from the good people of the ENWorld community.

The goal here is to give players in a skill challenge "tactical" options beyond just rolling the die (or choosing not to roll at all). I'd like for skill challenges to feel more like combat in that the players have options available to them beyond just whether or not to roll. At the same time, I'd like to keep it relatively simple.

Here's what I have so far. The following options will be available to each player in every skill challenge (unless otherwise specified):

• • Action Points – A player may spend an action point during any skill challenge to take an additional standard action.
  • Critical Success – Rolling a natural 20 on any skill check for a skill challenge success or failure (not an Assist Another action) results in 1 additional skill challenge success.
  • Mitigating Failure – As a standard action, a character may remove a skill challenge failure by expending healing surges. The first failure removed in this way in any given challenge costs 1 surge, the second costs 2, and so on.
  • Skill DCs – All skill check DCs (classified as Easy, Median, and Hard) will be individually determined on a case-by-case basis, but as a rule of thumb, Easy DCs will be 5 lower than Median and Hard will be 5 higher. Typically, each roll for a skill challenge success will be made at Median difficulty.
  • Assist Another – As a standard action, a character may make an Easy skill check in an attempt to aid an ally on his/her next skill roll. Any skill can be used in this attempt, but the player must explain how the skill will aid the other character to the DM’s satisfaction. A successful check grants the next player to roll (and only the next player) a +2 bonus on his/her next check. A failed check results in a skill challenge failure.
  • Extra Effort – As a standard action, a character may spend a healing surge in order to treat the DC of his/her next roll as Easy rather than Median. If the check succeeds, he/she is awarded a skill challenge success, but a failed roll results in 2 skill challenge failures. (I'm thinking I might add that only 1 character may attempt this in any given round, but if it does get overused, that's a lot of healing surges...)
  • [FONT=&quot]Desperate Measures[/FONT] – As a standard action, a character may spend a healing surge in order to treat the DC of his/her next roll as Hard rather than Median. If the check succeeds, he/she is awarded with 2 skill challenge successes (this will stack with a critical success for 3 total successes), but a failed roll will only result in a single failure.

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It should be noted that the median DCs in a system like this will have to be a bit higher than those currently suggested in the DMG. I'm supposing that a baseline Median DC for a level 1 character should be around 15-16. This system also clearly better favors longer skill challenges than shorter ones, but I think it can work for either. (Also, I am a big fan of having various "external" time limits on my skill challenges, so I would like to think those help keep the tension high even if the PCs do have the option of removing failures.)

Hopefully, this system would encourage a more diverse set of actions from my players (and also encourage resource expenditures in skill challenges). But does any of this leap out as a bad idea? Anyone tried anything like this already? All thoughts are appreciated.
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[Saeviomagy]

The key flaw with the current challenge system is this:

There is a significant disincentive to participate if you do not have top tier skill bonuses.

In other words, the best possible skill challenge result is achieved by one person with the best skill modifier in a skill taking the entire challenge themselves.

This basically drags the entire system down. It means that players without good skills, or with inappropriate skills don't want to participate in challenges. It means that characters don't want to risk experimenting with anything other than their best skill (which really eliminates any sort of experimentation).

While some of your changes DO reduce the severity of failures, which helps with the above, they still leave the optimal skill challenge solution as "the person with the highest appropriate skill makes skill rolls and everyone else assists or contributes surges". Removing the assist means that you're back to the current scenario, which is "everyone who doesn't have a high appropriate skill does their best to abstain from the challenge".

Personally I think that the entire concept of tallying failures to determine failure of the skill challenge is flawed, and the skill challenge system won't be fixed until it's replaced with something that means that a character taking part in the skill challenge is better than them abstaining. If failures accrued at a fixed or randomized rate, that would pretty much do it.

My own thoughts on a replacement are something like the following:
Each PC decides on a course of action, and a DC for the action (or alternately the PC describes a course of action and the DM sets the DC). At the end of the round (or alternately at the challenges initiative), the challenge (using it's own set of skills) rolls against the DC of the highest successful challenge with the same skill the PC who rolled it used, racking up an automatic success if no PC succeeded. Naturally quantities of successes and failures for overall success/failure will need to be adjusted, aiming for a challenge completing in about 3 rounds.

I see the benefits if this as being
1. There is some strategy involved. A given players actions will ideally take into account the actions of the other players.

2. There's some gambling involved: do you go for a high DC to deny the challenge it's success, or a low one to guarantee your own?

3. It allows for better narrative->mechanic correlation from the players. Someone with a high bluff skill can go for an outrageous bluff, the expert climber can escape his pursuers by choosing the difficult route (or choose a difficult route that avoids hazards) etc.

4. If you really, genuinely don't have an applicable skill, you can either go for something outrageously difficult that yo're good at and narrate it in (I use my tumbling skill to distract the king's advisor, so his arguments against us are less effective), or go for something very easy that's directly applicable and uses a skill you're bad at (my weedy, bookish mage lies down on the rope bridge, and crawls very very slowly across it).

Incidentally, a skill challenges skills will be set by looking at the current challenge DCs and translating those to skills that succeed 50/50. Counterintuitively, a challenge will have very high (or auto-succeed) in skills that totally do not apply in any way.
Naturally a DM can still say "no, your narrative is so out of place that you automatically fail at that attempt" OR "no, given that narrative, I'm going to bump your DC to 40", and avoiding this is going to be a goal of players. If you try to use diplomacy to try to talk a rockfall into moving, you're unlikely to get away with setting a DC of 5 for that action, for instance. That said, a particularly free-flowing DM might decide that the rockfall is caused by/inhabited by a rock spirit of some description, and it all works out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hmmm, not quite sure I follow the mechanics of your procedure there Savio, hehe. Sounds like it might be interesting although maybe a little tricky to run but I'm not sure.

As a general set of observations, I see nothing in the SC RULES that allow a character to "opt out". There are certainly ways PCs can effectively do so in some cases but I don't think any system is going to stop those.

I'm leery of the OP's suggestions. The issue I've seen with SC mechanics is that methods of assisting in general tend to undermine the difficulty of challenges. Of course you can set different DCs than the default but I wonder if some alternate mechanics wouldn't work just as well or better. For instance suppose that a challenge involves a complex task requiring several people. It would make logical sense if they ALL had to succeed. Those successes could involve different skills and different DCs but that would transform a challenge into a situation where all the PCs had to actually cooperate and work together.

Ultimately though I see the failings of SCs being most often in their narrative integration with the story and logical consistency. It has less to do with the SC system core mechanics than it has to do with presentation by the DM and design of the specific challenge.

 

[Chzbro]

Well, I'd like to keep the core of the skill challenge system as close to "as written" as possible, so switching to something like Stalker 0's fine system or having the system roll against you is something I'd like to avoid.

And while I totally agree that the current system only encourages the top skill, I generally do not allow my players to do nothing. Or rather, choosing to do nothing is typically a bad idea. I try to do this by including a time constraint inherent to each challenge. If 5 characters need 12 successes before 3 failures in no more than 3 rounds, then at least 3 characters need to record a success each round...which I think makes things more interesting.

Of course, the trick is figuring how to make that time constraint interesting and have it make sense in the context of the challenge. But that's a different discussion...

I'd like to think that such time constraints also speak a bit to AbdulAlhazred's observation about aiding another. Such actions can throw the difficulty curve off dramatically. However, if you only have a limited number of attempts for successes and you trade one of them away to give someone else a +2, is that really a good trade off? I hope at least that it's a decision worth considering.

What really worries me about my own changes is the Extra Effort clause. I don't want that to be a superior option to a regular Median roll in most circumstances...and I'm a little worried that it might be.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, I think some of your suggestions at least are certainly things I would (or have) integrated into specific challenges and would consider using pretty generally. I think a "toolbox" approach is good where you can toss in various challenge specific mechanics as needed, like my suggestion of several skill rolls together being needed to count as a success (actually a variant of the already existing group check mechanic).

Interestingly the SC rules don't specifically allow any participant in an SC to opt out. Nor do they allow for Aid Another as a general thing (only in the group check mechanic is it mentioned). Since most SCs provide secondary "booster" skill checks that are more difficult than the DC10 of Aid Another I'd say the designers of the SC system didn't consider AA to be a legit tactic. Its pretty arguable though, as is opting out.

I agree about opting out too, I simply read the rules such that the PCs can't do it. Makes things more interesting. Timed encounters can be cool as well. I think those work well using Stalker0's Obsidian but I've kind of wandered back to using the standard DMG system after playing with both for a while. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

Mostly what I've found is that running a lot of SCs does hone your ability to run them well. Its unfortunately pretty easy to write bad SCs though.

 

[Saeviomagy]

As a general set of observations, I see nothing in the SC RULES that allow a character to "opt out". There are certainly ways PCs can effectively do so in some cases but I don't think any system is going to stop those.

That doesn't matter in the slightest. If a player is made to feel that the group would be better off without him because of the system, the system has failed whether or not it forces participation.

Incidentally, I was writing out how a round would go under my system, and I came to the conclusion that the challenge should probably be doing something with the worst DC success as well as the best, otherwise the PCs can get away with one person doing very tough attempts and everyone else bottoming out on unfailable skill DCs.

So, the challenge will roll against the DC of the highest successful attempt as well as the lowest DC attempted. It gets 1 success for each challenge it succeeds against.

So, an example of play:

The scenario is that the players are crossing a raging river. The primary skills for the challenge are endurance and athletics, which means that the river has a +5 skill modifier in each of those. Secondary skills are knowledge nature, perception and acrobatics, and the river has +10 in each of those. In all other skills the river has a +15 modifier. I'll say that the players need 4 successes before the challenge gets the same, although this is just pulled out of thin air at this stage.

Initiative is rolled. The order of play is player1, challenge, player2, player3 and player4

Player1: "I need to set a high DC, or the river's going to own us on it's go. I'm good at acrobatics so I'll use that to vault across with a pole. I figure that's pretty hard, so I'll shoot for a dc 23"

DM:"Jumping is the domain of athletics. Acrobatics is all about tumbling and falling."

Player1:"Ok, how about swinging? That's pretty much what acrobats do. I'll throw a grappling hook at a high point on a tree and swing across"

DM: "Sounds good, roll it"

Player1:"Ok, I get a 27. Success!"

Challenge: The highest successful DC from the previous round is 23, acrobatics. The lowest attempted DC is also 23, acrobatics. The river rolls twice with a +10 mod and gets one success.

DM:"Ok, as you are swinging, the branch that you're swinging from bows a little. Your feet hit the water. Because you chose a high tree to swing from however, your swing is merely stopped by the river, you don't actually plunge in. The river got one success"

Player2:"I'm not really very good at anything physical, and I don't think that knowledge:religion is going to help. I'll just pick up a big stone, hold my breath and try to wade across. I'll go with an athletics DC 10"

DM:"Ok, you know that there's a good chance that the river can make that, right?"

Player2:"Well, hopefully it's got a worse chance than I do. *roll* 8. Sigh"

DM:"You drop the rock and start floating. You haven't been washed away yet, but it looks like it might be coming..."

Player3:"I'll try to see if there's anywhere downstream that might be better"

DM: "Well, I need a difficulty. Do you just want somewhere that's easier to cross, or would you like to try to find somewhere that you can save your friend? Or somewhere that's both?"

Player3:"I'll shoot for both."

DM:"Ok, that's going to be a difficult roll. DC25"

Player3:"That's a little high. Can I go for a DC20 to find a high branch that crosses the river?"

DM:"Yeah, sounds good to me, roll away"

Player3:"20! right on the money"

DM:"Yup, you find a high branch that overhangs the river. It's not perfect though: it's a little flimsy to be honest".

Player4:"I've got a good endurance and a good athletics. I might jump in and try to help player2 get to player1's rope. It's still dangling in the water, right?"

DM:"Yeah, it sure is"

Player4:"Ok, so is that endurance or athletics? And what's my DC?"

DM: "Well, athletics covers jumping and swimming, so it's perfect for this. I'll say a DC 15"

Player4:"That seems a bit too easy. I can do better than that! Forget the rope, I'm just going to try to grab player2 and swim all the way across. Sign me up for a DC 20... *rolls* aww man! 19!"

DM:"Ok, you manage to get to player2, and you are making decent headway with him until you get fouled in player1's trailing rope."

Player1:"Well, it's my go next, so I'm going to try to haul in the rope and free them"

DM:"Well, that seems more like a brute-force type of solution, so it's going to be athletics"

Player1:"In that case, I'm going to go for something easy..."

DM:"Hanging from a rope above a raging torrent AND trying to haul it in at the same time is easy?"

Player1:"Yeah, you're right. I'll climb down the rope to them and try to get them untangled. DC 14 sound good?"

DM:"Sure"

Player1: "Success!"

Challenge: Highest successful DC is 20 perception, lowest attempted is 10 athletics. The river succeeds at perception and fails at athletics.

DM:"Ok, the current of the river eddies and whorls apathetically at you, like it's not even trying to sweep you away. However the tree that player3 spotted is actually a stinging willow, and touching it can result in painful burns."

Player2: "I'll try to climb up the rope, DC15. Success!"

At this point the players have won the challenge, 4 to 2. The DM rounds everything out in a sane manner.

DM:"Ok, you haul yourself up. Player4 swims the rope across to the far side and you all hop off. Player3 can simply walk across the branch that he's found, because touching the bark with his shoes has no effect, it was only going to be an issue if he'd needed to lie down and haul someone up. Congratulations, you've passed the challenge!"

Note that I've not run the statistics to see how many successes for each side are likely to result in a win or loss. At a guess, its going to be a ratio of 2 successes for the PCs to every success for the challenge assuming a 4 person group if you want a 50/50 success/fail rate. Requiring less successes for the PCs makes the challenge quicker and easier. Requireing more successes for the challenge means the challenge will be roughly the same duration but easier. Lowering the challenges skills will make the challenge easier, but it's not going to be even slightly linear.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, that would be my concern with it is how do you really evaluate the overall difficulty of the challenge? This is somewhat of an issue already with the stock SC system where its pretty sensitive to the exact DCs and you have several different variables the DM can tweak.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Yeah, that would be my concern with it is how do you really evaluate the overall difficulty of the challenge? This is somewhat of an issue already with the stock SC system where its pretty sensitive to the exact DCs and you have several different variables the DM can tweak.

Well, part of the difficulty with the current system is that if the PCs do badly, the challenge does well, which makes altering DCs incredibly swingy.

Under my system, the challenge and the PCs are pretty much rolling against the same sort of numbers, but the gambling element does make it a bit difficult.

 

[eriktheguy]

Give this alternate skill challenge a try
Stalker0's Obsidian Skill Challenge System V1.2
It includes many of the houserules you suggested here, fixes some of the problems that you noticed, and even improves on some you didn't. You will also find that the system is easy to implement your own houserules in because it is much simpler.

 

[Blue]

If you want to stay close to the existing rules, but want to encourage participation, then don't count failures, count rounds. The only penalty for failure is that you didn't contribute to success and the clock is ticking. This prevents sitting back and letting one expert do everything.

I just came up with this based on Saeviomagy's post, we'd have to play to determine the number of rounds to be roughly equivilent.

Side effects would be that it could encourage less aid-another teamwork - if you can make that roll, why not have a shot at adding a success. Not sure if that's a problem or not.

Also, party size would affect skill challenges more than it does now. Now a large party is usually just extra aid another, or perhaps one extra PC trained in the skill. With this it's more chances per tick. Perhaps it should be -1 round per PC over 5, and +1 round per PC under 4.