Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8391490" data-attributes="member: 6790260">...yes. That's literally the point. I'm sorry I dropped the rest of that line, I do that sometimes--get distracted responding to later parts and forget to finish the previous. The answer is, "It depends on what it does!" The whole point of that was that you are not actually asking a question. You're making an assertion, disguised as a question, that it's not useful, that it's inherently "cumbersome and unneeded." And, again, "unneeded" is an ENTIRELY POINTLESS standard for game design. NOTHING is EVER "needed" for games. You don't need HP--plenty of games don't have them. You don't need XP, or stats, or discrete actions, or random number generation (let alone specifically that via polyhedral dice), or...literally any mechanical element of the game.The ONLY standards that actually matter are (1) "Is it useful?" and (2) "Does it support the desired experience?"Literally no rule is ever actually necessary. Trying to frame things in terms of what is "needed" is just unfairly enforcing a standard that no game rule has ever, or will ever, actually meet.Then it's a badly-run Skill Challenge, full stop. Any time you ignore these things, it's bad, short and simple. Don't run Skill Challenges that way, because literally nothing run that way would be good--regardless of whether it's formal or informal!The rules don't tell you to ignore those things. They just give you a really, really basic framework. As with many D&D rules, their best-practices use isn't explicitly written into the rules themselves, it's a matter of learning how they work best. The exact same statement applies to things like monster design (e.g. 5e has a lot of rather poorly-designed monsters, as the designers unfortunately have tended toward making big fat sacks of HP that don't do much damage; the same happened early in 4e as well, so this isn't a unique problem to 5e either.)...except no, it really does serve a purpose. Because even if you don't make the count obvious, even with the rules as written for SCs, it should still be quite obvious that things are heading toward success or failure. It explicitly is NOT supposed to be a state of sustained total ignorance until you hear the completely unexpected "ding!" of success or the "BZZT!" of failure.If people ran SCs for you that way, then yeah, I can totally understand why you'd dislike them. But, again, that's not even going with the way Skill Challenges are actually described, let alone the not-directly-stated best practices for using them. Your complaint would be like someone saying that 5e combat is frustrating and swingy because their 5e DM required them to make all of their melee or spell attacks at once, with a single attack roll. The rules don't actually work that way, and while making that change is permissible, it's not useful to do so.Uh...don't? Again I just...don't understand why you would WANT to do that. You don't have to, and the SC rules text doesn't tell you to--it even kinda-sorta tells you NOT to. I will 100% admit that the descriptions and examples of Skill Challenges are not the best, but given your whole argument is "people shouldn't be limited by the rules," why should people be prevented from doing things the rules don't say anything about? Let alone doing things the rules actually (sort of) tell you not to do!But...why can't you decide how things change...within the framework? All a skill challenge does, at its most fundamental level, is require a certain number of successes before a certain number of failures. That's it. That's literally all the "formalism" you're talking about. "To win, succeed X times total. You lose if you fail Y times before you get enough successes." That's LITERALLY all the "formality" the system has to it. Everything else is style, approach, etc.--and those things can and should change in response to how things proceed!Why can't you say, "Ah, because you were able to vault over the tops of the buildings(1) and used your squad's underworld connections to get a bead on where your target was going(2), you were able to keep on their tails when they thought they could shake you. They're getting desperate now, which means they're willing to do some dangerous things to try to stop you. They jump down into a busy market square, and start vandalizing stalls and throwing innocent people into the way of danger in order to cause chaos and slow you down. What will you  do?" (Notes: (1) the result of a successful Acrobatics or Athletics check, (2) the result of a successful Streetwise or Diplomacy check, depending on the specific way you relate to these groups.) This is a dynamic and evolving scenario that doesn't have to be pre-planned. Sure, maybe the DM knows where these rapscallions are headed, but they don't have to have planned for every single possible action the players could take. They can organically adapt, accepting successful and unsuccessful results as ratcheting up the tension on one side or the other, and allowing for a potential spread of final results within the overall binary of "you succeeded" vs "you failed."Like...again, the rules don't tell you you can't have grades of success or failure based on how narrow the result was. They don't tell you that you can't have the SC evolve as players make choices (and kinda-sorta tell you to DO that very thing). They don't tell you that you can't (say) provide an immediate success or failure without rolling, if a player's idea is smart enough. Why limit yourself from things the rules don't even talk about? And then on the flipside, the rules don't tell you to plan out every possible result so that the players are just using random numbers to blindly stumble through your flowchart. They don't tell you to work through the process as mechanistically and rigidly as possible--it's a framework, not a straightjacket. Why force yourself to do things the rules don't talk about--and indeed sometimes, whether implicitly or explicitly, tell you NOT to?Yeah uh....stop right there.You have no idea why or how things happen the way they do. Remember that 4e came out in the middle of a severe recession. A recession in which one of the most prominent book store chains in the country went out of business. There are WAY too many factors involved to raise things like this as an objection--even if it were relevant to what I said, which it isn't. Whether the game is designed to support new players or old ones is very nearly orthogonal to the overall financial success of a single edition.So, again: Do you thinkAnd these are...?That's.....not how it read, at all, but....okay I guess.I think you overinflate the costs, particularly because, as I said, veteran players have ALWAYS been able, and almost always QUITE willing, to tell the rules where they can stick it.(1) They help new players get their footing and figure out how they want to do things. This is very useful, and you haven't actually said why it isn't.(2) They can be made relatively light and extensible. Again, the only actual formality you're arguing over is, "You must succeed X times before you fail Y times." That's it. That's ALL the formality of a skill challenge. If I can express the ENTIRE formalism in one sentence like that....is it really THAT formal? It's not even as formal as most of the rules that exist in 5e![citation needed]Again: there is literally nothing "needed" in any ruleset ever. There is only the play-experience the designer desires to support (and thus whether the rules do support it), and the overall process of play (and thus whether the rules serve the purpose for which they were designed.) IOW, the only standards that matter are "does it make the kind of game I want?" and "does it do the job it's meant for?" Since nothing is "needed," I reject your repeated calls for justifying the "need" for formalisms. In D&D, the desired experience is heroic adventure, which has a lot of meanings to a lot of people, but generally means doing risky things either to defend your principles (nation/origin, morals/values, etc.) or to acquire resources (money, treasure, power, etc.) The function for which Skill Challenges were designed is to give DMs a basic, extensible framework to cover essentially all possible "complex" not-specifically-combat scenarios, that is, anything where success should be dependent on an overall or collective non-violent effort, rather than violent efforts (aka combat) or individual non-violent efforts (aka single skill checks.)So the questions that are actually worth answering are, "Do Skill Challenges support a heroic adventuring experience?" and "Do SCs fulfill the function for which they were designed?"It sounds like you pretty clearly disagree with the former, but, as I've argued above, I think that's because the people who ran skill challenges for you ran them extremely, almost indescribably badly. Like...they literally ignored the rules in order to run them worse than they're supposed to....uh, yeah, about that. 5e is still quite mechanically heavy. It's WAY heavier than something like Dungeon World, to say nothing of games like Fate. 5e has loads and loads of mechanistic features. They're just packaged in familiar ways, which makes their complex mechanisms both easier to ignore and more familiar-feeling, which makes it easy to think they aren't actually all that complicated.I mean, 5e has the THP vs HP distinction. That alone, with all its internal layers and hooked-in features, is more complicated than some entire game systems.Then, as I've said several times, you're having DMs that run bad Skill Challenges. Full stop. Really, really bad ones. Like, worse than the worst examples from canned adventures. Actively ignoring how the books describe them, but in the worst possible ways. Again: almost indescribably badly run.A good Skill Challenge isn't totally unnoticeable, even if the DM doesn't explicitly say it--players can usually figure it out. But a good SC is also dynamic and responsive. It permits varying degrees of success or failure. It allows the players to change the terms of engagement--or, conversely, it allows the opponents/environment to do the same, if the players screw up badly. It allows smart players to skip past the rules part entirely, if they have an idea good enough that there's no question about whether it should succeed. And, if the DM is being actually honest with herself and her group, it allows for players to circumvent the SC in its entirety, for exactly the same reasons that players could circumvent combats, while still giving the players appropriate rewards.And...how exactly can you "game the system" with SCs? Again, the only actual rule within the SC framework is, "you must succeed X times before you fail Y times." How is that "gameable"? Like...players are always going to try to roll skills they're good at and avoid skills they're bad at. They'll do that regardless of whether you use SCs or not. And players will try to buff up for situations they expect might happen, or in response to needing to make a skill check...again, whether or not you use SCs. So....what is it that is so "gameable" about "you must succeed X times before you fail Y times"?...no, it's really not, and 4e rituals were VERY specifically a HUGE part of that. Skill Challenges were another huge part.The formalism--rituals--lets you know what you definitely can do, if you meet whatever requirements (skill checks, having a scroll, whatever). Despite your phrasing, though, what was discussed isn't "do[ing] without that." It's showing that the formalism is an extensible framework. It's a thing that can be expanded upon, with other tools. In this case, you can (explicitly!) deviate from the normal behavior of a ritual, by using the Arcana skill. (I don't know if this is explicit in the text, but I'd let characters trained in divine magic to use Religion, and those trained in Primal Spirit traditions to use Nature, instead of Arcana, which is implicitly for characters trained in arcane magic.)Again, you have this notion that the formalism MUST always be 100% perfectly rigidly adhered to, or it's worthless. That's not how 4e was designed, and trying to play 4e that way is going to be either EXTREMELY frustrating or really, really, REALLY boring.4e was designed so that using the rules as written and no more, you'll get a game that is consistently and reliably functional. It is your responsibility to do more than JUST what the rules say. The point of the formalism is to give you a jumping-off point. A solid baseline. A foundation on which to build other things. The fact that buildings have foundations doesn't mean you can't build wild and crazy things on top. The foundation doesn't say "you're ONLY allowed to build directly onto bedrock and ONLY below the surface and ONLY with this specific set of materials." Yes, it is (or should be!) built on bedrock, underground, and with specific and sturdy materials in specific and sturdy ways. But the whole point of that foundation--the reason it's useful, not the reason it's necessary--is that once you have that, you have substantially MORE freedom to do as you like building up from it.It's hard to build a good house on sand.Then those DMs were playing it wrong. Full stop.I'm more curious why you thought that having a formal system automatically means that anything it doesn't talk about is explicitly forbidden.They really aren't more open-ended though. In 4e, an Arcana skill check could--explicitly, in the rules--modify what a ritual does. Does 5e explicitly, in the rules, allow an Intelligence (Arcana) skill check to rewrite the rules for spells?And who has the capacity to make those magic items? Who can replicate those magic items with low-level or even infinitely-repeatable spells?Then don't go into terms of financial success, as though financial success were a valid metric of whether a game supports new players vs long-time ones....how many rituals did you use or look at? Because....well, here, let me give you a list of rituals. 100% of these are from 5th level or lower (mostly so that I'm not listing hundreds of the things): amanuensis, comprehend languages, dowsing rod, explorer's fire, fastidiousness, glib limerick, master artisan, pass without trace, portend weather, secret page, tracker's eye, traveler's chant, wizard's curtain; bloom, delver's fire, fluid funds, last sight vision, lower water, spirit fetch, survivor's preparation, tree shape, water walk; battlefield elocution, calm emotions, hunter's curse, Leomund's trap, lullaby, speech without words, summon winds, wind words; beast growth, call of friendship, dark light, familiar mount, feat of strength, hand of fate, iron vigil, snare, travelers' feast, wavestrider enchantment; animal friendship, breach disguise, deep pockets, hallucinatory item, hidden pocket, hunter's blessing, lesser telepathy, magic circle, object reading, precise forgery, reliable balance, self-holding bag, speak with nature, starshine, thorough search, tongues, uncanny strength, Vistani passkey. And that's JUST stuff 5th level or below, excluding anything even vaguely combat-related.I...don't personally think 5e Fighters can do much of anything "amazing," but I'm well-known for my, ah, criticisms of 5e design on that front, so it may not be productive to discuss that. As for magic items "out of the gate"? No, you don't actually need any magic items initially in 4e. You can quite easily get to level 5 or 6 before you "need" anything at all--and if your group uses Inherent Bonus rules, you don't actually ever need magic items.At 20th level, a 4e Fighter has 4 encounter powers, 4 daily powers, and 5 utility powers. (ou never have more than 4 encounter or daily powers; instead, at certain levels, you replace one of your lower-level powers with a higher-level power. For comparison, a 10th level Fighter has 3 encounter powers, 3 daily powers, and 3 utility powers.Exactly the same for me. I feel as though I've lost more than half of the game. On the one hand, the first 3-4 levels are stultifyingly boring training levels, which are either painfully endured (and thus not adding to the game at all) or skipped over (and thus actually reducing the amount of "playable game"). On the other, there's a whole nothingburger after level 20, if you ever even manage to get that far. Going from 30 levels of actual progression to 16 levels plus some tacked-on boons feels like a major loss.Completely agreed on all counts.As you say: it's not like anyone HAD to use Skill Challenges. They were meant as an optional additional thing, to be used when using them would be beneficial. </blockquote>

Verification