Advice regarding 'Skill Challenge'

[Celebrim]

I think that is the strength of 4e's skill system is that while you certainly won't be trained in everything you ARE likely to have pretty competent bonuses at least 1/3 of all the skills in the book

Only because the skills in the book collectively cover only a small percentage of things one could be good at, and only because the overall approach of 4e retains 3e's overall passive approach to skills (compare how skills are used to how class features are used) - but let's not turn this into an edition debate.

While the number of skills in my game is larger than even RAW 3e, the ability of a group to span competency in a large number of skills is no less. An 18 INT human rogue would be at minimum 'proficient' in 16 skills. I have six players in the group, and there are two skill monkeys in the group, and a multi-class character that has dipped into skill monkey. Aside from captaining a large sailing vessel, the party has pretty broad competency. I'm not terribly worried about whether for a given scene someone will have an obviously relevant skill, much less a very specific 4e problem like can you use a spell or class ability in place of a skill check to gain a success if you are playing RAW?

What I'm worried about is creating a range of scenes where everyone's different skills (whether literally skills or class abilities or spells) will be potentially useful, and equally where the color of the scene and its resolution are diverse. Of course in such scenes I could default to ability checks, but ability checks are generally unreliable. The important point is that if you are skilled in my game, you can reliably propose actions on the basis of that (because unlike 4e, difficulty is not expected to scale with level) in the exact same way you can reliably propose actions by casting a spell (in 3e) or by using a class ability (in 4e).

As far as the broad conflict here, they are racing to catch up to the BBEG who is an another ship (one better suited to this voyage). How well they handle the voyage determines how far behind they are, and as such, how time crunched they are as well as (for some complicated reasons I won't go into) how they'll interact with the BBEG and what the BBEG's plans will be. There is also a specific conflict between the PC and a deity playing out here which is directly tied to character background. This scene is intended to bring that conflict to the player's attention in a very climatic way, and is likewise intended to be the climax of the voyage (all scenes after this event are intended to be either denouement or side quests). Ideally, if all goes well, the outcome of this scene is 'You reach the island with few further incidents'. (Though of course, I have plans for all eventualities).

Some of the suggestions above like mutiny, sea monster, and sahaugin are planned events that feed into part of the journey's central structure - that is, the ship and crew are the real 'hit points' in the journey. The ship has 105 crew. It requires a minimum of 25 crew to properly run the ship (and that with some stress). Likewise, the ship has a set number of hit points. The structure I'm planning for this journey is less, "Protect your character" than it is, "Can you protect the ship and crew." So I already have something like a 'skill challenge' planned and designed with several sea monsters, where how fast and efficiently they can dispatch the threat largely determines not whether they get injured, but how much crew they lose. If they get to the hurricane with a beat up ship and crew that's largely been eaten by monsters, and don't resolve some problems in ship's morale and so forth, then the hurricane is going to be an almost insurmountable challenge and the ship is probably going down. If on the other hand, they do resolve those problems and take care of the ship then I want the challenge to be scary but not particularly threatening - NPCs can handle the ship, and the PC's assist in various small ways to protect the crew. I do however have 2 skill monkey's that can directly help with skills generally superior to the NPC's on the boat in every regard but actually sailing it, so I want to get them involved tying down rigging, reefing sails, cutting lose torn sails, and so forth. The rest of the PC's have no business being above decks during the height of the storm, so I'm particularly interested in ways to keep them involved so that they aren't merely passengers in the scene - manning pumps, closing hatches that are ripped off, helping the carpenter patch leaks, tying down cargo that breaks lose, treating injuries, and so forth.

Right now my biggest worry is pacing, because I have no plan for putting this all together. My ultimate goal is to have a set of 'timelines' with parallel events in the hold and on deck that together tell a dramatic and exciting story, which is going to climax in a 'rogue wave' that is anything but a rogue (it's actually a very obedient wave).

 

[Celebrim]

Or avoid a 'climb' or 'balance' task by throwing the rope accurately?

I have a player that loves using 'use rope' to lasso things, so potentially, "Yes."

Get someone in danger of being washed overboard to "hang on"? Inspire everyone to use "one hand for yourself, and one for the ship" to keep safe while working?

Yes, though Leadership does let you 'Assist Other' at a distance, or to assist multiple people simultaneously, so most of what you are talking about reminds me more of 'I grant X +2 on their check', which is perfectly fine but I don't think requires much planning on my part.

This depends on how "medieval" you want your ship to be.

Nautical technology on my homebrew world is roughly equivalent to mid 18th century in most respects, though some features are as advanced as 19th century (for example, purpose built 'Crow's Nests' have been invented, though in game they are usually called 'Drake's Nests'). The main difference is that, in order to avoid introducing ubiquitous explosives to the game, torsion engines are used in place of cannon BUT other than range, these engines are basically as effective as cannon (a shot from a torsion engine would almost certainly bounce off a real 18th century ship without doing much real damage, but gamism over realism here).

The ship in question is the 20 engine Ship-Rigged Corvette 'Valiant', a privateer operating out of the player's home port and which they are minority owners. You can presume I'm familiar with the basics of naval history, but not with the practice of actually sailing. However, in general, I have the initial plan proposed by the NPC to be to run before the storm, and when this fails, to try to hove to in the storm. This switch will be one of the dramatic moments which the NPCs take a calculated risk because they'd be briefly lying ahull during the turn, and where the success of the PC's in helping will determine to a great extent how well it goes and what complications arise immediately. I would count convincing the captain that the storm can't be run from and to hove to immediately as a success toward winning the challenge, but I don't foresee that happening. If they don't hove to eventually, that's a big problem, because the rear hull of those 18th century ships just can't survive being overtaken by a breaking wave (lots of glass back there and a big flat surface), so that climax event would almost certainly swamp the ship.

What if there were several similar objects - belaying points, for example - and picking which were likely to give way and which not was the required action?

Sounds like a good idea.

Maybe an enticeing island - complete with sheltering lagoon - is detected by the party mage as an illusion/enchantment and the characters must dissuade the crew from heading straight for such obvious salvation? The "isle" might even have been conjured by the party's enemies...

The enemy could probably conjure a real island to crash into, in so far as it comes to that. I'll have to think about that one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Only because the skills in the book collectively cover only a small percentage of things one could be good at, and only because the overall approach of 4e retains 3e's overall passive approach to skills (compare how skills are used to how class features are used) - but let's not turn this into an edition debate.

No, no debate. I'm curious what is meant by 'passive approach' and how that would contrast with some other approach. I've not personally experienced any skill system that wasn't "you got skill X, you need to do Y, X is appropriate to Y, roll some dice against X" or possibly in 4e you might match your passive/active Perception or Intuition against an opponents Bluff or Stealth check. The latter might be what I would consider a 'passive use of a skill' perhaps, though it is just as easy to think of those things as 'defenses' too, and those 2 skills could easily be derived attributes instead of 'skills' per-se, though its really hair splitting.

 

[pemerton]

I very much see the sense in Manbearcat's comment: "Regardless of how you handle it, I've always found that the best way to engage each player is to have a broad exposition of the scene, framing the whole in the conflict. Then, isolate each PC and put specific trouble right in their face NOW that they have to deal with." I'm just struggling with make this work as a group activity with PCs really not optimized for running a boat, and making it exciting.

<snip>

In addition to novel events - cargo breaking lose in the hold, waves rocking the ship, lightning striking a mast, and so forth, I need inspiration regarding getting PC's involved in the scene instead of just huddling in the hold waiting for it to play out.

<snip>
Intimidate/Diplomacy

Two thoughts/suggestions:

The first comes from the fact that I am currently GMing the Penumbra d20 module Maiden Voyage (session report here). I am not especially nautically informed or inclined. Neither are my players. But what a ship gives you is a relatively small cast of NPCs whom the PCs can't escape, because of the confined space and consequent enforced contact.

This can then link into social skill checks/conflicts. These don't even have to be linked to the storm per se - rather, the storm can provide the backdrop for bringing some pre-existing dramatic conflict to its crisis point. This can also give a less physically-inclined PC a reason to get involved in the action.

I also saw in the OP that it is a Storm Lord enemy that is precipitating the hurricane. Others have suggested assaults by sahuagin or whatever. I would link these directly to the Storm Lord - so dealing with the assailants also (from the point of view of the players) further progresses the broader campaign connection to/engagement with their enemy. This also gives you a fail-forward if you need one - the ship goes down (or has to beach on a deserted island, or whatever) but the players have some sort of more-or-less concrete lead to the Storm Lord that they can pursue via their PCs even if their ocean voyage in itself has become something of a failure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Its a good point Pemerton, its always nice to have a "wow we wiped bad on that one, here's the new plan" sort of contingency in mind. This did make me think about what else you could have in terms of a fun monster. A Typhoon Dragon would be awesome!

 

[Celebrim]

I'm curious what is meant by 'passive approach' and how that would contrast with some other approach.

Basically, a passive use is only used to respond to events in the game world, and usually only those particular events where the DM has called out 'You can use this skill here'. In general, passive skills only have value if the designer invents scenarios for the player to use the skill in. For example, this is common problem with Call of Cthulhu scenarios - not all skills are created equal. A typical entry in a CoC module will describe 2-3 skills that are useful at that time. Your knowledge of Ancient Greek only matters if their are clues in Ancient Greek. Knowledge skills are typically passive, and certainly the 'Know' skills when 3e was first released were entirely passive.

On the other hand, since CoC is almost entirely skill based, it has many active skills as well. Active skills are skills that let the player propose to do things and develop strategies and solutions that they might not otherwise have available to them. D&D is class based and almost all the active abilities that a player character has are class based abilities. The 3rd edition designers were generally very conservative with respect to the skills system and made the skills very weak, unreliable, and passive compared to class abilities (such as spells). Some of the few examples of skills that aren't passive and weak - like Use Magical Device - were really instances of the designers translating class abilities from prior editions into the new skill system (something that they did rarely). But, for example, Bluff is a very potent skill by 3e standards because it allows the player to propose social solutions that they might otherwise not have, and to propose two combat maneuver ('Feint' and 'Distract') which they might otherwise be unable to rely on. So you can regularly make new plans if you are skilled in Bluff that comparatively don't rely on DM. However, even so the Bluff skill design is very conservative. Consider that the DC of having false surface thoughts is 100, yet the spell it is trying to defeat is available at 3rd level. Similarly, Sense Motive lets you emulate 'Detect Thoughts' with a DC 100 check, but as a spell this available at 3rd level. There is a huge distrust of making the spells more reliable and less used solely as a way to overcome hurdles when the DM calls them out that remind me that in D&D skills are a later edition to the system that is somewhat tacked on.

I've not personally experienced any skill system that wasn't "you got skill X, you need to do Y, X is appropriate to Y, roll some dice against X" or possibly in 4e you might match your passive/active Perception or Intuition against an opponents Bluff or Stealth check. The latter might be what I would consider a 'passive use of a skill' perhaps, though it is just as easy to think of those things as 'defenses' too, and those 2 skills could easily be derived attributes instead of 'skills' per-se, though its really hair splitting.

Yes, I think you actually intuit the heart of it. Bluff and Stealth are active. Perception and Intuition are passive (or 'defensive'). I'm not saying passive skills are entirely bad. Every system is going to have some. If they involve defenses that reliably come up, even if you can't plan an action around them they can still be highly useful to have. Arguably Tumble is a passive skill and so as you mention are the 'Perception' skills, but since they defend against situations that reliably come up in scenarios and which are quite serious, they make the cut IMO as well designed. In fact, Tumble is one of the better 3e skills, giving the player character defenses against AoOs and falls, and improved AC when fighting defensively. It's so potent and broadly useful, I have a tendency to think of it as one of the active skills, since the player is freed up to propose a lot of tactics in combat that they might otherwise be forced to avoid.

Basically, I'd like all the skills to be as useful as Bluff and Intimidation, for their to be more 'active' skills available, and for skillfulness to compete with spells in terms of reliable utility. To do that required lots of minor tweaks.

I consider 4e a mixed bag on skills. On the one hand, they did more to protect active skills from strictly superior skill use ('Fly' vs. climb, 'Invisibility' vs. hide, 'Bluff' vs. Glibness or Charm Person). But it seems also that they more intended skills to work as occasional means to vaulting some hurdle that the DM put in the way, and generally made being the skillful one less valuable.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Basically, a passive use is only used to respond to events in the game world, and usually only those particular events where the DM has called out 'You can use this skill here'. In general, passive skills only have value if the designer invents scenarios for the player to use the skill in. For example, this is common problem with Call of Cthulhu scenarios - not all skills are created equal. A typical entry in a CoC module will describe 2-3 skills that are useful at that time. Your knowledge of Ancient Greek only matters if their are clues in Ancient Greek. Knowledge skills are typically passive, and certainly the 'Know' skills when 3e was first released were entirely passive.

On the other hand, since CoC is almost entirely skill based, it has many active skills as well. Active skills are skills that let the player propose to do things and develop strategies and solutions that they might not otherwise have available to them. D&D is class based and almost all the active abilities that a player character has are class based abilities. The 3rd edition designers were generally very conservative with respect to the skills system and made the skills very weak, unreliable, and passive compared to class abilities (such as spells). Some of the few examples of skills that aren't passive and weak - like Use Magical Device - were really instances of the designers translating class abilities from prior editions into the new skill system (something that they did rarely). But, for example, Bluff is a very potent skill by 3e standards because it allows the player to propose social solutions that they might otherwise not have, and to propose two combat maneuver ('Feint' and 'Distract') which they might otherwise be unable to rely on. So you can regularly make new plans if you are skilled in Bluff that comparatively don't rely on DM. However, even so the Bluff skill design is very conservative. Consider that the DC of having false surface thoughts is 100, yet the spell it is trying to defeat is available at 3rd level. Similarly, Sense Motive lets you emulate 'Detect Thoughts' with a DC 100 check, but as a spell this available at 3rd level. There is a huge distrust of making the spells more reliable and less used solely as a way to overcome hurdles when the DM calls them out that remind me that in D&D skills are a later edition to the system that is somewhat tacked on.



Yes, I think you actually intuit the heart of it. Bluff and Stealth are active. Perception and Intuition are passive (or 'defensive'). I'm not saying passive skills are entirely bad. Every system is going to have some. If they involve defenses that reliably come up, even if you can't plan an action around them they can still be highly useful to have. Arguably Tumble is a passive skill and so as you mention are the 'Perception' skills, but since they defend against situations that reliably come up in scenarios and which are quite serious, they make the cut IMO as well designed. In fact, Tumble is one of the better 3e skills, giving the player character defenses against AoOs and falls, and improved AC when fighting defensively. It's so potent and broadly useful, I have a tendency to think of it as one of the active skills, since the player is freed up to propose a lot of tactics in combat that they might otherwise be forced to avoid.

Basically, I'd like all the skills to be as useful as Bluff and Intimidation, for their to be more 'active' skills available, and for skillfulness to compete with spells in terms of reliable utility. To do that required lots of minor tweaks.

I consider 4e a mixed bag on skills. On the one hand, they did more to protect active skills from strictly superior skill use ('Fly' vs. climb, 'Invisibility' vs. hide, 'Bluff' vs. Glibness or Charm Person). But it seems also that they more intended skills to work as occasional means to vaulting some hurdle that the DM put in the way, and generally made being the skillful one less valuable.

Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing, though I think there's a strong active component to every 4e skill (and at least potentially to pretty much any skill in most systems, including 3e). That is to say the majority of skill use IME in 4e and 5e (which is FAIRLY similar to 4e in this respect) is initiated by the player. In 4e you say "I want to look for traps" and you make an active Perception check. Even with Intuition you can say something like "What do I think the King's reaction will be" or something like that. I found the 4e type skills to be a pretty much first-class part of the system. Its true, class features and powers are 'stronger', the assumption being they're basically drawing from internal 'mundane' skill, where the other things are at least partly magical and thus logically superior, at least some of the time.

I think the 4e skills actually might be better named 'knacks'. They represent areas of strength that the character has, types of things they do well. Having the 'Nature' skill means you have a great familiarity and comfort with animals and plants, and the environment. The character may know very little more formally about specific plants than someone who has the background 'profession: herbalist' or something like that, but they still are likely to know which plants are found in an area, which ones typically have medicinal or food value, etc. The herbalist OTOH will tell you this is 'Velerium Officianalis and it treats skin infections' or whatever. 4e doesn't really bother to have specific knowledge rules at that level of detail, but that's an area you could elaborate.

I'm just not sure how having sub-categories of the Athletics skill for instance increases its 'active' nature in and of itself. I think if you wanted to increase the potency of skills, make them the core of the system, you'd want to make things like spells and class features invoke skill checks. 4e actually does SOME of that, but its not particularly consistent. Anyway, its interesting food for thought for me, since I have been working on my own skill system tweaks.

 

[Celebrim]

Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing, though I think there's a strong active component to every 4e skill (and at least potentially to pretty much any skill in most systems, including 3e). That is to say the majority of skill use IME in 4e and 5e (which is FAIRLY similar to 4e in this respect) is initiated by the player. In 4e you say "I want to look for traps" and you make an active Perception check.

No, you are confused. Whether or not the action is initiated by the player isn't the test. The test is how reliant the player is on an obstacle being present in the setting that the DM has made relevant to the skill and the DM's level of detail and support in resolving the proposition. Checking for traps is a very much classic case of a passive use of skill. Whether it is of any use at all depends on whether or not there are traps in the environment. Ancient Greek may be a very useful skill, but only if all the clues are written in Ancient Greek. Checking for traps grants you no reliable narrative force.* Being able to place a trap in the environment on the other hand would.

*(In fact, the opposite is often the case. If the DM is prone to improvisation, you are more likely to lose narrative force than gain it by checking for traps.)

4e doesn't really bother to have specific knowledge rules at that level of detail, but that's an area you could elaborate.

Because it has no mechanical force, it remains a passive skill. If the rules elaborated, "In any wilderness setting, a player can make a Nature roll during every short rest to find level x 100 g.p. worth of useful reagents. These reagents can used to pay the cost of a ritual.", then the skill would have an active component that doesn't depend (very greatly) on encounter design or DM fiat. The very vagueness of what 4e skills do that you praise is what makes them so passive by default. Sure, a DM can empower them via consistent rulings, but since the rules themselves don't describe how to do this in detail and that's highly dependent on improvisation (which is never reliable IMO), they are likely to remain passive. Compare the treatment given to class abilities and the very definite mechanical benefits that derive there from, and a hypothetical treatment where Fighters had no class abilities but a combat 'knack' or 'skill' described in the rules only as, "Knowledgeable regarding combat techniques, fighting styles, and the use of arms." In theory, such a skill could completely substitute for all the class powers and maneuvers of a fighter and then some in the hands of a capable and flexible DM, but in practice it probably wouldn't. Likewise, in practice if it did, these 'rulings' would have a tendency to morph in to reliable and established house rules.

Sub-categories of Athletics doesn't increase its active nature in and of itself. But you'd have to bundle all possible benefits of various skills into Athletics to make it equivalently active. Compare 4e Athletics with my approach. For example, I have a 'Paladin' PC in the current group that has a 40' move purely because he's skilled at running, with no recourse to class features at all.

 

[Balesir]

I think I 'get' [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]'s classification of skill use, here, and I like it. A much better example of where 4E gets this right, I think, is Skill Powers (which can be taken by spending either a Utility Power slot or a Feat, but require training in the appropriate skill). These are, I think, the "active" part of most skills in 4E (and I might even argue that the 'active' elements of Bluff, Intimidate et al might be better beefed up as Skill Powers, also), while the "skill roll" part is, indeed, mostly passive.

Might this actually be a good way to package skill capabilities, though? Take the "training" and you get all the passive benefits, then take additional "packets" to get selected "active" benefits as suits your character.

 

[Celebrim]

Might this actually be a good way to package skill capabilities, though? Take the "training" and you get all the passive benefits, then take additional "packets" to get selected "active" benefits as suits your character.

An all 'feat' approach would be is similar to a reorganized 1e/2e. NWP were the 'packets'.

In my house rules, I reorganized it so that the Thief class - the ostensible skill monkey with literally no advantages outside its out of combat skills - received more 'packets' and improved proficiency with those packets.

I have two problems with trying to convert a modern rules set over to the packet approach.

First, I don't think D&D needs another radical variation.
Secondly, I've actually been trying to take things in the opposite direction, where everyone that is proficient can at least attempt everything implied by the skill, and the feats (or packets) only imply exceptional skill in that special area of focus. I'm making war on absolutes and binaries built into the system.

For example, I've got long term plans to revise the DC of tasks to reflect that, for example increasing the DC of finding traps by 5, then making the Rogues 'Trap Finding' be a +5 bonus to search when detecting traps, or increasing the DC of tracking by 5, and making the Track feat give you a +5 bonus on skill checks when tracking.