Alternatives to map-and-key

[soviet]

A man kicks a ball.
The ball moves.

There was no man, nor a ball, just text, but you might have imagined a man and a ball. And the causal relationship is pretty clear too.

A man kicks a ball.
The ball doesn't move.
A hat appears and turns into a pigeon.

I have broken the laws of causality!

 

[soviet]

Combat rules are structured rigidly to allow a tactical mini game. I would not want all of the game to work like this.

You still have normal one-off skill rolls. Skill challenges don't become mandatory.

Though of course the combat minigame has far more tactical depth than skill challenges, if combat rules were just "the side which first lands six hits wins" I doubt a lot of people would care for it.

You just described the TSR editions.

And of course you can "bypass" some or all of the combat rules by various ways if fictional positioning and the action taken warrant such, you can kick enemies into chasms, intimidate them to surrender, collapse structures on them etc.

You can do this in a SC too.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If a failure on the very first roll means a failure on the whole thing, then it shouldn't have been an SC in the first place. The point is that they help resolve multi-pronged complex situations that aren't simply one pass or fail check.



Something I've seen before is when there's an NPC who has valuable information or resources but needs some convincing to give them up. The success threshold of this is entirely undefined. Player A tries diplomacy, uh marginal success, he's warming to you but not convinced. Player B tries intimidation, uh failure, he's getting angry now. Player C tries hunting, hey look at all my hunting trophies, failure, he ignores you and thinks you're an idiot. Player D gives him a blessing and heals his injuries, uh great he's not angry now but he's still not really convinced. Player E offers his fealty as a paladin and casts a Zone of Truth to show he means it, GM (who is bored himself now, and waiting for anything half reasonable so we can move on) says oh OK I guess that's enough.

Do you see how a more defined structure (three successes before three failures or whatever) makes that situation more interesting to play out?

No, not really. I'd much rather let the whole play out in mostly free roleplay, with skills and special abilities punctuating the process when the GM thinks the outcome is in doubt or the player has a brainwave, and allowing the evolving fiction to lead to a natural tipping point one way or the other.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I'm not sure all these investigation rolls should be a part of the SC.

Perhaps, but some of them were suggested as possible contributors by the person who came up with the example.

I'm not sure players should make five barely related checks (at things they are apparently also bad at) in a three-failure skill challenge. That says to me that the players either want to lose or simply don't understand the rules.

But why would the characters refrain from doing those things? Causally nothing bad should follow from thinking and observing, one would think, it is just the structure of the skill challenge that means they now have somehow failed.

And this is BTW an example of the sort of divergence in player and character decision spaces that some narrative mechanics might cause that I mentioned earlier.

And in any case, I feel that we end up coming up with a lot of ifs and buts and exceptions for these skill challenges to keep the fiction coherent, meanwhile the benefits of the technique remain elusive, especially as more exceptions you add more the transparency is lost.

I say focus on what the goals are in the fiction, what the fictional positioning is, and interact with that, with the mechanics merely acting as a representation of it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

A man kicks a ball.
The ball doesn't move.
A hat appears and turns into a pigeon.

I have broken the laws of causality!

Yes you have. Thus demonstrating that there is an expected causality between fictional things, and if you significantly deviate from it, it is obvious.

 

[soviet]

But that is not what the rules actually do. Rules do not care about obstacles, they care about the number of successful checks. Thus if the players manage to overcome the obstacles presented in the fiction with few checks, new obstacles must be presented so that the check quota can be fulfilled. Similarly reaching the required number of failures must result the goal of challenge failing, regardless of whether that would causally follow from the actions taken. In either case the fiction is moulded to follow the mechanics, not the other way around, lessening the impact of engaging with the fiction.

The GM isn't expected to quantum cook some new obstacles to keep things going. The SC structure is transparent. It's a pacing tool. If players are describing big SC-ending actions when they have three successes left to go, or describe nothingburger actions when one more failure means disaster, that's bad play/GMing. It would be the equivalent of a player describing a decapitation strike when they hit an enemy with 100 hit points left, or a DM describing a hit that kills a PC at the end of a long bloody fight as 'I dunno, he does a bit of fancy footwork and his blade just scratches your cheek'.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Provide players with information to they can make informed decisions.

First if all, refusing to engage your repeated attempts to "drill down" into my motivations in the hopes of catching me in a "gotcha" is not threadcrapping.

Secondly, I'm fine with providing the players with information so they can make decisions, provided the information in question was acquired by the PCs in fiction. Nothing beyond that please.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The world doesn't exist to be observed. It's all made up. You are making a decision as to which parts of that made-up world you give weight to, and which additional fiction you do or do not introduce.

Actually, the players are making a lot of those decisions, when they have their PCs take certain actions and pay attention to certain parts of the setting.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The GM isn't expected to quantum cook some new obstacles to keep things going. The SC structure is transparent. It's a pacing tool. If players are describing big SC-ending actions when they have three successes left to go, or describe nothingburger actions when one more failure means disaster, that's bad play/GMing. It would be the equivalent of a player describing a decapitation strike when they hit an enemy with 100 hit points left, or a DM describing a hit that kills a PC at the end of a long bloody fight as 'I dunno, he does a bit of fancy footwork and his blade just scratches your cheek'.

In other words, the fiction needs to conform to the rules of the challenge, making this a rules first rather than fiction first process.

Like look at my prison escape example. One approach would have taken two steps, another took five. If this was a skill challenge, in the case of the first approach the GM would absolutely need to "quantum cook" some additional hurdles so that the required number of successes can be met, making the choice between the approaches largely a matter of colour.

Oh, and characters in my game totally have kicked a powerful enemy into a shoggoth pit when they had plenty of HP remaining, intimidated enemies to surrender etc. So you totally can "bypass" several "combat steps" by taking appropriate actions given the current fictional positioning.

 

[soviet]

Yes you have. Thus demonstrating that there is an expected causality between fictional things, and if you significantly deviate from it, it is obvious.

No I have shown that I decided, not 'the fiction' or 'the simulated world'.

A man kicks a ball.
It's a goal!

A man kicks a ball.
It isn't a goal.