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

[Plane Sailing]

Complex skill challenges first appeared quite comprehensively in Unearthed Arcana.

You can read all about it on a d20 SRD site such as this one here

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/complexSkillChecks.htm

I know that people don't often seem to follow links off-site, but I do recommend you have a browse of that information to get a handle on some of the concepts which seem to have made themselves into 4e.

Cheers

 

[Harr]

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.

Haha, yes, I had a player try, during a scene where the challenge was to convince a Druid to release his captive Dancing Children say something like 'Ok, Im going to jump around and do backflips and somersaults, impressing him with my acrobatics skills enough that he agrees with me.' To which the rest of us all chuckled amusedly, and I replied 'Cute. No.' Which was the answer he had expected

Edit -> If, however, instead of a fat, severe druid it had been maybe a sly rogue, a circus performer, or maybe even an impressionable young lass, I probably would have allowed it and rolled with it.

 

[Khaim]

Ok, I think I get it now. It is just a meta-gaming mechanism, right?

The success/failure thing? Yeah, I think so. The DM can describe when you hit either threshold, but as Harr illustrated, he doesn't have to.

You asked earlier why the Samurai failing a history check would set off the trap. It wouldn't- but if it was enough to "fail" the party, maybe he remembers something wrong and that information means the next person sets it off (regardless of what they try, and probably before even rolling).

Also, I get the feeling that the DM doesn't have to explicitly say "you passed", "you failed", etc. So the result of a failed knowledge check, or disable device (sorry, Theivery), or whatever might not even be noticed by the players.

 

[Harr]

You have certainly described an exciting encounter, Harr, but I don't understand a few points in it. For example, if the trap goes off after 4 failures, how does the Wizard failing to talk to the Dryad or the Samurai not knowing his history very well contribute to the trap going off?

Well, the thing is, I'm not married to the concept of the trap going off. I see the thing as an encounter. An encounter that happens to have a trap, a dryad, and a big tree in it. If the success threshold is reached, 'something good' happens that wraps up the scene. If the failure threshold is reached, 'something bad' happens that similarly wraps up the scene. What happens excatly I have no idea before we play through it.

Say they fail, and I know, ok, something bad here. If their actions centered mostly around the trap, and their descriptions and their decisions and their roleplaying imply to me that they are all standing around the trap poking it when they reach the fail limit then yes, the trap will explode in their face.

However, if they spent the entire challenge ignoring the trap and just poking the dryad around (which, you know, who wouldn't rather poke a naked dryad rather than a naked bloody corpse ) then 'something bad' is going to happen over there, like the dryad gets scared and melds into her tree never to come out, the dryad gets angry, maybe the dryad attacks, maybe the dryad herself is just so despondent and discouraged that she tries to commit suicide by jumping out and pushes the corpse over? (bah that would have been cool if that had happened!).

Also, it's a trap, right? Are we lessening the rogue's detect traps ability by turning what should be for him a simple die roll into something else? (Even if that something else is a lot cooler?)

Well, in short yes, however I made it clear that ONLY a rogue can search explicitly for traps (ie, only a rogue can say, 'I search for traps' and actually find a trap as being a trap). The Samurai got lucky that he asked exactly the right question directed at exactly the right detail of the right object in the scene to get the description that he did, so yeah, other people can find traps, IF they find them through normal exploration, rather than honing in on 'trap' as an object.

But now we're getting more and more into house-rules and interpretations.. this is REALLY far off from what we know of 4e skill challenges which is very little

Edit -> @xechnao, I think the reason why it is cool to have multiple skill rolls to determine what oneskill roll could achieve is the same reason we just don't roll one time to decide a combat? I mean, we could say, you roll d20 plus your character's level, I roll d20 plus the monster's level, whoever's higher wins, could we not? Why have combats? Same reason to have skill challenges

 

[Aegir]

I'm usually all for anything that cuts down on "needless" rolling, but this system (in theory: I haven't had a chance to try it yet) seems like its worth the extra bit of rolling.

For one, it makes what is often a rather dull situation interesting. Take the example given above, with the corpse. When situations like that have popped up in games I've run/played in, the PCs are split into three groups: The ones who enjoy puzzles and "poke" at the situation to find an answer, the ones who have an idea or two, but once they're expended, largely fall silent, and the ones that couldn't care less, and wander off/watch TV/fall asleep while the scenario plays out.

While a system like this doesn't guarantee that that won't happen, it seems like it would help make it more of a group thing.

 

[Dausuul]

Heh this is pure metagaming. No other way to say it - it's the thrill of gambling. Do you think you can make DC 18, sure, but can you make DC 23?? Or are you gonna wuss out and go for the security of DC 13?

Actually, it doesn't have to be metagaming. Let's say you're trying to sneak into a castle, and you hear "Halt! Who goes there?"

Now, you can say, "Messenger for the King." That's an Easy bluff check. Simple, direct, reasonably believable, but it doesn't necessarily get you very far. The guard will probably have some questions about why you didn't announce yourself at the gate, and he may offer to take the message inside for you. You can avert a fight by saying "Messenger for the King," but you'll have to do some more jawboning before the guard lets you in.

Or you can say, "Sssh, quiet, you fool! I'm a royal spy returning with vital information. It's absolutely crucial that nobody knows I'm here. Stay at your post and don't tell anybody you saw me." That's a Hard bluff check. It's a heck of a gamble and takes some serious chutzpah to pull off, but if you do, you're home free.

Your choice. Which do you want to try?

 

[Celebrim]

I don't see any difference in the actual skill checking in either edition beyond the extra 'coaching' 4e gives you to do it better.

The extra coaching is probably the biggest single improvement between 3e and 4e - assuming that they actually come through with that.

I don't see alot of mechanical improvements. I see some tradeoffs. I see some personal preferences coming to the fore. I see benefits to a certain style of play at the expense of another.

But alot of the advice they've been giving about encounter design, trap design, and the use of skills is spot on. It's annoying that they keep saying, "In 3e you couldn't do this.", when they should be saying, "In 3e we didn't tell anyone to do this, you had to learn on your own." But still, if the DMG is as well written as it seems it could be this iteration, it might be the best DMG since the first one.

And that I think is a very high standard to meet. If its a better DMG than the 1st one (which had alot of bad advice along with the good), then I'll buy it even if I don't intend to play the system. Simply because I still thumb through the 1st edition DMG for ideas even though I know longer use the system.

 

[Ximenes088]

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.

In my experience, you don't get the same mechanical effect. Aside from the blisteringly difficult prospect of quickly calculating a single die difficulty out of multiple checks at variable difficulty, each stage of the process is contingent on the results of the earlier one. The players will dare high difficulties or try to bet safe with low based on how they're progressing.

I recently ran a solo-PC mass combat with the Skill Challenge mechanism. The PC had a ragtag band of villagers that she'd managed to organize into an ambush on a stronghouse full of elven occupiers. She was rolling Diplomacy to inspire, Intimidate to weaken the morale of the elves, Tumble to break through their line, and three or four other skills during the course of the battle. She used her combat abilities as stunt flavor for the rolls, occasionally gaining a bonus in exchange for exposing herself to damage or expending limited resources.

The dice did not favor her, and the steady racking of skill failures gave me all the reason I needed to decide that the battle was going against her. She could see the fight gradually slipping out of her control, rather than making a single die toss and watching everything collapse on a single failure. The slow failure gave her time to rethink and decide to take some major risks to get the bonii on her rolls that eventually got her the successes she needed. The fact that she'd came within one failure of loss gave me all the direction I needed to indicate that the battle had been ferociously bloody and that the villagers would surely have been slaughtered to a man without her leadership. She came out of it permanently scarred due to the risks she took in the fight, and she feels like she actually earned that scar, rather than having it be some random accident of a bad die roll. The battle simply would not have played out the same way if I'd boiled it all down to one Diplo roll to see whether she could keep the peasants fighting longer than the elves could stand it.

 

[Andur]

To the OP, why, because it makes it less swingy. Nothing sucks more than having 20+ ranks in a skill and rolling a 1. Too bad you fail. Likewise you can make an atomic bomb if you roll a 20 on a Int check for engineering...

Multiple checks allows for less swing. The way they are introducing it in 4e makes it so the rogue is not the skill hog, everyone CAN participate, but are not forced to participate. I guess you are not a big fan of choice or giving weak role players tools to role play better.

And what Xim said about probability guide... saves me typing.

 

[Harr]

There's another, more 'touchy-feely' way to look at the whole 'why multiple checks' thing, and it's the psychological impact on the players of effort versus reward, which Ximenes touched upon.

The reason I think this is because right after this encounter was done, one of the players commented 'you know... I think this is the first puzzle, EVER, that we have ever solved, the way it was supposed to.' And the others agreed. I hadn't mentioned that until now because it seems very over-the-top and fanboyish, and it really isn't, these are guys who couldn't care less about system and really have no idea (which is why we're playing with a mock-4e skills system in a 3e game in the first place).

And it struck me that they would feel that way, because we've been playing D&D more or less weekly for over a year now, and they've certainly both lost and won their share of non-combat encounters, gotten rewards for them XP, everything. But they say they always felt that they either won through luck, or they bumbled along without knowing what the hell they were doing until something went right, or they knew what to do but messed it up somehow anyway. The encounters and the rewards and the XP were there, but the simple satisfaction of 'you did good' wasn't. Last night was the first time things actually clicked in that way.

I guess I could read all sorts of things into this, such as 'team effort', 'everyone participates', 'nobody including the DM knows the outcome', 'encouraging creativity and outside-box thinking', 'appropriate reward for an appropriate effort, etc, etc, but the truth is, I have no idea why it worked, it just did. Maybe I jsut got lucky last night and I'm giving more credit to the system than it deserves. I don't know.

The PC had a ragtag band of villagers that she'd managed to organize into an ambush on a stronghouse full of elven occupiers. She was rolling Diplomacy to inspire, Intimidate to weaken the morale of the elves, Tumble to break through their line, and three or four other skills during the course of the battle. She used her combat abilities as stunt flavor for the rolls, occasionally gaining a bonus in exchange for exposing herself to damage or expending limited resources.

Dude, that is awesome. Consider that bit stolen

You know what I'm thinking? Next session we're renting out a ship to sail across some islands in search of treasure [deserved plug: it's an adventure taken from Goodman Games's Dungeon Crawl Classics #46 "Treasure Maps" book].

So then... Challenge: Ship runs into a ferocious elemental-water storm. Can the party help, direct, inspire, bluff and intimidate their crew into pulling out of it alright? Or will the ship capsize and dump them all out to find themselves alone and half-drowned on the beaches of Treasure Island? We'll see next week.. thanks for the idea!