Skill Challenges: Bringing the Awesome

[hong]

And ffs ppl, it's "causality".

 

[Celebrim]

Um.. What?

Errr... Ok.

Seriously, much of your arguments, while well worded, concise, and apparently valid, seem to fall down

See, now that is what provokes me to say, "Um... what?" If it is apparantly valid to you, then it can't also seem to you to fall down. Seeming to 'fall down' implies that to you the argument is apparantly invalid.

...in that I fail to see how it is an argument against the rules, as opposed to an argument against a given DM's capability.

It is a DM's choice to break causality in such a fashion.

Everything is the DM's choice, including breaking the rules. My point is that the rules as described can break causality (or rather, break forward causality). It is the DM's choice to adhere to this mandated causality break or not, but if he doesn't adhere to it then he is also perforce choosing to break the rules. And I'm asserting that the fact that the rule is written such that the DM is inclined to break it to maintain causality and/or versimilitude is a condemnation of that rule.

In the above scenario, the players could walk on, nothing would happen, and the dryad would eventually die when the corpse was triggered by natural action.

Yes, but that isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Situations like that are fairly easily covered as '6/4, failure to accumulate 6 success after 24 hours (or whatever unit of time) consitutes failure in the challenge.' That's not a big problem. Let me give a couple of examples of what I consider problems:

1) The character uses Perception to note the wound sowed up. He then immediately proposes to use his Heal to perform a careful autoposy on the wound, and then follows up this with an immediate proposition to use Thievery to carefully remove the device without damaging it. All of these are successful, but we now have only 3 successes accumulated. Per the rules, the device isn't disarmed and the challenge isn't over, but we are now physically further along in the process as we were in the scenario where by this point the party could not fail the challenge. Does the DM demand three more successes per the rules, or does he decide to wave the remaining three challenges per his common sense? If the latter, what did he need the rules for in the first place?
2) The party is confused but cautious. They make four knowledge and insight checks to try to figure out what is going on before getting closer to the body. But do to some bad luck, these checks are all unsuccessful. At this point, per the rules the challenge is a failure and the trap should 'spontaneously' go off (or some event should happen or be invented to cause it to go off, which is fundamentally the same thing). Yet, at this point less time has transpired than in the described scenario where they reached the point where nothing they could do would fail.
3) Same thing, the party is confused but cautious, only this time they have a string of good luck and accumulate 6 insight/knowledge successes before every coming closer to the body or the three. At this point, per the rules, nothing they can do would cause them to fail - no matter how inept or incompotent they might be at skills to actually disarm the device. At this point they've done nothing to actually remedy the situation and the actual physical act of removing the device has yet to be accomploshed, yet they are farther along to success than someone who may have actually done so. Per the rules as described, what should happen if the party just leaves at this point? Per the rules, haven't they disarmed the device? Is the intent to do something the same as doing it?
4) Suppose the first proposition of the party is something utterly inappropriate, like 'I go and chop down the body with my battle axe.' This action would certainly at some point set the device off, and yet when offered in the first place is it impossible for this proposition to catastrophically fail? Does the universe inevitably intervene to prevent the character from doing something which would invalidate the challenge? If it would, would it also do the same thing if the players intent was to cause the challenge to fail?

As you can see, with the 6/4 constraint added to the situation, causality becomes hazy and conditional in a way that has nothing to do with DM ineptness. This is easily seen because if we remove the 6/4 constraint and remove the 'skill challenge' context, we never find ourselves in a situation where 'successful proposition A' doesn't lead 'logical consequence B' and the DM doesn't have to invent 'run time' exception handling or retroactive events to explain the consequences of success or failure.

Please keep in mind that I'm not saying that the DM can't successfully invent explanations, nor am I saying that it is impossible to adhere to the rules and also provide a logical framework.

 

[Hussar]

/snip]



Yes, but that isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Situations like that are fairly easily covered as '6/4, failure to accumulate 6 success after 24 hours (or whatever unit of time) consitutes failure in the challenge.' That's not a big problem. Let me give a couple of examples of what I consider problems:

1) The character uses Perception to note the wound sowed up. He then immediately proposes to use his Heal to perform a careful autoposy on the wound, and then follows up this with an immediate proposition to use Thievery to carefully remove the device without damaging it. All of these are successful, but we now have only 3 successes accumulated. Per the rules, the device isn't disarmed and the challenge isn't over, but we are now physically further along in the process as we were in the scenario where by this point the party could not fail the challenge. Does the DM demand three more successes per the rules, or does he decide to wave the remaining three challenges per his common sense? If the latter, what did he need the rules for in the first place?

Of course he would require three more successes. You still haven't disarmed the ENCOUNTER. A further three failures would see the dryad attack, for example. Depending on how much poking and prodding the PC's do, it could still set off the trap.

Note, the skill challenge is not limited to one single element - the trap. The skill challenge includes all elements in the scene - the trap plus the dryad.

2) The party is confused but cautious. They make four knowledge and insight checks to try to figure out what is going on before getting closer to the body. But do to some bad luck, these checks are all unsuccessful. At this point, per the rules the challenge is a failure and the trap should 'spontaneously' go off (or some event should happen or be invented to cause it to go off, which is fundamentally the same thing). Yet, at this point less time has transpired than in the described scenario where they reached the point where nothing they could do would fail.

Nothing in the scenario above is time constrained, so, the amount of time they take is irrelevant. The trap going off spontaneously could easily be one result of four failures. The dryad getting more and more frantic as the PC's gather around the trap to check it out and then getting antagonisitic is another. Heck, on the fourth failure, a crow lands on the corpse, pecks out its eye and the trap goes off.

3) Same thing, the party is confused but cautious, only this time they have a string of good luck and accumulate 6 insight/knowledge successes before every coming closer to the body or the three. At this point, per the rules, nothing they can do would cause them to fail - no matter how inept or incompotent they might be at skills to actually disarm the device. At this point they've done nothing to actually remedy the situation and the actual physical act of removing the device has yet to be accomploshed, yet they are farther along to success than someone who may have actually done so. Per the rules as described, what should happen if the party just leaves at this point? Per the rules, haven't they disarmed the device? Is the intent to do something the same as doing it?

Again, you equate Trap with Scene. They have enough successes to defeat the scene. Thus, nothing that happens afterwards will be bad. Perhaps the trap is a dud.

4) Suppose the first proposition of the party is something utterly inappropriate, like 'I go and chop down the body with my battle axe.' This action would certainly at some point set the device off, and yet when offered in the first place is it impossible for this proposition to catastrophically fail? Does the universe inevitably intervene to prevent the character from doing something which would invalidate the challenge? If it would, would it also do the same thing if the players intent was to cause the challenge to fail?

I imagine that the DMG will include advice on how to handle this. It's no different really than if you want to bang on the trapped chest - it goes off. You failed, not because of the 4 failures, but because you chose not to accept the skill challenge at all.

But, say you shoot the body down with an arrow. The body falls and bursts open. Now, how does the dryad react to this? Suppose that you now get six successes and calm the dryad down. Did you succeed or fail the skill challenge? The trap is disarmed and the dryad is friendly. I'd say you succeeded.

As you can see, with the 6/4 constraint added to the situation, causality becomes hazy and conditional in a way that has nothing to do with DM ineptness. This is easily seen because if we remove the 6/4 constraint and remove the 'skill challenge' context, we never find ourselves in a situation where 'successful proposition A' doesn't lead 'logical consequence B' and the DM doesn't have to invent 'run time' exception handling or retroactive events to explain the consequences of success or failure.

Please keep in mind that I'm not saying that the DM can't successfully invent explanations, nor am I saying that it is impossible to adhere to the rules and also provide a logical framework.

In an RPG there is no such thing as causality. Only what the DM rules happens. If something is unknown to the players, then it does not exist as far as the players are concerned. It's more of a quantum approach to the game - everything has occured can be known, but, until such time as it has been resolved, all bets are off.

And that applies to the DM as well.

But, in the end, Celebrim, the problem is that you have artificially narrowed the challenge to exclude all the actors. There is the trap AND the dryad and they are both included in the skill challenge. There is no one right way to solve the skill challenge and there can be any number of possible resolutions that range from catastrophic failure to perfect success.

I can really see this shift requiring a lot of reevaluation of how we DM because D&D has never been presented in this way before.

 

[VannATLC]

See, now that is what provokes me to say, "Um... what?" If it is apparantly valid to you, then it can't also seem to you to fall down. Seeming to 'fall down' implies that to you the argument is apparantly invalid.

Yes it can. That's what 'apparently' means.

Yes, but that isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Situations like that are fairly easily covered as '6/4, failure to accumulate 6 success after 24 hours (or whatever unit of time) consitutes failure in the challenge.' That's not a big problem. Let me give a couple of examples of what I consider problems:

1) The character uses Perception to note the wound sowed up. He then immediately proposes to use his Heal to perform a careful autoposy on the wound, and then follows up this with an immediate proposition to use Thievery to carefully remove the device without damaging it. All of these are successful, but we now have only 3 successes accumulated. Per the rules, the device isn't disarmed and the challenge isn't over, but we are now physically further along in the process as we were in the scenario where by this point the party could not fail the challenge. Does the DM demand three more successes per the rules, or does he decide to wave the remaining three challenges per his common sense? If the latter, what did he need the rules for in the first place?

This is valid. And curious. I am thinking about it, but under your example, nobody has actually dealt with the device yet.. but I get where you are coming from. Under this set of circumstances, based on what we currently know, I'd be assigning 2 checks for some of those actions, as an 'easy' check.

2) The party is confused but cautious. They make four knowledge and insight checks to try to figure out what is going on before getting closer to the body. But do to some bad luck, these checks are all unsuccessful. At this point, per the rules the challenge is a failure and the trap should 'spontaneously' go off (or some event should happen or be invented to cause it to go off, which is fundamentally the same thing). Yet, at this point less time has transpired than in the described scenario where they reached the point where nothing they could do would fail.

See below. As per successes, so with Failures. Also being aware we are discussing, in absolutes, a system we haven't seen most of yet.

3) Same thing, the party is confused but cautious, only this time they have a string of good luck and accumulate 6 insight/knowledge successes before every coming closer to the body or the tree. At this point, per the rules, nothing they can do would cause them to fail - no matter how inept or incompotent they might be at skills to actually disarm the device. At this point they've done nothing to actually remedy the situation and the actual physical act of removing the device has yet to be accomploshed, yet they are farther along to success than someone who may have actually done so. Per the rules as described, what should happen if the party just leaves at this point? Per the rules, haven't they disarmed the device? Is the intent to do something the same as doing it?

I cannot remember where, unfortunately, but I recall somebody with a WoTC marker indicating that not all successess are necessarily successes, if they are not withing the DM-decided idea of appropriate actions. This extrapolates to failures, as above.

4) Suppose the first proposition of the party is something utterly inappropriate, like 'I go and chop down the body with my battle axe.' This action would certainly at some point set the device off, and yet when offered in the first place is it impossible for this proposition to catastrophically fail? Does the universe inevitably intervene to prevent the character from doing something which would invalidate the challenge? If it would, would it also do the same thing if the players intent was to cause the challenge to fail?

Again, assumptions regarding the text of the actual rules, as opposed to the fuzzy ideas we've actually seen.

Also, initation of combat is going to be a cessation of a Skill Challenge, in any situation I can readily forsee. In the instance you've given, I'd give the party a second to intervene, then proceed with the effect of chopping down the tree.

As you can see, with the 6/4 constraint added to the situation, causality becomes hazy and conditional in a way that has nothing to do with DM ineptness.

And I still disagree. Nothing I've suggested as a method to overcome your objections breaks causality. There is a larger requirement for a DM to think of their feet, and examine their challenges with a finer eye.

This is easily seen because if we remove the 6/4 constraint and remove the 'skill challenge' context, we never find ourselves in a situation where 'successful proposition A' doesn't lead 'logical consequence B' and the DM doesn't have to invent 'run time' exception handling or retroactive events to explain the consequences of success or failure.

Please keep in mind that I'm not saying that the DM can't successfully invent explanations, nor am I saying that it is impossible to adhere to the rules and also provide a logical framework.

 

[Cadfan]

What counts as a "success" is defined by the DM. In the trap scenario, if you're worried that the party will attempt six different knowledge checks and the trap will magically disarm itself, you just have to stop defining knowledge checks as successes after the first or second. Sure, they might succeed at the skill roll, but they've remembered everything relevant, so there's no "success" to be gained through that route.

I rather like the trap scenario, and I really like the way the knowledge check factored in.

Think of it from the perspective of the players. They encounter something odd. One character remembers that what they've encountered resembles a certain historic trap. Based on this information, they engage in a several step process of disarming the trap.

It only breaks verisimilitude if you let it break verisimilitude, and I've given up any shred of sympathy I once had for people who do that. You want to screw over your own game, be my guest.

 

[Celebrim]

Of course he would require three more successes. You still haven't disarmed the ENCOUNTER. A further three failures would see the dryad attack, for example. Depending on how much poking and prodding the PC's do, it could still set off the trap.

Which rather neatly evades the point, which was that for a given scene, a very direct path might end up tying up more loose ends than a less direct one while racking up fewer successes.

And as a whole, you spend alot of time arguing for something I'm not really arguing against. See the last comment of the post you are responding too. Yes, of course you can create various post hoc rationalizations and descriptions within the system that are logical and from the players perspective consistant. I freely concede that. In fact, the existance of these explanations is necessary to understand my concern. The fact that you tumble out claims like, 'the amount of time they take is irrelevant' and 'The trap going off spontaneously could easily be one result of four failures' and 'on the fourth failure, a crow lands on the corpse, pecks out its eye and the trap goes off' and 'Perhaps the trap is a dud' as an argument against my concern leads me to think I'm not explaining my point well enough for you to understand what it is.

Seriously, you think 'Schrodinger's trap' is an argument against my concern that causality is now fuzzy?

But, in the end, Celebrim, the problem is that you have artificially narrowed the challenge to exclude all the actors.

No, that isn't the problem, because as soon as you start saying things like 'In RPG's causality don't exist' and 'It's more of a quantum approach' then AFAIC you've conceeded my point.

After conceeding my main and larger point to me, talking about how my problem is that I haven't mentioned the dryad (or the possibility of a crow arriving) in a particular example is rather much nitpicking.

There is the trap AND the dryad and they are both included in the skill challenge. There is no one right way to solve the skill challenge and there can be any number of possible resolutions that range from catastrophic failure to perfect success.

This is a feature of RPG's rather than a feature of the skill challenge resolution system.

I can really see this shift requiring a lot of reevaluation of how we DM because D&D has never been presented in this way before.

And it is really ironic that after spending your post telling me how wrong I am (while conceeding pretty much everything too me), you end in this way, because isn't this my point? Isn't my point ultimately that the skill challenge system requires you to DM in a way that is not only different from how D&D is normally ran, but which is different from how the mechanics of the rest of 4e D&D requires the game to be run? Hense my complaints of 'incoherency' and all the rest?

 

[Saeviomagy]

1) The character uses Perception to note the wound sowed up. He then immediately proposes to use his Heal to perform a careful autoposy on the wound, and then follows up this with an immediate proposition to use Thievery to carefully remove the device without damaging it. All of these are successful, but we now have only 3 successes accumulated. Per the rules, the device isn't disarmed and the challenge isn't over, but we are now physically further along in the process as we were in the scenario where by this point the party could not fail the challenge. Does the DM demand three more successes per the rules, or does he decide to wave the remaining three challenges per his common sense? If the latter, what did he need the rules for in the first place?

This was a fault with the DM's description. If the trap is the only element in the scene, and it takes 6 successes to overcome it, then obviously the result of the third success shouldn't be "the scene is effectively over".

Which, apart from anything else, it's not. At the end of your described scenario, your players are holding a dangerous, still armed device. Again - another thievery check shouldn't immediately disarm the trap.

2) The party is confused but cautious. They make four knowledge and insight checks to try to figure out what is going on before getting closer to the body. But do to some bad luck, these checks are all unsuccessful. At this point, per the rules the challenge is a failure and the trap should 'spontaneously' go off (or some event should happen or be invented to cause it to go off, which is fundamentally the same thing). Yet, at this point less time has transpired than in the described scenario where they reached the point where nothing they could do would fail.

Well, for a start, each failed insight check should be described in some way as making things worse. Giving radically wrong information, and the like.

If you can't imagine a way that that could happen, then perhaps that skill check should be ignored for the purposes of the challenge. Under 3e's skill system, the limit is 1 knowledge check each on each knowledge the characters have, and if you fail, you just don't gain anything useful.

3) Same thing, the party is confused but cautious, only this time they have a string of good luck and accumulate 6 insight/knowledge successes before every coming closer to the body or the three. At this point, per the rules, nothing they can do would cause them to fail - no matter how inept or incompotent they might be at skills to actually disarm the device. At this point they've done nothing to actually remedy the situation and the actual physical act of removing the device has yet to be accomploshed, yet they are farther along to success than someone who may have actually done so. Per the rules as described, what should happen if the party just leaves at this point? Per the rules, haven't they disarmed the device? Is the intent to do something the same as doing it?

Again - each check should be having some impact. If you can't think up an impact that the check should be having, then it's probably not an appropriate check. Under 3e there's a similar limit (ie - how much info has the DM prepared). Chances are most DMs do this anyway - there's info available, and the first few decent rolls on slightly appropriate knowledge checks get anything that might help.

4) Suppose the first proposition of the party is something utterly inappropriate, like 'I go and chop down the body with my battle axe.' This action would certainly at some point set the device off, and yet when offered in the first place is it impossible for this proposition to catastrophically fail? Does the universe inevitably intervene to prevent the character from doing something which would invalidate the challenge? If it would, would it also do the same thing if the players intent was to cause the challenge to fail?

The action counts against a failure. The body falls and starts leaking gas. One or more characters pass out within the gas cloud. Con checks allow other characters to hold their breath and rescue them.

Once a certain amount of dice rolling is done, the encounter is over.

The key thing is - it's easy for the DM to, as you've described, let an encounter just go on and on and on, giving the players no feedback about progress in the positive or negative, and in the end resulting in a boring time being had by all.

I feel that the x/y system just encourages a DM (and players) to think about non combat encounters in terms of progress, and if something isn't making things progress, he handwaves it and moves on.

 

[Celebrim]

Yes it can. That's what 'apparently' means.

I'm not struggling with the meaning of 'apparently'. I'm struggling with how to the same person a thing can be both apparently valid and apparently invalid at the same time. But let's not get derailed on that.

See below. As per successes, so with Failures. Also being aware we are discussing, in absolutes, a system we haven't seen most of yet.

The system I'm discussing is the described system (by the OP), not the system as written by WotC (which we obviously haven't seen). I can discuss the described system, as we have 'seen it'. The two may differ, but nonetheless, I think it reasonable to suggest that the two systems will have much in common.

I cannot remember where, unfortunately, but I recall somebody with a WoTC marker indicating that not all successess are necessarily successes, if they are not withing the DM-decided idea of appropriate actions. This extrapolates to failures, as above.

Yes, but comments of this sort yet again raises the question, [if what propositions advance the counters is up to DM fiat] what does the skill challenge mechanic give me that I wouldn't have without it? Is it only to remind DM's and player's that different skills could contribute to the resolution of problems?

 

[VannATLC]

Yes, but comments of this sort yet again raises the question, [if what propositions advance the counters is up to DM fiat] what does the skill challenge mechanic give me that I wouldn't have without it? Is it only to remind DM's and player's that different skills could contribute to the resolution of problems?

Yes. It is.

It was something missing within the 3e rules, something that lead to the vast majority of games I observed, as being combat driven, with ocassional dialogue, and the odd class, (Mostly the rogue/bard/trained person) overcoming a trap or some such.

This is a codified mechanic, presumably with guidelines, that will enable a DM and his players to formulate meaninful, interactive, and non-combat based situations.. much like the example given did for Harr's group.

Yes, it was perfectly possible to do this previously.

No, it was not, in any way, shape, or form, encouraged in the RAW.

 

[Celebrim]

Saeviomagy: You seem to be of the mistaken opinion that if you could show that the scene could be arbitrated in a logical fashion according to the rules, that you will have done harm to my point.

This was a fault with the DM's description. If the trap is the only element in the scene, and it takes 6 successes to overcome it, then obviously the result of the third success shouldn't be "the scene is effectively over".

It can't be the fault of the DM's description, because the PC doesn't know what the stakes of the challenge is. The PC in my example is just doing what seems logical to him. My point isn't being made against the specific example. Rather I'm trying to show that the number of successes you garner isn't necessarily related to how far you appear to have gone towards solving the initial problem. The key clause is, "we are now physically further along in the process as we were in the scenario where by this point the party could not fail the challenge" It should be obvious that in general, this can happen, and that preventing it from happening would make a skill challenge look increasingly like traditional D&D challenge resolution.

Which, apart from anything else, it's not. At the end of your described scenario, your players are holding a dangerous, still armed device.

Irrelevant. At the end of the described scenario, the party is farther along toward disarming said dangerous still armed device than the party which per the rules cannot fail to do so.

Well, for a start, each failed insight check should be described in some way as making things worse. Giving radically wrong information, and the like.

So what. My point is that the paranoid party had adopted a purely passive approach to the problem - they were just going to think about it. This thinking about it corresponds perhaps to the described events Insight, History, and Nature checks (and perhaps other similar ones). But the point is that they were going to continue to think about it regardless of how long it took. One party merely by thinking about it, solved the problem. Another party (perhaps the same party in a parallel universe), merely by thinking about it it, didn't. Yet both took the same in game physical actions, namely, none.

If you can't imagine a way that that could happen, then perhaps that skill check should be ignored for the purposes of the challenge.

It probably should, but that means that we've returned to accepting that some sort of finite set of relevant actions are required to resolve various problems. At that point, why bother having skill challenge mechanics? Likewise, if we are ever ignoring skill checks, haven't we returned to the case (whether this is a fair description or not) of "an encounter just go on and on and on, giving the players no feedback about progress in the positive or negative, and in the end resulting in a boring time being had by all."?