Actual play: my first "social only" session

[Spatula]

I would say that most published skill challenges, and certainly all of the early WotC ones, suffered from a lack of conflict. My thinking is similar to pemerton's in that there needs to be stuff happening in the challenge that interacts with and informs the players' decisions. Obstacles. Complications. Developments. Danger! Otherwise you might as well not bother. If the SC is just roll some dice until you succeed or fail - and this was what most of the example SC in the DMG1 were - it's going to be boring.

The "travel from point A to B, and if you fail, you fight a combat that's worth more XP than the SC was, but still get there" is a depressingly common example of that.

 

[wedgeski]

Early WotC Skill Challenges suffered from a dreadful lack everything, including being good. But, I can kind of sympathise; the framework as I recall was added late to the game, the math was wonky, and the spirit of those early adventures was not conducive to relaxed, open-ended SC's built as much (or more) from improvising around the PCs' behaviour as being planned and structured in advance.

Mearls' later studies on the concept which appeared on DDI and then later in ?DMG2? were much more inspiring.

 

[Balesir]

Here it is, from http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/dungeon/156/156_sow_rivenroar.pdf

Yep, the Trollhaunt Warrens adventure (low Paragon WotC early adventure) has a similar challenge for "finding the dungeon". I modified it heavily; in the original it really made no difference if the PCs succeeded or failed - they got to the dungeon anyway. And yet there were a set of other sites in the area described and provided with clues/treasures to find but with no obvious reason or mechanism for exploring them. I simply made each site the "bonus" for getting a success in the SC - one success = a chance to explore one site. One failure also led to a short combat encounter (worth half the SC value in XP, but not giving any additional XP over that awarded for the challenge). Overall success finally gave possible surprise in the encounter before the dungeon; failure made it likely that the PCs were surprised (because they needed the clue in the encounter, and could thus get pulled in by the 'bait').

It worked pretty well in play. We had a fair bit of ritual use*, for a change, and a magical map resulted in the players getting (eventually) a map that proved handy later on...

*: Travellers' Camoflage (?) for die mods and for stealth bonuses when a failure led to a combat encounter. Others for aids exploring the 'bonus' sites.

 

[I'm A Banana]

For me, the exploration challenges generally cost the PC's a day's rations and a healing surge (that they can't recover) when they fail a check. Failure also means you can't try anymore. They just need to get X successes (usually 3-5, depending on how hard/how many days the journey is supposed to be).

The party could die on the road, running out of supplies or healing surges, or they could simply all fail and wind up back where they started (making that particular strategy impossible: they must now find a map/hire a guide/something else), or they could make it to the place, with several surges and rations spent.

The key here, I've found, is to make sure there's more than one path (usually ~ 3 paths) from Point A to Point B. The party might not want to spend the gold to hire the guide, or take the well-traveled, but bandit-ridden roads, but they'll eventually be out of options, if they want to go there, and they keep failing.

That doesn't work so well for social encounters (though the success/failure still functions OK, the only real risk is "the other guys don't change their minds"), and I'd still like the PC's do be able to do something unique and distinctive ("I roll another check..."), but it's an adequate stop-gap.

 

[pemerton]

That doesn't work so well for social encounters (though the success/failure still functions OK, the only real risk is "the other guys don't change their minds"), and I'd still like the PC's do be able to do something unique and distinctive ("I roll another check..."), but it's an adequate stop-gap.

I wanted to pick up on the comment about "the only real risk" being that the NPCs don't change their minds.

I think a social skill challenge can be worked a bit harder than that, by reframing the situation in response to each successful or failed check, so that something more nuanced than "they agree" or "they disagree" comes out of the challenge. I see it as working something like the idea of compromise resulting from a Duel of Wits in BW - and in my own experience, social skill challenges can produce outcomes that neither the players nor the GM anticipated going in (eg the example I gave in the OP; or the time when the players began by negotiating a truce with the Duergar slavers, and ended up agreeing to ransom the slaves for 300 gp to be paid over in a neutral city in a month's time).

For me, this goes back to the idea I posted upthread (#13), that a skill challenge - particularly one with a fairly high degree of complexity - by obliging the GM to keep the scene alive, creates a "space" in the fiction that allows for unexpected outcomes to emerge.

Looked at in this way, the skill challenge "X before Y" approach is not an artificial constraint on the natural flow of events (as some critics sugget) but a facilitator and mandator of creativity - analogous again, at least in broad terms, to the compromise element of a Duel of Wits.

 

[S'mon]

The (original) Skill Challenge rules to me seem like a kind of programming, they look like something a computer games designer would create. With social skill challenges they create a form of AI. Having a real live GM at the table seems to me to make them completely unnecessary. Now more recently people are treating them as a much more relaxed open-ended framework; I still don't think that they add significant value but at least they no longer detract heavily from the value of having a real person GMing.

 

[Balesir]

The (original) Skill Challenge rules to me seem like a kind of programming, they look like something a computer games designer would create. With social skill challenges they create a form of AI. Having a real live GM at the table seems to me to make them completely unnecessary. Now more recently people are treating them as a much more relaxed open-ended framework; I still don't think that they add significant value but at least they no longer detract heavily from the value of having a real person GMing.

For many years, I went with the "diplomacy is just done with a real conversation between GM and players" route. Eventually, though, I observed that (a) certain players could persuade certain GMs every time, while others were unlikely to have their contribution accepted, and (b) even though I (naturally - and not necessarily accurately) thought myself quite objective and dispassionate in my own judgements, I felt more inclined to accede to some players than others.

For me, therefore, what the skill roll (and skill challenge) system in 4E does is it makes me engage with ideas that, at first, I might dismiss due to my own prejudices, my own way of looking at the world, or my own "match" with the way the idea was worded. Or, it makes me look for a way in which an idea I instinctively like might fail, or is flawed.

I find that a useful discipline - but I can see that it's not for everybody.

 

[Imaro]

For many years, I went with the "diplomacy is just done with a real conversation between GM and players" route. Eventually, though, I observed that (a) certain players could persuade certain GMs every time, while others were unlikely to have their contribution accepted, and (b) even though I (naturally - and not necessarily accurately) thought myself quite objective and dispassionate in my own judgements, I felt more inclined to accede to some players than others.

For me, therefore, what the skill roll (and skill challenge) system in 4E does is it makes me engage with ideas that, at first, I might dismiss due to my own prejudices, my own way of looking at the world, or my own "match" with the way the idea was worded. Or, it makes me look for a way in which an idea I instinctively like might fail, or is flawed.

I find that a useful discipline - but I can see that it's not for everybody.

I would be interested in hearing from you or permeton, how the actual skill challenge mechanics foster this. I guess I'm a little confused since it seems the actual skill challenge rules are used very loosely, with supplemental material from other games, or as a basis for alternate rules, and this makes it hard for me to see the benefit that the actual skill challenge mechanics as designed by WotC, bring to these types of situations vs. the "roleplay and roll" method alot of games default to. If anything it seems you all have had to modify running skill challenges to get what seems to amount to the same net result.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would be interested in hearing from you or permeton, how the actual skill challenge mechanics foster this. I guess I'm a little confused since it seems the actual skill challenge rules are used very loosely, with supplemental material from other games, or as a basis for alternate rules, and this makes it hard for me to see the benefit that the actual skill challenge mechanics as designed by WotC, bring to these types of situations vs. the "roleplay and roll" method alot of games default to. If anything it seems you all have had to modify running skill challenges to get what seems to amount to the same net result.

I think it is too narrow to think of the SC mechanics presented in DMG etc as a systematic set of mechanics. It is a set of concepts and guidelines to start with. There is a basic structure to it, but if you read the various articles by Mike Mearls and the material in DMG2 it is pretty clear that there's no one specific set of mechanics that constitute THE 'skill challenge system' as there is for the combat system.

So, you can run the game with nothing but tossing skill checks here and there. You can add in the pass/fail mechanic and have a way to measure PC progress towards a goal. You can pile variable levels of success on top of that. You can use Advantages, secondary skills, etc to allow you to reflect specific features of a given situation or give the players specific levels of control or different strategies to follow. You can also totally rework the system to use different mechanics or use them in very different ways (and DMG2 contains an example of this).

The advantage is always the same advantage. The SC concept gives you a way to decide when a goal is or is not achieved and to what degree. You can 'wing it', but sometimes it is nice to be able to just go with where the players and the dice take you and when they hit 3 failures KNOW that you can just say "OK, you blew it".

 

[Imaro]

I think it is too narrow to think of the SC mechanics presented in DMG etc as a systematic set of mechanics. It is a set of concepts and guidelines to start with. There is a basic structure to it, but if you read the various articles by Mike Mearls and the material in DMG2 it is pretty clear that there's no one specific set of mechanics that constitute THE 'skill challenge system' as there is for the combat system.

So, you can run the game with nothing but tossing skill checks here and there. You can add in the pass/fail mechanic and have a way to measure PC progress towards a goal. You can pile variable levels of success on top of that. You can use Advantages, secondary skills, etc to allow you to reflect specific features of a given situation or give the players specific levels of control or different strategies to follow. You can also totally rework the system to use different mechanics or use them in very different ways (and DMG2 contains an example of this).

The advantage is always the same advantage. The SC concept gives you a way to decide when a goal is or is not achieved and to what degree. You can 'wing it', but sometimes it is nice to be able to just go with where the players and the dice take you and when they hit 3 failures KNOW that you can just say "OK, you blew it".

Ok, so SC's are basically anything you want them to be?? As to knowing when a goal is achieved or not, shouldn't that flow organically from the interactions? I mean if your players have rolled 3 failures, yet one player has a cool idea that makes sense and can still achieve the goal... should it end?

Ultimately I find it hard to praise a system that, for all intents and purposes, boils down to "run it however you want to." ... since that's basically what everyone was doing before skill challenges. Maybe I'm expecting more or looking for something that just isn't there, but it's not hard to expect more when you have people praising the SC mechanics. However I think your definition of them being just guidelines much more acceptable.