SCs: Tailored to the party?

[sfedi]

DMG2 states: "Know what skills your player character's are good at, and tailor your challenges to those skills."

This brings several problems:

- You can't have "general" SCs (as in modules, or for typical situations)
- Adds the burden of knowing your characters to the problem of making a good SC
- Choices the PCs make on which skills they are good at and which they leave out are irrelevant

So, I have this other principle for SCs:

"Skill Challenges are made to reflect a problem, they are not tailored to the party overcoming them.
A party decides which challenges it is better at by (indirectly) deciding which skills they are going to train."

What do you guys think?

 

[renau1g]

I'm with you on this, if a party decides to totally forgo any social skill, guess what? There's a consequence for that. I'm not running a game to spoon feed my players and they know enough that a well-rounded party is key to any adventure. Kind of like how I have a lot of locked chests and doors in an adventure even though nobody's trained in Thievery, because it's realistic the bad guy usually locks his stuff.

I usually build it with a specific set of skills that works, but I am always open to interesting uses of non-key skills. If a player comes up with a non-standard solution to the problem I won't say "no, sorry the module doesn't list that as a key ability here"

 

[keterys]

I'm not 100% there*, but I do think that every skill challenge should be at least as interesting if it fails as succeeds and that failure should always have a real chance of happening.

So I wouldn't want to setup SCs that the party had a 95% chance of failing... I'd rather just handwave their sucking or get it over with quickly, but I wouldn't want to pull punches either.

* Sometimes a party is created as a party, with weaknesses planned around, covered, etc. Sometimes it's just characters people want to play, and who am I to say 'You guys can't play the characters you want to play. One of you has to take one for the team and change.'

 

[sfedi]

Keterys, that's the whole point.

Why bother tailoring the SCs to the party, if ANY outcome moves the sotry forward?

Seems like the success or failure of a SC moves the sotry in one way or another, and it seems sensible that that way is the one the party is tailored for.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Both ways of looking at it have their advantages and disadvantages. I wouldn't advocate making every SC work only with the skills the party happens to have, but I would advocate trying to design SCs in such a way that its unlikely a typical skill distribution of a party will leave some PCs unable to contribute. I think that's more the issue with tailoring SC than making them easy for a given party.

I'll draw the analogy to the debate in the thread on flying creatures. A good DM will probably not suddenly have a dragon show up and ravage the party from the safety of the air at 20+ squares range without given the party some alternatives. Even though you could say "Well, they should have invested in X,Y, and Z for that eventuality" its unlikely that every party will have contingencies for every single kind of situation. Likewise with SCs. Challenges will come up that nobody anticipated or it was just too expensive to plan for.

Now, that doesn't mean the DM should axe the dragon idea, he should just make it more interesting than "the party runs in fear from the undefeatable enemy". He doesn't have to let them win, but defeat can be made interesting. "The party flees into the woods where they run into the refugees of the village the dragon burned." Likewise with some kind of SC the party can't handle. In other words you might call it tailoring the SC, but its more like just making sure the narrative accounts for every possibility.

The real tailoring issue with SC then is "the useless character". For example I have an SC I designed last week for my group which I haven't run yet, but it basically consists of climbing down a shaft to a tomb while ghostly spirits try to frighten the characters away. It could have been just a climb, but then how do the wizard and the starlock participate since they mostly have knowledge skills. That's where the spirits come in. It adds a dimension to the challenge that they can deal with by using some history, religion, and arcana checks as secondary skills to erase a failure, give a bonus, and unlock another primary skill. I'm not sure I would say this SC is "tuned to the specific party", but it has a balanced set of ways that knowledge, social, and physical skill sets can contribute. That would probably make it a decent challenge for most parties.

Of course unfortunately WotC module authors don't always seem to be the best adventure designers so if you run prefabs you will often find one-dimensional encounters (both SC and combat). I guess either you have to tweak them or just not spend money on modules. Personally I haven't run a module in probably 10 years at least, but then I'm crazy that way...

 

[keterys]

Keterys, that's the whole point.

Why bother tailoring the SCs to the party, if ANY outcome moves the sotry forward?

Seems like the success or failure of a SC moves the sotry in one way or another, and it seems sensible that that way is the one the party is tailored for.

Sure - and it can move the story forward to send a level + 8 solo up against the party to try and capture them.

_But_ I wouldn't play it out that way. Wouldn't be a point. I'd look for a different way to play it out.

That said, many SCs the DCs are so low and there's room enough to fit in other skills to a certain extent you can just get away with whatever. But I wouldn't put the party up against a SC they had a 95% chance of failing. Wouldn't see the point.

 

[Ryujin]

The SCs should be somewhat representative of the skills the party possesses or they won't have any fun, and will constantly be missing out on much needed experience. This has to be balanced with not encouraging munchkinism by allowing the party to ignore important skills. Nothing is absolute and a DM who forgets that fact will soon lose control of his game.

The character that I'm currently playing tends to be less effective in combat encounters than he could be, specifically because I'm making up for things that are lacking in the rest of the party. I took a multiclass that assists in interaction SCs through rituals. I took interation skills rather than things like Stealth. I boosted INT so that my knowledge skills would be better, which hurt my primary attack stat. Someone had to.

 

[DracoSuave]

Yeah, of course SCs should be tailored to suit the party. That's 'How to Run a Roleplaying Game 101' and is applicable advice to every roleplaying game ever played. I mean, seriously, if you don't do -some- measure of tailoring to the party, it's like your party has said 'We'd like to play this kind of game' and you're punishing them for not wanting to play something else.

Let's say, for instance, the party decides not to take Streetwise. Big frackin' deal. They don't tend to go pounding the streets for information. They have to go about things a different way. To then go 'Alright, here's a pound the street for info skill challenge' your party will probably go 'Well, let's see what I can research at the library' because -that- is the kind of characters they made.

It reminds me full well of a game of Changeling the Dreaming I played in. We all made this team of crooks inspired by Sly Cooper. We had the brain, the goon, the sneak, the faceman, really cool Oceans Eleven stuff. Our Storyteller decided to take this team who were designed to go into things and steal stuff, and put them on a political adventure of doom.

The game didn't go past that session; the DM decided to toss us into a situation we not only weren't prepared for, but absolutely didn't care about. We wanted to spend our time preparing a dastardly heist, not sitting in court waiting for the local gorram Baroness to shut her yap about stuff that our team didn't even care about.


Tailor stuff to your group, and you're telling -their- story. And that's what they are there to do. Tell -their- story.

 

[Shin Okada]

This is not a problem inherent to SC itself. It is an old issue which all the RPGs with customizable character making have.

To make the adventure interesting, the best way is to tailor stories to fit the abilities, backgrounds and personalities of the PCs.

But when making a published module (adventure), the author doesn't know what kind of PCs will play it. So basically, not just SCs, but all the challenges and storyline are made somewhat "generic". And made based on the story and the situation. Still, good authors will left some flexibility.

So, as a DM, you can either use a published module as it is and let your players enjoy challenging it with their (possibly) unfit party, or modify some part (story, combat and non-combat encounter including SCs) to suit your PCs better.

Both of them are interesting playing style. I enjoy both.

But when making my own home-brew adventure which only my players will play, I will try to make each aspects fits better to the PCs. Because I already know what they can and what they cannot.

 

[Camelot]

I agree with Dracosuave, and would like to go a bit further.

"Tailoring the skill challenge to the PCs" does not mean letting them use skills that they are good at when the use of those skills does not make sense. Instead, think of it as the way the PCs overcome the problem. If you want them to discover information, you may think the most obvious way would be to ask around on the streets, using Bluff, Diplomacy, Insight, Intimidate, and Streetwise. However, when you look at your PCs and they have good Arcana, History, Nature, and Religion, then instead you could design a skill challenge that allows them to find this information by researching with those skills. You don't do this because you want to make it easy for the PCs; you do this because that is how the PCs would approach the problem with the strengths they have.

Of course, to make it more interesting, you should first confront the players with problems that are difficult for them to overcome. Not until they think they have used their last chance do you reveal the possibility of using their strengths to aid them. This makes their victory much more enjoyable. In addition, if they manage to overcome a challenge they were not tailered to succeed in, they will feel proud of their achievement and you won't have to pull out the challenge you made tailored to their strengths. It's a win-win situation!

Good luck with your game.