Sucking the Life Out of Skill Challenges

[Pour]

In the heat of the moment last night, I created a skill challenge on the fly, disregarding a lot of my past philosophy just to see what happened, and I got some astounding results.

The Set Up
My party had acquired the location of a clandestine meet, far and away in a pseudo-Arabian land, quite specifically in the middle of an uninhabitable desert. Despite the implausibility of such a meeting place, the man they tortured (quite effectively) held up to their Insight checks.

After a month of travel with a merchant caravan, they turned off the main trade road and headed into this blasted waste, toward the place marked on their map. Because they'd hired nomad guides, they were given the illusion things would be a bit easier (I entirely ignored difficulty rating), until which point the natives refused to go any deeper into the desert. No one survived that far out in the Glass Dunes, and all sorts of local legend basically sealed the nomads' departures.

At this point, three players and three camels, with all the supplies they could carry, the skill challenge began. I limited skills to Nature (navigating) and Endurance (surviving). That was it. Creative uses of powers, while appreciated, did not impart any mechanical bonuses like I normally would allow. However, later on a player made a good case for Perception, which I allowed as a secondary skill (counted as a failure for the challenge if botched, or on a success would give +2 to either of the next main checks).

Now here's where I really veered off the prescribed rules.

1. Failing this skill challenge meant a total party kill, that all three of them would die in the dunes, game over. That upped the ante right there.

2. Because one of the players was a native of the desert, I gave him 5e advantage. That proved VERY useful. In fact, it won them the challenge.

3. More interestingly, I decided to use a range of DCs on a rolling bell curve. Using Sly's cheat sheet, I listed low, medium, and hard DCs for one level below them (9), their level (10), and one level above them (11). The list looked like DC 12, 17, 25, 13, 18, 26, 13, 19, 27.

As we moved around the table, players rolled against the DCs in turn. This rolling range allowed for players whose skills weren't that great to contribute, and sometimes confounded players with higher skills in Nature and Endurance. It was much more exciting to move through, and a lot more dynamic.

4. Furthermore, I had a threshold for success or failure. Basically, they needed to rack up 5 successful Nature checks and 5 successful Endurance checks. Failed Nature checks were like they were moving in circles or getting lost, and failed Endurance checks saw their camels die off and them become dehydrated or even delirious. Oppositely, successful Nature checks kept them forging ahead, and successful Endurance meant they found shelter and sustenance despite the harsh terrain. If they racked up 5 cumulative failures, they lost the challenge and died.

5. Critical successes counted as an automatic success, then an automatic success on the next DC, which they could put toward either Endurance or Nature.

When they eventually racked up 5 successful Endurance checks, that skill became closed. They'd found all they were going to find sustenance wise, eeked out every last drop of water, slew the camels and sucked the water from their fatty humps, everything short of cannibalizing one of their number. This created an even more tense and exciting close, when they found themselves on a knife's edge, 1 fail away from death, and 1 Nature away from success.

Advantage gave them the last success they needed, and boy was it rewarding. I am definitely going to be using definitive skills and a rolling DC curve from now on.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Let's look at an example: the stereotype of bad design, the secret door that is the only way to access the locations required for the adventure to proceed.

According to the approach championed by 4e, if there is a skill challenge to find the entrance and pcs fail, they should still find the secret door in order to avoid "losing the adventure".

Maybe the distinction is subtle, but the DM successfully running the PCs through an adventure - vs the adventure being de-railed and never resolving - is not the same as the PCs achieving their goals. They may go into the adventure with a certain goal in mind, find out it's unachievable or undesirable or even just a red herring, and still complete the adventure in a different way than they'd planned.

I'm also a fan of the potentially lethal skill challenge for similar playstyle reasons. If skill challenges are supposed to be worth the same number of xp as combat, yet they never cost many resources, hps, surges, daily powers, etc, they are overvalued IMHO

Nod. SCs don't cost surges quite as often as they should - though, clearly, some shouldn't (though, making surges more general in nature - not just healing but also 'heroic effort' or 'using up luck' - could have changed that). And more of the PCs expendable resources should have been no-combat or dual-use, so that resource management (if the game's going to make such a big deal out of it) can come into play in all 3 pillars.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I limited skills to Nature (navigating) and Endurance (surviving). That was it.

In my experience some of the most boring roleplaying situations were ones where the GM (in any edition) had us use the same skill over and over again. For example when travelling overland from one village to another the GM would describe us travelling, ask us to roll Nature, and describe the result of the roll. For the next day he would describe us travelling, ask us to roll Nature, and describe the roll. It would get very monotonous.

What do you think in your skill challenge prevented that sort of monotony? Was it the life or death situation? Was it absorbing storytelling on your part? Something else?

 

[Pour]

What do you think in your skill challenge prevented that sort of monotony? Was it the life or death situation? Was it absorbing storytelling on your part? Something else?

Great questions.

The succeed or die aspect did create tension, but that tension would have still existed in some capacity regardless. I think visceral details, like sucking water from the camel fat, added something to it, too, but then I think the monotony was prevented more from several key elements in these rule alterations.

1. The DCs changed as the environment changed, and sometimes the going got tough, and sometimes the numbers gave them a break. Despite the limited skills, those trained in Nature and Endurance sometimes failed, and those untrained sometimes succeeded (though being trained was still preferable). A player managed a success on a roll of 14, but as circumstances changed and the DC went up another failed on the same check on a 20. This happened back to back, even, but the players took it well as I informed them of the changing terrain (sandstorms, heat exhaustion, burns, etc) and the rolling DCs.

Mind you, the DCs were all within the prescribed tracks for their level range of 9-11, encompassing easy checks, medium checks, and hard checks on a track, reflective of all the varied desert elements, and had them choose Nature, Endurance, or Perception to attempt to meet those DCs. That kind of anticipation and uncertainty added a lot to the experience, and I think reflected a harsh environment well.

2. Also, requiring X amount of successes in both skills changed the dynamic of the challenge half way through, and players couldn't roll or approach the challenge the same way they had ealier. The player who was best at Endurance maxed 5 Endurance successes and was forced to decide whether to risk Perceptions to give that +2 toward the more Nature-oriented player or risk Natures for actual successes. Failure meant failure regardless of primary or secondary, so there was more weight to the choice.

3. The Critical successes (which there were 2 in the challenge) allowed players to take an active roll in where to attribute their successes, whether toward Endurance or Nature. They needed 5 in each. The party wisely chose Nature, knowing they were less skilled than in Endurance, but even that choice was a calculated gamble on whether or not the fighter could manage to pull his end with good Endurance. He ultimately did.

4. There was the possibility of opening up more secondary skills, it just depended on when and why. Eventually, as they neared the end of the challenge, one player wanted to look for tracks and signs of life or movement, as they were presumably near the meeting place. That rung true to me, and I allowed it. Had he tried that in the beginning, I would have probably shot him down. I guess I didn't want them to have total leeway, but I didn't want them to suffer from the challenges rigidness, either. It was the perfect blend for our situation.

I sort of railed against total leeway because I've run challenges were I was very accommodating. I even allowed power use, appropriate at-wills giving a +2 to the check, the use of an encounter giving an auto success, and the use of a daily giving 2 successes (the stipulation being these powers were expended during the next encounter, barring an extended rest). While the players enjoyed themselves, and it's normally how I run challenges, I didn't want to go so easy on them. I'll tell you the pay off at the end was greater in terms of an actual personal investment. They played the game, so to speak, and came out on top. With my more freeform challenges, they created their way out and came out on top, equally fun in certain situations, but in this case I preferred the harsher course.

 

[Grandpa]

In my experience, skill challenges too often led to an exercise in reading the DM's mind or fearful player participation, despite the awesome goal of enabling drama and connecting dots between character sheets and character fantasy. My solution was turning skill challenges into a rule of thumb:

When the player's want something and failure is possible, I...

1. Choose an interesting worst-case scenario and two steps of degradation (three failures)
2. Announce a "shared story" moment where players play by describing cinematic actions that match the fantasy of their character
3. Listen to their descriptions and assign a roll, doing everything within reason to realize their fantasy (the DC can still be whatever fits, and the last 'success' happens when it feels right)

It makes me a partner in enabling success but maintains fun with dice and potential failure(s). But it's my responsibility to make it happen through their abilities, by tying it to one of their better skills (even if a stretch) or adjusting the narrative so a team mate helps (multiple players roll) or by using combat powers with some tie to their description. If they keep going to a skill they don't have, I bring it up after a session and suggest ways they can juggle their character sheet to help achieve their fantasy.

It's helped me, anyway.