Anthony Jackson
First Post
One of the basic design objectives of the skill challenge system, as described in designers notes, is that everyone should be involved. This is manifestly not true in the current rules: having anyone but your best problem-solver involved in a challenge is actively harmful.
In addition, skill challenges suffer from a basic plot flaw: they are often binary. Either you succeed, generally at no cost to yourself, or you fail. There is no middle ground, where you succeed at some cost, or you succeed partially. My goal here is to fix both problems, while keeping a simple mechanic that's fairly compatible with skill challenges as presented in the DMG.
A basic skill challenge has three traits: difficulty, successes required, and consequences.
Difficulty is the DC required for success on the 'standard' skill to be used in the encounter, and can be decided in any of several ways. Typically, adding 6-8 to the highest skill check bonus in the group will make for a challenging encounter. Adding 10 to the skill check bonus of your primary adversary will produce a 'realistic' DC, which may or may not be interesting. Based on level, if you assume skill check items exist 15+level is appropriate, if you don't think they exist 15 + 0.8*level is better (subtract 5 for non-skill). Yes, this still pretty much means you'll need utility powers granting bonuses to succeed at high levels.
Successes is the total number of successes required. Generally, it should be equal to complexity * number of players.
Conquences are the effects of failing a roll. The standard consequence is "Failure or Strain". What this means is simple: you can either fail at the challenge, or you can choose to expend some of your fatigue, luck, resolve, what have you, and avoid failure (this doesn't buy you a success; it just prevents you from failing. It's more fun if you come up with an interesting explanation; for example, if you're trying to cross a narrow bridge and fail your acrobatics check, taking strain might mean that you fall and catch yourself at the last minute). Mechanically speaking, this is resolved as "take damage equal to your Healing Surge value". You may not take Strain if it would drop you below 1 hit point. Strain is subject to all normal healing powers. Not all challenges permit strain, but most should.
Some challenges don't work this way. In a timed challenge, you succeed as long as you get the required number of successes in a specific amount of time. In an endurance challenge, each character just makes a fixed number of rolls and suffers consequences for every failure.
The advantage of this mechanism is that it introduces a real cost to skill challenges (and, well, if you try to bluff your way past the guards and blow it, you're going to be at a disadvantage in the subsequent fight), but because the cost is personal, rather than group, it doesn't hurt the group when the low skill character tries to help out.
Under these rules, don't allow assist actions at all. Assisting is implemented as "roll; if you add a success, you assisted".
In the particular case of traps, each success on a trap should do damage to the trap. Thus, 'beating up the trap' and 'disarming the trap' are usefully cumulative.
This process can be made more interesting by adding hazards (which attack PCs every round) and secondary objectives, which grant some bonus (or eliminate a hazard) but are not strictly necessary.
In addition, skill challenges suffer from a basic plot flaw: they are often binary. Either you succeed, generally at no cost to yourself, or you fail. There is no middle ground, where you succeed at some cost, or you succeed partially. My goal here is to fix both problems, while keeping a simple mechanic that's fairly compatible with skill challenges as presented in the DMG.
A basic skill challenge has three traits: difficulty, successes required, and consequences.
Difficulty is the DC required for success on the 'standard' skill to be used in the encounter, and can be decided in any of several ways. Typically, adding 6-8 to the highest skill check bonus in the group will make for a challenging encounter. Adding 10 to the skill check bonus of your primary adversary will produce a 'realistic' DC, which may or may not be interesting. Based on level, if you assume skill check items exist 15+level is appropriate, if you don't think they exist 15 + 0.8*level is better (subtract 5 for non-skill). Yes, this still pretty much means you'll need utility powers granting bonuses to succeed at high levels.
Successes is the total number of successes required. Generally, it should be equal to complexity * number of players.
Conquences are the effects of failing a roll. The standard consequence is "Failure or Strain". What this means is simple: you can either fail at the challenge, or you can choose to expend some of your fatigue, luck, resolve, what have you, and avoid failure (this doesn't buy you a success; it just prevents you from failing. It's more fun if you come up with an interesting explanation; for example, if you're trying to cross a narrow bridge and fail your acrobatics check, taking strain might mean that you fall and catch yourself at the last minute). Mechanically speaking, this is resolved as "take damage equal to your Healing Surge value". You may not take Strain if it would drop you below 1 hit point. Strain is subject to all normal healing powers. Not all challenges permit strain, but most should.
Some challenges don't work this way. In a timed challenge, you succeed as long as you get the required number of successes in a specific amount of time. In an endurance challenge, each character just makes a fixed number of rolls and suffers consequences for every failure.
The advantage of this mechanism is that it introduces a real cost to skill challenges (and, well, if you try to bluff your way past the guards and blow it, you're going to be at a disadvantage in the subsequent fight), but because the cost is personal, rather than group, it doesn't hurt the group when the low skill character tries to help out.
Under these rules, don't allow assist actions at all. Assisting is implemented as "roll; if you add a success, you assisted".
In the particular case of traps, each success on a trap should do damage to the trap. Thus, 'beating up the trap' and 'disarming the trap' are usefully cumulative.
This process can be made more interesting by adding hazards (which attack PCs every round) and secondary objectives, which grant some bonus (or eliminate a hazard) but are not strictly necessary.
