D&D General Skill challenges: action resolution that centres the fiction

[Crimson Longinus]

Skill challenges, group checks* and other forms of extended contests certainly have their uses, and I occasionally employ them, though probably far more infrequently than many others here. I feel they're most useful for abstracting extended activity exact details of which you're not interested in modelling. Travel is a common use.

* Seriously 5e's group checks are very similar to skill challenges, I don't know why people are not similarly enamoured with them...

However, the central claim of the OP was that skill challenges "centre the fiction". I don't really see this, it is almost the opposite. This is very "mechanics first" way to handle things. You have the mechanic framework as a starting point, and then you weave fiction on top of that to justify skill uses and invent what success and failures mean. Now people here certainly have given excellent examples of how to do that in a way that compelling fiction is generated. I think this is mostly due their skill and experience, and perhaps aided by importing principles, guidance and approaches from other games. The actual printed text IIRC is pretty sparse about how the fiction and mechanics are connected.

The "traditional" approach is for the GM to come up with the fictional situation and then trying to honestly and consistently represent this via mechanics. To me this me seem far more "centred to the fiction". If fictionally it makes sense that the problem is solved via one genius move or escalates into unmitigated catastrophe by an idiotic one, then so be it. In this approach such following of the fiction with integrity is not prevented by rigid mechanics that dictate predetermined amount of checks.

And I don't buy the notion that the latter is (or at least has to be) just GM arbitrarily deciding when the issue is solved. It is not arbitrary. The GM sets up the fiction and is constrained by honestly following it, just like in the skill challenge they set up the complexity of the challenge and are constrained by it.

And sure, things that were not predetermined might become relevant and the GM might need to ad hoc decide them. But similarly in skill challenge the GM has to make such decisions. When does the fictional positioning warrant the use of a skill? What additional complications failures bring? What additional avenues of gaining further progress the successes open? Especially if played in non-scripted, no-myth mode advocated by many I feel the GM must make far more such decisions and they will shape the course of the fiction far more than in an approach where the GM is just trying to honestly present a prepped situation.

 

[clearstream]

Since you’re familiar with Torchbearer, a good way to look at Skill Challenges might be Torchbearer adventure and resolution design. Take a quick look at the Adventure Budget:

I bought and played 4e when it came out. The designers presented a few subtly different takes on SCs over the publishing lifetime.

I hadn't thought to compare them with TB2 however.

Looks an awful lot like a combination of Skill Challenge Complexity and Level!

Then consider the Fail Forward "Twist but Fun Once" action resolution that undergirds Torchbearer.

Torchbearer Short to Medium Adventure Budget + Difficulty Level + Success or Twists but Fun Once is basically the same architecture/engine (broadly) as 4e Skill Challenges.

I need to give that some thought. It's an interesting comparison.

EDIT I wish Enworld had a "thinking" emoji.

 

[pemerton]

On the one hand, supposing we part from our primary and secondary skill lists - which as you show is intended - then what is the real value of that mechanical furniture over clocks, which are my comparative?

I've neither read nor played BitD, so can't comment on its clocks. @Manbearcat seems to think they are fairly similar to skill challenges.

Skill challenges are clearly different from AW clocks, because the latter are both "prescriptive" and "descriptive", in the sense of both driving and following from the fiction; whereas skill challenges are prescriptive.

My own view, based on experience, is that it is often helpful, in advance of running a session of 4e, to think about what skill challenges are likely to come up (given the current trajectory of play) and think about some of the ways they might be adjudicated (eg what are some places that invite the insertion of Hard checks; what are some good consequences for failure - eg like the encirclement by Goblin wolfriders that I mentioned upthread; etc). This is for the same reason that - again in my experience - 4e benefits from having stat blocks prepared in advance. It's an intricate mechanical system.

None of this is to say that preparation is essential. I've run many impromptu skill challenges, and chosen or written up stat blocks on the spur of the moment. But 4e is not a light system.

 

[pemerton]

However, the central claim of the OP was that skill challenges "centre the fiction". I don't really see this, it is almost the opposite. This is very "mechanics first" way to handle things. You have the mechanic framework as a starting point

I don't think this is correct. The starting point is that the PCs are confronted, in the fiction, with an obstacle to their goal. And the players declare actions for their PCs to try and overcome those obstacles.

The framework is not a starting point: rather, what it does is direct the GM how to narrate consequences: successes can't be narrated as final - in relation to the goal - unless they are the last success required. And failure can't be narrated as final either - again, in relation to the goal - unless they are the third failure.

The GM also has to keep an eye on the tally of successes and failures, and narrate consequences having regard to that, so that when finality (be that success or failure, relative to the goal) does need to be narrated, it can be done so consistently from what has followed rather than being a jarring rabbit from a hat.

TL;DR: The framework is not a starting point; its role is to guide the GM in respect of finality of consequences.

then you weave fiction on top of that to justify skill uses and invent what success and failures mean.

As I've just posted, the fiction comes first: the PCs confront an obstacle. Then the action declarations come next - they are grounded in the fictional situation as the player understands it ("try not to say no") but with the GM as ultimate arbiter (" make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation").

There is no weaving "on top of" anything. The GM narrates consequences - successes and failures. These are no more "invented" in a skill challenge than in any other context of resolving a check: the stakes of the check are either express or at least implicit in the fiction, and depending on whether the player succeeds or fails the GM narrates the gain or loss in relation to those stakes appropriately.

The narration does depend upon the GM having regard primarily to intent - both local, and the overall goal of the skill challenge - and stakes - again, both local, and the overall context of the skill challenge - rather than just granular analysis of and extrapolation from the task. But this is not particular to skill challenges, or even to closed scene resolution: for instance, it is pretty central to the adjudication of a single check in Burning Wheel or Torchbearer, and having regard to stakes (though not so much intent/goal) is also part of GMing Apocalypse World, which does not use closed scene resolution at all.

The actual printed text IIRC is pretty sparse about how the fiction and mechanics are connected.

The OP sets out some of the key passages from the original printing of the DMG:

As the 4e DMG sets out (p 74), "You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results." So the GM is always bringing the focus of play back to the fiction.

This centrality of the fiction is reinforced by this from the DMG (pp 72, 75):

a skill challenge is defined by its context in an adventure. . . . In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. . . . it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation.​

In other words, the GM needs to use the fiction to put the pressure on the players that will make them declare actions for their PCs (ie the fiction gives rise to the skill challenge), and needs to use the fiction to establish consequences.

<snip>

The players likewise need to engage the fiction to bring their skills to bear: as the 4e PHB says to them (p179), "It’s up to you to think of ways you can use your skills to meet the challenges you face."

<snip>

The DMG explicitly addresses this need, in prep, to come to grips with the fiction in relation to social encounters (p 72):

If the challenge involves any kind of interaction with nonplayer characters or monsters, detail those characters . . . In a complex social encounter, have a clear picture of the motivations, goals, and interests of the NPCs involved so you can tie them to character skill checks.​

Sparseness is, perhaps, in the eye of the beholder. But to me that all seems pretty straightforward and unambiguous.

The "traditional" approach is for the GM to come up with the fictional situation and then trying to honestly and consistently represent this via mechanics. To me this me seem far more "centred to the fiction". If fictionally it makes sense that the problem is solved via one genius move or escalates into unmitigated catastrophe by an idiotic one, then so be it. In this approach such following of the fiction with integrity is not prevented by rigid mechanics that dictate predetermined amount of checks.

And I don't buy the notion that the latter is (or at least has to be) just GM arbitrarily deciding when the issue is solved. It is not arbitrary. The GM sets up the fiction and is constrained by honestly following it, just like in the skill challenge they set up the complexity of the challenge and are constrained by it.

The OP is not comparing skill challenges to the approach that you and @Pedantic prefer, although in post 215 upthread I give some reasons for preferring skill challenges to your preferred approach.

As the OP makes clear - with its references to Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, Torchbearer, Marvel Heroic RP - the comparison is being made with systems based on opposed checks and ablation of opposing pools. The point is elaborated in post 194, with reference to two further RPGs: In A Wicked Age, and Agon.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So I actually don't have a problem with any of this except the bolded part. Yes, absolutely, the GM is a window into a non-existent world they are attempting to simulate to the best of their ability at all times. They are a deist god who set a world in motion, and also the camera unto that world as necessary. We can argue about whether that's practical or not I suppose, but that's the design basis I'm coming from when talking about these kinds of challenges. The castle exists, independently of whether the PCs will ever engage with it, and has traits that are only interesting to them should they appear there. It's an obviously impossible task to actively simulate an entire additional universe in full, but it's not particularly difficult to emulate doing that at the point of PC contact, and design choices flow from assuming that's the norm.

And this is FUNDAMENTALLY why we won't agree, cannot agree, because we are not approaching the structure of play in the same way, at all. There is no 'world' and it is NOT being 'simulated' in any meaningful way. We are playing a game which involves telling parts of a story, or several interwoven stories. Nobody owns it, or has total control of what it is. There is certainly no 'deist god'. There are a group of participants who are playing the game and finding out what sort of world they are creating, and what sort of things will happen in it, together. There's no need for the GM to be in some sort of 'drivers seat'.

The bolded section is just wrong. I have no idea what you mean by "when a conflict is over" without the framework of a skill challenge or timer. Whatever is happening is happening, and if a player wants a particular outcome, they have a bunch of actions available to change the world to their liking. A conflict ends when the PC has gotten the thing they wanted, or it is no longer possible for them to get the thing they wanted.

But how do you measure when it is no longer possible? Either you have to have closed scene resolution, or the GM invents that answer on their own (or maybe a player gives up or changes there mind I suppose).

This is the thing I keep talking about, where the PC sets the victory condition, and gets to change it whenever they want. They decide what it is they want, and then spend their available actions to get to that point. The story of a given campaign is the ex post facto stringing together of that PC chasing each of those goals and recording what happened from point A to point B along the way.

More to the point though, removing the GM from resolution is the primary goal of such a system. Actions have discreet effects and consequences, so you can figure out what happens by plugging a PC choice into the mechanics for resolving that action, and be handed a result. Then you reevaluate the state of the world, any other parties that can take actions do so, and you repeat. Continue until everyone is dead or the PC has gotten whatever it is they wanted done.

The GM can never be removed. In this classic paradigm the GM IS the world, removing them isn't even remotely possible.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So, I think we can summarize the difference in agency we're discussing pretty simply. In a skill challenge framework a players the following two points of agency:
1. Which skill they're rolling
2. Which difficulty they're rolling against.

Those might be limited in various ways by the situation, and depending on the structure, they may also get:

3. Spend resource to ignore roll.

I'm proposing that players should additional have the agency:

4. Adjust number of rolls until victory.

And that this is best achieved by leaving victory undefined until the player decides they've achieved it, and by limiting resolution to each individual roll.

But that is not what happens. The GM calls for checks. The GM determines what sort of progress is made when a success is achieved (and vice versa). The only time this is going to be completely outside the GM's immediate control is when they decided beforehand, by completely specifying the situation, and now we are in the same situation as an SC! (at best). The player is deciding nothing.

I mean, if you are suggesting a very non-classical type of system in which players simply decide for themselves when the situation warrants final success and simply informs the GM of such (OK, I passed a swim check, I've reached the other side of the River Lethe) well, OK I yield the point (but Mr. Czege wants to have a word with you now...)!

You don't necessarily know, but you're certainly going to do your best to manipulate any situation to cut down on risk as much as possible. Consequences are intrinsic to actions, the primary cost being time, and other consequences following naturally in reaction to events. And yes, conservative is a fine descriptor of the sort of play I'm after. Players are trying to be efficient and effective with their resources, but you know, face a whole fantasy world full of problems and will be forced to expend them.

See, I think the problem is, you are taking one very narrow agenda of play, deciding that a certain system design might not work for it, and declaring it to be a bad design. Yet, at best, you know nothing of how well it works for everyone else who doesn't share that exact agenda.

But I find there is another issue, which is the 'unreality factor'. A fantasy world imagined by a GM and/or players (or however its description came about) is a very 'thin' thing. 99.9% of everything is really not defined in the description and is unsettled. Thus nobody can really say what the risks are. Heck, a pretty good hunk of why most RPGs involve dice is the feeling that there are MANY factors that have not been taken into consideration, could not practically be taken into consideration, by the participants, and thus a stochastic mechanism, the dice, is employed to kind of 'fill in'. But even that aside, most plans rely on factors nobody knows about! Is the candle maker friends with the scullery maid? Who knows? I mean, sure, it could theoretically be noted, but nobody fleshes out that level of detail, yet it could be a critical factor, and the GM will have to decide it, on the fly. In a sense there really is nothing BUT 'low myth' play, and the idea that anyone can map out any but the most immediate and proximate causes and consequences of things doesn't hold water. There is no 'plan', there is no spoon, thus I cannot bend the spoon, you get it?

Not knowing I don't have any agency to improve my situation does not actively improve my agency, and merely makes whatever game I'm playing more frustrating. Now the player has to play a meta-game to figure out what game they're in, and then attempt to optimize for that.

No, now they know a way to even-handedly decide. We can get on with the interesting part, what actually is it that we find in this situation?

The math is not hard on these, and more to the point, in a sufficiently well designed system there is no functional difference between trying to optimize your chances of success and engaging with the fictional state. Your character, it can generally be assumed, is competent, wants to survive, and has the goals you've given them. Optimizing their chances of success is exactly how one engages with the world.

I would not presume that at all, and find the idea that this is the only design which provides 'agency' to be a highly dubious proposition. You would clearly benefit from playing in a game using an RPG and techniques which challenge your assumptions.

 

[clearstream]

Skill challenges are clearly different from AW clocks, because the latter are both "prescriptive" and "descriptive", in the sense of both driving and following from the fiction; whereas skill challenges are prescriptive.

Yes, I think that is right. To put it in hopefully not too banal terms, SC's set an amount of work to be done to reach an outcome, and list some tools for doing that work. Clocks measure the amount of work of a certain sort that is done, by whatever means, and list an outcome. Contrast

• You have to dig a hole this deep. You can use a shovel or a spade. You might hit some electrical cables if you dig in the wrong place.
• You're digging? Okay, let's track how deep: there are electrical cables this far down.

I agree too about the value of the right kind of prep for heavier systems. It's the dilemma of crunch: one can enjoy crunchy play, but typically the crunchier the play, the more prep is needed to sustain that enjoyment. I think SC's - in the context of a crunchy system - strive to offer a light-enough framework for playing out a wide variety of situations in a systematically-constrained way with minimal prep.

When I ask myself - would 4e have done better with clocks than SCs? My intuition is probably "yes"... but you know, it's very much a matter of style and taste. The fixed ticks for effect level could have been readily translated into powers, for example +1s when using Nature. That actually has some pretty beneficial consequences.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I understand the automatic success rationale. The game text I can find provides for additional possible successes on successful skill checks, but only for complexity 3+.

I think people are overestimating the degree to which the intent in 4e is for all these various elements beyond the number of successes and failures to be used rote as exactly written. There are advantages, different DCs, possible 'use a ritual and get a success' (or other resources), etc. It is not really exactly spelled out that every one of these must be in play exactly to the letter of the blurb on each one.

My take on SC rules, as of RC or basically DMG2, is you have the tally of successes and failures based on Complexity, a level, and the GM can decree various things like primary and secondary skills, some number of advantages, etc. as it seems like the situation is best served. Some of these things have pretty precise guidelines, like the number of advantages and the number of different DCs of checks that you should use appear in the complexity table, so you PROBABLY use them as-is. OTOH the rules on what happens when a ritual gets cast, or a power used, are quite a bit more vague and clearly owe so much to the fiction that whatever is said is at best advisory.

So, I think @Manbearcat kind of decided that if you use a ritual, you make a ritual check, and you get AT LEAST the one success for paying to do the ritual plus maybe another one if the ritual check is sufficiently good. Now, if it was a different ritual, maybe one that doesn't scale its outcome based on the check, or doesn't even have a check, maybe he would call it differently. You'll have to ask him. I think he stated the SC was Complexity 3 anyway, right? So maybe that was why it was at least that high, I'm not sure...

 

[clearstream]

I think people are overestimating the degree to which the intent in 4e is for all these various elements beyond the number of successes and failures to be used rote as exactly written. There are advantages, different DCs, possible 'use a ritual and get a success' (or other resources), etc. It is not really exactly spelled out that every one of these must be in play exactly to the letter of the blurb on each one.

To get perhaps overly technical and legalistic, I dislike that argument on the following principle

• where game text can be read in one way to sustain meaning in all parts, and another way to empty some parts of meaning, we ought to prefer the former
• this is true except where there the principle of specific beats general applies

I believe the game text on advantages in SCs based on their complexity would be strictly meaningless, if the intent of the DMG text is to confer an identical benefit. Construing the DMG text as you suggest isn't literally necessitated, and it breaches both principles above (the advantages text would be emptied of meaning, even while the advantages test is the more specific).

My take on SC rules, as of RC or basically DMG2, is you have the tally of successes and failures based on Complexity, a level, and the GM can decree various things like primary and secondary skills, some number of advantages, etc. as it seems like the situation is best served. Some of these things have pretty precise guidelines, like the number of advantages and the number of different DCs of checks that you should use appear in the complexity table, so you PROBABLY use them as-is. OTOH the rules on what happens when a ritual gets cast, or a power used, are quite a bit more vague and clearly owe so much to the fiction that whatever is said is at best advisory.

Perhaps the better thing to say is something like this: I queried a poster's description of an adjudication based on their words as I read them compared with words in the game text. It's okay to say that one feels the intention of the game text is vague and make a different interpretation, but one can't say that the game text I compared with doesn't exist. Nor does it really seem right to me, to put vagueness in one place on the same footing as clarity in another.

So, I think @Manbearcat kind of decided that if you use a ritual, you make a ritual check, and you get AT LEAST the one success for paying to do the ritual plus maybe another one if the ritual check is sufficiently good.

Agreed. As I said up thread, for me it is right to understand from the DMG that investing resources can earn successes. What they don't do (outside advantages) is increase the number of successes from ongoing checks. (Or maybe they do, there's a lot of text scattered through the books, but no one has shown where yet!)

Now, if it was a different ritual, maybe one that doesn't scale its outcome based on the check, or doesn't even have a check, maybe he would call it differently. You'll have to ask him. I think he stated the SC was Complexity 3 anyway, right? So maybe that was why it was at least that high, I'm not sure...

This is how the SC was categorised

Level + 2 Skill Challenge, Complexity 2; you've got to get there quickly > convince the ankheg > the two of you get back quickly.

 

[Manbearcat]

So, I think @Manbearcat kind of decided that if you use a ritual, you make a ritual check, and you get AT LEAST the one success for paying to do the ritual plus maybe another one if the ritual check is sufficiently good. Now, if it was a different ritual, maybe one that doesn't scale its outcome based on the check, or doesn't even have a check, maybe he would call it differently. You'll have to ask him. I think he stated the SC was Complexity 3 anyway, right? So maybe that was why it was at least that high, I'm not sure...

To get perhaps overly technical and legalistic, I dislike that argument on the following principle

• where game text can be read in one way to sustain meaning in all parts, and another way to empty some parts of meaning, we ought to prefer the former
• this is true except where there the principle of specific beats general applies

I believe the game text on advantages in SCs based on their complexity would be strictly meaningless, if the intent of the DMG text is to confer an identical benefit. Construing the DMG text as you suggest isn't literally necessitated, and it breaches both principles above (the advantages text would be emptied of meaning, even while the advantages test is the more specific).


Perhaps the better thing to say is something like this: I queried a poster's description of an adjudication based on their words as I read them compared with words in the game text. It's okay to say that one feels the intention of the game text is vague and make a different interpretation, but one can't say that the game text I compared with doesn't exist. Nor does it really seem right to me, to put vagueness in one place on the same footing as clarity in another.


Agreed. As I said up thread, for me it is right to understand from the DMG that investing resources can earn successes. What they don't do (outside advantages) is increase the number of successes from ongoing checks. (Or maybe they do, there's a lot of text scattered through the books, but no one has shown where yet!)


This is how the SC was categorised

We’re going backwards. I resolved this several posts back:

DMG2 p86

“A character who performs a relevant ritual or uses a daily power deserves to notch at least I success toward the party's goal.”

So 1 auto-success + 1 success for hitting the DC for amplified Eagle’s Flight.

You could look at this like Blades +1 Effect or Torchbearer’s Margin of Success. Principally the same.

DMG2 says at least 1 success for deploying relevant Ritual. How do you get to 2? By exceeding the base effect DC of the Ritual.

4e is exception-based design with a mega-transparent chassis. The rules inform resolution qualitatively and quantitatively except in edge cases where GM must adjudicate (as above).