Excerpt: skill challenges

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This is all kinds of awesome, but what are the consequences of failing and is doing a ritual identical each time.

Hmmm....

Template: Ritual under pressure.
"Quick, set up those candles"
"The rain keeps putting them out!"
"Then MAKE them stay alight, if we don't finish the rite successfully all hope will be lost"

This skill challenge covers attempts to perform a ritual under heavy environmental duress. Sometimes this is a hostile area (like a storm) and sometimes it means you have to get it perfectly right the first time.

Setup: For the ritual to work, the party have to deal difficulties. Normally rituals are performed in calm and ideal situations, but in this case compromise must be made and difficulties overcome.

Level: Equal to the level of the entire Party +2.

Complexity: 3 (8 Success before 4 Failures)

Primary Skills: Arcana, Nature, Endurance.

Arcana (moderate DCs): You try and perform the ritual, or aid the person performing the ritual. Each failure using this skill counts as two failures. At least one successful Arcana check must be made by the person performing the ritual during the challenge.

Nature (moderate DCs): You try in some way to shelter the ritual and ritualist from the elements. A successful use of this skill allows you to reduce the difficulty of the Endurance checks to a moderate DC.

Endurance (Hard DCs): You try to ignore your own tiredness and struggle on through the hard times. A successful use of this skill allows the use of a Intimidate check to help the Ritualists concentrate.

Religion (moderate to hard DC): You set up the ritual in a familiar and comforting way, by mimicing the religious practices of the participants. Can only be done once.

Intimidate (Hard DC): You brow beat everyone into working harder and faster, NPCs will work ignoring their own discomfort - PC's may chose to expend Healing Surges to add to this.
This can only be done once. If PCs are involved in the ritual, they may (as a whole) expend 4 healing surges each and gain 2 successes instead of 1.

Success: The ritual is a success.

Failure: The ritual is a failure, and all resources used are wasted. The players may well have to find another way to deal with the problem.

On a failure, I'd like the idea of unintented side effects more.
Like "Okay, you performed the Ritual of Ashkente, but for some reason, Death does not appear in the circle. And while his face might just be a skull, his grinning seems intentional and discomforting". Or summoning an uncontrolled spirit. Or, possibly better, a summoned devil betraying you at a later time. The Divination giving you false, misleading or incomplete information. The Teleport sending you a few miles off. Or your Dragonbane Arrow only working if you hit a specific spot. A Curse that hits more targets then intented (or a break enchantment that just transfers the curse to someone else).

 

[Simon Marks]

On a failure, I'd like the idea of unintented side effects more.

Yes, that is better.

*Flash of Inspiration*

The new ENWorld site is going to need a "Skill Challenge Template" forum. And that's a good thing.

 

[Phaezen]

I agree. Can we get back to discussing dragonborn breasts now?

But would you be able to use intimidate to get them to show them to you, or would diplomacy be more suitable?

what?

Phaezen

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yes, that is better.

Example for the challenge at hand: After having "successfully" intimidated the Duke, he sends them 20 of his best men. In secret, he tells their Captain "These guys are just as dangerous as the enemy you're helping them to take out. They were willing to threaten my wife, my kids and my life. After you have completed the mission, at your first opportunity, take them out. You'll have my best men at your disposal. Don't fail me, or we might see each other soon again in after-life."

*Flash of Inspiration*

The new ENWorld site is going to need a "Skill Challenge Template" forum. And that's a good thing.

The WotC boards gets the new "Party Optimization"-board, we get the "Skill Challenge Template" forum. Sounds like a fair deal, doesn't it?

 

[Torchlyte]

But would you be able to use intimidate to get them to show them to you, or would diplomacy be more suitable?

what?

Phaezen

Diplomacy.

Intimidate would bring back the Half-Orcs.

Example for the challenge at hand: After having "successfully" intimidated the Duke, he sends them 20 of his best men. In secret, he tells their Captain "These guys are just as dangerous as the enemy you're helping them to take out. They were willing to threaten my wife, my kids and my life. After you have completed the mission, at your first opportunity, take them out. You'll have my best men at your disposal. Don't fail me, or we might see each other soon again in after-life."

That's a success in my book. ^^

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Diplomacy.

Intimidate would bring back the Half-Orcs.



That's a success in my book. ^^

It looks like one, for the moment. But remember, skill challenges are not purely about "success, you get all you want" and "failure, you all die". That's what combat is for.
Failing a challenge means further complications. The Escape from Sembia scenario didn't end with the players in prison if they failed, but instead, they faced harder opposition at a later time. That's one of the fundamental difference between a skill challenge and a skill check. The check is binary - you climb the wall, or you don't. A challenge means you try to climb the Mountain of Yrthak. If you fail the challenge, you're slow, lose resources, and your rival is there before you, lying in ambush. If you succeed, you're there before him, can secure the top, and prepare an ambush for him.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It looks like one, for the moment. But remember, skill challenges are not purely about "success, you get all you want" and "failure, you all die". That's what combat is for.
Failing a challenge means further complications. The Escape from Sembia scenario didn't end with the players in prison if they failed, but instead, they faced harder opposition at a later time. That's one of the fundamental difference between a skill challenge and a skill check. The check is binary - you climb the wall, or you don't. A challenge means you try to climb the Mountain of Yrthak. If you fail the challenge, you're slow, lose resources, and your rival is there before you, lying in ambush. If you succeed, you're there before him, can secure the top, and prepare an ambush for him.

Maybe. I mean all that is required is that there is a benefit to succeeding and a consequence to failing to make it so the results of the Skill Challenge matters in some way.

The consequence certainly could be death. However, that result normally ends the adventure for everyone and is probably no fun.

It's the same reason most DMs design combat encounters so that the PCs will win. If you are running an adventure that is about defeating the cultists of Tharizdun and stop them from destroying the world, you want that to happen and the adventure to reach its satisfying conclusion. You want the rolls in the Skill Challenge to matter, but you don't want it to end your adventure(either through the deaths of all of the PCs or due to derailing the plot enough that it no longer becomes possible for the PCs to win).

So, maybe the PCs are at a disadvantage in a later combat. Maybe it takes another adventure to complete the overall plot as the PCs look for a clue they missed. Maybe it just gives them negative modifiers when dealing with the duke in the future.

As an example, while thinking of ideas a while back I came up with a chase Skill Challenge. The goal was to chase after some monsters who had kidnapped someone. Success meant arriving at the cave they were living in just a couple of rounds after the monsters. This meant that they didn't have time to station extra guards at the entrance yet and the first combat was easier. As well, the traps in the cave weren't enabled yet.

The traps would certainly make things harder. However, they were designed to be not overwhelming so I knew they'd make it to the end and save the kidnapped person anyways. That was the idea. He was the plot hook for the rest of my adventure.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It looks like one, for the moment. But remember, skill challenges are not purely about "success, you get all you want" and "failure, you all die". That's what combat is for.

After thinking about this one again, I think what I wrote about combat is wrong. The extreme end of a combat "failure, you all die". But that's usually not what you want. Most of the time, a "failed" combats means you spend more resources on it then you can recover in time, or some monsters escaping, either leading to later complications (no fireball left for this horde of enemies, out of healing surges for the final encounter, monsters are warned and prepared for your arrival).

Ultimately, when you roll multiple dice, the end result is not supposed to be binary. There are extremes you can reach (walk-over fight vs. Total Party Kill, the Duke kissing your ass and giving you an army vs the Duke putting you to prison or having you killed by assassins), but the actual result will usually be inside a continuum of possibilities. The rolls you succeed and the rolls you fail shape up to what comes true inside this continuum.

 

[ForbidenMaster]

I dont understand why this is still an issue. The template is for a scenario in which the PCs are trying to gain the trust of the duke. Everyone here agrees that intimidating the duke would be against that goal, right? So whats the problem with the template?

The only counter is that if the PCs are using intimidate then they arent really trying to gain the dukes trust. But that isnt true, they could just be making a mistake. Either way, the template still stands. Using intimidate does not gain the trust of anyone. People are trying to apply a template to a scenario that it doesnt cover.

A scenario in which the PCs are trying to simply gain assistance by whatever means (friendly or unfriendly) would call for intimidate, as well as the other social based skills. But that is a different scenario.

Its simple, the template is for a very specific scenario in which the PCs are trying to gain the dukes trust. If you change the scenario then the template no longer applies; but that doesn't invalidate the template for its given scenario. It simply means that the template doesnt apply to the scenario given and another template is required, one which is appropriate for the other scenario.

 

[billd91]

Thats... uh... fine. However he wasn't asking about any of that. He was asking about this specific subsystem of 4e and getting a bunch of answers that amounted to 'Well, *I* wouldn't do it that way, so you can't.'

I just figured someone ought to address his actual question rather than wander off on tangents about personal preferences. And given the presentation, the answer is yes, you can ignore the RP aspect with this system. It isn't a commentary on whether its good, bad whether you could do it in 3e or while playing Tunnels and Trolls. Just an answer to whether or not the skill challenge system can reduce an RP encounter to a roll-off.

But it really did answer the question. Every encounter, combat or non, in any edition of D&D could have been reduced to a die roll off. The skill challenge system is no different. It's the style of playing at the table that is the determining factor.