D&D 4E 4e skill system -dont get it.

[FitzTheRuke]

I must have missed the memo on this "skill challenges" system, 'cause I don't understand what the OP is talking about, or what Harr is describing, but I'm mighty intrigued.

Could someone fill me in?

So you decide that there's a skill challenge moment like it's an encounter, and decide the pass/fail total checks for the intended goal, and let the players decide the skills they'd like to try? What's this with the easy and hard checks?

Could you, Harr, give me a mechanic-only rundown of what happened in your example?

Thanks
Fitz

 

[Harr]

How long to roll is irrelevant mechanically. Honestly it means nothing from a gaming perspective. And by gaming I mean decision making.

Honestly all I can tell you is that it's made a world of difference for us. Some things are not easy to grok from just thinking about it and theorizing but from doing it and seeing how it plays out. This plays out a lot better.

How is it better is what I do not get here.

Look at my first post. See the description of that encounter?

Before I learned this skill challenge system, that whole description would have read:

'The party comes upon a hanged man in a tree. The rogue decides to check for traps and rolls. He finds the hanged man is a trap. The rogue tries to disarm the trap. He rolls and makes it; trap is disarmed. Rest of the players have to be told to pay attention.'

Which one is actually 'better' I guess is up to each one's taste. You may may like the second one. That's cool. When I say 'better' I mean 'I like playing when it's the first description instead of the second one'.

 

[Harr]

I must have missed the memo on this "skill challenges" system, 'cause I don't understand what the OP is talking about, or what Harr is describing, but I'm mighty intrigued.

Could someone fill me in?

So you decide that there's a skill challenge moment like it's an encounter, and decide the pass/fail total checks for the intended goal, and let the players decide the skills they'd like to try? What's this with the easy and hard checks?

Could you, Harr, give me a mechanic-only rundown of what happened in your example?

Thanks
Fitz

Fitz, check it out here

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=220605 (people's reports from DDXP)

and here

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=222259 (mechanics that I use)

and in the PHB Lite version 1.2 (stickied at the top of the forum).

This whole thing is really really speculative, as all we have to go on are reports and subjective experiences of the players who went to DDXP. But it's given me good results to try it as I understand it so far. That's not to say that when 4e actually comes out it won't all be completely different.

 

[Henry]

Harr, that was a really sweet example. I've seen similar things in Spycraft 2, but not as applied to D&D.

 

[xechnao]

This makes 2 fails, but they need 4 to fail the challenge and set off the trap,

Are the players supposed to know the critical number of failures they need to get? And btw why 4 and not 1, 2, or 3 or 5? If the ranger just failed his acrobatics shouldnt just have set off the trap?

The Samurai rolls athletics to catch the corpse gently and makes it (but it wouldn't have burst anyways since the challenge was won)

Well, I think this does not make any sense to me yet. It is not coherent with the need to have different skills. You can just make a rolling challenge then for everything. Since, if it is won it still comes to the same conclusion regardless.

 

[xechnao]

Before I learned this skill challenge system, that whole description would have read:

'The party comes upon a hanged man in a tree. The rogue decides to check for traps and rolls. He finds the hanged man is a trap. The rogue tries to disarm the trap. He rolls and makes it; trap is disarmed. Rest of the players have to be told to pay attention.'

Which one is actually 'better' I guess is up to each one's taste. You may may like the second one. That's cool. When I say 'better' I mean 'I like playing when it's the first description instead of the second one'.

I do not think that it was 4e here but rather your ability as a DM. IMO you should have informed the rogue on his detect traps roll what you described on your post above he perceived. But nice adventure btw. I would like to be playing it

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Okay. I read those, and it sounds great, except I'm not too sure about the declaring part, both in the "it's skill challenge time, team!" and the players' "I'm gonna climb the tree - but make it hard for me!"

Could you elaborate on how you do this? Why would climbing the tree be a hard challenge?

I'm sure I"ll love it once I can wrap my head around it.

Fitz

 

[Harr]

The player's don't know exactly how many rolls either way are needed to succeed or fail, but they know they need noticeably more wins than loses. On my end, for wins/loses I use 3/2 for small quick challenges, and 6/4, 9/6, and 12/8 for larger, more dangerous, or more plot-important scenes.

Also, they can only make a roll when the action they describe makes sense, and they don't get to choose the skill directly, (even though that's kinda how I wrote it up there, that's wrong, sorry) they describe the action and I assign a skill that makes sense both to them and to me. They usually can't repeat the same action over and over because it goes without saying that something like that just doesn't make sense.

Well, I think this does not make any sense to me yet. It is not coherent with the need to have different skills. You can just make a rolling challenge then for everything. Since, if it is won it still comes to the same conclusion regardless.

Yes. You have a solid point. It seems weird and unrealistic. I just take it as a guide. For me, it's basically the system telling me, 'It's ok dude, they have 6 wins and two losses? They've won enough. Don't worry about it... you can give it to them now. Enough time on this thing; time to move on to something else.' Otherwise, how do I know when to stop the rolling? Are they going to need a roll to catch the corpse? a roll to carry the corpse around? a roll to find a place to bury the corpse? A roll to bury the corpse? A roll to keep talking with the dryad, etc, etc, etc,? When does it stop? This way I know 'ok, right about now would be a good time to wrap it up'. That's the value for me.


Anyway I understand how even with all this there will be people who go, 'so what.' That's cool, but there's really nothing more to it, that's all there is. Just a guideline. Whether it's valuable is up to each DM on an individual basis, IMHO.

 

[xechnao]

I just take it as a guide. For me, it's basically the system telling me, 'It's ok dude, they have 6 wins and two losses? They've won enough. Don't worry about it... you can give it to them now. Enough time on this thing; time to move on to something else.' Otherwise, how do I know when to stop the rolling? Are they going to need a roll to catch the corpse? a roll to carry the corpse around? a roll to find a place to bury the corpse? A roll to bury the corpse? A roll to keep talking with the dryad, etc, etc, etc,? When does it stop? This way I know 'ok, right about now would be a good time to wrap it up'. That's the value for me.

I will try to apply my OP to what you are saying here. You can calculate the probability odds of this guide (say X% chances of overall success or failure) and equally check them with only one roll. Why do you need to throw multiple times the dice when you can get the same mechanical effect by rolling just one, from a mechanical perspective is beyond me.

 

[Benimoto]

Probabilities and statistics play exactly the same role: you just need to count your probabilities before deciding how to roll the dice and so make the right decision. It is not like combat where new data may come round after round (ie new monsters, finding out about a monster ability you did not know before etch) so you have to play it out. 4e skill system just seems needlessly more complicated for what it is. Is it something else I do not get?

While it's true that if you always roll the same skill against the DC, there's not much difference, in terms of probability between just rolling once, or rolling until you get 5 successes or 5 failures.

What makes it somewhat different is the group participation. The way I've seen it, you're encouraged to go around the table, so that every player can contribute either a success or a failure towards the whole resolution of the task. This makes it so that players share the spotlight, as opposed to a lot of the combined diplomacy or other checks I've seen in 3.x, where only the best player rolls for the actual skill use, and the rest of the players assist if they can.

As to why there are different skills, the answer is that the spirit of the game says that a player should try to use his or her most applicable skill. And the rules say that a DM can disallow nonsensical skill usage.

Really the whole exercise is intended to help roleplaying by encouraging the players to tell a story and play in character. Sure, you could achieve the same mechanical result by just giving each character five numbered skills at random values, and the players could pick one and say "I use skill 2 to solve the problem," but that wouldn't solve the goal of encouraging roleplaying. The goal is for each character to have skills that they feel their character is good at, and that their character can use to solve challenges.

It's true that if you stare at the system too hard, it falls apart. It's a system where you get out of it what you put in to it. If you just say "I use my best skill, Athletics at +17" to every challenge, and the rest of the group goes along with it, there's not much point to the system. Possibly, you'll be getting XP rewards and accomplishing the quest, but the system used to achieve that will seem pointless and unnecessary. If you try to have fun and play your character, you'll probably find the system more rewarding on those fronts.