Yeah, I think Vempyre has it right. It would be better if this system worked right out of the box with their basic guidelines (and honestly, if you just grab the DCs from the table, without consulting the asterisk, I think it probably does), but ultimately, if the main problem is some ratios of numbers, they are pretty easy to fix. If 2:1 is a bad idea, make it 1:1, if DC 20 is bad, make DC 15 or 17. Not a catastrophic problem, and they already said they are looking into it, so no need to jump on Keith for giving advice about how to use the system as is.
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A discussion of Keith Baker's post regarding the Skill Challenge system
- Thread starter Stalker0
- Start date
Nail
First Post
Moving along with this further:
If Mr. Baker is not a 4e designer, why are we debating his post? I feel ..... conflicted. (Which comes right after the embarrassment I wrote about avove.
) Sure, he's a great guy and all, but if he didn't help design 4e, I don't really give a Flying Fig how he thinks the Skill Challenge system section of the DMG should be read.
If Mr. Baker is not a 4e designer, why are we debating his post? I feel ..... conflicted. (Which comes right after the embarrassment I wrote about avove.
) Sure, he's a great guy and all, but if he didn't help design 4e, I don't really give a Flying Fig how he thinks the Skill Challenge system section of the DMG should be read.
WhatGravitas
Explorer
It would help if the OP would change the title to "Keith Baker's post"/"Hellcow's post", because there's a Rich Baker at WotC, while Keith is only freelancer and Eberron creator - and AFAIK more known by the full name combo/nickname than "Mr. Baker".Nail said:
Well, probably because he had the rules longer than us and said that he's been using the rules for a playtest... which means he has actual game observation to add to our more theoretical observations.Nail said:MIf Mr. Baker is not a 4e designer, why are we debating his post? I feel ..... conflicted. (Which comes right after the embarrassment I wrote about avove.
Cheers, LT.
On topic, but shifting gears, I want to actually ask Stalker0 about some of the things Mr. Baker says that I find interesting, but am somewhat too impatient to do the math or simulation of myself:
Let's assume that the players are level 2, as he says. Let's assume that in general they have 3 trained skills with at least +3 from a stat and that one of those skills is +5 either from a stat alone or from a stat +racial boost or from a stat + feat bonus. This means that by default, they each have 3 options with a +9 to +11 bonus. Let's also assume that the DM designing the challenge is aware of their stats and intentionally designs the encounter so that each of them can use one of those skills as primary and the other two only as secondary. Let's also codify a secondary skill use as being a check that gives +2 to the next check if it succeeds and does nothing on failure (so no hard DC secondary checks to potentially gain a challenge success).
Given these parameters, using 20 as the baseline DC, we could simulate the encounter by saying that each character, in order, is going to make a check. 2 times out of 3 that check will be at +9, the other time it will be at +11. 2 times out of 3, that check will count directly to success or failure, the rest of the time it will give +2 to the next person's check (if successful). With that simulation, what are the odds of success for a complexity 1 and a complexity 5 challenge?
Then, we can vary things by saying that the DM hands out the occasional "best friend", so each check has some tweakable percentage chance to get +2. We can also adjust them by saying that the DCs are not all 20, but are distributed around 20 (basically, make a table of values 15-25 with percentages of each). I think this would give us a pretty good sense of just about where you have to put things in order to ensure a reasonable challenge (depending on what you want that to mean - since it isn't like an encounter because the penalty for failure isn't death, the chance of failure can be much higher, even though the rewards are the same).
Maybe I'll write the program myself...
Let's assume that the players are level 2, as he says. Let's assume that in general they have 3 trained skills with at least +3 from a stat and that one of those skills is +5 either from a stat alone or from a stat +racial boost or from a stat + feat bonus. This means that by default, they each have 3 options with a +9 to +11 bonus. Let's also assume that the DM designing the challenge is aware of their stats and intentionally designs the encounter so that each of them can use one of those skills as primary and the other two only as secondary. Let's also codify a secondary skill use as being a check that gives +2 to the next check if it succeeds and does nothing on failure (so no hard DC secondary checks to potentially gain a challenge success).
Given these parameters, using 20 as the baseline DC, we could simulate the encounter by saying that each character, in order, is going to make a check. 2 times out of 3 that check will be at +9, the other time it will be at +11. 2 times out of 3, that check will count directly to success or failure, the rest of the time it will give +2 to the next person's check (if successful). With that simulation, what are the odds of success for a complexity 1 and a complexity 5 challenge?
Then, we can vary things by saying that the DM hands out the occasional "best friend", so each check has some tweakable percentage chance to get +2. We can also adjust them by saying that the DCs are not all 20, but are distributed around 20 (basically, make a table of values 15-25 with percentages of each). I think this would give us a pretty good sense of just about where you have to put things in order to ensure a reasonable challenge (depending on what you want that to mean - since it isn't like an encounter because the penalty for failure isn't death, the chance of failure can be much higher, even though the rewards are the same).
Maybe I'll write the program myself...
FourthBear
First Post
While I definitely agree that the target numbers in the DMG for Skill Challenges have definite problems, I don't think it's appropriate to say that Skill Challenges will somehow "go down in flames." I think the basic system is a good one, they simply need to clarify the appropriate target numbers and success/failure numbers. By simply not using the +5 DC from Difficulty Class table, you make a pretty big stride to approaching reasonable success chances. From looking over Stalker0's work, it seems the next generation of this system will need to work on reducing variance with small changes or at least warning DMs of the issue.Nail said:
