Excerpt: skill challenges

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It may be impossible to intimidate someone into trusting you, but that isn't what this challenge is about: it's about securing the assistance of the noble in question.

Consider this:

Player: I make a knowledge nobility check (I don't know if this is an actual skill, but substitute the appropriate check if it isn't). I want to know who this lord's liege is, and something that the liege is known to enjoy. Roll. Success.

GM: I'm not sure where you're going with this, but his liege is Lord Stanley, who enjoys playing cricket.

Player: Okay. This time it's intimidate. Hmmn, you seem reticent to help us out here. That's certainly understandable. I will have to mention that to Lord Stanley when I play cricket with him next month at Goblin Knob. Yes, it seems we are in a sticky wicket, here, isn't it.

Look at the context: I know who your boss is, and I'm going to tell him that you haven't been helping us. He won't like that. That's intimidate, and it's used all the time in noble circles. It's a very low level threat, actually.

Does the NPC trust you now?

The thing is, intimidate gets used all the time to get things done: NPCs do it to the PCs all the time, so why not turn the tables on them?

NPCs rarely, if ever, use social skills against PCs, and very rarely are their attempts even succesful. Intimidation certainly never helped an NPC to appear trustworthy to the PCs.

 

[Stormtalon]

Regarding Intimidate and History:

First, Intimidate. I think it might go over better if folks stopped thinking of Intimidate as being "impossible" to use against the Duke but rather as "counter-productive." It provides one skill failure out of 4. It would be railroading if it immediately failed the entire encounter, sure, but that's not what happens. As a DM, it makes eminent sense to me that in most situations there will be skills which may actively harm your progress; it makes things a bit more fluid and can add suspense to what would be an otherwise rote bit of "Beat the DCs." There's drama to be milked out of such things, I'm thinking.

On to History. Can't say I'm buying the argument of "but I know all this historical stuff, why can't I just make use of it right away?" The answer (and I know it's been stated multiple times by multiple people, but not quite so bluntly) is "Relevance." Sure, you can know a lot of history -- enough to impress just about anyone. However, without the knowledge that this one individual considers this one bit of historical knowledge to be personally important, that vast amount of information packed away in your brain is as good as useless in a negotiation setting. The Diplomacy check opens that door as the Duke makes a reference to something that you might have considered irrelevant. It's not just about knowing the history of the region. It's about knowing this one bit of information AND knowing that it's of value. It's that last part that's the kicker, and why you need Diplomacy first to let you make use of your vast knowledge of History.

 

[Fifth Element]

If Skill Challenges would be presented as a guideline they would need less space which could be used for something else in addition to be better for the game as you can react better to what the PCs do.

The same could be said for the Combat chapter. You need to get out of the old D&D mindset when discussing 4E. That is, combat has detailed, complex rules, while everything is just roleplayed.

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

I like it

Well, I am on a slow Wifi connection in La Paz, Bolivia, so I can't read this whole thread,
but I want to say that I like what I see about the complex skill resolution.

Contrary to what some others here think, I like it that only some skills are relevant, and that
others automatically engender failures. I really dread the idea of a player maxing one skill out
and relying on it too much. I think this system has a good mix of complexity and randomness.

On randomness:

I think it's good that there's more randomness in outcome in the social skill resolution system
than in the combat system. I don't want to see every RP encounter designed so that a balanced party of 4 (5?) should automatically win, expending X percent of their resources.

I want to see player skill rewarded, not just character skill. It's stupid for low level PCs to try to intimidate the duke!

In summary, I was a big critic of the Escape from Sembia writeup ('I use my history skill to remember about the sewer entrance at the end of the alley', etc) but I like what I see here.

Ken

 

[Irda Ranger]

That said, I don't get your reasoning. There's a big difference between "everyone can just decide" to ignore your intimidation, and acknowledging that different people respond to threats differently based upon context, and that a particular set of PCs may not have any leverage with which to intimidate a particular landed noble into performing a specific task.

Sure, but the player group isn't broken up and evenly balanced into social roles the way they are into combat roles. If someone takes the Intimidating Street-Tough role, do I have to provide encounters suitable for that? What happens if he gets invited to a noble banquet? I prefer these matters be handled through RP than have char-gen choices force the issue.

This is "just deciding" to ignore the Intimidate skill in the same sense that telling a PC that there's nothing in the room big enough to hide behind is "just deciding" to ignore his Stealth skill. Skills are used in context of the gameworld, and sometimes the gameworld doesn't facilitate the use of a particular skill. That's why you get more than one.

Actually, that's why I don't use Stealth either. In 95% of cases there's either no meaningful chance the other person will hear you if you use simple precautions (e.g., you're wearing soft leather boots and you wait for a heavy grain-wagon to roll past before making your move) or there's no chance of them not hearing you (e.g., you're wearing hobnail boots, the floor is made of marble, and the room is relatively quiet). Since Skills are so rarely useful, a simple Dex check (Dex+Race/Class mods+1/2 Level) will usually suffice on the odd chance you need to roll something.

This is a rule I've adapted from Castles & Crusades, and it works great. It's much more free form and open ended than a defined and limited Skill system. It also encourages creative roleplaying on the PCs parts ("What if I take off my shoes?" or "What if we throw some pebbles over into the other bushes?"), which I love encouraging and handing out XP awards for.

You're probably asking yourself, will he use any Skills at all in 4E? The answer is: I don't plan on it. I'll probably have to do something about Arcana and Religion (since they're probably linked to some class features), but other than that I plan on skipping it.

But what about Thievery? A self-justifying, niche-protecting skill, for the most part. I'm glad to see that 4E is coming my way by allowing that many skills may be used to solve particular kinds of traps, but it's a shame they didn't follow the logic to its conclusion. As for real locks, (1) they're rare in any age prior to the 18th century, and (2) you don't need the Thievery skill to use a crowbar or bribe a guard to let you in.

 

[Lacyon]

Sure, but the player group isn't broken up and evenly balanced into social roles the way they are into combat roles. If someone takes the Intimidating Street-Tough role, do I have to provide encounters suitable for that? What happens if he gets invited to a noble banquet? I prefer these matters be handled through RP than have char-gen choices force the issue.

Such a character has about a five-point difference between his Intimidate and Diplomacy skills. That matters, but he's still got a chance to contribute if the DCs aren't out-of-whack.

There should definitely be times when characters get to use the skills they put chargen points in, but any single challenge where they can't isn't likely to break the game.

You're probably asking yourself, will he use any Skills at all in 4E? The answer is: I don't plan on it. I'll probably have to do something about Arcana and Religion (since they're probably linked to some class features), but other than that I plan on skipping it.

Good on ya. Should work out about the same in the long run, I'd think.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

but you can train the use of a skill... you could provide bonuses for having used that skill in such a way before and keep track of it...

but that simple +5 modifier is ok... even +2 or 3 would have been helpfull... a different solution would have been replacing your normal skill modifier by int bonus or something...

that +5 difference here just means beeing able to do DC 15 checks instead of DC 10 checks easily... which may mean you are a bit fast on the cliff etc... its about the ablity bonus difference between a main attribute to an unimportant attribute which seems reasonable to me... so default chance on competing an easy task is 75% is you are under stress... which seems quite good to me

 

[Lord Zardoz]

This reminds me of a somewhat more flexible version of that, especially with the idea of some skill checks opening up other ones. I could even see this concept amortized over an entire adventure where the characters had to have 4 "successes" before 2 "failures" where successes could be things like defeating a certain monster, destroying a certain relic of unholy might, etc.

Red Hand of Doom almost does this. It uses Victory Points rather than a flat X success before Y failures method. You can defeat the module by getting a certain number of points, and you get points for things like clearing road blocks, killing leadership of the Red Hand, slowing the progress of the opposing armies, etc.

The thing about adventures is that you probably do not want the adventure to end in outright failure if the players manage to rack up a few failures early on.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Mirtek]

That is a suboptimal choice .

Doing something which I am absolutely sure to win 6 times is better than trying something with a high risk of failure.

I'd rather roll 1d20+15 vs. DC 17 six times than to try my luck with 1d20+8 vs. DC 20

After reading the excerpt, I'm just afraid that you won't have the opportunity to make an interesting choice.

Yep, not much point in chosing if you don't know which options you can chose from.

 

[Mirtek]

How does 3 = 8s/4f?

Because 4e is so awesome that it gets +1 to everything!