Skill Challenges: Please stop

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I disagree. Players should simply have a Tactics skill, rolling X successes before Y failures in order to defeat a monster or group of monsters. Pick the values of X, Y, and the DC of the roll based on the challenge you wish to represent.

In no case should the player have to determine what tactics or powers to use. I mean, am I supposed to be as tactically brilliant as my 15th level fighter? I think not!



RC

Frankly, that sounds better than the "woo me" style of DM'ing. Why not do away with the dice entirely, and just have them describe their attacks, and if you approve, they get to hit, and if they dont, they miss?

Dice are what separates the game from "guns" kids play, where one yells "Bang! I hit you", and the other yells "no you didnt". Certain styles of DM's seem to crave the ability to say "no you didnt" just based on their position in the DM chair alone. The rules provide structure to assist in adjudicating that.

IMO, the end result of a skill roll should typically outweigh the player's description of said action, be it an attack, hide or diplomacy check. If someone gives a masterful description, but rolls poorly, the end result is they dont hit, hide, or persuade the king. Perhapd their opponent was lucky, perhaps a patrol rounds the corner unexpectedly, perhaps the local reeve is in a foul mood or tired of hearing honeyed words of people day after day.

I'm all for giving a circumstaqnce bonus for effort, but really, role playing should be its own reward. Its why I DM, because I get to jump into lots of different personalities, not because I need to hold 5 others captive to my whims every week.

Some DM's havent moved past the whole "guess what I'm thinking/tell me what I want to hear/one true way" petty tyrant DM'ing of yesteryear. If you hve rules for skills, use em. Those players willing to engage the game more are likely getting mroe out of the experience anyways. Skill challenges are far from perfect and could use a re-do, but skill checks free me from having to over analyze myself for bias and just sit back and enjoy the game more.

 

[the Jester]

Jester, I'll be yoinking a variant of your island ship challenge for my own 11th lvl party.

Hey, cool! I'm honored!

Especially since, last session, inspired by what may be the most frustrating moment in your dming history, I pointed the pcs at the Great Modron March.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Frankly, that sounds better than the "woo me" style of DM'ing. Why not do away with the dice entirely, and just have them describe their attacks, and if you approve, they get to hit, and if they dont, they miss?

Conversely, of course, why not do away with the players entirely, and have the dice determine their attacks?

My point in the bit that you quoted was that the players do make important decisions in combat that shape the outcome -- challenging the player as well as the character. Ideally, the same occurs outside of combat: Both the character's abilities and the player's choices matter. Resolving things like diplomacy with only rolls is like resolving combat without player input for tactics.

In other words this is the fallacy of the excluded middle, and, IMHO, the middle is where the best rpg design strives to be.


RC

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Something I'm interested in trying in my game is give the characters different types of role-playing opportunities created by their skill checks. In a "round" of a skill challenge, I'd ask each of the players how they want to contribute to the situation at hand, essentially choosing a skill that they want to implement.

I will then ask them to roll their check, and I will determine how successful that roll is. If it successful or very successful, I would tell those players that they did (or are doing) a good job, and for them to roleplay appropriately. Hopefully they will do their best to roleplay the result, and my DM filter will adjudicate the attempt appropriately.

For whoever rolls poorly, or very poorly, I will ask them to roleplay an appropriate unsuccessful attempt. They get to choose how they foul up, despite their best intentions...

We've been playing a variation on this, in any system with skills, for over a decade. It might be closer to 2 decades, as we gradually morphed into this style, and I don't remember exactly when it became the default.

It works great, and it removes at once a whole chunck of the issues discussed in this topic. My favorite part, though, is how it affects player interaction and roleplaying awards. You roll a 1 on your athletics check. Now you narrate how the events are in-game. What before was either a plan crushing failure or a complete reversal from a pre-roll description of a "graceful leap"--is now an opportunity for you to get some benefits! It's hard to roleplay well, say, a diplomacy check of 8 when you needed 12. It's a rather vague failure. But 1s (total fail) are easy.

With player interaction, we let people jump in on the narration when they have something to contribute. So you roll a 5, needed a 15, and your failure narration is rather blah. But the guy next to you has a better idea as to what you said to the fence in the bad neighborhood, while trying to tack down the crime lord. He throws it out there, and your character so said it. It's memorable. We don't have anyone that takes offense at this kind of ribbing. And the very next roll, they may be helping you sound more impressive with your 19.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

(1) The creation of a skill challenge (esp. when created as part of an adventure, rather than on the fly) implies a decision ahead of time as to how the encounter will be approached.

The existence of skills does not. In fact, an rpg with skill rules, combat rules, etc., that does not require the GM to pre-structure what can/will happen, implies the opposite -- that an encounter can be approached in many ways.

I really like skill challenges, but now you've got me wondering how one would do a replacement mechanic that answered this objection. It would not be so much a skill "challenge", as a way for a party to collaborate, prior to the challenge, in the development of a resource that could then be sprung as needed to meet an appropriate situation.

TIA, if this causes me to lie awake designing it in my head, tonight.

 

[surfarcher]

*heh* I've made two apparently contradictory posts on this topic. Noone seems to have noticed yet tho... Wonder who will spot it first?

I've been posting for a few weeks now that the example skill challenges in a module or the DMG have to be seen as analgous to a GM's prep notes.

I think that's one of the problems folks have with SC definitions. They figure they are supposed to be implemented the way they read! As though they are some kind of hard structure that must be adhered to in the format presented. That's always going to be really ugly.

Right, exactly what I've been saying. Do it just like combat. Pick an action, roll a check, narrate the results. In an SC this will be more back-and-forth than using some standard power in a combat, but the general concept works fine.

It works very well I like to remember that all kinds of things other than skills can and should come into play. Because I like to encourage that I almost ever announce the challenge. Instead I give them a hook and see if they take it.

And call me old school if you want, but I want dice in my peanut butter. Remember, there are static DCs and passive checks for "the perceptive cleric spots something" that doesn't need dice, that's exactly what it is there for. Active checks OTOH are the players driving the game through the agency of their characters. Sure, fate is involved. There are also a lot of unquantifiable factors in any reasonably complex action. Like I said above, you can definitely work a success or failure in a lot of different ways, and it can spin into all sorts of possible new avenues.

Ahmen.

One thing that helps a lot is for the DM to have a fair amount of detail to his notes about a situation, especially a social one. There should be a number of NPCs potentially involved, different motivations, various little details that the players can latch onto and use to hang narrative off of, etc. For example, in Convincing the Duke:
...snip...

Kind of agree but I'd suggest it's sometimes more about putting some thought and imagination into it, rather than writing actual notes. My notes are more memory triggers than definitions and I find this also encourage me to adlib. If you can get some good adlib roelplaying working with your group you can tweak and change the SC on the fly to accomodate whatever left-field ideas and actions the PCs pull out of their sleeves.

Oh, absolutely! And skill challenges are a good example of a mechanic that needs a certain amount of finessing to avoid a really artificial feel. Several of the early skill challenges that I ran kinda sucked; but by learning from them (and the article series about them, and published examples, etc), I really improved my mastery of skill challenges. Just like I have over the years by learning from sucky npcs, encounters, plotlines, etc.

Gotta agree here Experience is a big help. So is persistance and and open mind.

I think I actually put more into designing many skill challenges than I do into designing a lot of combats- and this despite the fact that I usually take a very "tell me what you're doing" approach rather than the "here are your primary and secondary skills" approach.

I definately put more into many of my SCs than I do into the equivalent combats!

 

[Dausuul]

As far as the "Mother-May-I" issue goes: The problem is that there's really no decision-making involved in searching a room. I mean, in the absence of a time constraint, you're gonna search everything you can think of to search, in every way you can think of to search it. Since the DM is providing a description of the room, the logical thing for players to do would be to copy down that description word-for-word, then read through the description looking for nouns. Each time you find a noun, announce, "I examine the <noun>." Whatever the DM says in response, write it down--there may be more nouns in it. Repeat until all answers are variations on, "There's nothing else interesting about the <noun>."

Next, repeat this process with other verbs. "Move," "lift," "push," "pull," et cetera.

This ensures that the room is thoroughly searched and no bit of data the DM has provided is missed. It's also fantastically boring. It's game balance by tedium, in which the player with the highest tolerance for boredom gets the biggest reward.

So, instead, we just assume the characters are searching to the best of their ability and roll a Search check to see how good that ability is. Social interaction is another kettle of fish. There are decisions and consequences involved there which typically do not crop up in a room search. (To be fair, a room search can have decisions and consequences. If there's a trap, you may risk triggering it if you poke the wrong thing. But my experience is that most room searches lack such threats.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As far as the "Mother-May-I" issue goes: The problem is that there's really no decision-making involved in searching a room. I mean, in the absence of a time constraint, you're gonna search everything you can think of to search, in every way you can think of to search it. Since the DM is providing a description of the room, the logical thing for players to do would be to copy down that description word-for-word, then read through the description looking for nouns. Each time you find a noun, announce, "I examine the <noun>." Whatever the DM says in response, write it down--there may be more nouns in it. Repeat until all answers are variations on, "There's nothing else interesting about the <noun>."

Next, repeat this process with other verbs. "Move," "lift," "push," "pull," et cetera.

This ensures that the room is thoroughly searched and no bit of data the DM has provided is missed. It's also fantastically boring. It's game balance by tedium, in which the player with the highest tolerance for boredom gets the biggest reward.

So, instead, we just assume the characters are searching to the best of their ability and roll a Search check to see how good that ability is. Social interaction is another kettle of fish. There are decisions and consequences involved there which typically do not crop up in a room search. (To be fair, a room search can have decisions and consequences. If there's a trap, you may risk triggering it if you poke the wrong thing. But my experience is that most room searches lack such threats.)

Right, which is of course why DMG1 suggests you give the PCs the results of rolling a 20 on their Perception checks for a situation where they can simply examine every square inch of an area in detail without any real consequences or hard time constraint. This can be extended to a few other situations as well, though there isn't an official take 20 rule.

[MENTION=84774]surfarcher[/MENTION] Yeah, I could put 'notes' in quotes. Mine are often just some random chicken scratches, lol. Those details could also be riffed in play, but I do like to think about each point for a minute and try to come up with some way each element might come into play, even if I don't write it down.

 

[Saagael]

I'm probably coming into this a little late, but I figure I'd my take on making interesting skill challenges.

First off, in the two and a half years I've run my 4e campaign, I think I've only had one skill challenge that was solely a social encounter. Aside from that one, the social aspect to the skill challenge was only part of it.

For example, probably the most memorable skill challenge I've ever done (taking three 3-hour session to resolve) was a siege skill challenge. It started with the players convincing a dwarf king that there was a legitimate threat (skill challenge number 1). Success resulted in the players having a faster response time to incoming forces, failure meant the players couldn't get to work until the enemy was on their doorstep.

Part two involved 3 skill challenges occuring at the same time. Each player chose which challenge they wanted to do based on skills, and not every player had appropriate skills. This forced them to try skills they weren't so good at. Then the siege started. Every round the players who were acting generals commanded the troops, and their result affected the players commanding artillery, and their result affected the players defending the gate.

This was also mixed in with combats. At 2 successes, 4 sucesses, and 6 successes a "milestone" in the combat was reached and something would change, and the players were forced to adjust their tactics to accomodate.

Probably my favorite skill challenge, however, started as a really simple social encounter with a brown dragon. Now, I wanted to throw the players a curve ball since they were used to fighting dragons and had done it before, so the social encounter turned into a skill challenge whereby the players tried to get the dragon's trust by cooking it a meal.

This was more straight-forward. Players would look around the oasis they were in and decide what they wanted to do to aid in the cooking process, be it gathering herbs, hunting wild behemoths, slaving over a firepit, or fishing.

My next task is making a skill challenge to represent the players leading an army cross-country and attacking a well-fortified city. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

TL;DR: Skill challenges are meant to model complex non-combat encounters. You can't expect good results unless you put some work into making the SC more complex as well, otherwise it turns into "I attack with my sword", but with skills.

 

[Iron Sky]

I don't agree with everything in the articles on the ars ludi site I linked before, but there is alot of brain food there. This one also seems appropriate to the discussion here as well.

The short version is - if a player is excited about something their player does or describes/roleplays something cool, you either let them succeed and add a complication to represent the failure ("The Duke agrees to the Treaty, but demands that you marry his daughter") or the environment fails ("You parkour your way up the wall as the thugs stare up at you in wonder, but when you get to the top the wall crumbles under your feet and you fall into the fast-flowing river on the other side!")

In contrast, if the PCs just say "I'll make a Diplomacy check" then they can "just fail it". This rewards PCs describing what they are doing and give the DM fun opportunities to make the PCs lives more interesting, throw plot twists, or even spark whole adventures!