D&D 4E Showing the Math: Proving that 4e’s Skill Challenge system is broken (math heavy)

[Cadfan]

I would never lay this at the feet of the playtesters.

Expecting a typical (target) 4e player to analyze the underlying math is like expecting a 1st level party to pass a complex skill challenge.

The fundamental promise of 4e is that the math just works and you don't have to worry about it. It's a good promise. It's right up there with "You don't need to know how to rebuild a carburettor to drive our car."

Its not a question of the 4e playtesters understanding the math. Its this: assume that someone out there did 20 playtest skill challenges. According to this thread, they should have lost the vast majority of them. Did they?

Related question- people have been using skill challenges for a while. Are they losing all of them? Are they adjusting the DCs in some way?

Basically, it seems very unlikely to me that everyone using skill challenges has been losing the vast majority of them. This suggests that something else is going on that is not accounted for in this thread. Perhaps it is DM intervention regarding skill challenge DCs. Perhaps it is players optimizing their choices more effectively than this thread suggests. Perhaps it is something unknown.

I'd like to know the explanation, to help me in my own work as a DM.

 

[GruTheWanderer]

I'm going to be setting the DC's by hand for a while, based on the skills of the characters in my party succeeding at the rolls around 75% of the time. That way there's still a chance of failure with bad rolls, but the party will succeed at skill challenges more often than not.

I'm hoping that the 10/15/20 values will work out, but I suspect that if characters who are not trained in the right skills participate, it can still easily go bad.

I think the +5 to skill checks makes sense for individual skill checks. A 50% chance of failure on a single climb check is as reasonable as a 50% chance of failure on a single attack roll. It's the way the skill challenge combines successes and failures that really doesn't jive with the values in the DMG.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Its not a question of the 4e playtesters understanding the math. Its this: assume that someone out there did 20 playtest skill challenges. According to this thread, they should have lost the vast majority of them. Did they?

Who knows? It wasn't an open playtest. There's no way of knowing how the playtest was set up, what results were reported, and what fixes (if any) were implemented.

Basically, it seems very unlikely to me that everyone using skill challenges has been losing the vast majority of them.

I understand your point, but you need to be careful. You don't want to elevate anecdotal evidence over the math.

This suggests that something else is going on that is not accounted for in this thread. Perhaps it is DM intervention regarding skill challenge DCs. Perhaps it is players optimizing their choices more effectively than this thread suggests. Perhaps it is something unknown.

I'd like to know the explanation, to help me in my own work as a DM.

Fair enough; I agree.

 

[Celebrim]

What I find truly odd is that the high failure rate wasn't picked up in playtests. Unless, of course, the way to win at skill challenges really is to make full use of the Aid Another action at low levels.

It wouldn't be odd if skill challenges weren't a major part of play testing.

People on the EnWorld board focused on skill challenges as if they were some new revolutionary approach to playing D&D. Now that we've seen them, that seems a much less reasonable assumption. The actual skill challenge system looks very different than the Forge games that people invented imagining the skill challenge system.

Since we've dropped our assumption of how revolutionary they are, can we not also drop the assumption that they were in some fashion central to 4e design? If they weren't central to 4e design, then they probably weren't tested alot in play testing.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Who knows? It wasn't an open playtest. There's no way of knowing how the playtest was set up, what results were reported, and what fixes (if any) were implemented.

Especially since in their recent FAQ, WotC expressly forbid playtesters from talking about their playtest experience...

(I hope I'm not too cynical, but I rather liked the way that in the 3.0e playtest days the WotC website had playtest reports up, highlighting issues raised by playtesters and the rules changes that resulted from it. The fact that nothing like that happened this time, that the playtest seemed to take place over a shorter timescale this time and that there were apparently several 'tiers' of playtesters, many of whom didn't see the whole rule set doesn't fill me with confidence)

 

[Henry]

BTW, I love mathematics like this.

I could watch it all day.

It's like watching a tennis match with an invisible ball....

 

[Halivar]

BTW, I love mathematics like this.

I could watch it all day.

All that's missing are the pugil sticks.

 

[Plane Sailing]

It wouldn't be odd if skill challenges weren't a major part of play testing.

People on the EnWorld board focused on skill challenges as if they were some new revolutionary approach to playing D&D. Now that we've seen them, that seems a much less reasonable assumption. The actual skill challenge system looks very different than the Forge games that people invented imagining the skill challenge system.

It is actually very similar to the Complex Skill Checks from Unearthed Arcana:

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/complexSkillChecks.htm

That actually included the maths for success with "3 success before 3 failures", "5 success before 3 failures" and "10 success before 3 failures" so people were doing the maths at that time.

 

[Dragonblade]

So this is an interesting discussion.

What would be the best way to fix the skill challenges then?

DCs of 10/15/20?

or how about keeping the DCs but changing the required successes? So, instead of 4 successes before 2 failures, how about 4 successes before 4 failures? How does that change the math?

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

It is actually very similar to the Complex Skill Checks from Unearthed Arcana:

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/complexSkillChecks.htm

That actually included the maths for success with "3 success before 3 failures", "5 success before 3 failures" and "10 success before 3 failures" so people were doing the maths at that time.

Thanks for posting that. I knew that Complex checks originated in UA; I didn't realize that table predicting success was there.

Which quite frankly leaves me-- baffled! It looks like the concept got departmentalized and this rather important piece of the puzzle fell by the wayside.