official revision to skill challenge system

[Paul Strack]

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:

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.

This does seem like it is a workable system. I agree that it is less swingy. I have a couple complaints about it, though:

1) It doesn't scale by party size. Larger parties have a better chance of winning against the same DC. It means you have to factor in party size when you pick the DC.

2) Having a point man makes sense for some challenges (opening a lock or negotiating with the Duke) but not for challenges where everyone in the party needs to perform some task: sneaking into the castle or climb the cliff.

3) It seems less "fun" to me. For what I can tell, it is basically like a single check with modified Aid Another for the rest of the party. I as a player would want a bigger role than that in a challenge. It certainly does not feel nearly as meaningful as a combat encounter.

It also means that everyone in the party *except* the point man can roll really well, and then have the point man blow the final roll. That can be really frustrating to the rest of the group. In practice it may not be any different than the last guy in a standard challenge getting a failure instead of a success on the last roll, but it would certainly feel different in play.

4) It has fewer overall rule parameters, making it harder to add tactical options to the challenge.

 

[Paul Strack]

Tactical Options for skill challenges.

Here is a dump of some of the tactical options I am considering for skill challenges (draft only). To balance them, I give them complexity adjustments. This is what I meant when I said "making challenge options more rigorously defined as part of the rules".

Extra Primary Skills (-1 complexity per Skill): A challenge can have more Primary Skills than normal. Each additional primary skill above three reduces the challenge complexity by -1.

Two Skills (+1 complexity): A challenge with only two Primary Skills counts as +1 complexity.

Single Skill (+3 complexity): A challenge with only one Primary Skill can be very difficult and counts as +3 complexity. A single-skill challenge option should be balanced with something else to reduce the difficulty. Opt-Out or Aid Another are good balancing options.

Limited-Use Skills (-1 complexity): The challenge includes two additional Primary Skill, but those skills can only be used successfully only a limited number of times in the challenge. Once the skills have added successes equal to the basic complexity of the challenge, they cannot be used any more in the challenge. If appropriate, the successes for the limit-used use skill may be required instead of optional. This option should generally be balanced against primary skills than normal. This option is good for defining a "sub-challenge" as part of the main challenge.

Secret Skills (+1 complexity): Sometimes the list of Primary Skills for a challenge isn't obvious. The party should always have a general idea of which skills to use (social skills in a social challenge) but they may not know, for example, that the Duke reacts poorly to Intimidation attempts. Using the wrong skill either counts as an automatic failure or increases the DC of the skill check to the Hard skill rating. This option works well in combination with the Information Skills and the Easy Skill option.

Information Skills (-l or -2 complexity): Information skills are two extra skills that can be used with the challenge, generally knowledge skills, Perception or Insight. Each success provides information about the challenge. This could reveal which skills are best for the challenge, give knowledge of special bonuses that can be earned or unlock an Easy Skill. There is only so much information that can be gleaned, so information skills can only be used successfully a limited number of times. The number of pieces of information available should equal the base complexity of the challenge.

Successes and failures on the information skill normally still count toward victory or defeat in the challenge. If they do not, this challenge option has a complexity adjustment of -2 instead of -1.

Easy Skill (+0 or -l complexity): This options adds another skill that can be used more easily than others in the challenge, using the Easy DC instead of the Moderate DC. An easy skill should only be used with secret-skill challenge. Generally, the characters must guess correctly or succeed at an information skill check before they "unlock" the easy skill. If the easy skill can only be used once, this doesn't modify the complexity of the challenge. If the easy skill can be used multiple times, up to the base complexity of the challenge, this option reduced the complexity by -1.

Creative Skills (+0 complexity): Characters can attempt to use any skill with the challenge rather than the listed primary skills, but only if the player can justify using that skill. Each creative skill can only be used once in the challenge, and only if the GM agrees that it is appropriate. Once a player uses Arcana creatively in a challenge, no other player can use that skill, whether the check succeeds or fails. Furthermore, the DC for the check is the Hard DC number, not the easy number. This option just not adjust the challenge complexity, but it entirely up to the DM whether it is allowed.

Costly Failures (+1 complexity): Characters lose some limited resource for each failed skill roll in the challenge. This could be gold, healing surges or magical Residuum. Healing surges can be lost to represent exertion or injury in physical challenges. If equipment or gold is lost, it should equal 10% of the value of a magic item of challenge's level for each failure. The resource lost must matter to the characters. Healing surges only count as a costly failure if the party cannot take an extended rest before their next combat encounter. In a challenge with costly failures, the consequences of defeat may simply be the lose of additional resources.

Extra Exertion (+0 complexity): The character can expend a resource, either to re-roll failures or buy successes for the challenge. This could be spending an Action Point, a healing surge or a daily power appropriate to the kind of challenges. The resource spent resource should allow a re-roll for a failed check (for action points or healing surges) or to buy a success without making a skill roll. Because the character is expending resources to improve their odds of victory, this doesn't modify the complexity of the challenge. Like costly failures, only resources that matter can be spent.

Helping Hand (+0 complexity): The character voluntarily takes a -2 penalty of her skill check to give another character a +2 bonus on his next skill check. Since the bonus and penalty even out, this does not modify the complexity of the challenge. Only one character can give a helping hand to another character at a time. This option is especially appropriate to challenges with costly failures.

Aid Another (-2 or -1 complexity): A character can choose to Aid Another by making an Easy Skill check with the skill being aided. Unlike other checks, success or failure on this check does not count towards victory or defeat in the challenge. Instead, a success gives the aided character a +2 bonus and a failure has no effect. Each a party member can only be the recipient of a single Aid Another check each round in the challenge. That party member must make a skill check with that skill on his next turn, whether or not the Aid Another attempt succeed.

Normally Aid Another can be used by any party member to help any other party member and reduced the challenge complexity by -2. If Aid Another can only be used to help a designated party leader once per round, this option only reduces the complexity by -1.

Opt Out (-3 complexity): If party members can choose not to participate in the challenge, it becomes much easier, because only those party members with the best skills need to roll. This option should be balanced with other options that make the challenge more difficult, such as a single-skill challenge or making the challenge higher level than the party.

Total Victory (+0 complexity): Normally a challenge ends when a party accumulates successes equal to the victory threshold. This option lets the party continue to roll past this threshold to gain some additional benefit. If the party manages to get two more successes above the Victory Threshold, before they reach the defeat threshold, they achieve a total victory and the added benefit. If they reach the defeat threshold before the achieve total victory, they only achieve a normal victory instead.

Partial Victory (+1 complexity): This option is similar to total victory above, except that the party suffer some setback if they only achieve a partial victory (an extra complication or some lost resource). The party can push on to achieve a total victory by earning two successes beyond the Victory Threshold if they want to win a clean victory with no side effects. The only difference between this option and the total victory option is that the party is penalized for only earning a partial victory instead of getting a bonus for earning a total victory.

Fewer Failures (+1 complexity): This option reduces the number of failures the party can have in a challenge. Each -1 to the failure threshold adds 1 to the complexity. This option should only be used to balance some of the beneficial options that reduce complexities, such as Opt-Out or Aid Another.

Short Challenge: Short challenges take less time than normal. Halve the number of successes and failures needed to complete the challenge. Halve adjustments for options like Total Victory, Partial Victory and Fewer Failures as well. This does not adjust the complexity, but the XP earned from winning the challenge is also halved. Challenges with multiple parts can be broken up into a series of short challenges. An opt-out, single-skill short challenge is a good choice for challenges in combat.

EDIT: In case it isn't clear, I don't think every one one of these options should be applied to every challenge. When the DM designs a challenge, he skills the basic challenge and its complexity and layers on a fewer options to make it interesting and different from other challenges.

This makes challenges more like the core rules, where you have a simple base system to which you can add additional special rules on a case-by-case basis.

 

[Paul Strack]

An example challenge, based on the above:

RESCUE FROM A BURNING INN

Setup: The villains have barred the doors to the inn and set it on fire! The party has to rescue the other people trapped in the inn and break free.

Complexity: 3 (balanced options)

Level: Party level

Primary Skills (Moderate DC): Perception (to find people in the smoke), Diplomacy (to keep the crowd calm and organized), Heal (to treat injuries and smoke inhalation).

Limited Use Skills (-1 Complexity, Moderate DCs): Athletics (to bash down the door) and Endurance (resisting the flames as you work open the door). Once the party achieves 3 successes on these skills, the door is open and no further check can be made.

Costly Failure (+1 Complexity): Each failed skill roll means that party member makes a mistake and is burned, losing a healing surge to represent the injury.

Victory: The party escapes and rescues everyone in the inn.

Failure: The villagers outside the inn help pull the party free, but some people in the inn are lost to the flames, tarnishing the party's reputation.

 

[clearstream]

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.

In trying to de-snafu it, you quickly realise that the first problem is getting all players to roll, which can be handled by needing more successes than one player can generate, leading into the second problem of making it account for how many players are involved.

At that point, you might as well use Stalker's Obsidian, which in my view re-engineers the original system to about as good as it'll get.

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..

I worked up a bunch of powers and feats, and keywords to put on skills, and frankly it's easy to produce stuff that plays around with the mechanics, but I'm getting no feeling from it, there's no spark, no zone.

It's like, choose arbitrary stuff and tell your DM 'Am good at arbitary stuffs' then DM tells you pack 'kk let's tell a story where arbitrary stuffs are good' and that's fun and all for RP, but...

...where is my god-fearing, verisimilitudenous, packed-with-interest crunch!

Nowhere, that's where.

-vk

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

Let's also acknowledge the elephant in this room - believability. While a 2nd or 3rd ed (even 1st, for those still playing it) escape from prison was sort of a nebulous thing to DM - what are the rolls? how good do they have to be? - the completion didn't feel strange. You escaped when you made it to the door and got out.

Now in 4th ed, we have a (theoretically) well calculated set of DCs and a nice skill check success/failure framework, but now the escape seems off. I escape after I make 6 successful checks, no matter where I am in-game reative to the exit. My thought as a player is no longer really getting out - it's counting my success ratio. At least Obsidian pulls the fear of failures out of it for the players but the continuity is still disjointed. "I need to leave!" versus "I need 6 successes!" or even "How many successes do I need?" is a subtle but important difference.

Perhaps the better solution is not to count successes and failures of individual rolls, but of broader tasks. In the prison break scenario, the 4/2 success/failure ratio might mean you have to accomplish 4 of the following tasks before you fail 2 (and this is just off the cuff here)

*Pick your cell lock
*Steal a key
*Create a diversion
*Bribe/blackmail a guard
*Obtain disguises
*Petition for pardon
*Arrange for help
*Defeat 3 guards in combat

and then determine the success of each task with one or two skill checks. Or combat

 

[clearstream]

Let's also acknowledge the elephant in this room - believability.

...

and then determine the success of each task with one or two skill checks. Or combat

Agree, and agree. Let's resolve all skill challenges (swimming to Alaska, flower-arranging, shagging the barman, breeding guinea-pigs, convincing the Storm Trooper you aren't the droids he's looking for) using combat.

-vk

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

Agree, and agree. Let's resolve all skill challenges (swimming to Alaska, flower-arranging, shagging the barman, breeding guinea-pigs, convincing the Storm Trooper you aren't the droids he's looking for) using combat.

-vk

I smell the sarcasm, but I'm going to assume it's all in good fun

I'm with you about 4e placing too much emphasis on combat at times - at least we have more standardized and ennumerated XP awards for story and skill uses on this go-round. That being said, a skill challenge and a combat challenge are both conflicts. 4e has a viable conflict resolution system for combat that keeps people involved and interested. Why not port over the concepts to the non-skill challenges to achieve the same end? I also enjoy putting skill challenges in combat situations as another 'enemy', so to speak. It would be helpful to either see (or create) a skill challenge statted out like a trap so I could balance it with the rest of the encounter.

On my other comment about the 'believability' factor (maybe not the best wording, but I'm going with it anyway) - this arises from my DM experience with #155 Heathen. There's a 12/6 Skill Challenge where the PCs have to locate such-and-such thing out in the middle of some random forest. It became an awful lot of Nature and Endurance checks with no sense of progress other than "we found another random-burnt out hamlet and made two more successes." I did my best as a DM to flavor each success to keep the narrative going, but how many ways can you really flavor an Endurance check? It quickly became a nauseating series of team-aided Nature checks by the ranger with no sense of accomplishment except for "wow, I don't want to do that again." The game really lost its sense of immersion at that point - we no longer felt like adventurers, but people sitting around rolling virtual dice. My desire with the task-counting system would be to compartmentalize the individual rolls into small chunks that would feel more flavorful, allow for a wider variety of skill usages and alleviate some of the fear of failing an untrained check.

 

[Paul Strack]

I worked up a bunch of powers and feats, and keywords to put on skills, and frankly it's easy to produce stuff that plays around with the mechanics, but I'm getting no feeling from it, there's no spark, no zone.

I guess your experience differs from mine. For my group, challenges have been working fairly well, more or less as written, once I massaged the numbers and added a few more options to give the party some choices.

Perhaps the better solution is not to count successes and failures of individual rolls, but of broader tasks. In the prison break scenario, the 4/2 success/failure ratio might mean you have to accomplish 4 of the following tasks before you fail 2 (and this is just off the cuff here)

*Pick your cell lock
*Steal a key
*Create a diversion
*Bribe/blackmail a guard
*Obtain disguises
*Petition for pardon
*Arrange for help
*Defeat 3 guards in combat

and then determine the success of each task with one or two skill checks. Or combat

I think something like this could work just a well in the context of the existing challenge system. You could do a jail-break challenge based on Thievery, Stealth and Bluff, and have the players decide what the actual breakdown of tasks is.

When I run challenges, I give the players the general situation, the skills I think are appropriate and then require them to describe how they are using their skills to advance the party towards victory. I lean heavily on the player's creativity, coaching them along only when they are stumped for ideas.

They could begin their jailbreak with a Thievery check to pick the cell door's lock, a Stealth check to hide from the guards bringing them food or a Bluff check to pretend they are sick. Each success would bring them closer to their goal and each failure would be an extra setback. I would describe the results based on how close they are to winning or losing the challenge. All I have to do is arrange it so the last check either gets them free of the jail or has them recaptured.

Deciding all the individual tasks in advance is a lot of extra work, and doesn't account for the clever ideas the players come up with during the game.

 

[Paul Strack]

I just realized I didn't respond to this more rules-oriented part of your post.

In trying to de-snafu it, you quickly realise that the first problem is getting all players to roll, which can be handled by needing more successes than one player can generate, leading into the second problem of making it account for how many players are involved.

You get all of your players to roll by requiring them all to roll. Just say any character that doesn't roll counts as an automatic failure. I don't have an issue with this: not everyone is going to be good at everything and sometimes the characters have to stretch themselves. After all, your strikers don't decide to sit out a combat with a lot of minions just because they are going to be less effective than the controller.

Once you require full participation, accounting for the number of player is a help rather than a hindrance. The party's success rate is based on the average of the party's skill level, which help mitigate the presence of high and low skill characters in the group.

Of course, this only works if you reduce or eliminate the use of Aid Another in skill challenges. This is one area where I think the errata is moving in the right direction.

At that point, you might as well use Stalker's Obsidian, which in my view re-engineers the original system to about as good as it'll get.

I like Obsidian a lot and I check my own numbers against it to see if I am in the right ballpark. It doesn't cover all the cases I want to include, though. The fixed-length challenges don't allow for shorter or longer challenges. Also, the system doesn't work well for including a challenge within a combat.

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

Agreed that creating a list of tasks beforehand is tedious and fails to account for player creativity. It is still a good starting point, though, in the way that current skill checks suggest primary skills. I would have no problem with a player devising a new task and counting that towards the successes. The point is not to stifle creativity, but to provide a more solid narrative framework for the challenge and reduce the fear factor for untrained characters. A failed task has the potential for redemption in certain circumstances. A failed roll doesn't.

Disagreed about the forced rolls. I mean, if it works for you and your players - more power to you. Glad that fixes it. I would never want to do that, though. To continue your analogy with the striker and minions, sure he isn't going to be as effective. But she's not going to hinder the party's progress and it's still fun. That's what a skill challenge should be as well.