Alternatives to map-and-key

[AbdulAlhazred]

One other thing I would add on 4e SCs. There are 5 complexity levels, each requiring more successes. Yes CL5 is harder than CL1, but let us look closer... Typically a party of 5 PCs will cover 80% of the skills at +5 or better, yielding around 90% success rates per check. CL1 requires 4 successes. So, your chance of outright failure is pretty low. In the first 3 checks it's like 0.1% and only 1% of the time you will stand at 2 fails at this point, so you have pretty close to a 99.9% chance to either succeed at check 4 or go on to 5. Overall success rate here is pretty close to 99%. The GM gets a hard DC, and the fiction could box the players into a suboptimal check now and then. So we might conclude that the easiest CL1 is at least a 90% chance of success, probably more like 99%.

Now CL2-5 ARE harder, but each additional check doesn't increase failure rate much, because characters just don't fail checks often! Players can also expend resources like powers, consumables, etc. These expenditures usually grant success, or at least move the DC down to easy. So even CL5 is probably only failing 5% or so of the time.

But that is fine. How often do parties get their clocks cleaned in combat? Not often in D&D unless they are totally reckless. You can be reckless in SC too. If your fail chance per check is 25%, CL5 is pretty much certain failure!

My point is, the players are much more in charge of how hard things are than it might seem. The GM can certainly throw curves at you, but I would not call the difficulty arbitrary. No more so than with combat that falls within the encounter guidelines.

 

[pemerton]

What does the GM base his decision to require 3 successes before 5 failures instead of 5 successes before 7 failures. Deciding one vs the other seems a bit arbitrary?

there’s no basis for which goal should be difficult and which shouldn’t be. Which demonstrates the arbitrariness of using different ones for different difficulties.

It's a decision about "weight", about the degree of focus/attention to be given, in play, to this particular matter.

Which is no more arbitrary than, for instance, deciding that when the PCs crest the ridge they see 20 rather than 10 or 100 Goblins waiting to attack them (or to attach the village, or whatever). Part of being a GM, in a game like 4e D&D where the GM is in charge of establishing scenes, is deciding how "big" they will be.

Every action the PCs take is of equal weight to resolving the skill challenges and thus isn’t contextual to the specific PC action chosen.

The generated fiction isn’t contextual either. If less successes ‘should’ otherwise get them to their goal then the DM is mandated to invent a reason it doesn’t simply because it’s a skill challenge.

the actions should fictionally carry different weights and have different impacts.

I don't really know what "not contextual" means here. Suppose a NPC turns to the fighter PC and asks directly "Why should I do as you ask?" - well, that seems pretty contextual, The fighter has to answer - and that is likely to play out differently from the bard answering. Or, if the fighter defers to the bard or looks to the bard to answer, that will generate different fiction again - it seems likely to paint the fighter in a certain sort of light.

Likewise "should" - what does it mean to say that a success "should" get the PC to their goal, or that different actions "should" carry different weight? The cause/effect relations are managed by the GM and the players, based on the fiction and the mechanics. In a combat, as a player rolls their d20 to hit they might describe their PC skewering an Orc, or shooting a lizard through the head - but if the damage roll is low, the combat goes on. The GM narrates something less than, or different from, what the player hoped for.

When we are talking about RPGs in the abstract, it's possible to set things up so that different actions carry different weight: for instance, when fighting a troll in most versions of D&D, attacking with fire carries different weight from attacking with an ordinary weapon. This gives play a type of "puzzle-solving" flavour: the players have an incentive to try and work out, or at least guess, the best action. Conversely, the choice to give every action equal weight within the mechanics is a choice to give play a different sort of flavour - it foregrounds the fiction of the declared action, as something that the player sees as bearing upon the fictional situation, and obliges the GM to narrate consequence that respond to that action.

even the same PC can do all the checks.

Whether one PC can do all the checks will depend on how the GM presents the situation. As per the example I just gave, if a NPC directly addresses the fighter, this puts some pressure on that PC's player to declare an action for that PC. Likewise if the GM describes a boulder about to fall on a PC's head.

Maybe clever/imaginative players can find a way to "carry" their weak link, just as they might do in a combat. That's probably OK.

Failure for combat actions doesn’t move you closer to defeat, it preserves the status quo.

In D&D combat, NPCs/opponents get to take actions. So a player's failed action "wastes" their turn, allowing the NPCs/opponents to take an action on their turn, which (if successful) will set back the PC(s). In a skill challenge only the players declare actions and roll dice. So the failure is an automatic setback. It's analogous to a combat rule that, instead of giving the NPCs turns, says "If you fail your attack against a NPC, you take damage from them as per their combat stats". That's not how D&D works, but it's not a strange rule, or one that would be wildly out of place in a D&D-esque RPG. For instance, combat in T&T works a bit like that.

 

[pemerton]

@AbdulAlhazred

Generally I would use complexity 1 or 2 challenges in a broader context (eg combat), in which case they are generally more of an action sink than a chance to fail.

With more complex skill challenges, as you say these will tend to absorb more resources. Mostly the players succeed. Occasionally they fail!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred

Generally I would use complexity 1 or 2 challenges in a broader context (eg combat), in which case they are generally more of an action sink than a chance to fail.

With more complex skill challenges, as you say these will tend to absorb more resources. Mostly the players succeed. Occasionally they fail!

Yeah, and you mentioned that complexity is essentially a matter of determining the overall weight of the events contained within the challenge. I tend to give low weight to fairly straightforward situations. Say you are needing to lift a portcullis, and the mechanism is broken. The approaches are fairly straightforward and don't require a bunch of steps. Making it a CL5 SC is going to be awkward at best, and spending an hour rolling dice for such a one-dimensional obstacle seems odd. And as you say, it would tend to naturally fall into the realm of something embedded in a combat, there are Orc Archers up there on the top of the gatehouse, have fun!

CL5 is more like a complex ritual that caps off a story arc, or at least leads up to the climactic fight. Oops, maybe I shouldn't have spent my Daily inventing and casting that demon summoning ritual...

 

[Thondor]

Here’s the types I think we’ve covered so far:

Map-and-key
Draw a map, fill it with content. Where the players go, there is where the game goes.
covered in OP

Event List (or Scenario)
May have a time line, may be partially location based, can activate based on player actions or NPC actions/reactions.
covered in OP

Conflicting Agendas
Common in drama games/genres. Players create multiple agendas for their characters that may be at cross purposes with other player character and NPC goals.
Agendas are explicity stated publicly, and written down for handy reference. Play consists of attempting to meet goals and avoiding them being thwarted.
covered in more detail in my post:

Post in thread 'Alternatives to map-and-key'

Aug 7, 2025

In that case the OP should characterize the discussion as "what are some uncommon/lesser known ways of doing x". In short, explicitly rule out the majority, as I suggested above.

I think they did. Implicitly if not explicitly in the OP.

Here are some examples from actual play, when I GMed a session for a parent and two kids - I've started from the list of characters, to help the best interests make sense:

They are motivations/desires/goals - but authored, especially on the GM's side, to drive play by underpinning scenes that will prompt play. For instance, if I (as GM) frame...

• Thondor

• 

Abstract Challenge / Goal
Something about the challenges nature and level of difficulty is prepared ahead of time. Players can chose to overcome the challenge in many different ways, earning “successes” or clock ticks towards overcoming the challenge or meeting some goal.
The narrative is shaped around the approaches that the players actually use to overcome the challenge or meet the goal.
covered in all this discussion around 4e skill challenges and clocks from FitD

Random Prompt / Oracle
These might be random tables to help a GM generate content when players head off in an unexpected direction, or they might be vague question prompts in a GMless story-game or solo play game.
The random result frames and narrows down possibility while the referee (or acting player) solidifies the details.
covered in some discussion about random gen and roguelikes, though the solo play and GMless version I don't think has been mentioned already.

 

[pemerton]

Random Prompt / Oracle
These might be random tables to help a GM generate content when players head off in an unexpected direction, or they might be vague question prompts in a GMless story-game or solo play game.
The random result frames and narrows down possibility while the referee (or acting player) solidifies the details.
covered in some discussion about random gen and roguelikes, though the solo play and GMless version I don't think has been mentioned already.

I mentioned Classic Traveller trading play upthread, but didn't put it in the context of GM-less play. Which is something the rules expressly flag. It relies on the players being able to use random generation for worlds, for cargoes, etc.

 

[aramis erak]

I mentioned Classic Traveller trading play upthread, but didn't put it in the context of GM-less play. Which is something the rules expressly flag. It relies on the players being able to use random generation for worlds, for cargoes, etc.

And reactions. The reactions bit is vital for solo play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So, there was discussion of In a Wicked Age and 'agendas' (best interests to use IaWA terminology). I think we then have some hybrid approaches, like DW where you have bonds, which are a kind of limited agenda, and an alignment, which is a more general orientation/agenda. DW then also has fronts, and a kind of interactive system of questions leading to scene framing. There isn't one single technique that dominates.

 

[pemerton]

So, there was discussion of In a Wicked Age and 'agendas' (best interests to use IaWA terminology). I think we then have some hybrid approaches, like DW where you have bonds, which are a kind of limited agenda, and an alignment, which is a more general orientation/agenda. DW then also has fronts, and a kind of interactive system of questions leading to scene framing. There isn't one single technique that dominates.

I will summon @thefutilist on this: I think that one point thefutilist has made in previous posts is to contrast the relatively "closed" situation of In A Wicked Age (all the "players" are on the board from the outset, with their "best interests" laid out) with an approach like how you describe Dungeon World, or how I think of Burning Wheel, where the PCs have "best interests" (bonds, alignment, beliefs, etc) but the situation is established by the GM during, and unfolds during, play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I will summon @thefutilist on this: I think that one point thefutilist has made in previous posts is to contrast the relatively "closed" situation of In A Wicked Age (all the "players" are on the board from the outset, with their "best interests" laid out) with an approach like how you describe Dungeon World, or how I think of Burning Wheel, where the PCs have "best interests" (bonds, alignment, beliefs, etc) but the situation is established by the GM during, and unfolds during, play.

Yeah, IaWA seems like a bit of a special case. Honestly it is a very different sort of game, there's really only a certain amount that can happen in a game where all of the premise is laid out at the very start of play. Still, the way I, as a DW GM, frame scenes is not ENTIRELY different. The main difference is that new things can arise, and the reasons for them coming into the game are more varied (IE perhaps simply to fulfill the GM's agenda).