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

[UngeheuerLich]

Yes, but you do not resolve combat by making multiple rolls and hoping to achieve x successes before y failures. You just roll once each time/round: each roll is different-for a different task. And things among your task resolutions may change.
In 4e skill checks things do not change: you either escape the guards or you do not. Yes, you may critically succeed or fail but you still need only one roll to check it out.

Of course, that is all combat is about: achieving enough hits to kill before enemy achieves enough hits to kill you.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Celebrim, can you give me an example from official sources where you could do a series of skill checks like what Harr has presented?

I think the closest you can come to it are scenarioes of the Dungeon/Dragon Adventure Path.
I remember probably 4 encounters that contained something that came relatively close to the general gist of the idea, but the actual implementation is not "perfect". Basically, the idea seemed to be to have several interconnected mini-scenes which often could be resolved by a few skill checks to solve the whole encounter to a good satistfaction.

I put the examples in a spoiler block.
Note that I was a player in both settings so I don't know the "implementation details" outlined in the books and can only refer to what I actually saw and did not forget.
Shackled City:
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One encounter was "chaos" breaking out in Cauldron. A Umber Hulk appeared/got free, and I think there might have been even more going on. Anyway, the PCs tried to rescue themselves and some NPCs, and I remember that there were several checks involved, and no single "clear" way to solve the situation.

Another encounter was the volcano breaking out in the same city. Again, a city in chaos, and there were several situations where the PCs had to rescue people. The goal was to get "points" for solving certain situations, and to get enough to have enough people rescued. Not all tasks required skill checks, I remember at least one big fight, and maybe a second, but it might have actually be part of the first described scenario.
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Savage Tides
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The first attack on Farshore consisted of several smaller encounters/challenges. Rescue someone from a burning house, stop a few pirates. Most of them were resolved by combat, though.

The lead-up to avoid the destruction of Farshore by the Pirates allows several individual tasks that can be resolved with skill checks to gain "victory points".
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Basically, there was always the kind of idea that you could link several individual aspects together and decide, based on the overall importance, how things worked out. But it was always something more or less "made up by the adventure designers" (speaking to their skills), not something that seemed to have a clear underlying guideline. I wouldn't be surprised though if such adventures weren't the reason why WotC designers came up with the 4E guidelines.

(But before anyone complains about stealing stuff from Paizo - I know at least one game that had a similar concept of skill challenges - I remember that there was a special mechanic for this in Torg.)

 

[Celebrim]

The example he gave is if they fail to convince a King of something, that a total failure would never end with "and then the PC's are locked in the dungeon forever. The End" Instead if they do fail they will either not gain a reward, or get some story based penality later on.

Campaigns should never end in TPK's either, but sometimes there has to be the risk of it. Failure can't always consist in 'not getting your reward'. I met play the game that way for 5 year olds, but this isn't 'Fluffy Bunnies & Lollipops'.

 

[xechnao]

I would ASSUME that players will get feedback on how difficult their attempt was and thus would likely be able to change plans mid way through the contest.

And furthermore being able to change the contest itself. IMO this is key for a tabletop roleplaying game. It is what it makes it different from a video game where everything is pre-programmed (every possible contest and its outcome).
But if this is the case you still do not need the precalculated multiple successes/failures thing. I hope it comes more as an example of a guideline in the books, along with others that are different than this one, rather than the actual mechanic which does not make so much sense.

 

[Mallus]

Campaigns should never end in TPK's either, but sometimes there has to be the risk of it.

There does?

Failure can't always consist in 'not getting your reward'.

Of course not. But depending on the level of player investment in the in-game narrative, there are a whole host of deleterious consequences a DM can witness on players short of killing the lot of them.

 

[DeusExMachina]

What I also like about this system is that it gives you a a certain guideline as to how well/badly the party succeeds or fails at it. With the 6/4 system while trying to convince the king of something for example, it'd be completely different if they fail 4 times in a row, which might earn them the wrath of the king and get thrown in prison or if they end up with 5 successes before they roll their 4th failure, which might mean that the king is not indifferent to their problem, but after much deliberating decides not to help them, because it has too much political ramifications. Perhaps if they come back later with more proof or reasons they might actually get help after all...
With 1 diplomacy roll you simply don't get that kind of options, so the skill challenge system helps integrate system mechanics and roleplay in my opinion...

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

At a practical level, combat often is achieving X hits before Y failures, or something bad happens.

This is just more abstract than the norm for combat systems in RPGs.

Removing the chrome, every PC has an array of abilities. Some are going to be Easy, Medium, or Hard in order to achieve a useful result. The PCs get some amount of feedback along the way, that they are getting successes or failures (descriptions of the results of attacks).

 

[Celebrim]

Celebrim, can you give me an example from official sources where you could do a series of skill checks like what Harr has presented?

I'm far from the best person to ask that. I pretty much stopped buying WotC stuff when 3.5 came out, and I have only passing familiarity with the contents of latter WotC works.

However, by my philosophy of gaming, I think it is entirely the wrong question as well. I think a better question would be, "Can you show me a rule from official sources which would prevent you from doing a series of skill checks to resolve an encounter?"

Everything that isn't forbidden, is permitted.

Besides, I never play by the RAW anyway. Especially when they suck. (See 'Diplomacy')

I think it is fairly easy to demonstrate that many problems are in fact a series of skill checks. For example, when crossing a rickety suspension bridge, the mechanic isn't 'Make a balance check, get to the other side'. The mechanic is, 'Make a balance check, move X number of feet'. If the bridge is longer than that (as for example one like the one in 'X2: Isle of Dread'), it can be viewed as a series of skill checks. Nor is the mechanic a binary, 'Fail a balance check, fall'. It is 'Fail a balance check by more than 5, fall, otherwise make no progress'. And that's just for a simple linear problem. If we wanted to spice things up, we could add a gap in the bridge that must be jumped... or bridged with a craft skill check... or tyrolean traversed by using rope... or whatever.

The same is obviously true of the climb skill. The same is obviously true of the 'runaway mine cart' scenario given as an example of 4e style play. You could run the same encounter in 3e, you just wouldn't have been encouraged to design an encounter like that.

Diplomacy makes a poor example primarily because the social rules as written are so bad that I very much doubt anyone uses them exactly as written in practice. If they do, I want to play a Bard in thier campaign. Between maxing out my Diplomacy and the Glibness spell, the only thing we'll ever need to fight is things that are mindless.

But a complex social encounter in 3e would play out very much like the balance check example. Social encounters can be imagined as dungeons, in which the rooms represent various states of mind of the NPCs, and the corridors represent methods of changing the NPCs attitudes. Some rooms are dangerous and to be avoided. Some are dead ends. Some corridors are trapped - the way seems deceptively easy but it is in fact hard.

Imagine a situation in which thier are say nine NPC's. Each NPC starts out with differing attitudes to the PC's - from perhaps friendly all the way to hostile. Let's imagine that the goal of the scenario is to convince all nine NPC's to give the PC's aid, and before that can happen each of the NPC's must first be friendly and then must be convinced it is in thier interest to help the PC's and then must be convinced that if they are to give aid, it must be of the magnitude the PC's desire instead of some lesser gesture. Even under the rules as written and presented in the most simple way (all 9 individuals are part of the conversation at the same time), this is obviously not best handled as a single diplomacy check. The DC of convincing the different individuals is different. Different strategies might be employed depending on the individual (bribes, convincing an NPC to make an appeal on your behalf, intimidation, deciet, etc.). Different arguments will appeal differently to each NPC. The PC's might learn things about the NPC over the course of the encounter that given insight into how best to appeal to that NPC (they might learn that they have been falsely accused by a third party, and now that NPC holds a grudge against them, they might learn that the NPC shares a common religion or special interest with one of the NPC's, they might learn of an NPC's secret motive, or that an NPC is being blackmailed by thier enemy, or find that the NPC has a rational concern that they are able to address). It is also somewhat obvious that influencing the NPC's attitude is a different skill check than convincing the NPC to provide aid even under the rules as written.

If you want to run a scenario like that with a single diplomacy check, be my guest. You'll still be able to run scenarios like that with a single diplomacy check in 4e. Obviously, social encounters aren't for you. But the real problem from my perspective with running the above social problem in 3e isn't that you can't do it with multiple skill checks, its that diplomacy skill (and skills in general) are in 3.X much more lightly valued in the rules than combat ability which makes skills to easily broken by anyone that wants to min-max them.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

It is a matter of scale of fineness/coarseness. In 3e most examples provided are very simple.

One could easily imagine an information gathering phase of an adventure being a series of socials skill encounters. You might start the ball rolling with Gather Information. More specific questions yield a trail to more specific "encounters". The encounters might each be resolvable in a number of ways, some might require a single check and others might require more.

FREX, a certain captain of the town guard might be an Easy use of Diplomacy with a very large bribe. But there are ways avoid paying a bribe with other approaches. Maybe he can be blackmailed? But if you are too clumsy (gather more Fail results than Succeed results) the guard may get wind of your sniffing into his affairs and become adversarial (you suffer a negative consequence).

 

[LostSoul]

Campaigns should never end in TPK's either, but sometimes there has to be the risk of it.

Why should there be a chance of something happening that you never want to happen?