official revision to skill challenge system

[Paul Strack]

I agree that the need for any reworking of this system is a huge pain in the ass.

However, the basic upshot is that if you consider 4th edition to be like a car, this problem is no more serious than a broken tail light. Fixing this problem is not especially intrusive. Swapping out a broken tail light is pretty simple. Having to replace the engine / transmission / brakes is not.

I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.

Also, I think even in its broken form, the 4E challenge system has ideas in it that are quite innovative. I've looked at a lot of games, and I've found very few that included a successful non-combat system that will engage the whole group and still be interesting.

Even in its broken form, if you twiddle the DCs right and do a bit of judicious DM intervention with the occasional "roleplaying bonus", you can get the 4E challenges to work. My group has enjoyed the challenges I've put them through quite a bit.

My main fear is that WotC will thrash at the system too much, disgusting everyone to the point where they give up on it completely. There are some nice ideas buried in there if we or they can get the numbers to work.

 

[grickherder]

Colour me disappointed with the "revision" of the skill challenge system. I'm basically chucking the whole DMG section on them in favour of Obsidian. It does everything I want it to. It produces non-binary results, it involves everyone at the table, and the DCs work.

 

[WyzardWhately]

This does seem like a pretty severe oversight. I don't have my DMG with me to check, but it seems to indicate that hidden things are no longer going to be a problem for pretty much any party, ever. I mean, nobody is going to stumble into traps, ever, at those kind of DCs.

I think it's absolutely crazy to drop the skill check DCs by 10.

One of my players, the cleric, has a passive perception of 20
{20 = 10 + 5(trained) + 1(1/2 lvl) + 4(18 Wis)}

Before the new errata, that meant he would automatically find a normal secret door (a moderate skill check, which is 20)

Now, he automatically finds a magically hidden door (a hard DC, which is now 15). In fact, he automatically finds a magically hidden door in a dungeon meant for 9th level characters (hard DC = 19).

I am flabbergasted.

 

[clearstream]

Also, I think even in its broken form, the 4E challenge system has ideas in it that are quite innovative. I've looked at a lot of games, and I've found very few that included a successful non-combat system that will engage the whole group and still be interesting.

The skill challenge system reflects community comments far prior to 4th ed release. The main one being that single throw skill resolution sucked.

No matter how you dial the numbers, the core mechanism is not featured enough to yield interest. Sure, maybe the first couple of challenges you'll be wide-eyed and excited, then they'll grow dull. The strategies are trivially unravelled, the risk/reward structure is vanilla. Insert standard caveat about great DM being great.

The point of entry into fixing these rules is to identify the requirements, and then engineer the core mechanism. From there you move toward instance features (like costs on skill use, or one-shots), and from there you trial instantiate to dial in final numbers.

Dialling in final numbers only works if you are sure the core mechanism is sound. If you aren't, it costs a lot of effort to find the best values, and then after several plays you realise what a waste of time that was.

-vk

 

[two]

An obvious idea

I'm sure this has been tried and put into somebody's home rules skill challenge system. But I'll throw it out there anyway, just to be redundant.

It's clear to me, at least, that skill challenges should include everyone at the party, whenever possible. The idea is for the party to pick one PC for the main skill roll; the other PC's can or can not make supporting skill rolls which might or might not give a bonus to this main skill roll.

The mechanics should be plain and up front; the roleplaying and cleverness are associated (generally) with the support roles.

The main skill roll is the one that counts for sucess/failure. The supporting rolls do not. So a really bad skill PC can try to help the chosen PC make the main skill roll. If he succeeds, he might grant a +2 to the main skill roll. If he fails, he grants +0. If he fumbles, fails really badly, he gives a -1 to the main roll, let's say. If he succeeds wildly, perhaps +3 or +4.

For example, to use a boring example, the party killed a bunch of goblins and are in a goblin library looking for information about a evil grue.

It's a skill challenge, which the GM makes clear.

"find information about the evil grue."

One of the PC's has a knowledge check of +10 and will be doing the "main" roll for the first part of the challenge. Other party members will try to help this PC search for knowledge about the grue.

The fighter PC has crap skills. He uses his brains a little, though, and goes back and finds a captured goblin who worked in the library. He intimidates the goblin into supplying some information about grues. Skill check made, gives a +2 bonus to the skill check. The Cleric tries to ask his god for advice or something, GM knows this is impossible but lets him roll. A +0 results. Ranger searches library for tracks; nothing really possible, +0. Whatever.

The point is the "aid another" mechanic should be where the other PC's get involved to help the main roll. You can't just let the PC's help; they have to be clever and justify it and make a skill roll. But failure does not screw the skill challenge; it just does not help the main skill roll.

So whatever, after the party works on it, the wizard with +10 knowledge has been given an additional +3. He rolls and succeeds. The party celebrates. The wizard remembers that grues are also knows as Bints and filed under "b". They go and find nothing under "B" for bints - strangely.

Part 2 of the skill challenge involves searching/investigating around the B stack for hidden or strangely moved books. Rogue does the main roll; wizard and everyone else helps.

Etc. Etc. yes, a stupid example. I just wanted to get it out there.

What this allows is the DC's of the skill challenge to be set to the typical "high end" for a party, while at the same time allowing other party members to participate in a real way without leading to insta-failure.

You know? Does this make sense or did I just explain it horribly?

 

[Rechan]

Firelance and Frostmerrow had come up with an alternate system on the homebrew forums

Do you have links to those? Because sifting through 40+ pages of threads is really a pain in the arse.

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

Have a Link

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=231534
I thought it was a pretty fair system, myself. Used it in a campaign.

 

[TerraDave]

this...is...such...a....huge....mess

I almost regret checking back into this forum. Almost better not to know!

 

[Paul Strack]

The skill challenge system reflects community comments far prior to 4th ed release. The main one being that single throw skill resolution sucked.

No matter how you dial the numbers, the core mechanism is not featured enough to yield interest. Sure, maybe the first couple of challenges you'll be wide-eyed and excited, then they'll grow dull. The strategies are trivially unravelled, the risk/reward structure is vanilla. Insert standard caveat about great DM being great.

The big problem with the skill challenge mechanic is that it is very "swishy" (sensitive to small changes in skill level). But any multi-roll system is going to have that problem to some extent. Any small percentage advantage or penalty in a single roll will grow in significance as you make more rolls.

The point of entry into fixing these rules is to identify the requirements, and then engineer the core mechanism. From there you move toward instance features (like costs on skill use, or one-shots), and from there you trial instantiate to dial in final numbers.

Dialling in final numbers only works if you are sure the core mechanism is sound. If you aren't, it costs a lot of effort to find the best values, and then after several plays you realise what a waste of time that was.

I happen to think the original core mechanic has a pretty good chance of meeting the requirements. By this core mechanic, I mean "the whole party makes skill checks from a limited set of skills trying to accumulate a certain number of successes before a certain number of failures."

I think any other multi-roll skill system is going to have similar problems with swishy-ness. I also think that the original (non-Errata) challenge system has some features to help swishy-ness that folks are not considering. In particular, by forcing every party member to participate, the skill level per roll is averaged over entire the party, which mitigates the presence of both Skilly McAwesome characters and Lamo McLamerson characters.

I think what the core system lacks is (a) solid base numbers and (b) additional tactical options to make the system interesting enough for long term play. There is nothing preventing us (or WotC) from adding these options to the existing challenge system.

In fact, many of the sample challenges and suggestions in the DMG do include such options, just not in a rigorous way. Examples include one-shot Easy skills, Information Skills that provide data on how best to beat a challenge, failures that cost your resources like healing surges or gold, etc.

My current thinking is to make those and other options for skill challenges more rigorous, assigning complexity modifiers to them when they are added to individual challenges. Each challenge would use the base challenge rules (which should be simple) plus a few challenge options to twist things up and keep it interesting.

 

[two]

The big problem with the skill challenge mechanic is that it is very "swishy" (sensitive to small changes in skill level). But any multi-roll system is going to have that problem to some extent. Any small percentage advantage or penalty in a single roll will grow in significance as you make more rolls.



I happen to think the original core mechanic has a pretty good chance of meeting the requirements. By this core mechanic, I mean "the whole party makes skill checks from a limited set of skills trying to accumulate a certain number of successes before a certain number of failures."

I think any other multi-roll skill system is going to have similar problems with swishy-ness. I also think that the original (non-Errata) challenge system has some features to help swishy-ness that folks are not considering. In particular, by forcing every party member to participate, the skill level per roll is averaged over entire the party, which mitigates the presence of both Skilly McAwesome characters and Lamo McLamerson characters.

I think what the core system lacks is (a) solid base numbers and (b) additional tactical options to make the system interesting enough for long term play. There is nothing preventing us (or WotC) from adding these options to the existing challenge system.

In fact, many of the sample challenges and suggestions in the DMG do include such options, just not in a rigorous way. Examples include one-shot Easy skills, Information Skills that provide data on how best to beat a challenge, failures that cost your resources like healing surges or gold, etc.

My current thinking is to make those and other options for skill challenges more rigorous, assigning complexity modifiers to them when they are added to individual challenges. Each challenge would use the base challenge rules (which should be simple) plus a few challenge options to twist things up and keep it interesting.

This is why my suggestion (above, somewhere) was to allow everyone in the party to contribute, even Lamo McLamerson, but have their skill checks contribute modifiers to the "main skill roll."

So in a 5 member team, one of the members (likely with the highest modifier for the skill in question), will be the "point man" and make the main skill roll.

The other party members make skill rolls, if they want, to try to grant modifiers to the main skill roll (the result of the assisting skill rolls might be bonuses between -1 and +4 for example per PC, with a lot of +0's and +1's in there, with a -1 for skill fumbling)

This means that the lame skill PC's get a chance to do something, and if they fail it's not a "failure" it's just not giving a bonus to the main skill roll. If a lame skill PC rolls well, is clever, has other useful skills they use in good ways, they could contribute up to +4 or something to the main skill roll.

This means:

1) All the party is involved, even lame skill PC's. Giving a +1 or +2 to the main skill roll is a big deal.
2) Party cleverness is rewarded (if PC's use their lame skills in clever ways to help generate modifiers to the main skill).
3) DC's are much easier to determine and fix, because they will be based on the expected "high skill" bonus for the party.

So if I know a knowledge check will be required, I know the high/maximum range for this check throughout all levels. So I could set a DC allowing for 50% success if the main skill check gets no help. If all the party really is on fire, they might contribute +8 to this check, helping a lot. If the rest of the party isn't able to help, then they might fail. Or set it to 75%. Or whatever. It's a lot less swingy because you can control the maximum amount of "helping" skill modifiers - and assume that the party will always use the highest skill PC for the main roll. Which is what they do currently.