D&D 5E What's the rush? Has the "here and now" been replaced by the "next level" attitude?

[pemerton]

I prefer having a realistic base because I feel that allows my game to be more narrative by allowing scenes and situations to flow naturally rather than me -as the out of game entity known as the GM- needing to reach my hands into the game so often.

<snip>

The easiest example to cite is the classic hostage scenario: In D&D, it doesn't tend to work because of D&D style HP. Instead of "ok, what should our characters do here," I feel the discussion too often (when sitting at a D&D table) turns into "ok, well, how many HP would the hostage have; can we shoot her?"

4e, at least, has easy mechanics for dealing with the hostage case (namely, minions and minionisation as part of the framing of a situation); but I think that is secondary to your main issue.

I have a lot of experience dealing very "realism"-focused games (especially Rolemaster). In practice, I find that these games move the focus of play (in terms of energy, thought at the table etc) away from the interesting story elements, on to matters like "How heavy is an X?", "How long will it take me to heal?", "How much resources of type XYZ will be consumed in walking from A to B and will we contract dyssentry on the way?", etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that all the games that I mentioned in the earlier post for their resolution systems are also games based around scene-framing that is, by classical D&D standards or RQ/RM/Traveller/GURPS standards, relatively hard. I'm not sure I can fully articulate what the connection is that explains this non-coincidence, but I think it at least in part rests on a design conceit that one of the useful things that a GM can do, as an impartial arbiter of the game, is to shift the direction of that effort away from answering questions about process, and towards the goal of keeping drama, genre and "story" in the forefront of everyone's mind as the preeminent focus of play.

 

[Argyle King]

4e, at least, has easy mechanics for dealing with the hostage case (namely, minions and minionisation as part of the framing of a situation); but I think that is secondary to your main issue.

I have a lot of experience dealing very "realism"-focused games (especially Rolemaster). In practice, I find that these games move the focus of play (in terms of energy, thought at the table etc) away from the interesting story elements, on to matters like "How heavy is an X?", "How long will it take me to heal?", "How much resources of type XYZ will be consumed in walking from A to B and will we contract dyssentry on the way?", etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that all the games that I mentioned in the earlier post for their resolution systems are also games based around scene-framing that is, by classical D&D standards or RQ/RM/Traveller/GURPS standards, relatively hard. I'm not sure I can fully articulate what the connection is that explains this non-coincidence, but I think it at least in part rests on a design conceit that one of the useful things that a GM can do, as an impartial arbiter of the game, is to shift the direction of that effort away from answering questions about process, and towards the goal of keeping drama, genre and "story" in the forefront of everyone's mind as the preeminent focus of play.

I understand your point of view, but it's still odd for me to consider because GURPS is actually the game I have in mind as I respond. For me, I've found that it enhances my ability to build a scene rather than taking away from it. (That's not to say I find the system perfect; there are house rules I use.) In contrast, while I did eventually get to a point where I felt comfortable running 4th, I too often felt I was working against the game rather than with it. I wouldn't feel that way now, but, at the time I did. GURPS functions in a way which is pretty close to how I tend to see things working out in my head as a baseline, so (for me personally,) as I said upthread, I feel as though I can write what I want to write and create what I want to create and just worry about plugging in the numbers later. With D&D, there are a lot of times when I feel as though I have to rewrite a lot of my scenes because they do not conform the the world model D&D (either 3rd or 4th) has.


On the other hand, I also highly enjoy Edge of The Empire. While it is (I believe) very focused on narrative play, it seems to do so in a way which still feels more real to me than D&D; even during the most cinematic of moments during Edge.


Edit: In fact, the current game I'm running is a GURPS Supers game in which I'm also using the fate (dark side/light side) tokens from Edge of The Empire. So far, the game is going very well.

 

[Lanefan]

I have a lot of experience dealing very "realism"-focused games (especially Rolemaster). In practice, I find that these games move the focus of play (in terms of energy, thought at the table etc) away from the interesting story elements, on to matters like "How heavy is an X?", "How long will it take me to heal?", "How much resources of type XYZ will be consumed in walking from A to B and will we contract dyssentry on the way?", etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that all the games that I mentioned in the earlier post for their resolution systems are also games based around scene-framing that is, by classical D&D standards or RQ/RM/Traveller/GURPS standards, relatively hard. I'm not sure I can fully articulate what the connection is that explains this non-coincidence, but I think it at least in part rests on a design conceit that one of the useful things that a GM can do, as an impartial arbiter of the game, is to shift the direction of that effort away from answering questions about process, and towards the goal of keeping drama, genre and "story" in the forefront of everyone's mind as the preeminent focus of play.

Yet the background to that drama-genre-story has to be some sort of reality; and by far the simplest option for presenting this is to simply say "it's the same as the real world except where the game mechanics and-or the setting being played make it different". Which is to say, a rock in the game world behaves much like a rock on Earth; rivers flow downhill; light and sound behave like we're used to except when magic messes with them, etc.

And once there's some sort of reality backing everything up questions like "how heavy is this?" are inevitable - as they should be.

I mean, if a DM wants to have a world where gravity is only half as strong as Earth that's fine, but she has to then re-jig all the other bits of reality that would normally be affected by that change...either that, or throw believability out the window. I know this from experience: the first world I designed was twice as large as Earth but intentionally much less dense so gravity would be about the same as we're used to. But what does this do to other things? Ocean currents and weather go crazy, for one thing, as the Coriolis force is so much greater; this would also affect plate tectonics as the underground currents in the molten core would work differently The atmosphere density isn't the same at higher altitudes (I think it would get thinner quicker, but I'm not physicist enough to know for sure). The magnetic field would be stronger - probably way stronger - with who-knows-what ramifications. And so on. During play I handwaved a lot of this away (except the setting did have crazy weather), but as time went on the more I looked at it the less pleased I was, and when the campaign finally ended I chucked that world with no real regret at all.

Lan-"the key is to know just enough about geology, physics and geography to be able to believably make the rest of it up"-efan

 

[pemerton]

Yet the background to that drama-genre-story has to be some sort of reality; and by far the simplest option for presenting this is to simply say "it's the same as the real world except where the game mechanics and-or the setting being played make it different". Which is to say, a rock in the game world behaves much like a rock on Earth; rivers flow downhill; light and sound behave like we're used to except when magic messes with them, etc.

This is fine as it goes but doesn't go to the heart of the issue.

A simple example from actual play in my game: the dwarf fighter/cleric of Moradin has the dwarven engineers in the town, plus his mage PC friend, reforging the warhammer Whelm to turn it into Overwhelm, a two-handed dwarven battle hammer of epic proportions (in 4e called a mordenkrad).

This is being resolved as a skill challenge - 4 successes required before 3 failures. The fighter/cleric had succeeded at Dungeoneering (the closest in 4e to an engineering skill) and Diplomacy (to keep his dwarven artificers at the forge as the temperature and magical energies rise to unprecedented heights). The wizard had succeeded at Arcana (to keep the magical forces in check). But the fighter/cleric failed his Religion check - he was praying to Moradin to help with the process, but it wasn't enough. I described the artefact glowing red hot in the forge, and vibrating and resonating with magical energies to such an extent that the artificers could not properly grasp it with their tongs to work upon it. So the player - realising that while his character is not an artificer, he is the toughest dwarf around - said "I want to stick my hands into the forge and hold Whelm down so they can grab it with their tongs. Can I make an Endurance check for that?"

In RQ, or RM, or 3E, there is no simple answer to that question. For instance, there is no rule that tells you that an Endurance bonus of a certain amount is tantamount to having the Resist Elements spell. To answer the question you have to look at the chart of Endurance DCs, find something analogous to grabbing a red-hot artefact sitting in a Forge, set the DC and have the player roll. Apart from other features of this process, it has a tendency to cause people to go running to encyclopaedias or the internet to establish facts about temperatures, specific heat, heat conductivity and the like - none of which are really what I want to have as the focus of play.

Whereas in the genre/drama approach, the first question is, Does that make sense within genre and dramatic expectations? I thought the answer was pretty clearly Yes, and so then went on to set a DC - a level-appropriate Hard DC. The player then made the roll and succeeded, as the PC shoved his hands into the forge and held down the hammer with brute strength! His hands were burned and scarred, but the dwarven smiths were finally able to grab the hammer head with their tongs, and then beat and pull it into its new shape. (The wizard then healed the dwarf PC with a Remove Affliction (using Fundamental Ice as the material component), and over the course of a few weeks the burns healed. Had the Endurance check failed, things would have played out much the same, but I'd decided that the character would feel the pang of the burns again whenever he picked up Overwhelm.)

if a DM wants to have a world where gravity is only half as strong as Earth that's fine, but she has to then re-jig all the other bits of reality that would normally be affected by that change...either that, or throw believability out the window. I know this from experience: the first world I designed was twice as large as Earth but intentionally much less dense so gravity would be about the same as we're used to. But what does this do to other things? Ocean currents and weather go crazy, for one thing, as the Coriolis force is so much greater; this would also affect plate tectonics as the underground currents in the molten core would work differently The atmosphere density isn't the same at higher altitudes (I think it would get thinner quicker, but I'm not physicist enough to know for sure). The magnetic field would be stronger - probably way stronger - with who-knows-what ramifications. And so on.

I tend not to assume that the weather, geology etc of my fantasy worlds works on the same physical principles as operate in the real world. Avoiding such issues is, for me, part of the rationale for favouring a genre/drama-first approach.

That's not to knock those who go the other way (as I myself have in the past). It's just to try and clearly explain the rationale for my personal preference.

 

[Manbearcat]

I reckon that what I've got in that paragprah sets out a pretty good system. It is one in which the players "figure out the best way to reach the objective with the party's skillset and minimal risk of failure and then execute said plan, adapting to failures on the fly." It is certainly not one in which players "repetitively rolling dice to gather enough points to proceed without any plan or intend to actually work towards the goal, with everyone rolling the highest skill s/he can get away with over and over, it doesn't matter what". The biggest single error in the second quoted description, which is utterly belied by the rules text I have set out, is to ignore that "what a player can get away with" (in terms of declared skill and declared action" is utterly dependent upon having a plan and intention that work towards the overall goal.

Well, it can be if the GM:

(a) ignores the technique advice and principles outlined in the books (and/or has no experience with conflict resolution theory; reading/running).

and/or

(b) has absolutely no honed skill in properly pacing conflict resolution with respect to the system's framework and dramatic structure generally.

and/or

(c) has no honed skill in developing genre-relevent and conflict-coherent complications that yield interesting and thematically compelling decision-points for the players.

and/or

(d) is dead-set on running abstract conflict resolution as a high resolution micro-processes simulator.

Anytime I see these (repetitive) complaints, and then I see the terrible (horribly misunderstanding) examples (ok, parodies really), I know one or all of the above is at work. Much of the time it is (d) above, which effectively guarantees (a) and, by proxy of that, you can throw in (b) and (c) even if the GM does have experience/honed skill. Conflict resolution is not meant to be a high resolution micro-process simulator. If you treat it as such (which mandates that you ignore the intent and techniques/advice developed to actualize that intent), don't be surprised when your conflicts (in this case Skill Challenges) come off as frustratingly banal, silly, and your players don't feel engaged or that they have meaningful decisions to make (or any of the other epithets commonly thrown at 4e Skill Challenges).

If I equip a rescue Bell UH-1 (classic Huey) with 750 lbs of (especially loose) gear and/or personnel beyond its load-bearing capacity, thus destroying its ability to maintain stability and achieved the trim condition, I shouldn't be surprised when my rescuers need rescuing themselves after they crash. Hopefully, the next chopper I send in won't have such mismanagement from the top.

Airframes (and Conflict Resolution schemes) won't make you observe their flying qualities (intent, techniques, system impetus, advice). But when you willfully, or ignorantly, do not observe their flying qualities, don't blame the engineers when you crash.

 

[Nagol]

<snip>

Probability transparency is an issue, as it is in any dice-pool system. The most basic way to handle this, present in the system from the beginning, is "fail forward" - meaning that for the players the stakes of estimating the maths correctly are significantly reduced. That requires adopting a non-Gygaxian attitude towards skill and challenge resolution, but skill challenges already require this anyway, so it's no big deal.

Even in stories protagonists sometimes fail and are forced to rethink goals, objectives, and future tactics to account for that failure. Since I run RPGs less like a story and more like a world inhabited by the PCs, failure should be a possible expected outcome -- especially if facing a situation where the underlying conflict is static (i.e. a SC such as "Find the Island" -- if you fail, you didn't find it!).

As for the probability, I don't see it as a dice pool system -- it's more of a markov chain. The danger lies in the facts the probability of final success depends on the probability of success at each discrete step -- and that choice is out of the hands of the designer.

Since then there has been a further development on probabilities. The Rules Compendium, in addition to once again revising the DCs, also introduces a rather ad-hoc and under-explained mechanic called "advantages", which is basically a species of "plot point" that the players can use, subject to some GM oversight for genre credibility, to manipulate the DCs. The more complex the challenge, and so the more successes required, the more "advantages" the players are entitled to. This makes complexity of challenge not so much a proxy for difficulty, but rather for "how much time and effort is this worth spending on at the table" - which I think is closer to the initial DMG intention.

I can't comment on changes introduced later as I'm unwilling to buy the material just to see changes in a system I don't use. I didn't see the intention you describe. A complex difficult SC seemed it was supposed to be harder to achieve than a simple one in the original DMG not just consume more table time. In fact table time is quite constrained since the framework of X successes vs. Y failures doesn't provide much variation at all. If the expectation was a greater emphasis on the table time, the difficulty of each check would increase as would number of failures allowed rather than the number of successes required.

I'm not sure what the problems are that you have in mind with on-the-fly assignment of consequences. This is an element of the system, but I'm not sure it's an undesirable one. The game has pretty good advice on level-appropriate damage, healing surge taxing, etc, plus the disease track as a further model. Story consequences can be worked out in the same way they are in any "fail forward"/"genre logic" resolution system. In practice I haven't generally found this to be a big deal, but I'm interested to hear more.

The framework is missing is a mechanism to mitigate or negate a failure so failing a check becomes a big deal.

Suppose a SC is presented to change the king's mind on a matter of policy. The challenge is established as a six success before three failure requirement.

What is an appropriate result if there are 0 failures? 1 failure? 2 failures? All count as a successful result so the king's mind is changed, but what level of consequence is appropriate for the accumulated failures? How many failures should the group expect from the challenge? Can the players know in advance? How can those stakes be presented? Can the accumulated consequences mean the group considers the event a failure even though their original goal was achieved as a sort of Cadmean or Pyrrhic victory or should that be restricted to an overall failure?

On the reverse side, what happens if the PCs fail, but have achieved 5 successes? Should there be a difference compared to if they failed to achieve any successes at all? If there is a difference, can the group consider the outcome a 'win' even though the original goal wasn't achieved or should that be restricted to an overall success at the challenge?

As to active particpants: the system handles active opposition in the sort of way that [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] mentioned upthread, namely, via the GM narrating in such opposition as the context in which success has not yet been achieved and hence further checks are required (and unlike Balesir I don't find this makes things static rather than dynamic - the number of required rolls is static, but the sorts of checks that might be required, and how best to frame them, are rendered dynamic by this approach).

But when it comes to (say) two parties competing two achieve a common goal, the system isn't as strong. There is a model in the DMG2 for how to do this, which assumes that the PCs are helping different teams, based around tracking successes for each team. I suspect that still isn't helping with the sort of scenario you have in mind, though.

For me, I see this feature of skill challenges as a limiting one, but it's a limit that to me is reasonably compatible with D&D's overall very strong focus on party play.

I find that solution underwhelming since the PCs need not react to the opposition, but can (and probably should) continue with their own strategy with the highest discrete probability of success. I like the concept of skill challenges. In many ways they are a formalism of many of the things I was already doing for results simulation. I find the framework is stifling since it places the PCs as the only active actors in the scene. My version has frameworks for PCs, multiple groups working independently on mutually exclusive goals, and groups working in direct competition.

 

[pemerton]

I didn't see the intention you describe. A complex difficult SC seemed it was supposed to be harder to achieve than a simple one in the original DMG not just consume more table time. In fact table time is quite constrained since the framework of X successes vs. Y failures doesn't provide much variation at all. If the expectation was a greater emphasis on the table time, the difficulty of each check would increase as would number of failures allowed rather than the number of successes required.

In the original presentation the number of failures allowed did increase: it was 2X successes before X failures, with X = complexity +1.

The framework is missing is a mechanism to mitigate or negate a failure so failing a check becomes a big deal.

This is dealt with in DMG2 and RC.

 

[Manbearcat]

Suppose a SC is presented to change the king's mind on a matter of policy. The challenge is established as a six success before three failure requirement.

What is an appropriate result if there are 0 failures? 1 failure? 2 failures? All count as a successful result so the king's mind is changed, but what level of consequence is appropriate for the accumulated failures? How many failures should the group expect from the challenge? Can the players know in advance? How can those stakes be presented? Can the accumulated consequences mean the group considers the event a failure even though their original goal was achieved as a sort of Cadmean or Pyrrhic victory or should that be restricted to an overall failure?

Hey Nagol. Good post and I typically always feel that I understand your position and your playstyle concerns after I read them. I do understand why certain styles of conflict resolution would be adversarial to your preferred playstyle.

I'm just going to try to answer the above right quick.

1) There shouldn't be a Pyrrhic victory with respect to the stakes outlined in the burgeoning moments of the conflict; "what, specifically, the PCs are trying to achieve." If the conflict is set to resolve the question of "do I navigate the swamp and get to the hut of the medicine man (?)", then the success condition automatically affords the PCs the attainment of that goal. The same can be said for a PC trying to "kick a bad habit" or PCs trying to "convince the king to change policy." The PCs are playing their PCs, pushing toward the attainment of that overarching goal while GM is playing the totality of adversarial components that would interpose themselves between the PCs and the successful attainment of those goals (respectively, the swamp's denizens/hazards, the bad habits "will to remain", and the king's (and perhaps court or other relevant actors/circumstances) commitment to maintain the present path of policy.

2) Micro-failures in a challenge, while (by rule and GM principle) being unable to answer the question to be answered by the overarching conflict, do have relevance and their own fallout. One immediate, and obvious brand of relevance and fallout, is the ablation of PC staying power/resources; Healing Surges and/or others. This will serve to (i) make the work day more difficult and (ii) potentially make the scene more difficult. For instance, let us say that we're in the swamp to find the medicine man because we've contracted some kind of disease that he can heal. The result of a micro-failure could be (a) the loss of a Healing Surge and (b) an immediately required Endurance check at the Medium DC, the result of which can only result in moving down a stage or remaining stable. Moving down a stage may be debilitating.

Other relevance and fallout will be on the reframing of the conflict's trajectory to pay heed to the evolution of fiction that will arise from the failure. This will have immediate consequences and could have post-conflict relevance and fallout. The immediate consequences could be that the decision-points that arise from the fiction evolved from the failure put the PCs in a spot. This "spot" could be mechanically. Perhaps the next check is at the High DC and out of the 3, or so, likely candidates for genre-coherent resource deployment, only one Skill is trained and without a supporting modifier; so perhaps only a 40 % chance of success. There is an option within the PCs' collective portfolio of abilities which would afford them the opportunity to spend a Daily or invoke a Ritual for an automatic success (and perhaps another benefit such as a rolling + 2), but do they want to commit those resources?

Post-conflict relevance could be something such as one of the King's captain of the guard dieing while fending off an assassination attempt (because the PC's intervention failed). The conflict was a "success" sure, the policy has now been changed. But this fallout could make the king vulnerable off-screen and subject to further assassination attempts (and perhaps death while the PCs are on campaign). Or perhaps this was his best friend and now he is horribly beset by grief and anguish, crippling his ability to properly act as king (providing opportunity for member's of his court to strategically move against his interests). On an oceanic journey, a ship's hull can be breached by one failed effort and if the subsequent effort to save the crew is also a failure, perhaps key members of the crew dies. Perhaps something important in the cargo hold is lost. If the point of the conflict was to "get to the lost island of Bobville" then sure, you've made it if you've achieved the parameters for success. But there will be relevant, post-conflict fallout (that may play out on-screen or off-screen). These sorts of things will frame future conflicts to resolve and possibly provide future antagonists for the PCs to deal with. This feedback loop is by design.

I find that solution underwhelming since the PCs need not react to the opposition, but can (and probably should) continue with their own strategy with the highest discrete probability of success. I like the concept of skill challenges. In many ways they are a formalism of many of the things I was already doing for results simulation. I find the framework is stifling since it places the PCs as the only active actors in the scene. My version has frameworks for PCs, multiple groups working independently on mutually exclusive goals, and groups working in direct competition.

Yup. I can certainly understand that the design impetus and GMing principles of certain conflict resolution schemes are anathema to your playstyle objectives. I've GMed this sort of play, a plenty, in the past, still do on occasion and what you say makes sense. However, it is also true that the design impetus, GMing principles and system components of certain (many) conflict resolution schemes, coupled with deft and informed GMing, provide the precise (meaning not by blundering accident) means to pursue the sort of game that others might enjoy.

 

[Nagol]

Hey Nagol. Good post and I typically always feel that I understand your position and your playstyle concerns after I read them. I do understand why certain styles of conflict resolution would be adversarial to your preferred playstyle.

I'm just going to try to answer the above right quick.

1) There shouldn't be a Pyrrhic victory with respect to the stakes outlined in the burgeoning moments of the conflict; "what, specifically, the PCs are trying to achieve." If the conflict is set to resolve the question of "do I navigate the swamp and get to the hut of the medicine man (?)", then the success condition automatically affords the PCs the attainment of that goal. The same can be said for a PC trying to "kick a bad habit" or PCs trying to "convince the king to change policy." The PCs are playing their PCs, pushing toward the attainment of that overarching goal while GM is playing the totality of adversarial components that would interpose themselves between the PCs and the successful attainment of those goals (respectively, the swamp's denizens/hazards, the bad habits "will to remain", and the king's (and perhaps court or other relevant actors/circumstances) commitment to maintain the present path of policy.

That doesn't negate the Pyrrhic victory option though, does it? The price the PCs pay could be deemed "too high" for the results obtained. If the goal is getting to the hut, the PCs could achieve that whilst at the same losing something not mentioned in the premise -- such as the extra time taken by navigation means the crown prince is beyond salvation, an item more important to strategic success has been lost, or the failures raise the enmity level of the swamp denizens so much the medicine man will not truck with the party.

2) Micro-failures in a challenge, while (by rule and GM principle) being unable to answer the question to be answered by the overarching conflict, do have relevance and their own fallout. One immediate, and obvious brand of relevance and fallout, is the ablation of PC staying power/resources; Healing Surges and/or others. This will serve to (i) make the work day more difficult and (ii) potentially make the scene more difficult. For instance, let us say that we're in the swamp to find the medicine man because we've contracted some kind of disease that he can heal. The result of a micro-failure could be (a) the loss of a Healing Surge and (b) an immediately required Endurance check at the Medium DC, the result of which can only result in moving down a stage or remaining stable. Moving down a stage may be debilitating.

Ablation works in some specific challenges, such as escaping a burning building, but less so in others such as "Find the Island" -- there the only ablation is time wasted. The micro-failures affecting the effectiveness of the group inside the challenge is problematic as it will tend to lead to a failure spiral. The probabilities of the markov chains are murky enough without damaging the success chance of any individual or all subsequent checks. It can also lead to the Pyrrhic of Cadmean victories described above. "We made it to the hut, but we were so weakened that we died before the medicine man returned."

Other relevance and fallout will be on the reframing of the conflict's trajectory to pay heed to the evolution of fiction that will arise from the failure. This will have immediate consequences and could have post-conflict relevance and fallout. The immediate consequences could be that the decision-points that arise from the fiction evolved from the failure put the PCs in a spot. This "spot" could be mechanically. Perhaps the next check is at the High DC and out of the 3, or so, likely candidates for genre-coherent resource deployment, only one Skill is trained and without a supporting modifier; so perhaps only a 40 % chance of success. There is an option within the PCs' collective portfolio of abilities which would afford them the opportunity to spend a Daily or invoke a Ritual for an automatic success (and perhaps another benefit such as a rolling + 2), but do they want to commit those resources?

And that is where I feel some guidance is necessary. What level of stake is appropriate for a single failure level? What is the base expectation for number of failures in the challenge? If the odds say the party will succeed, but a typical party will suffer two failures then applying a substantial penalty at the first failure is uncalled for.

Additionally, forcing a PC into a sub-optimal check runs the risk of starting a failure spiral or at least being identified as the point the challenge was lost. I also tend not to use Daily and Encounter powers as the metagame resources [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]does which limits their purpose in a challenge for me. It is unlikely, for example, that Twist of Space could be used to penetrate a planar boundary and retrieve a trapped character. It may be a neat twist, but that's not what the power does to my mind.

Post-conflict relevance could be something such as one of the King's captain of the guard dieing while fending off an assassination attempt (because the PC's intervention failed). The conflict was a "success" sure, the policy has now been changed. But this fallout could make the king vulnerable off-screen and subject to further assassination attempts (and perhaps death while the PCs are on campaign). Or perhaps this was his best friend and now he is horribly beset by grief and anguish, crippling his ability to properly act as king (providing opportunity for member's of his court to strategically move against his interests). On an oceanic journey, a ship's hull can be breached by one failed effort and if the subsequent effort to save the crew is also a failure, perhaps key members of the crew dies. Perhaps something important in the cargo hold is lost. If the point of the conflict was to "get to the lost island of Bobville" then sure, you've made it if you've achieved the parameters for success. But there will be relevant, post-conflict fallout (that may play out on-screen or off-screen). These sorts of things will frame future conflicts to resolve and possibly provide future antagonists for the PCs to deal with. This feedback loop is by design.

I recognise how failures can be used (though again my game style limits the type of failure from some that have appeared on the forums over time), what is unclear is the level of severity the players should expect from failure counts. This should of course be tied to the challenge, but appropriate determination depends on at what point the overall success becomes moot ("You saved the king! Unfortunately, your failures led to no one detecting the poison put into his wine. He died overnight" ) and when the party feels punished because there was no chance of getting through without at least one failure (you saved the king, but because Bob slipped up, you are under house arrest until he recovers sufficiently to clear you.")

Yup. I can certainly understand that the design impetus and GMing principles of certain conflict resolution schemes are anathema to your playstyle objectives. I've GMed this sort of play, a plenty, in the past, still do on occasion and what you say makes sense. However, it is also true that the design impetus, GMing principles and system components of certain (many) conflict resolution schemes, coupled with deft and informed GMing, provide the precise (meaning not by blundering accident) means to pursue the sort of game that others might enjoy.

Absolutely, and I've adopted a few systems over the years for use in whatever game I'm running. Skill Challenges are a less perfect tool for me than others I've found. Recall I entered the thread at this point:

They are certainly imperfect - lack of "active" opposition is a flaw - but the idea that they are worse than "make an arbitrary number of undefined rolls and spell uses until the GM's reluctance - itself based on how much they were amused and impressed by your "plan" - is overcome" in either probability transparency or clarity of shared vision is absurd.

I suspect most GMs I see on the forums are not using "make an arbitrary number of undefined rolls and spell uses until the GM's reluctance - itself based on how much they were amused and impressed by your "plan" - is overcome" as the mechanism of choice.

 

[Balesir]

They are certainly imperfect - lack of "active" opposition is a flaw - but the idea that they are worse than "make an arbitrary number of undefined rolls and spell uses until the GM's reluctance - itself based on how much they were amused and impressed by your "plan" - is overcome" in either probability transparency or clarity of shared vision is absurd.

Surprisingly enough, that isn't how I've done/seen non-skill challenge situations resolve in the last three decades or so. I might almost be inclined to posit that this position is also a parody.

No parody, just how I have experienced the typical "simulationist" (i.e. attempting to simulate the real world) RPG working. The players describe a plan, which the GM sees as more or less "plausible"/"possible"/"practical" depending on how well aligned the players views of reality were with the GM's when they conceived the plan. Based on this view - which the GM generally sees as simply a "common sense" or "rational" assessment of how likely the plan is to work - the GM decides what rolls are needed (and/or what spells, abilities or items and other resources must be used) in order for the plan to succeed.

From the players' point of view (in fact, from the rest of the world who are not the GM's point of view) this combination of rolls and resources is arbitrary. Its "rationality" depends entirely upon a model of the way reality works that they do not entirely share. It might happen, by chance, that the specific parts of the model match up for this specific task - in which case they have lucked out and the task will likely prove easy - but this is happenstance, not something that has happened by design.

The Skill Challenge at least puts some structure and pre-design into this. The GM chooses a level and size/complexity of challenge just as they would pick monsters of a certain level and to a certain number for a combat encounter. This dictates the experience points that the challenge is worth, thus making it clear that there are game-mechanical implications of the choice and, hence, of changing it. It also informs the players of what manner of plan or what sort of action the GM expects them to take in order to overcome the obstacle. Previous editions did not include any such mechanism.

I prefer having a realistic base because I feel that allows my game to be more narrative by allowing scenes and situations to flow naturally rather than me -as the out of game entity known as the GM- needing to reach my hands into the game so often.

I understand the sentiment, but I think this is partly an illusion. You are "reaching your hands in" as a GM every time you make a judgement concerning what is "realistic". Your model of reality is, assuming that you are like every other human on the planet, both in some respects wrong and in some respects different from those of everyone else. The reason you feel more comfortable making rulings based upon it is that you are naturally disposed to consider it to be "only common sense". Your model represents deeply held beliefs about reality and, as recent research has clearly shown, this makes you extremely reluctant to change it. The truth is, though, that it's no more reliable than anyone else's - and those are not very reliable at all...

Yet the background to that drama-genre-story has to be some sort of reality; and by far the simplest option for presenting this is to simply say "it's the same as the real world except where the game mechanics and-or the setting being played make it different". Which is to say, a rock in the game world behaves much like a rock on Earth; rivers flow downhill; light and sound behave like we're used to except when magic messes with them, etc.

At risk of repeating myself, this is a trap - and one that is very easy to fall into. Human beings are fundamentally incapable of simulating all aspects of reality because the models that they believe are true about reality are all wrong. They are a fair approximation for many situations that come up in everyday life, for sure, but outside of that they can be hopeless. In the real world this does not matter, because we have one simulation that is flawless - reality itself! Any misconceptions we have will be swiftly pointed out as soon as we encounter them in person. In a game, though - and one that seldom restricts itself to "everyday life" - such a model is not available. Which is why we so often see blazing arguments between gamers adamantly arguing that such-and-such a system should work in such-and-such a way because that is "realistic"...

The answer is simple. Forget "realism" when playing the game - just use the rules for how the game world works. Consider the real world when designing the rules, fine - there is a lot about the real world that is elegant and neat, so it makes a good source of inspiration. But if you build a system in an attempt to model reality perfectly you are on a fool's errand and doomed to disfunction. And if you try to wrangle the system on the fly to be "realistic" you have the same problems, but now you add those of time pressure, adversarial considerations and lack of player foreknowledge.