Skill Challenges for Dummies

[Tuft]

. It is true that one or two people having a lot lower chance of success will change the probabilities quite a bit. In fact, if you run the system as written it is extra important to keep the DCs low, so that the PCs have a chance for success even if they have party members with no really good skill to choose. It can also be a good idea to give the players a hint that they should make sure to have more than one skill that they are optimized in, just like it is a good idea to make sure they have something useful to offer in a combat.

Well, one way to beat a particularly difficult Skill Challenge is simply to make sure that any non-optimal characters are absent. Boring but true; if they aren't there, then they reasonably cannot roll for the skill challenge initiative, and don't have to do low-odds rolls...

Does the PH have chloroform in the equipment section?

 

[Tervin]

Well, one way to beat a particularly difficult Skill Challenge is simply to make sure that any non-optimal characters are absent. Boring but true; if they aren't there, then they reasonably cannot roll for the skill challenge initiative, and don't have to do low-odds rolls...

Does the PH have chloroform in the equipment section?

A simple way is just to let those characters hesitate and delay action till they have a situation where they feel can do something useful. That I might actually allow - and then the system can be used, almost as written...

 

[Tuft]

A simple way is just to let those characters hesitate and delay action till they have a situation where they feel can do something useful. That I might actually allow - and then the system can be used, almost as written...

That's a good question for a future FAQ on Skill Challenges. "Can you use a Delay or Ready action in a Skill Challenge?" Belongs with "how does per-encounter powers work in a Skill Challenge of long duration, particularly an interrupted one?"

 

[IceBear]

If I'm picking up 4e, I'm making a decision not to play rules-light and to instead pick a more rigorous system. When the game fails to deliver the rigorous system I expected, it partially invalidates my decision to choose 4e over, say, Clint Nixon's

I think this is where a lot of people are having issues with 4E. I consider 4E rules-light (at least compared to the bloat that was 3.x) and thus having more things subject to DM tweaking.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm perplexed by the skill challenge system, and the 'math' threads. The math used is fine, even obvious - of course if you have a 50-50 shot at each check, you're not easily going to come up with 4 successes before 2 failures. That complex challenges actually got easier when your rolls were very good was interesting, though. Both point to the system being flawed, though.

I think the examples in the DMG illustrated the problem, they were too abstract, too simple, and the idea of 'rewarding' the use of an unexpected skill with a /hard/ difficulty wasn't very helpful.

D&D combat manages to be exciting and avoid just being a simple hit-point removal game (at least, in prior editions), through compexity. If you could boil down a D&D combat to doing X damage before taking Y damage (and the Skill Challenge system is even simpler than that), it'd be boring. Complexity is interesting. Combat has a lot of natural complexity, because it's resolved round-by-round (nearly, blow-by-blow), and because there are many powers and options.

Skills actually give you a lot of options, but the Skill Challenges seem to restrict them. Reading the examples in the DMG reminded me of old text-based computer RPGs, where you advanced the plot with a conversation tree. The NPC said something, you picked a response, if you picked a series of right responses, you got to the next scene. Skill Challenges seemed similar, only you were rolling to see if you got the right response.

 

[Stalker0]

Let me first say can we all calm down a little. I realize that anytime you challenge an established body and say its wrong, that's going to cause tension, but we can all discuss this rationally. Let me address some points:

1) You cannot determine if a system is broken based on pure math, you need playtesting and experience.

In general, I wholeheartidely agree with this. In fact, normally I champion it. I've done a lot of houserule tweaks in the past, and I have learned the painful lesson that some times theory and reality don't mix.

So...why not this time right? How come after a few calculations (and by few I mean several thousand, and no I'm not kidding) I'm ready to call it and say the system is broken?

The reason is because the math is so very low. If I had run my calculations and found that a party had a 50% win rate, or heck even 40%, I would have been very skeptical of the system, but I would have given it a shot. I would have thought, maybe aid another makes a big difference, or maybe those utility powers really add up, etc. But I didn't find 40%, I found 7%. So I started investigating mathematically, and I didn't just find bad win rates, I found incredible variation with different skill modifiers, and an inversion in complexity, I found strong problems with the system. And I thought I could do better. That's why I started the skill challenge system in the house rules thread, and why I alerted the community to this problem.

2) You can't model the system with pure math.

Actually, 4e has made this easier than ever before. In 3e, you had to account for a wide array of variables, numbers, conditions, etc etc. 4e has fulfilled its promise of streamlining the math, and as a result the system is much easier to model mathematically. Of course I can't account for every thing a player might do under the sun, but I can certainly account for an average party.

3) When the math was done, was the fact that some people will have over 50% and less than 50% taken into account?

The answer is yes. I've run countless scenarios with mixed party skill bonuses. Some I do in depth, meaning I run all of the actual numbers. However, in many cases I will run an averaged value. This is important, because my averaged values actually give better results than the real ones.

For example, take 3 people with 50% to succeed. Then take a party with a 60%, 50%, and 40%. The average of both parties is 50%, but in actuality the 1st group has a better chance to succeed. So when I say a group at 50% will have a 7% chance to succeed, that means that if that group has 1 person at 60% and another at 40%, the chance is even LOWER than 7%!

4) The skill challenge system will work if you use aid another all the time, or use these utility powers, or X Y and Z.

If you will look on page 3 of this thread, I already addressed one of the utility powers, as well as a skill bumping item (for those who don't want to look back, the answer is those things help, but not near enough) But here's the thing, if the system requires skill utility powers and everyone have +X bonus from a magic item to their skills, then the system doesn't work, because not everyone will have those utility powers, and won't have those bonuses.

Others are saying aid another is the key. If that's true, then WOTC needs to make that clearer. If WOTC came in and said, "guys we made this system assuming everyone would aid one person every round" and those numbers worked out, then I would throw up my hands and agree that the system works. I wouldn't like such a system, but I would agree that the system does what they intended it to do.

But what the poor DM who just wants to give his party a level 1 complexity 5 challenge, and is walking into a 93% failure chance for his party? Should he be forced to tell his party, everyone pick one guy to roll for real, the rest of you aid, or you will fail this challenge? If that's the case, then what's the point of the skill challenge system in the first place?

 

[Lorthanoth]

Sorry but for British people like me who studied Eng Lit at University... 4*3 is maths. Sorry, Vempyre, it just is. I do not understand a single thing in the original thread and it is in no way 'obvious'. I know people if their 20s who can't do their times table, so it's by no means something everyone knows.

Threads like this are valuable for thickos like me.

 

[Regicide]

The DCs are too high, this should be obvious to everyone by now, and it should come as no surprise to people when the DCs get lowered by 5 as errata.

There are other problems with the system though. The first is that, when it comes down to it, it's just a bunch of die rolls. While a combat encounter requires many decisions from positioning, timing, choosing targets, which weapon to use, when to run away and such, the skill challenge system is too simple and doesn't offer much more than a thin veneer over a die roll to pass/fail. Although I really like the idea, the fact of it is that combat takes up 20+ pages of how to run it and almost all the character powers, and equipment and magic items are geared towards combat, skill challenges take up a couple pages. Hopefully DMG2 will give us a more worthy system that doesn't come down to half a dozen die rolls.

The second problem is that because skill challenges are tacked on the fact of the matter is that +skill magic items and +skill focus feats are not commonly taken, or when they are they're almost always for a couple skills that are considered the most important... perception and diplomacy come to mind. If you have a fighter in the party and his +5 athletics isn't going to be useful, well, you're not going to be beating that skill challenge, are you?

The third problem is that they're basically impossible for published adventures to use. Because there are +skill feats, +skill powers and +skill magic items the difference between a skilled party and an unskilled one is HUGE. An encounter can be completely trivial for one party and totally impossible for the other. The same problem they tried to get rid of with 4E combat by removing stat buffs they still have with skills because they left in skill buffs.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm wondering if the 'mistake' was in the "before y failures" part of the rule. It wouldn't be difficult to underestimate the effect that'd have the overall chance of success, and if it was a late change it could have slipped through. I'd think a system more like the disease set up, where you have two targets, one for success, and one for not making things worse, would work. You have to accumulate so many successes before accumulating so many horrid failures (failing by 10 or rolling a natural 1 or whatever).

To avoid the problem of more complex challenges becomign easier, though, it'd have to be a fixed number of horrid failures to end the challenge.

 

[Dave Turner]

Stalker0,

In all the excitement, I've forgotten a point which you've probably covered elsewhere. Could you briefly remind me what the effect of removing the controversial +5 to skill checks footnote has on the math?

Thanks.