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

[LostSoul]

It seems to me that it has always been true that the DM decides the outcome of a skill check, regardless of whether you succeed or fail. Are you suggesting that its not possible for a 3e DM to have an 'escape from the city' scenario that depends on the outcome of one (or a 100) hide checks? Ditto for 4e.

What I'm suggesting is that the DM does not resolve "what happens". He makes the case: "Skill challenge to get out of Sembia." The PCs roll enough successes. They get out of Sembia. Or the opposite: the PCs roll too many failures. They fail to get out of Sembia.

The dice were used to resolve the skill challenge, not DM fiat.

That's the difference between 4e and 3e.

I think, anyway. It might still be the case that successful Hide checks only resolve "How well you Hide," not the skill challenge itself (though I doubt it).

 

[LostSoul]

My concern is that it seems to put A LOT of pressure on you, at a moment's notice, to come up with credible reasons/solutions to each and every thing the PC's decide to do.

Shift some of that responsibility to the players.

 

[Fifth Element]

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

Because otherwise the game would be too narragamulationist.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Published horror/detective adventures tend to be filled with these sorts of 'gotchas'. A typical scenario involves the players going to some location where they must succeed in a skill check to find the hidden peice of evidence that is the only possible clue as to where to go next to find the next hidden clue. No alternate paths are provided, there is simply binary pass/fail.

It renders the skill 'challenge' rather pointless, in that the DM has potentially designed the equivalent of a campaign ending TPK over say a 'knowledge' or 'search' skill check. He never really wants the check to fail, and if it does, then either it is the most anticlimatic way to end an adventure possible or else he must arrange for the challenge to be pointless because the information will be provided anyway.

A bit of an aside...

The GUMSHOE system attacks this issue directly by outright stating that if your party has a reasonable breadth of skills with "1 rank" invested in them, there should be no possibility of a hard dead end. An adventure should never lack this "feature".

Judicious use of yet higher levels of skill earn your PC spotlight time, or forewarn/forearm your party with bonus knowledge as you push towards the next encounter or adventure climax.

 

[Professor Phobos]

Yeah, GUMSHOE is designed with that very problem in mind. I run a lot of investigative games, and so I always prepared multiple trails of clues to get to the final confrontation, but in a poorly designed published scenario or with a GM who doesn't know how to run a mystery game, it can be a problem.

 

[hong]

A game where you can't actually suffer character death, is equivalent to a game of monopoly where no one can actually go bankrupt.

Nonsense.

 

[Just Another User]

The party now has the 6 wins, so they've won the challenge, but I say nothing and I let it play out. The Samurai rolls athletics to catch the corpse gently and makes it (but it wouldn't have burst anyways since the challenge was won), then the rogue describes burying it so that it won't hurt anything else, which I tell him he doesn't need to roll, they have won the challenge, they clap and cheer a little bit, and the dryad thanks them and gives them some advice and the traditional wooden magic item that dryads always give as rewards

What I don't get it is, nothing the PCs did could reasonably disable the trap and yet, just because they rolled succesfully six unrelated checks the trap stopped working. WTF? At least It fit what we seen of 4e until now, a totally gamist approach without even an hint of an reasonable in-game explanation of why things happen the way they happen.

 

[Harr]

What I don't get it is, nothing the PCs did could reasonably disable the trap and yet, just because they rolled succesfully six unrelated checks the trap stopped working. WTF? At least It fit what we seen of 4e until now, a totally gamist approach without even an hint of an reasonable in-game explanation of why things happen the way they happen.

You left out the part where the ranger won the last roll (Hard difficulty) to secure the corpse together with rope so it would hold tight even when touched. In other words, the trap was disabled. That's what the 6 rolls meant. They were not unrelated, and I find it very weird and contrived that you would say that.

You were not present at the game, you have no idea what was communicated and what wasn't, and I assure you, it made sense to all of us perfectly well. We all knew the corpse was secured.

With no disrespect, it's easy to go hmmm and theorize and poke imaginary holes in a re-told account of a previous gaming session. Easy-peasy. It's quite impossible for me to actually type out EVERY LITTLE THING that went on and was tacitly understood by the players and me during this the game, unless I want to spend as much time typing as we did gaming the session (6 hours).

So, I'm gonna have to ask you for that little bit of respect that when I say, 'it made sense', you just trust me that it did, in fact, make sense, and not paint us like some loonies who accept nonsensical craziness out of nowehere. Because that is the only way we can get anything communicated and discussed without going in circles and rehashing the same point over and over and over.

Edit -> Actually you know what, the last few pages of this thread tell me that it has reached maturity; the OP got the insights that he wanted, some other people were intrigued and eventually understood what I was trying to get across, and I have certainly explained my own viewpoint to the point where I genuinely feel that it's laid out clearly enough that people who still don't get it are either purposely trying to find holes or are just meant to use other systems in the first place.

Like I say in my first post, this whole thing amounts to nothing but a simple coaching and a guide for knowing when to stop and move on to something else. If you don't need that to help you, you don't need this system. So with that, I will bow out, and wish everyone happy gaming with whatever type of skills and systems and challenges they enjoy.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

You left out the part where the ranger won the last roll (Hard difficulty) to secure the corpse together with rope so it would hold tight even when touched. In other words, the trap was disabled. That's what the 6 rolls meant. They were not unrelated, and I find it very weird and contrived that you would say that.

Moving away from how your scenario actually played out, Just Another User does make a good point. If I'm understanding the system as far as we know, you can succeed at disabling the trap without using Disable Device (to use the parlance of our times). Which does give an abstractness to combined skill challenges since the seemingly obvious skill doesn't necessarily need to be used. But I think you're right, if the GM explains how the trap was disabled without using Disable Device (in your case the ranger wrapping it tightly with rope) there is a narrative description of how it was disabled and from there it comes down to whether you like the success vs. failure system or not.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I commend you on that example Harr, it was very interesting, whether or not 4e actually works like that. My concern is that it seems to put A LOT of pressure on you, at a moment's notice, to come up with credible reasons/solutions to each and every thing the PC's decide to do. For an experienced DM coming up with stuff on the fly is just par for the course (it's also one of the most rewarding aspects of roleplaying), but for NEW DMs trying to do that: that's tough, and i would be intimidated.

I was thinking the same thing. And in addition to the DM needing to come up with a credible solution, there's also the added need for creativity as a player. As a player I think it will take a new mindset to start using a skill creatively and apt to the situation without automatically using an obvious skill ("It's a trap, so I'll use Disable Device. What else would I do?") or trying to use a skill that doesn't make sense for the situation.