Challenge the Players, Not the Characters' Stats

[RyvenCedrylle]

Part of the issue, I believe, lies in the way statistics are defined. Strength, Dexterity, Health, Body, whatever – this is never a roleplaying problem. The player’s physical body does not interact with the in-game portcullis, and so we don’t have a problem adjudicating this with a die roll. It DOES become a problem with Wisdom, Intelligence, IQ, Mind, etc as the player’s physical mind IS interacting with the in-game puzzle. It’s easier to play a character dumber, more foolish or less charismatic than yourself. It’s a LOT harder to play one more intelligent, diplomatic or broad-minded than yourself. Sure, that’s why we do this in the first place – to tell stories about people who aren’t us – but at some point, the character’s mental and social capacity must be accounted for mechanically.

I have two ways of dealing with this disconnect. The first is to allow checks to gain hints. The player must solve the puzzle, but his 18 INT character can make a skill check to get a hint, given some period of time. Remember, geniuses don’t always understand everything instantly! The high INT score just means they get there, and is not indicative of the speed in which they get there. Similarly, the high CHA character making a Diplomacy check doesn’t bribe the guard off the bat, but the player may be nudged toward the amount of money needed to actually bribe the guard.

The other option is fact introduction. Here, the player makes a skill check against an abstract difficulty to actually create an in-game fact. Let’s use the old ‘we need troops from the Duke’ example. The PCs are stuck; they have no idea what to say or do to get what they need. At some point, a player says ‘I bring up the safety of the illegitimate son he’s got hidden with a peasant woman out on a frontier town.’ Did I, as a DM, know the duke had an illegitimate son? No, but the player’s bard DID in fact know that regardless of player or DM intent! I set a DC for the probability of that even being true and the player rolls Bardic Knowledge. Bam – instant solution! Both the player’s mind and the character’s statistics were used to solve the problem at hand. Obviously, you need mature players that aren’t going to try to make every NPC into a lich and threaten to blow his cover, but given a good set of players, this is a great way to involve both the player’s imagination and the characters’ mental statistics in a positive and memorable way.

 

[pemerton]

I think he's saying rightly that the storytelling element could be removed from the Skill Challenge system and the game playing would not change. What story you tell only becomes important if the DM changes the difficulty checks because of it. Saying the DMG requires one to tell a story alongside playing the Skill Challenge game/element is technically correct and by the book. It's only significant if you want to tell stories. It isn't significant to those wanting to role-play those portion of the game and not tell it as a story.

I think we might have different notions of what the "game playing" is in 4e (or other games with "storytelling" aspects).

It's not quite true that the only effect the story has on the mechanical aspects of skill challenge resolution is (as you say) the GM changing DCs because of it. The story also opens up the use of skills.

But more importantly, the interest to the participants in the game turns on the story which is hung upon the mechanical skeleton of the skill challenge - just as the interest to the participants in the game of a combat encounter turns upon the story which is hung upon the mechanical skeleton of the combat mechanics (what makes combat interesting is not just moving numbers around from column A to column B, but the fact that this is my PC fighting for her life against these evil monstrosities!).

If you strip away the story and just roll dice as per the mechanics, I think you'll have a pretty boring experience. But this is not how the game is intended to be played.

True. I take back my assertion. It is possible Justanobody is using the Skill Challenge system mistakenly thinking he is still doing combat. Or is using it and is unsatisfied because he does not like any kind of non-combat play. I suspect differently, but you are right here.

It can be confusing when a single game switches back and forth between these two actions. Especially one with a history of traditionally just role-playing.

Maybe. 4e's integration of an abstract, narrativist/story-telling skill challenge mechanic, with a detailed combat system that is in some ways abstract but quite different in the way it plays out, is new. But the idea of a game that combines roleplaying in your sense (which the D&D rulebooks call "exploration") with mechanically-structured storytelling is not new. Besides other RPGs that have been around for several years (eg HeroWars, The Dying Earth) there is the example of D&D itself, which has combined roleplaying with mechanically-structured storytelling in combat (at least since 3E, but to a significant extent in AD&D and classic DE&D as well).

 

[GlaziusF]

1. I have two of them! Working on #3....

Well then, I'm sure you've come across Hume and Mill's writings on induction, and Kuhn's on the nature of the scientific process.

What is science, but the search for a useful fiction?

Both those words are important - 'useful' to have some standard of evaluating new ideas - 'fiction' so that if those new ideas prove more useful than the old ones there's no shame in discarding them. That's why Dalton's atomic theory took off and Democritus's died in its cradle - there weren't any problems that Democritus's was particularly good at addressing, but Dalton put his out at a time when chemists were struggling to come up with equations for chemical reactions. You try coming up with some when all you have to work with are mass ratios. Hope you like long, seemingly arbitrary, decimals! But with this new atomic theory, not only do you get to toss out your giant unwieldy fractions and replace them with simple integer ratios, but you can actually imagine what's going on inside the reaction!

I don't buy into Heidegger's more animistic theories, but the idea that the human filter on reality, whatever reality is, is story-based is more than just empty theories.

Seriously.

Okay, let's say you've got some graduate mathematics students and you give them a simple logic problem: "Cards should only have vowels on one side if there's an odd number on the other side. Turn over only as many cards as necessary to ensure that this rule holds."

Then you give 'em four cards: one with a C, one with an E, one with an 8, and one with a 9. They should only turn over the E (to make sure there's an odd number) and the 8 (to make sure there's no vowel), but half of them on average tend to honk the problem, either by also turning over the 9 or by flipping it over but not the 8.

Replace the logic problem with a story about postal regulations that ends with "envelopes should only have a pink stamp if they're unsealed" and give them envelopes that match the problem conditions (blue stamp, pink stamp, sealed, unsealed) and almost all of them get it exactly right.

This is Wason's selection task, performed by graduate math students at Berkeley who should know by now the basics of logic. Why does the story work when the logic problem doesn't? Perhaps because people don't actually think logically, even when they say they do?

I'm not going to try and defend any random pomo statement you drop in front of me. Why should I? If you're trying to find examples of a perceived reality that support a story filter and you're the one who came up with the filter in the first place, it's going to be a little too easy for you. Can you say "confirmation bias", kids? I knew you could. Most pomo is just an extension of the principle first articulated by Hume that you can just make up whatever kind of crazy crap you want to inside your head. Rewind time? Sure. Unmelt ice? No problem. Have an angel carry the Earth around the Sun, spinning it like a basketball? Go right ahead. Pomo is just harder for you to sanity check on your own because you're the one who made it up, and it's not exactly easy for outside observers either, unless they discard it all on principle. The guy who spoofed a pomo publication board by railing against the Euclidean tyranny of e is a great example of this.

But deconstruction works, too. Reservoir Dogs was a deconstruction of film noir. Watchmen was one of superhero comics, one so powerful that pretty much anything unreadably edgy in the 1990s was based on it. But along with deconstruction there's reconstruction, consciously telling a story based on the things that you want to go into it. Astro City shot for this after Watchmen, and succeeded in award-winning ways.

I'm not trying to say that there's no such thing as objective reality. At the very least it's proven a very convenient assumption for thousands of years and there's no compelling reason to give it up.

But I am saying that people by default engage the world in terms of stories, and if you're trying to create a fictional world, they'll engage that in the same way.

 

[pemerton]

I think this is just the sort of thing that 4e's skill challenge mechanics (and also some of it power mechanics) have in mind (eg per my example upthread of using Diplomacy in the Gates of Moria skill challenge).

But I think this sort of play is (on the whole) disliked by those who favour the more 1st ed AD&D-ish "challenge the players" approach.

 

[pemerton]

The player can attempt to do things that may including trying to aim the tentacle at the door, but I would make that more than one check or a very high DC meaning the actuality of it happening would be very low possibility. Odds are they can jump aobut good enough, but if they don't push in the right direction at the right moment then the tentacle will not go that direction. It also leads to the other point that the tentacle just might not reach the door. There is nothing saying it is long enough. So even bouncing around the right way and causing the tentacle to go towards the door, may mean that the effort is wasted due to not being able to connect with the door with enough surface contact to do anything by piss off the thing whose tentacle it is.

The more complex the action the less likely the chance of success. Remember called shots from older editions?

Well, if the GM is not prepared to let this sort of thing work, then 4e probably won't play very well. Conversely, if the GM is running the skill challenge in the way the DMG suggests, what answers such questions as "Is the tentacle long enough" or "Does it hit the door" is the player making a successful Acrobatics check (or not) at the specified DC.

I'm reminded of a Purple Worm thread a few weeks ago, in which the OP complained that his/her wizard PC got swallowed by the worm in the first round, and Lost Soul's response was "Why didn't the Rogue dive down the worm's gullet to save the wizard?" - noting that the base DC for an Acrobatic stunt in the PHB is 15. The OP's response was, in effect, that that sort of thing was too gonzo to possibly work.

For skill challenges to work as a mechanic, the GM has to be prepared to set feasible DCs for gonzo (or at least near-gonzo) ideas. Otherwise the idea of incorporating all the PCs into the encounter won't work (eg the ranger with Acrobatics but no Arcana or Thievery will have nothing to contribute to the Moria skill challenge).

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

Pemerton -

No snark intended here - I guess what I'm not following is, in my example, why do you say the players aren't challenged? (" ..disliked by those who favour the 'challenge the players' approach") There was a problem, they invented a solution, roundabout as it is. Having been a player since AD&D myself (I started very young), this feels 'old school' to me. Is it because the players made their own success instead of figuring out what the DM wants them to do? While there is a time and place for puzzles that are basically 'guess what the DM is thinking,' too many can become very railroad very fast, IMHO.

 

[justanobody]

@pemerton: The DM is told one thing, the players another. This is not conductive of good design. The players need only beat the numbers. The DM must have those numbers there. The players CAN just ask for the numbers and skip all else to the loss of other players if but one doesn't feel like waiting through some challenge description.

There lies the problem. It is more a group problem, but it is still a problem that the game allows. When one player can disrupt the enjoyment for others by playing the rules, that is the problem.

 

[howandwhy99]

My posts are getting eaten, but here's a quick repeat of my response:

I think we might have different notions of what the "game playing" is in 4e (or other games with "storytelling" aspects).

It's not quite true that the only effect the story has on the mechanical aspects of skill challenge resolution is (as you say) the GM changing DCs because of it. The story also opens up the use of skills.

It is true a DM could include a new skill, based upon a player's story of it, into the pre-designed Skill Challenge.

But more importantly, the interest to the participants in the game turns on the story which is hung upon the mechanical skeleton of the skill challenge - just as the interest to the participants in the game of a combat encounter turns upon the story which is hung upon the mechanical skeleton of the combat mechanics (what makes combat interesting is not just moving numbers around from column A to column B, but the fact that this is my PC fighting for her life against these evil monstrosities!).

I think your making an error on what "story" is and missing at least one playstyle preference. First, you're continually making the error of calling all imagined items as "story". This is a confusion you can easily resolve by checking the definitional difference between the two. To put it simply, not every idea == story.

Secondly, take a non-hobby rpg like the Model U.N. game for an example. Players can enjoy the debate portion of the game without caring that they are playing as U.N. Representatives or not. It's the same as someone who is equally pleased with playing D&D combat as he is with playing DDM. He's there for the combat system, not the fact his figure might mean anything more than that. The rest is just unimportant. And that's okay.

If you strip away the story and just roll dice as per the mechanics, I think you'll have a pretty boring experience. But this is not how the game is intended to be played.

As above, it's still a legitimate way to play the game. And again, it isn't story that they are interacting with just because the object interacted with is held as an idea vs. an idea represented on a game board. Story comes about with the retelling of those actions, not the taking of them themselves. That's the error of confusing all existence with telling a story. No one talks that way and there are defined modes of discourse explaining why not.

Maybe. 4e's integration of an abstract, narrativist/story-telling skill challenge mechanic, with a detailed combat system that is in some ways abstract but quite different in the way it plays out, is new. But the idea of a game that combines roleplaying in your sense (which the D&D rulebooks call "exploration") with mechanically-structured storytelling is not new. Besides other RPGs that have been around for several years (eg HeroWars, The Dying Earth) there is the example of D&D itself, which has combined roleplaying with mechanically-structured storytelling in combat (at least since 3E, but to a significant extent in AD&D and classic DE&D as well).

Two things:
1. Could you please point me to where the 4E books list role-playing as "exploration"? I imagine it's just another Ron Edwards, Indie community-based confusion on their parts. I don't think anyone should blame them for that.

2. You make assertions that 3E and pre-d20 D&D both have storytelling instead of role-playing in portions of their combat systems. Could you provide details? I'm not recalling any off hand.

 

[pemerton]

The players need only beat the numbers.

I think this has been done to death. The PHB says that you, as a player, must "describe your actions and make checks" (p 259 LHS) and that "It's up to you to think of ways you can use your skills to meet the challenges you face" (p 179 RHS). That is in no way equivalent to saying that "the players need only beat the numbers". Apart from anything else, a player's description of his/her PC's action, and a player's thoughts about applicable skills, will help determine what the numbers are (per DMG pp 74-75).

 

[pemerton]

It is true a DM could include a new skill, based upon a player's story of it, into the pre-designed Skill Challenge.

In fact, as I just posted in my reply to Justanobody, the player's story is relevant to determining the DCs for the skill challenge - and it is a core feature of the skill challenge mechanic that a player can introduce a new skill based on his/her story of what is going on, what has gone on, and what is possible in the gameworld.

I think your making an error on what "story" is and missing at least one playstyle preference.

<snip>

It's the same as someone who is equally pleased with playing D&D combat as he is with playing DDM. He's there for the combat system, not the fact his figure might mean anything more than that. The rest is just unimportant. And that's okay.

I don't think I'm ignoring that preference overall (perhaps in my earlier reply to you I may have). I'm just saying that, if you are playing a game with players who have that sort of preference, you are probably better off not including non-combat encounters (including skill challenges) in the game. Skill challenges are (on the whole, making what I hope is a permissible generalisation) for players who are not equally pleased playing D&D combat or DDM.

it isn't story that they are interacting with just because the object interacted with is held as an idea vs. an idea represented on a game board.

I agree with this. But I think for many participants in an RPG the interest in combat is the story that hangs upon the mechanical elements. And I think if this is not what an RPGer finds interesting, than the skill challenge mechanics are probably not for her/him.

Story comes about with the retelling of those actions, not the taking of them themselves. That's the error of confusing all existence with telling a story.

I think we've had this conversation in the past also. I agree that not all ideas (what I'm calling "fictions", given that they are not ideas of real things) are stories. But I don't agree that all stories are retellings. Some stories are the original tellings. I think a lot of (by no means all) RPGing is the original telling of a story. For example, when a player says "My guy swings his sword at the orc" that is the first telling of a story about some PC attacking an orc. Not a nobel-prize winning story, but a story nevertheless.

I don't think that wargamers or DDM players are telling stories - that's one typical difference, I think, between a wargame and an RPG. Likewise with respect to Magic the Gathering or Monopoly (which is why I find discussions about RPGing in 4e that begin with references to Monopoly particularly unhelpful).

I know you don't regard a lot of RPGing as storytelling. I've hypothesised above that this is because you limit the notion of "story" to retelling, and exclude the first telling. If this is wrong, then I don't know what your reason is for denying that a lot of RPGing is storytelling. (Is it because you have tighter strictures on what constitutes a story? eg a certain sort of plot, or thematic content, or tightness of authorial intention?)

Could you please point me to where the 4E books list role-playing as "exploration"?

This wasn't meant to be a contentious point. The 4e books distinguish three modes of play: exploration, combat encounters and non-combat encounters (PHB pp 9-10). Exploration includes "interacting with the environment" outside the context of an encounter (PHB pp 262-263). So a lot of what many people call roleplaying - eg saying (in character) "I go up to the door, calling out 'Anyone home?'" and, once the GM tells you that a gravelly voice replies "Yes", continuing "I say 'We come in peace'", etc - falls under the notion of exploration in 4e.

Exploration, in this sense, has nothing in common with what Ron Edwards/The Forge call "exploration" (ie the metagame priority of imaging/learning about the fictional world of the game).

However, the PHB goes on to say that non-combat encounters will "focus on skills, utility powers and your own (not your character's) wits", which means that some of what I was trying to get to with "roleplaying" above would also constitute a non-combat encounter (eg the example I gave above is probably on the verge of becoming a non-combat encounter, which may be resolved via skill challenge or the player's wits, depending on the way the table prefers to handle these things).

I hoped that the notion of "roleplaying" in play in the previous few paragraphs was something in the neighbourhood of what you meant by the term (my own usage is a bit broader, including what you are calling storytelling).

You make assertions that 3E and pre-d20 D&D both have storytelling instead of role-playing in portions of their combat systems. Could you provide details? I'm not recalling any off hand.

Just one example: no version of D&D has had full-fledged hit-location/critical rules of the Rolemaster/Runequest sort, which means that storytelling has always been required to determine what sort of injuries anyone suffers in combat, and (consequently) to describe what the healing of those injuries consists in.

Unlike in a skill challenge, however, that storytelling normally does not feed back into the mechanics (eg it does not open up or close off mechanical options like which skill is useable). I wouldn't be surprised if the game has been played in ways which allow it to feed back in, however - that would fit with the free-formish nature of action resolution in pre-3E D&D.