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Sudden Death Skill Challenge System
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4928898" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Another problem is that you would probably run out of useful skills in more complex challenges before the challenge is resolved. </p><p></p><p>Consider a complexity 5 challenge. It will require 12 successes, which means you need to find some way to use 12 different skills out of the 17 available skills. Its difficult to envisage specific situations in which such a wide variety of skills would be applicable to a single situation. Now, admittedly a few checks could be accomplished using powers or maybe rituals, but again that would be situational and its hard to see where more than a small number of them would be applicable to a given challenge, so it only helps a little.</p><p></p><p>I'm also concerned about swinginess. A few bad rolls which happen to occur during a single round causes failure. The chances of success are thus not very much dependent on the number of successes required, but on the DC of the rolls and the skill bonuses of the PCs. The players could easily sink themselves right near the start by using their best skills and suddenly discover they have basically no chance of overall success (well, at least this can be seen as a reward for good strategy, so it isn't all bad). Moreover once you get those bad rolls the challenge just plain suddenly ends and aside from burning APs your just done and don't have an opportunity to consider your strategy and make adjustments (further restricted by the fact that you may already have burned your best skills).</p><p></p><p>In many respects what this system seems to be trying to do is pretty similar to what the Obsidian SC system does, but IMHO it does it in a mechanically more robust way that takes into account party size and doesn't suffer from the sudden death issue. I think Obsidian is also nice in that it fixes the total number of rolls to a bit more manageable number from the start. With Sudden Death you'd need up to 60 skill check rolls at complexity 5. With Obsidian you need 25 skill check rolls for each challenge. </p><p></p><p>Finally I think the main issue with skill challenges is too many degrees of freedom. Level, complexity, relevant skills, and variable DCs are too many knobs to tweak and the result is you don't really know how hard a given SC is unless you can crunch some very complex math. Obsidian has only level as a variable, making it MUCH easier to know the chance of success on a given challenge. Since success chance IS the actual desired variable you want to be able to tweak I don't see the value in all the extra degrees of freedom in either the standard system or the Sudden Death system, they are just extraneous.</p><p></p><p>Of course you may be able to address these faults and its always interesting to see alternate ideas tried out. I'm not sure how Sudden Death can be tweaked, but give it some thought. It could lead somewhere interesting.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 4928898, member: 82106"] Another problem is that you would probably run out of useful skills in more complex challenges before the challenge is resolved. Consider a complexity 5 challenge. It will require 12 successes, which means you need to find some way to use 12 different skills out of the 17 available skills. Its difficult to envisage specific situations in which such a wide variety of skills would be applicable to a single situation. Now, admittedly a few checks could be accomplished using powers or maybe rituals, but again that would be situational and its hard to see where more than a small number of them would be applicable to a given challenge, so it only helps a little. I'm also concerned about swinginess. A few bad rolls which happen to occur during a single round causes failure. The chances of success are thus not very much dependent on the number of successes required, but on the DC of the rolls and the skill bonuses of the PCs. The players could easily sink themselves right near the start by using their best skills and suddenly discover they have basically no chance of overall success (well, at least this can be seen as a reward for good strategy, so it isn't all bad). Moreover once you get those bad rolls the challenge just plain suddenly ends and aside from burning APs your just done and don't have an opportunity to consider your strategy and make adjustments (further restricted by the fact that you may already have burned your best skills). In many respects what this system seems to be trying to do is pretty similar to what the Obsidian SC system does, but IMHO it does it in a mechanically more robust way that takes into account party size and doesn't suffer from the sudden death issue. I think Obsidian is also nice in that it fixes the total number of rolls to a bit more manageable number from the start. With Sudden Death you'd need up to 60 skill check rolls at complexity 5. With Obsidian you need 25 skill check rolls for each challenge. Finally I think the main issue with skill challenges is too many degrees of freedom. Level, complexity, relevant skills, and variable DCs are too many knobs to tweak and the result is you don't really know how hard a given SC is unless you can crunch some very complex math. Obsidian has only level as a variable, making it MUCH easier to know the chance of success on a given challenge. Since success chance IS the actual desired variable you want to be able to tweak I don't see the value in all the extra degrees of freedom in either the standard system or the Sudden Death system, they are just extraneous. Of course you may be able to address these faults and its always interesting to see alternate ideas tried out. I'm not sure how Sudden Death can be tweaked, but give it some thought. It could lead somewhere interesting. [/QUOTE]
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