D&D General Styles of D&D Play

[Micah Sweet]

The players only need to know

1. That it's a skill challenge
2. The goal of the skill challenge
3. A couple skills that work in the challenge
4. That a PC can't reuse a skill again because it's secondary
5. That's X failures and you're out

Yup, that's the frame. Any wonder why so many saw the best way to get through it was to talk the DM into just letting everyone use their best skill? If you ask me, that system incentivizes "roll-play".

 

[Campbell]

Yup, that's the frame. Any wonder why so many saw the best way to get through it was to talk the DM into just letting everyone use their best skill? If you ask me, that system incentivizes "roll-play".

You mean declaring an action based on the fictional situation that allows you to leverage your character's strengths? Like what we do whenever we play a roleplaying game? The fictional reasoning utilized to do so is what makes it a roleplaying game.

This is no different from what happens in less structured play. Players are still going to declare actions that they believe will leverage their best skills. That does not make it an exercise in just rolling dice because it takes skill to reason about the fictional situation and declare actions that leverage player character capabilities.

 

[Aldarc]

I would think this is largely because the resolution of political drama is not easily represented by arithmetic unless you would desire a social combat system in which social interactions are abstracted to a mechanical challenge rather than an intellectual one.

Political drama doesn't have to be about arithmetic in roleplaying games.

The Chronicle System was first developed by Green Ronin for political and dramatic roleplaying in A Song of Ice and Fire. Stars/Worlds Without Number is a D&D-adjacent "OSR" game that features rules supporting the play of factions and kingdoms, which in turn influenced faction rules in John Harper's Blades in the Dark. Characters in the PbtA game of Root will also have their reputations with factions go up and down through play, which affects how NPCs of the respective factions respond to PCs, and the GM likewise will take faction turns between sessions.

There is arithmetic there, but it's also about having written rules and guidance that actively support faction play.

It seems that some people want rollplay to drive everything outside of combat instead of roleplay. I don't. We tried that in 4E and it sucked the soul out of the game, especially initially.

Your statement here about rollplay is not only rude and deeply insulting to others, it also grossly misunderstands and mischaracterizes roleplaying other games that do not utilize freeform roleplaying as not true roleplaying or lesser roleplay. This may be "your opinion" but hiding behind your opinions doesn't change the issue one bit. You can have opinions without crossing the line into insulting others or mischaracterizing other roleplaying games that others enjoy. If you aren't capable of expressing the opinions you have that involve insulting others and their roleplaying, then you probably would have been better off not saying any of this drivel in the first place.

 

[Neonchameleon]

See, to me, you might as well either present the framework to the players (as many, many 4e players did), or just run the situation free-form (which is what I generally do). The whole idea of using the frame but not talking about it has no value to me, whether that's what the rules say or not.

Except I've pointed out why it has value to a less One True Way DM (who calls not presenting 100% of the mechanics to the players "deceiving") than you are. It helps set difficulty and pacing meaning that there's less to simply guess at to make an interesting scene.

And the "do in initiative order" was dropped very early by errata.

 

[Minigiant]

Yup, that's the frame. Any wonder why so many saw the best way to get through it was to talk the DM into just letting everyone use their best skill? If you ask me, that system incentivizes "roll-play".

Yeah but you could only use a secondary skill once and it might not give success.

That's the whole point. You would be forced to use your mediocre skills often or rely on combos from other PCs.

"Congratulations. Last turn you reasoned a way to use Persuasion to travel the Feywild. It's your turn again. You can't use Persuasion again. Nor Deception nor Intimidation as the minor fey have gone. What do you do? Draw a map? That's Arcana. Your bard can do it."

 

[Bedrockgames]

The players only need to know

1. That it's a skill challenge
2. The goal of the skill challenge
3. A couple skills that work in the challenge
4. That a PC can't reuse a skill again because it's secondary
5. That's X failures and you're out

Yup, that's the frame. Any wonder why so many saw the best way to get through it was to talk the DM into just letting everyone use their best skill? If you ask me, that system incentivizes "roll-play".

I don't see why the GM would have to tell the players all these mechanics. Can't they just describe what happens while the player responds and as they interact with the player request the relevant skill rolls? I don't play 4E and don't know a lot about skill challenges, but I do something like this a lot, in chases for example, where I will have the players say what they do at various points and then request a skill roll based on that, and often have a set number of successes in mind for what results in getting away, catching someone, etc.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

One of the selling points of skill challenge is that it gives a defined structure for required failures and successes instead of the GM just deciding based on the fiction when enough success or failures have been accrued. But if the GM doesn't tell the players that structure beforehand, from their POV the situation appears to be exactly the same than in the latter scenario.

 

[Minigiant]

I don't see why the GM would have to tell the players all these mechanics. Can't they just describe what happens while the player responds and as they interact with the player request the relevant skill rolls? I don't play 4E and don't know a lot about skill challenges, but I do something like this a lot, in chases for example, where I will have the players say what they do at various points and then request a skill roll based on that, and often have a set number of successes in mind for what results in getting away, catching someone, etc.

Well the DM is good at description they don't have to.

But as displayed in this thread, DMs who don't follow the structure and advice themselves end up screwing it up.

 

[Oofta]

I didn't mean to start a big argument about skill challenge details. I also repeatedly stated that I was discussing skill challenges as initially implemented, I quickly dropped them in my home game so didn't pay much attention to the modifications.

What I was pointing out was that for me, and 99% of the people I played with (there was 1 guy in my associated D&D player group who wanted to stick with 4E), when we replaced almost all of the out of combat activities role play with rollplay, it was very detrimental to the game for us. So no, I don't want a system for handling social or other activities. Combat still remains mostly rollplay, but there's enough strategizing and dynamic play to make it interesting. But one of the things that makes D&D work for me and the people I play with is the mix of that tactical rollplay with freeform role play backed up by rules that a DM can use if it adds to the fun.

The core concept of skill challenges isn't bad, I still use complex challenges now and then that are largely skill based when they make sense. But if a DM running a skill challenge can give people advantage, remove a failure, change the target DC, give multiple successes then at a certain point it's just back to the DM making judgement calls.

Whether or not we played skill challenges "wrong" or we didn't use the rules from the third iteration of the DMG doesn't really matter. For that matter I'm not talking about what other games do either. Different games take entirely different approaches, many of which are largely incompatible with D&D's core concepts. If you have ideas and examples or thoughts on what a system compatible with 5E would look like for some of the subsystems y'all want, feel free to bring them up. Give examples and actual details on how it would work. Heck start up another thread, I may even use the ideas occasionally.

But for me and most of the people I played with, skill challenges simply didn't work and the tweaks didn't improve them all that much. I want a mix of rollplay (e.g. combat) and role play (everything else) in my game. So do the people I play with.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yup, that's the frame. Any wonder why so many saw the best way to get through it was to talk the DM into just letting everyone use their best skill? If you ask me, that system incentivizes "roll-play".

And this is the core of the argument that having a skill system at all with the player able to say "I use diplomacy" is a bad thing. And "I do this thing I'm good at and can make relevant" is not an RP problem as long as they can make it relevant in character.

However, by having context be important and having easy/medium/hard within the skill challenge there are good reasons to use your less strong skills when they are more relevant to the task at hand because that should be an easier check.