A talk on the concept of "failures" in a skill challenge (no math, comments welcome)

[Quickleaf]

I appreciate all of the enthusiasm about "fixing" this potential "problem", but that's not what this thread is about. I want people in this thread to discuss whether its a problem at all.

Some people are saying yes, others saying no, so its not concrete one way or another.

If you would like to make changes, then by all means go to the houserule forum and write up those rules. But please leave this thread for its original intention.

Stalker, no intent to derail your thread, sorry. Yes, I think it's a problem, actually 3 problems in 1 relating to how it influences player involvement:

1. Reluctance to Participate
A group-minded tactical player without the option to "Aid" would clearly choose not participating in a skill challenge where his chances of success were dim - after all the reward (1 success like everybody else) isn't worth the risk of accruing a failure.
[sblock=Fix] Reward high risk rolls with 2 successes, or +1 success and reduce #failures by 1, or some variation on the theme.[/sblock]

2. Left Using Aid Another
The 4e philosophy is: No PC should be limited from taking their own exciting action by helping an ally. In other words, WotC identified a trend among gamers to view "Aid" actions as less fun than actions attempting to resolve or overcome a conflict. Thus, the cleric was revised to allow for an attack+healing in the same round.
[sblock=Fix] Revise "Aid" to allow for more complex situations.[/sblock]

3. Resorting to Best Skill
Since there's no tactical advantage to choosing different skills, a tactical player will rely on that small set of skills that are their best all the time (the skill challenge allowing). While the DM creating great balanced skill challenges helps, the real trouble is there's no incentive to try a different skill.
[sblock=Fix #1]Provide incentive for using a different skill, a cumulative +1 bonus perhaps?[/sblock]
[sblock=Fix #2]Implement "skill challenges" (same name, different concept) from Iron Heroes/True20, so that you can really push your ranks in your high skill to pull off cool stunts, adding some variety.[/sblock]

 

[Drammattex]

This argument has been pretty thoroughly covered in the math heavy threads, so we should avoid bringing it up here.

What was the consensus?

I'm interested. But not interested enough to scroll through dozens of pages of it.

(or a link to the relevant post)

 

[Tuft]

What was the consensus?

I'm interested. But not interested enough to scroll through dozens of pages of it.

(or a link to the relevant post)

I try to explain what I think is it here.

 

[Drammattex]

Thank you. Much appreciated.

 

[DM_Blake]

Once you have a system where every player is forced to participate, for better or for worse, the fear of failure you mention is simply a motivation to think creatively about what skill might apply to a given challenge. If a given PC routinely contributes to the failure tally instead of the success tally, then either 1) the player needs better dice, 2) the players needs to retrain to better match the campaign, or 3) the DM needs to build skill challenges that don't screw one of the players.

It's not necessarily the same player who is "screwed" each time.

One skill challenge might be a chase, which favors athletic characters in light armor and puts heavily armored characters and characters who devoted their training to non-athletic skills at a disadvantage. Another skill challenge might be a diplomatic scenario, with the previously advantaged athletic characters being the ones now disadvantaged.

The problem remains, that in any single skill challenge, it is likely that one or more participants are disadvantaged.

It is those players who will feel the pressure and the disappointment of their inability to gianfully contribute.

 

[Zurai]

Y'know, Quickleaf gave me an idea for a quick, easy house rule that at least seems on the surface to directly address the problem:

A player may, instead of risking a failure to gain a success, roll an allowed skill vs a Hard DC and remove a failure. Failing this check does not result in a failure for the purpose of ending the skill challenge.


That allows players that don't have high skill checks appropriate to the challenge to do something positive for the group without risking losing the whole shebang. At the same time, it's vs a Hard DC, so they're unlikely to create a situation where the party can't lose.

The only problem I see is the high-skill players taking a "round" to eliminate all the failures. That's a very real concern, so it needs to be addressed, but I can't think of anything extremely simple to fix it at the moment.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Interestingly enough, if you remove the "rack up a loss if you fail" mechanic from skill challenges and replace it with a sensible rate of loss accumulation (ie - "rack up a loss each round") then you end up with a far less swingy system than the current one. Furthermore strategies such as "everyone except the best guy just rolls to get a +/-2" or "everyone just aids the best guy's roll" become suboptimal (to the point of being automatic failures in the exact system I gave above - 1 person cannot accumulate 2n successes in n rounds).

At the same time, those with low skills aren't disincentivised to contribute (the current system is at the level where a player can say "you know what? If my character was dead, you guys would do better at this challenge" and me pretty much right).

Obviously the "2n successes in n rounds" system is far from complete: there's not any incentives for not simply rolling your best skill.