D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have seen this happen when the DM and group do not shift the meaning of success/failure of a single skill check.

It’s not explained well in the material, but by accepting that this is a good situation for a SC, you are also accepting that you need multiple successes (x) to reach your goal. Therefore, a success on a single skill check can only mean incremental progress toward the goal (unless it is the last one needed). The meaning of a single skill check has changed and the way a player can dictate her intent has changed.

So, in a SC chase scene someone can always say –

Player: “I try to shoot the rope holding the barrels, so the barrels topple on the assassin and take him out”. Rolls a 20! “I got him right?”

Dm: “Uhh, I guess you did. That was a good roll. Forget this SC.”

No! That is the single roll paradigm where you are expecting to get what you want if you beat the DC. The DM in fact sets the DC based on your desired goal in the 'normal' paradigm and the player has a lot of say on what that goal is. SC says that’s not how it works – you always just get closer to your goal. You can not expect the barrels to stop the assassin if its the first success, no matter what the roll. It's just a different structure.

By accepting the situation is suitable for a SC, the player needs to accept that she can’t negotiate/expect an ‘all or nothing’ result from a single skill check. And the DM needs to describe the successes as helpful to the goal but not so helpful that reaching the goal seems inevitable without further action.

And there is almost always a fiction first way of showing this incremental progress.

So in a skill challenge:

Player: “I try to shoot the rope holding the barrels, so the barrels topple on the assassin and take him out”. Rolls a 20!

DM: “The rope snaps and the barrels come crashing off the rack. The assassin manages to dodge most of them but one barrel slams into his leg and he falls to the ground for a moment. He gets back up but you’ve closed some distance and you notice a slight limp. He’s not going to be climbing up on roofs anymore.. He makes a sharp left behind a building and out of sight.”

Players: "We follow him, running"

DM: "You turn the corner and see hundreds of people in the crowded marketplace. He could be anywhere."

So the success has as a gamest component (you’ve tailed 1 success), but it also has a fictional framing component--- the assassin is likely to switch tactics from acrobatics to subterfuge since his leg is messed up. This gives PCs strong in Perception, Streetwise, etc. the spotlight vs. those with strong physical skills. Shifting the focus of the scene midway -- another key to making SC interesting.

That's good, yes. The interesting thing is that the SC does a number of things. It implies that the task is too significant to be completed on one skill check (this indicates SC should not be used for single unitary actions), but it insulates against failure with one check as well, one can only get closer to failure, not all the way there. It also provides a way for collaboration and the bringing together of multiple disciplines in problem solving. Skill checks are fine, but they can't achieve all of this and skill systems OFTEN break down in terms of these kinds of tasks.

What SCs do for 4e, one thing they do anyway, is they allow for the very broad generalized skills. They allow the character to be good at a specific thing by being good at each component part of it. There's no such thing as an 'archaeologist' in 4e, but you could certainly master an SC filled with history, arcana, nature, etc checks that let you unravel the natural history of a long-dead race or something like that. Its a necessary concomitant of the fact that the game only technically allows you to have 17 types of knowledge and expertise (outside of weapons and armor, etc that are covered by combat).

 

[bert1000]

That's good, yes. The interesting thing is that the SC does a number of things. It implies that the task is too significant to be completed on one skill check (this indicates SC should not be used for single unitary actions), but it insulates against failure with one check as well, one can only get closer to failure, not all the way there. It also provides a way for collaboration and the bringing together of multiple disciplines in problem solving. Skill checks are fine, but they can't achieve all of this and skill systems OFTEN break down in terms of these kinds of tasks.

What SCs do for 4e, one thing they do anyway, is they allow for the very broad generalized skills. They allow the character to be good at a specific thing by being good at each component part of it. There's no such thing as an 'archaeologist' in 4e, but you could certainly master an SC filled with history, arcana, nature, etc checks that let you unravel the natural history of a long-dead race or something like that. Its a necessary concomitant of the fact that the game only technically allows you to have 17 types of knowledge and expertise (outside of weapons and armor, etc that are covered by combat).

Yes, and I’d say a SC doesn’t just imply that the task is too significant to be completed on one skill check but actually mandates it. The group is deciding “Yes, this particular goal deserves a more involved structure to decide the outcome. We want a different kind of pacing”.

I agree with everything you said about what SCs add (insulates against failure with one check etc) and would also include the following:

1) gives non arbitrary criteria to decide on when to declare the goal has been met or lost based on multiple checks

2) allows the DM the ability to estimate the difficulty of success or failure ahead of time

I don't think SC are perfect and they certainly shouldn't be used all the time, but it was a good first attempt at structure for extended resolution of non combat goals.

IMO it was a great thing out of 4e that should have be refined and built upon for 5e.

 

[pemerton]

I mentioned 'raising stakes'

<snip>

It would be more likely to be something like "OK, you can't cross the burning chasm on the bridge in one round, and you don't think the door can hold back the fire giant any longer. Right! I just LEAP the whole chasm in one mighty jump! OK, but if you fail you're going down into the lava..."

We do this sort of thing in our 4e game, in a fairly ad hoc way.

 

[neobolts]

While you can always take a thread off on a variety of tangents, bombing a thread about the best things in 4e with a re-iteration of edition-war-era talking points is still a bit inappropriate.

I just voted in this poll today at made that post at the same time. I overlooked the sheer volume of posts in the thread as I posted.

To clarify, I liked and played 4e and am currently playing 5e. I was sharing was I thought were the highs and lows of the edition in regard to how I voted, and did not intend to come off sounding harsh or standoffish.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I just voted in this poll today at made that post at the same time. I overlooked the sheer volume of posts in the thread as I posted.

I did not intend to come off sounding harsh or standoffish.

You can go back and edit a post if you later find it conveys something you didn't intend.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, and I’d say a SC doesn’t just imply that the task is too significant to be completed on one skill check but actually mandates it. The group is deciding “Yes, this particular goal deserves a more involved structure to decide the outcome. We want a different kind of pacing”.

I agree with everything you said about what SCs add (insulates against failure with one check etc) and would also include the following:

1) gives non arbitrary criteria to decide on when to declare the goal has been met or lost based on multiple checks

2) allows the DM the ability to estimate the difficulty of success or failure ahead of time

I don't think SC are perfect and they certainly shouldn't be used all the time, but it was a good first attempt at structure for extended resolution of non combat goals.

IMO it was a great thing out of 4e that should have be refined and built upon for 5e.

Well, its commonly decreed that 'skill challenges were an obvious failure, so they were written out of 5e!' but that's only half true. They weren't a failure at all. The difference is that 5e went back to 2e's agenda. It doesn't WANT that kind of framing and player empowerment. 5e prefers to lurk in terms of game agenda back in a zone somewhere between the Gygaxian era of early AD&D and the hardcore process sim mechanism of 3e. It simply has no use for the SC within its agenda. Honestly I think it was quite shortsighted of the designers to write it out, as the technique had good potential and is one that can be fairly easy left out by those who eschew that sort of play. Oh well. I wasn't really that impressed by what 5e chose to leave behind TBH. Its just not that interesting a game.

 

[SirAntoine]

All the new monsters are really the best in my opinion. I wouldn't say they are simplified, though. I found their mechanics and jargon hard to work with, but I still make the effort to convert some of these monsters to my own game. The encounter and daily powers were very nice also, and the tactical powers were surprising and gave the game a good board game feel I appreciated. I really admire the structure of 4th Edition, and the completeness of the system with all of the extended options for classes. The races and cosmology, not so much, and there are rules like skill challenges which we never used,

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think the key part for me here is 'exploration'. FOR ME, what @Saelorn is describing is a prohibition against exploration of the game world in some dimensions. He's allowed to enter an unexplored room in the dungeon, but he's not allowed to explore the edges of how magic works.

The DM has zero ability to set the course of action for the party. If the PC sorcerer wants to explore the boundaries of magic, then that's certainly something you can always do, but you're unlikely to discover anything that the DM doesn't already know. (Like I said, the DM should have known beforehand that casting X spell in Y location would produce Z result.) The players can never surprise the DM about how things actually work. The DM sets all of the laws of physics of the world, including the laws of magic. And it must be that way - the DM must know everything - since the DM is the one tasked with adjudicating the resolution of all actions.

I guess there's an element of "It had to be determined ahead of time" in there. Presumably the room door will only open if the DM described its contents before the party even contemplated going there? This temporal dependency puzzles me somewhat. Is it absolute? Did the DM have to describe the room before the campaign started so he couldn't possibly say put a trap in there that he knew the thief would probably not find? I think clearly there's some sort of leeway here. So at what point do things have to be nailed down? Is the DM allowed to make up some rules about chaos energy and sorcery AFTER he knows the PCs have a wild magic sorcerer in the party and are hunting a certain dragon? Or is it only acceptable if he did it before that? Finally, how would the players be able to tell the difference anyway?

I don't remember much about that other game, where the players could earn XP by catching the DM in a lie, beyond its existence. As a practical matter, it's just not feasible to run a game that way, since the players are free to do anything they want, and the DM can't stop them. As a matter of necessity, the DM will be required to improvise things as they come up. And I think the ideal here, which the DM should attempt to uphold as much as possible - for the sake of the players - is that anything you make up extemporaneously should be indistinguishable from anything you set in stone beforehand. Don't "cheat" now, just because it would be easy. Don't let yourself be influenced by knowledge that you wouldn't have had beforehand. Be fair.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'd like to take a similar approach in my 5e campaign; I think that should work but am a little bit wary in case it leads to balance issues, 5e having a more traditional spell-packet system. Certainly in 5e creation of most magic items should not be routine. OTOH the one caster in my 5e game is a Warlock, and the 4e approach seems very character-appropriate to me.

There's already some precedent, since the Arcana skill is used to disarm magical traps. It's not difficult to extrapolate that out to generic manipulation of magical energies, in much the same way that you might allow someone using thieves' tools to disable a gnome's mechanical construct (or build something new entirely).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

We do this sort of thing in our 4e game, in a fairly ad hoc way.

Yeah, its pretty well-suited to that kind of play already since it has some explicit meta-game resources and the mechanics can accommodate some things like 'level of failure/sucess' pretty easily. I've included various of those things into my personal rules.