Any New Info on Skill Encounters?

[Belphanior]

Yes, Derren seems to run his game with an ironclad focus on realism. The city has a map. That street is a dead end. Running into it will get you nowhere.

And that's cool. Nothing wrong with that style of play. It's just not the one 4E uses, nor me for that matter.

The city has no detailed map. I'm not going to work out every street and alley, the entire sewer network, the exact height of every wall and roof. They don't do this in books or movies either. The city of Ankh-Morpork is just sort of there and people walk around in it, but we don't track the exact position of every protagonist on a minimap. Then a PC rolls streetwise. Fail? Damn, he ran into a dead end or other bad place because he doesn't know this area. Succeed? He knows the layout better than the players or DM do, which makes sense. He also knows more about casting spells than we do. It's his world after all. So he found a good way to evade pursuit.


At this point we've all established our playstyles. Derren doesn't like ours. We don't like his. Fine, let's move on.

 

[Derren]

anyways i think i understand your viewpoint now. i'll explain, but please remember this is just me speculating and describing what i think your stance is. Sorry if i missed your point.
you prefer for the world (in the hypothetical perfect game) to be perfectly described and players to react to it. 4e attempts this to a lesser degree than 3e. Now the pc's can alter the story/setting/reality with apropriate explanations and rolls, instead of only reacting.

me. i like it the 4e way.

More or less. The world must not be perfectly described, but good enough to feel living instead of just a construct where the PCs can sell loot and turn in quests before going into a dungeon again.

And you are mistaken that you have to change reality for the PCs to affect the story or the setting. You can do that equally fine when there no alleys appearing out of nowhere just because the PCs made a knowledge check.
In 3E the PCs have to work with the in game situation to solve the adventure/scene. In 4E the in game situation changes according to what the PCs do and imo this is simply cheap and "unrealistic".

 

[hong]

In 3E the PCs have to work with the in game situation to solve the adventure/scene. In 4E the in game situation changes according to what the PCs do and imo this is simply cheap and "unrealistic".

No, it's authorial power.

 

[mmu1]

It's funny... I rarely have every single detail of something like an escape from the city planned out (usually because my players end up having to run from things suddenly and urgently), so I actually create little details on the fly fairly often, to flesh things out, or as a reward if a player comes up with a good idea and backs it up with a skill check.

However, for all that, the 4E "skill challenge" system doesn't appeal to me at all. The whole point of playing an RPG, for me, is to take advantage of situations like these to let things work themselves out without having to resort to some sort of pre-scripted system. The idea that, even before the players have done anything, you decide it will take x number of skill successes before y number of failures take place strikes me as incredibly restrictive and artificial. What happens if the first idea they choose to try is awful, and not only that, they mess up the execution? Despite the fact that the results should be catastrophic, I shrug and say "well, that was bad, but you still have y-1 chances to not mess up?"

Sure, I can always override any blatantly nonsensical results... but why not do that from the beginning? The fact the DM is the final authority doesn't make bad rules and systems into good ones. It just makes them a waste.

 

[cwhs01]

More or less. The world must not be perfectly described, but good enough to feel living instead of just a construct where the PCs can sell loot and turn in quests before going into a dungeon again.

nothing new in 4e then.

and sorry if what i said was probably a little to simplified. Just wanted to emphasize what i see as your point of view.

And you are mistaken that you have to change reality for the PCs to affect the story or the setting. You can do that equally fine when there no alleys appearing out of nowhere just because the PCs made a knowledge check.

I hope i didn't imply it was the only way for players to affect the story. I meant there is now another way they can do it.

In 3E the PCs have to work with the in game situation to solve the adventure/scene. In 4E the in game situation changes according to what the PCs do and imo this is simply cheap and "unrealistic".

or 4e gives the players (presumably limited) authoritative power, transferred (stolen?) from the dm. imo a very cool idea.

btw i really, REALLY (enough to capitalize text) hope for someone who has real knowledge about the rules to actually comment on this whole debacle. just a short "yes 4e has stolen ideas from conflict resolution and narativist indie games" or "no. 4e skill resolution is task resolution as we know it from 3e".

me. i hope for the yes answer

 

[LostSoul]

The idea that, even before the players have done anything, you decide it will take x number of skill successes before y number of failures take place strikes me as incredibly restrictive and artificial.

I think that "x successes before y failures" does two things:
1) It's a pacing mechanic. You know how many rolls, at a minimum, you're going to need. This will give you some idea of how much focus you're going to have on this encounter.
2) It defines the difficulty.

What happens if the first idea they choose to try is awful, and not only that, they mess up the execution? Despite the fact that the results should be catastrophic, I shrug and say "well, that was bad, but you still have y-1 chances to not mess up?"

They can't do something so awful that it makes success impossible in the future, that's all. That's a narrative constraint I can deal with. (It could make future success impossible if you impose a penalty so large that the DC is out of reach.)

The thing is, the "awfulness" of the idea is pretty much determined by the result of the die roll, and not the DM. Maybe the DM will be allowed to apply modifiers to the roll or the DC to indicate that he thinks the players are idiots; but if you want the dice to resolve the encounter, let the dice do it, and if you want the DM to resolve the encounter, then let him do it without the meaningless dice rolls.

 

[smerwin29]

I ran "Escape from Sembia" at DDXP, and while I cannot talk in great detail about skill challenges, I can say some things:

Good DMs in any of the previous editions of D&D could do (and have been) something like skills challenges for decades. The skill challenge system is there to help DMs create a framework that allows the PCs to have flexibility in solving problems without making it too hard or too simple.

3e skills like diplomacy made it almost too easy at times: that hostile guard in now friendly, so he just walks away. Or it made it too hard: your only chance of escape is to climb the DC 25 wall, so you need to roll a 22 to make it.

The current skill challenge framework will encourage players to use their imaginations, while at the same time providing a rules mechanic to adjudicate it. And, of course, the final call is always up to the DM. If the players do something ingenious, she can always just decide they succeed for the entire encounter, or give them more than 1 success.

I had a 50/50 fail to success ratio for that encounter in the games I ran. We had a lot of roleplaying, a lot of laughing, and some great scenes and in-character actions. It gave me the flexibility to allow the PCs to do something they are good at, then force them to do something they may not be so good at, all without me having to worry that one decision on my part might ruin everything.

To answer the OP, I handled how things went in a variety of ways, sort of as a test of the system. Sometimes I gave two or three choices (you can climb boxes to the roof, which is easy, but there is a chance you will be seen; or, you can scale the wall directly so you won't be seen, but it is a tougher climb). Sometimes I let the PCs select based on easy, medium or hard, with the understanding that there might be consequences for success or failure. Sometimes I let them tell me what they wanted to do, and I set the difficulty based on the actions described. Sometimes I forced a specific check at a specific DC based on a corner that PC had painted himself into. It didn't take long for each table I ran to get into the mindframe needed to make the encounter work.

 

[WyzardWhately]

I loved doing stuff like this in Burning Wheel, Spirit of the Century, The Mountain Witch, and plenty of other games. The major hazard of it is that you have to have players who are pretty much on-board. It can take a little bit for some people, esp. if they've been playing for a long time, to grok that they have some authorial control all of a sudden and that they must use that power to produce awesome and win.

But once they get a good grip on it, it tends to work pretty well.

 

[jaer]

The problem is that with the 4E version this dead end is only not there when the PCs succeed in a knowledge check. If they fail its still a dead end.
In 3E the dead end is either there or not and the PCs either know about it or they don't. But the game world does not change depending on their skill check.

This sounds more like a DM decision then a edition decision. Anyone in 3e could have done the same thing: make a check, there is a secret passage. In 4e, the same thing could be taken away.

One thing about this encounter that needs to be taken into account was that it was designed to be run in a convention. It was designed to be run for multiple players by multiple DMS. Were I to run something similar, I'm sure I would do it very differently then it was at a convention because I would design it specifically for me to run, not so thay 20 people can read a couple sheets and DM the scene for random people.

I can see how this design idea can carry over into something like a Crushing Room trap; each round the wall moves in 5 feet. In 5 rounds, the PCs are flattened. A successful str check stops the wall from moving that round. There is a metal grate in the wall behind which the clockwork mechanisms are clicking away; the grate is too havy to lift, but there is a chain hanging from the ceiling attached to it through a pulley device of some kind. That might be enough to open the grate.

Someone made a perception check, so the athletic check to climb up the wall is better because the PC noticed a couple footholds in the wall leading toward the chain. A successful moderately difficult climb check would get the character just high enough to reach the chain (a low DC climb check would then require a low DC jump check...someone who wasn't as athletic could try two easy DCs vs 1 moderate DC check if they thought that would benefit them). The PC who is actually climbing decided to go a bit higher, aiming for the harder check. Having gotten as high as he did, PC was able to get a good grasp of the chain and is in a better position to pull it and hold it (+2 to his str check to pull the chain and open the grate).

With the grate open, the PC disabling the trap isn't squeezing his hands through a grate coated with mild contact poison anymore as he manipulates the mechanism, lowering the DC of the disable device and keeps the character from suffering poison damage. If the Disable device fails, the player can keep trying, so long as the chain holder can keep holding the chain and the wall doesn't advance all the way across the room.

I'm sure there are other skills characters could bring into play to get out of this trap that I haven't though of and planned for. I would need to be willing to listen to my player's ideas and decide what sort of affect, if any, they have in this situation. But I wouldn't simply add something becuase my PC decided to search for a secret door and succeed his check. If it's not there, it's not there.

Could this be done in 3e? Sure, there is no reason it couldn't. Use a skill, succeed, and go on to the next skill. But this was not the design philosophy of 3e. The philosophy there was that the trap sprung and it either hit or missed or the characters got a save against something. And then it was over.

The design philosophy in 4e is that things are much more complex and should require several rolls and more character involvment to 'defeat' a challenge. It's still in the DM's hands to create these challenges as they see fit.

 

[TwoSix]

And you are mistaken that you have to change reality for the PCs to affect the story or the setting. You can do that equally fine when there no alleys appearing out of nowhere just because the PCs made a knowledge check.

That's not what "change reality" means. 4e gives the actual player the ability to change parts of the game world, not just through the actions of the character. Using a per-encounter martial power, for example, doesn't simply mean your character is attempting the action. You, as a player, are also controlling the NPC to allow the opportunity for the power to happen.