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*Pathfinder & Starfinder
Skill Challenges: How Much Have They Improved?
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<blockquote data-quote="fanboy2000" data-source="post: 5202533" data-attributes="member: 19998"><p>I don't know if skill challenges have improved these past two years, but I do know that my understanding of them has improved. </p><p></p><p>Here's the way I view skill challenges: skill challenges are a way to build failure tolerance into a goal that otherwise may not have any. Skills challenges aren't viewed that way for three reasons: 1) early threads show that the math, as interpreted by the poster, didn't favor successful completion of the challenge by a wide margin. 2) The DMG didn't have <em>any</em> examples. 3) Many of the DMG 2's examples are simple pass/fail in outcome.</p><p></p><p>Lets examine these:</p><p></p><p>1) Frankly, I'm not sure what happened here. My personal experience is that skill challenges don't seem to be that difficult. Nor have I seen a lot of posts saying that they rarely succeed in skill challenges as written.</p><p></p><p>2) The lack of example was bad for the system. This changed over time, but the DMG should have included a series of examples to help people. Its fairly well known that when you try to teach people new things and new skills, you should include examples.</p><p></p><p>This left people to make-up their own and I'm not ashamed to say that I got it wrong the first time I included a skill challenge. In fact, based on what I know now, I wouldn't even call it a skill challenge. My first real skill challenge was as a player in the game day adventure <em>Journey Through the Silver Caves</em>. I was the Barbarian, and I used Athletics to get us through the rapids (high bonus + rolling twice = lots of success) When we got to the caves and needed to find which one was the correct one, we managed to reduce it down to two. At that point I piped up and said "I use dungeoneering to figure out which path leads to a dungeon?" The DM allowed it. (It's reproduced on pg 95 of the DMG 2)</p><p></p><p>My second exposure to skill challenges was H2, but this time as a DM. This skill challenge had a degrees of success. The more success the PCs got, the more information the NPCs gave. (Pg 93, DMG 2)</p><p></p><p>3) Looking through the DMG 2, however, I see a lot of skill challenges that don't have degrees of success. I think this causes people to view skill challenges as failure intolerant.</p><p></p><p>So why, then, do I think that the skill challenge system is a way to add failure tolerance to the skill system? By creating a failure threshold greater than one for goals that require more than one skill check to achieve.</p><p></p><p>Consider a system without skill challenges. Lets take D&D 3.5, since I'm actually familiar with it.</p><p></p><p>To handle a situation like in the <em>Restless Dead</em> from DMG 2 and H2 in 3.5, it's tempting to reduce it to a single diplomacy check. (RAW, diplomacy takes a minute.) The DM would likely require some amount of in character dialogue, if only to keep the situation from being over with to quickly. Another way to handle it would be skip the check and handle it all in character. When I ran 3.5, I handled it both ways, depending on the situation and what the PCs wanted to do.</p><p></p><p>But that's one check. (RAW discourages retries on diplomacy.) If the PCs screw-up, that's it, they don't get any information. There's defiantly the potential for it to be boring.</p><p></p><p>Another way to handle it in 3.5 is to unpack it. Each NPC gets their own diplomacy check. Even if the others hate your guts, maybe you can the information for one of them. This is better, but then each NPC seems like just another crack at the check (i.e. way to get around the discouraged retries), rather than a fully fleshed out entity its own right.</p><p></p><p>Of course, you give each NPC it's own skill check, fleshing out the NPCs a little more.</p><p></p><p>There still really isn't a degrees of success in this system because the NPCs either spill everything or not. Unless the DM decides either before hand or on the fly that PCs can get less than all the info. Such a thing isn't in the 3.5 rules, but it's not against them either. </p><p></p><p>Or you do have a skill challenge just like you would in 4th.</p><p></p><p>All 4th does is say that some times, when you fail at a skill check, you may still succeed at your goal, but you've had a temporary set back. In 4th, for example, diplomacy is explicitly stated to be something that might happen in a skill challenge. Set DCs aren't given. Retries are built into the system.</p><p></p><p>Now, I don't know about anyone else, but that's pretty much how I ran 3.5 diplomacy skills. (There seem to be a handful of skills that, for whatever reason, I never used RAW like diplomacy, craft, and profession.) In 3.5 (now in 4th) if a person failed a diplomacy check, I'd let the PC continue to try to persuade the NPC, but get enough failures and the success was no longer a possibility via diplomacy.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="fanboy2000, post: 5202533, member: 19998"] I don't know if skill challenges have improved these past two years, but I do know that my understanding of them has improved. Here's the way I view skill challenges: skill challenges are a way to build failure tolerance into a goal that otherwise may not have any. Skills challenges aren't viewed that way for three reasons: 1) early threads show that the math, as interpreted by the poster, didn't favor successful completion of the challenge by a wide margin. 2) The DMG didn't have [i]any[/i] examples. 3) Many of the DMG 2's examples are simple pass/fail in outcome. Lets examine these: 1) Frankly, I'm not sure what happened here. My personal experience is that skill challenges don't seem to be that difficult. Nor have I seen a lot of posts saying that they rarely succeed in skill challenges as written. 2) The lack of example was bad for the system. This changed over time, but the DMG should have included a series of examples to help people. Its fairly well known that when you try to teach people new things and new skills, you should include examples. This left people to make-up their own and I'm not ashamed to say that I got it wrong the first time I included a skill challenge. In fact, based on what I know now, I wouldn't even call it a skill challenge. My first real skill challenge was as a player in the game day adventure [i]Journey Through the Silver Caves[/i]. I was the Barbarian, and I used Athletics to get us through the rapids (high bonus + rolling twice = lots of success) When we got to the caves and needed to find which one was the correct one, we managed to reduce it down to two. At that point I piped up and said "I use dungeoneering to figure out which path leads to a dungeon?" The DM allowed it. (It's reproduced on pg 95 of the DMG 2) My second exposure to skill challenges was H2, but this time as a DM. This skill challenge had a degrees of success. The more success the PCs got, the more information the NPCs gave. (Pg 93, DMG 2) 3) Looking through the DMG 2, however, I see a lot of skill challenges that don't have degrees of success. I think this causes people to view skill challenges as failure intolerant. So why, then, do I think that the skill challenge system is a way to add failure tolerance to the skill system? By creating a failure threshold greater than one for goals that require more than one skill check to achieve. Consider a system without skill challenges. Lets take D&D 3.5, since I'm actually familiar with it. To handle a situation like in the [I]Restless Dead[/I] from DMG 2 and H2 in 3.5, it's tempting to reduce it to a single diplomacy check. (RAW, diplomacy takes a minute.) The DM would likely require some amount of in character dialogue, if only to keep the situation from being over with to quickly. Another way to handle it would be skip the check and handle it all in character. When I ran 3.5, I handled it both ways, depending on the situation and what the PCs wanted to do. But that's one check. (RAW discourages retries on diplomacy.) If the PCs screw-up, that's it, they don't get any information. There's defiantly the potential for it to be boring. Another way to handle it in 3.5 is to unpack it. Each NPC gets their own diplomacy check. Even if the others hate your guts, maybe you can the information for one of them. This is better, but then each NPC seems like just another crack at the check (i.e. way to get around the discouraged retries), rather than a fully fleshed out entity its own right. Of course, you give each NPC it's own skill check, fleshing out the NPCs a little more. There still really isn't a degrees of success in this system because the NPCs either spill everything or not. Unless the DM decides either before hand or on the fly that PCs can get less than all the info. Such a thing isn't in the 3.5 rules, but it's not against them either. Or you do have a skill challenge just like you would in 4th. All 4th does is say that some times, when you fail at a skill check, you may still succeed at your goal, but you've had a temporary set back. In 4th, for example, diplomacy is explicitly stated to be something that might happen in a skill challenge. Set DCs aren't given. Retries are built into the system. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but that's pretty much how I ran 3.5 diplomacy skills. (There seem to be a handful of skills that, for whatever reason, I never used RAW like diplomacy, craft, and profession.) In 3.5 (now in 4th) if a person failed a diplomacy check, I'd let the PC continue to try to persuade the NPC, but get enough failures and the success was no longer a possibility via diplomacy. [/QUOTE]
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