Mearls' Legends and Lore (or, "All Roads Lead to Rome, Redux")

[Raven Crowking]

Oh, I could push them through in less time, sure. My point is more that at the faster pace, I don't see as they are making the session more interesting for the players, so I question the wisdom of using such a construction to resolve getting through the swamp.

I suppose it comes down to a bit of design philosophy - to me, the half an hour is too long to use to cover something that's supposed to be light detail, but too short to be something that's covered in full detail. It feels to me like it should be 5-10 minutes, or an hour or more.

And certainly, YMMV.

In the case presented, it does, because the whole idea that there is a challenge involved to is (4e SC or not) implies that there is something more going on in the scenario.

For example, the PCs might be going to the Hidden Shrine of the Toad God, and it might be important to what occurs there that they understand returning along the same route is not necessarily easy.

For example, the river crossing might be an ambush point on the return journey, so that establishing the mechanics and lay of the land now makes the encounter more interesting for the players then. I.e., the players can use their experiences in the first crossing as the basis for decision making in the second instance.

It might also be a red herring, which disguises the importance of something that seems to be just glossed over along the journey.

Or, it may just be a counter-example to the "If the DM's paying attention to it, it must be important!" syndrome.

(Shrug)

Either way, the important point is that I don't see how this can be in any way improved upon by using the skill challenge mechanic.


RC

 

[LostSoul]

A question -- how do you know the DCs? Additionally, do you know the ramifications of failure?

In 4E specifically the DCs are based on the PC's level (which is supposed to be the same as all other PCs in the party); the ramifications of failure are not defined unless it's HP damage - you can look at page 42 of the DMG to figure out any damage done.

It's possible that failure on a Perception check could lead to total oblivion, but looking at effects from traps and monsters give you an idea of what kinds of effects should happen based on the party's level.

I think it's a failure of 4E that they didn't codify effects by level, the way they did with damage by level. (Of course, I wouldn't have used that in my hack, but as far as regular 4E goes I think they dropped the ball there.)

In other games that use similar procedures to determine difficulty, failure is determined in different ways! It's hard to say unless you specify a game.

 

[Raven Crowking]

In 4E specifically the DCs are based on the PC's level (which is supposed to be the same as all other PCs in the party); the ramifications of failure are not defined unless it's HP damage - you can look at page 42 of the DMG to figure out any damage done.

Well, the only Skill Challenge I've read and thought myself better for reading did define ramifications of failure, and seemed to have DCs set by what was attempted rather than the PC levels. To the degree which I may have misunderstood that SC, I may be wrong about its value. Overall, though, this seems like a terrible way to resolve action, to me!

YMMV, though.

IMHO, "thematic action" that is not tied to player choices which make sense within the context of the fictional reality is both bland and meaningless. And to make sense within the context of the fictional reality, things have to have varying levels of difficulty and chances of success based upon the nature of that fictional reality.

Give me a system where, if X is important to you, you must sacrifice Y to boost your chances of success.

Do not give me a system where, if X is important to you, well, since you're level Z, it is the same difficulty as not-X.

Likewise, risking the dangers of failure is almost defining (to me, anyway) of what is, or is not, important to a character. I.e., what you will risk or sacrifice to achieve X is the greatest measure available within the game for playing out how important X is to your character.

You say, "Because you don't have to worry about making poor decisions - for the most part, you know what DCs you will be facing - you are free to take thematic actions." I say, "That isn't taking thematic actions; that's empty posturing without substance."

I will defend your right (or anyone's) to prefer that, or to disagree with me for that matter, but I cannot pretend that they are the same thing.


RC

 

[BryonD]

In other words, the DM has zero control over the pacing here. The dice determine pacing. How long or short this scenario is is out of the hands of a (non-fudging) DM.

I don't recognize this as remotely resembling anything I play.

Yes, the dice provide a random element to the final details. But the parameters and degrees of freedom over which the dice have control are entirely under the control of the DM.

There are times when you *want* things to really come down to fate. And in that specific case, your description fits. But that is only because the DM endorsed it. If the DM wants more control, the DM can very easily impose it.

And, if done right, it should go back to being about the concept of the area being traveled and if dice and rules did not exist and the party was really there, what are the potential ways it could play out. Then you use rules and dice to simulate that with the reality of the dice as invisible to the action as humanly possible.

For a well run game, your statement of "zero control" is just completely wrong.

I think you do describe 4E correctly. But your description is very unappealing. Yes, you control the pace. But you pay a price in back fitting story to mechanics. And since you can have that in 3E without the price, to me it is a no brainer which is the preferable choice.

Now clearly if you WANT the mechanics/story dynamic that 4E is built upon, then it is a great thing. But it really takes the whole experience in a different direction.

 

[Nagol]

In 4E specifically the DCs are based on the PC's level (which is supposed to be the same as all other PCs in the party); the ramifications of failure are not defined unless it's HP damage - you can look at page 42 of the DMG to figure out any damage done.

It's possible that failure on a Perception check could lead to total oblivion, but looking at effects from traps and monsters give you an idea of what kinds of effects should happen based on the party's level.

I think it's a failure of 4E that they didn't codify effects by level, the way they did with damage by level. (Of course, I wouldn't have used that in my hack, but as far as regular 4E goes I think they dropped the ball there.)

In other games that use similar procedures to determine difficulty, failure is determined in different ways! It's hard to say unless you specify a game.

So the players will know the base range of DCs for their skill attempts (assuming they know the challenge difficulty of the SC) but not the actual ratings in the case where the DM has assigned a range of DCs to the challenge (i.e. navigate by Perception DC 23, navigate by Nature DC 19).

And since the players don't know the effects of a failure, the PCs are still presented with the possibility of a 'gotcha!' encounter at the river where disrobing and dropping weapons can be both embarassing and deadly. So a player group cautious/paranoid enough to expect gotchas in previous editions are just as likely to want to act in a cautious/paranoid way prior to placing themselves in that position.

 

[Hussar]

This seems patently incorrect. As has been expressed in example SCs -- including Jester's sodden ghoul SC upthread, the SC can evolve and include sudden (or hidden) enemy combatants. Thre is nothing that prevents a SC from containing a non-obvious threat such as a Dragon Turtle lurking in the river that is awakened with the first failure.

What you *presented would be true if the SC were run in an 'open' environment where the players understood the scenario presented and made tactical decisions based upon that situation. Others have suggested that SCs are rarely run that way and are more often run 'blind'.

Sorry, that was a misstatement on my part. I should have said, "A 4e SC doesn't need a specific river to cross. You are correct in that you certainly can actually have one.

I was more referring to the idea of controlling pacing. If I wanted to slow down pacing, I could drop a Dragon Turtle in the river that is awakened on the first failure. Or, I could simply say, "The going is rough, lose 1 healing surge". (boring as heck, but possible.)

I don't recognize this as remotely resembling anything I play.

Yes, the dice provide a random element to the final details. But the parameters and degrees of freedom over which the dice have control are entirely under the control of the DM. /snip.

It's funny that Raven Crowking hasn't jumped on you for this. You're basically saying that you control pacing by fudging the dice. If the dice say that a random encounter happens, then that's what happens according to the rules. If the dice say that the group gets lost, then they get lost.

Of course, you can ignore the dice, but considering the rather large amount of complaining about fudging from certain quarters, I wanted to be absolutely fair and RAW about things.

 

[Hussar]

So the players will know the base range of DCs for their skill attempts (assuming they know the challenge difficulty of the SC) but not the actual ratings in the case where the DM has assigned a range of DCs to the challenge (i.e. navigate by Perception DC 23, navigate by Nature DC 19).

And since the players don't know the effects of a failure, the PCs are still presented with the possibility of a 'gotcha!' encounter at the river where disrobing and dropping weapons can be both embarassing and deadly. So a player group cautious/paranoid enough to expect gotchas in previous editions are just as likely to want to act in a cautious/paranoid way prior to placing themselves in that position.

But, you are presuming that there is a map that's being followed throughout the SC. That if I succeed X times, I will reach a river. That's not necessarily true or even needed.

The river encounter can simply be tied to failures and not the narrative at all. You succeed four times and then fail once, you have a Dragon Turtle encounter. You fail the first roll and you have the Dragon Turtle encounter.

There is no point where the players are screwing around with disrobing and poncing about with the river because the river only comes up on a failed roll.

Note, this isn't the only way to do it, but, it is one way.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Hmm... but now I'm thinking about how I originally started played D&D, back with B/X. I recall counting out every single turn: distance travelled, time spent, wandering monsters, checks for secret doors, and the amount of torch that got burned up. That's a specific form of game-controlled pacing, and I think it worked very well.

That's a good point.

If you look at the original OD&D rules they set a very specific pace at which the dungeon operates. Just one year later, in '75, published material was demonstrating how you could adjust that pace (by varying the rate of wandering monsters, for example).

I think it's absolutely true that mechanics have a real and meaningful impact on the pace of play: Throw 1d6 goblins at the party and you're going to have a very different pace than 1d6 storm giants.

Our main point of disagreement re: 4E is that I don't think 4E provides much support for narrativist play; I think it's a good example of play with a pre-determined theme or dramatic flow. Combat pacing is a good example: combat encounters follow a pre-determined script, PCs coming in apparently weaker than their foes, get knocked down a couple of times, but draw on their superior healing and staying power to come back and defeat the monsters in the end.

That certainly matches my experience with the system. By RAW, 4E is a very pre-packaged experience. Insofar as it has any virtue, it's that 80% of the system can be torn away and replaced with shooting from the hip with pg. 42 in the holster.

 

[Beginning of the End]

That is the explanation. The combat dynamic of 4e unfolds as it does by creating the need for the players to deploy the deeper resources to which they have access, if the PCs are to succeed. And the choices made by players in the course of that deployment are expressive of thematic content/commitments.

Okay, this begins to make sense. As you mentioned in a previous post, you think that "make that guy move 5 feet closer to me" is a really meaningful narrative control. And here we see that you think "I use Split the Tree and fire two arrows at once that separate in mid-flight" is "rich and compelling thematic material".

I guess what this really boils down to is that my understanding of "rich and compelling thematic material" is... well... richer and more compelling than yours.

Everyone? Just the player of the ranger? At what DC? These are the questions that I need to answer to resolve the situation. The skill challenge mechanic answers them.

Except the skill challenge mechanic doesn't actually do that. In fact, the only people I've seen suggesting that it does do that before now have been fervent anti-4E haters who are getting their facts wrong.

Allow me to demonstrate: The ranger's player says to you, "We want to cut through the jungle instead of taking the road the long way around."

Walk me through the steps you take to resolve that action using a skill challenge. Starting with how you design the skill challenge and then taking me through each check and its outcome (specifying who's proposing the checks, what they're proposing, and how it resolves).

I will then demonstrate how (a) you did, in fact, set the DCs you're claiming you didn't set and (b) the skill challenge mechanics were completely irrelevant to what you just did.

It's interesting, Imaro, that you are choosing to ignore certain aspects of 3.5.

It's a question of how you're choosing to resolve these actions. 4th Edition also includes rules for overland travel, enduring harsh conditions, managing rations, and the like which are similarly being ignored by Hussar and pemerton.

 

[pemerton]

Situation: The party is traveling across country from A to B. The party does not have any other means of traveling other than mundane (horses, on foot, whatever, no teleport or fly) and the trip will take about four game days, give or take. There is no road, its wilderness trekking.

Pre-4e D&D. To do this, requires a number of checks.

<snip details of rolls, checks etc>

In other words, the DM has zero control over the pacing here. The dice determine pacing. How long or short this scenario is is out of the hands of a (non-fudging) DM.

Now, let's do this from a 4e perspective.

It's a skill challenge.

<snip details of rolls, checks etc>

In other words, pacing is 100% under the control of the DM.

Yep, this is what I meant. (Can't XP you yet though - sorry!)

In 3e, you tell the players they have to cross a swift moving river and that entails a swim check. Which in turn requires them to take off their armor or start breaking out the spells.

I can see this bogging way down in micro-managing analysis paralysis for many, many groups. "Do we take off our armor?" "Oh, this has to be a trap." "Ok, start searching the surrounding area for ambushes (roll roll roll)" "Detect spells on the river to see if anything's hiding beneath the surface"... on and on and on.

4e's design philosophy is much more up front about it. You don't have a specific river to cross, so, there's no analysis of the river and how to cross it. You simply make your checks and each failure carries some sort of penalty.

Thre is nothing that prevents a SC from containing a non-obvious threat such as a Dragon Turtle lurking in the river that is awakened with the first failure.

I agree with Hussar. And even when (as in the skill challenge that I actually ran in my game, and that I described the resolution of upthread) there is a specific river to cross - the Volaga river, marked on the 1 hex = 3 miles map that is on the inside cover of the module - I still don't need to know how wide it is, how deep it is, or how fast it is flowing.

I also agree with Nagol. In the skill challenge I describe, one consequence of failure was being surprised by the manticore-riding gnoll archer while in combat with the gnoll shaman and her band of gnolls and ghouls. This was a case, then, of using a combat encounter - and the arrival in the second round of that encounter of another two combatants - as part of the resolution of the skill challenge. Sometimes, though, I have handled combat as an immediate component of a skill challenge (eg in an infiltration challenge, I mentioned to the player that his PC sees two guards flanking the doorway he wants to enter - he spent his area attack encounter power, and as per the guidelines in DMG2 I then gave him +2 on his stealth check - when he succeeded this was narrated as him having dropped both guards with his halberd before then entering the doorway).

On other occasions I've handled "combat" as a simple skill check - when the party was fleeing the collapsing temple (as mentioned upthread) the player of the wizard decided that his PC would use Magic Missile to kill the devil-worshipper who had been rescued/captured from the gnolls by the players - I resolved this via a simple arcana check, forming the view that making him wade through the 50-odd hit points the NPC was statted as having for an actual combat context would add nothing at all to the game. (One way to construe this in mechanical terms - on a successful Arcana check, the player was able to "minionise" a lone NPC, who had no context or companions to make him a serious combat challenge.)

Incidentally, I don't know how 3E would handle this - with it's more simulationist treatment of hit points what I've described would be closer to cheating, and also there is no skill that is the functional equivalent of Arcana in this context - Spellcraft or Knowledge doesn't quite seem to fit. For me, then, this is another example of 4e's non-simulationist approach to skill use, and situation design, and resolution, offering better support for thematic play. The real issue in the scene I've just described was not the difficulty of killing the NPC, but the ruthlessness displayed on the part of the PC (and in some sense at least therefore endorsed by the player).

This "detail" is only necessary because you are choosing to use it, it's a tool like everything else in 3.x/PF. The skill descriptions make the setting of DC's trivially easy in 3e... especially since their function or the obstacle is what sets them... thus the only thing I need the DC for is the actual obstacle, any other DC's will be determined by the manner in which the PC wants to use the particular skill he chooses.

So can I set the DC of the swim check without knowing how deep and/or wide and/or fast flowing the river is?

The d20 SRD says this about swimming:

Make a Swim check once per round while you are in the water. Success means you may swim at up to one-half your speed (as a full-round action) or at one-quarter your speed (as a move action). If you fail by 4 or less, you make no progress through the water. If you fail by 5 or more, you go underwater.​

That implies to me that the players have to make at least as many swim checks as twice the ratio of the river width to their movement rates. The number required is more if some of those checks fail. I don't see how this is not the mechanics determining the pacing in a pretty simulationist fashion.

since again we are keeping this short and sweet we set the width in the range of one succesful roll for the majority of characters... 15' and since the description of the river is a strong current... the DC=15 to swim... that took me every bit of 10 secs to figure out.

Except that making it across a 15' wide river is not a very heroic achievement. I'm a pretty crappy swimmer (at least by Australian standards) and I've swum without difficulty across rivers quite a bit wider than 15' - even channels with fairly strong currents.

This relates back to the point about heroic protagonism. In a skill challenge I'm free to describe the river as wide and deep (and therefore challenging) while still resolving the crossing with only a handful of rolls. In 3E, at least according to the SRD, this would require a GM handwave. And in my view, at least, that GM handwave/fiat is at odds with the players' protagonism.

Yet tons of 4e skill challenges have every PC make an endurance check during travel... and tons of players only have the person with the best skill make a check to avoid failures... what's the difference?

At least two differences. First, these are almost always secondary checks (and so contribute to the consequences of the challenge, but not to ultimate success or failure), or if primary checks are a group check as per DMG2. The heroic protagonism is therefore still there - if the endurance checks are secondary then what will contribute to sucessful primary checks is someone's successful nature (or similar) check, or if it is a group endurance check the group will be anchored by (for example) the dwarf fighter who can't fail on an easy DC, therefore meaning that only half of the other 4 PCs must succeed in order for the group as a whole to clock up a success.

Second, there is no need to specify the minutiae of the ingame elements (dust, heat, lack of food, whatever) that determine the frequency and DCs of these checks.

I could just as easily do the 5-10 min thing in 3.X if I wanted too by simply describing the scene and using a simple skill check by each player at each stage (which would roughly give you the same length of time as SC's in 4e)... However I would rather let the particular table choose the length and level of detail they want in a particular scene, and thus set the pacing that best fits their group.

It's interesting, Imaro, that you are choosing to ignore certain aspects of 3.5. You're not calling for "Getting Lost" checks (which seem to require a map of some sort; perhaps not) or making random encounter rolls. In addition, your handling of getting a good night's rest and the bandit ambush is to my liking, though not by the rules as far as I can tell.

Maybe you can answer my question about 3.x: When do you call for a skill check? It seems to me that any time you attempt any action that's listed in any of the skill descriptions you must make a check (or Take 10/20). If that's the case, you can see how that would affect the pacing of a game.

at a certain point all games including 4e and Heroquest require DM fiat for situations and actions that are unexpected.

What I'm interested in is the nature of the GM fiat. Skill challenges support the GM framing a scene with challenge and pacing in mind, and then leaves the players to take the lead in resolving it, without needing to get bogged down in minutiae. Whereas, at least according to the d20 SRD if I want to achieve this for a river that's more than 15' wide, I either have to start doing multiple swim checks, or else have to start GM fiating the action resolution rules.

the thematic thing I just don't see period, it seems to be based in fluff and since fluff is in every edition I don't buy 4e does that objectively better either.

I'm not sure what you mean here. A PC ruthlessly killing a (for all practical purposes) helpless and unwitting NPC isn't just fluff. That's a significant event in the fiction which is mechanically modelled, in some form or other, in every edition of D&D.

If part of the point of playing is for the players to be able to express thematic ideas through engaging with the fictional situation via their PCs, then the mechanics that permit them to do that - and therefore, for example, to kill off NPCs in the way I've described - make a big difference.

Apart from anything else, if killing the NPC requires multiple rounds of to hit rolls, the possibility of retaliatory attacks by the doomed NPC, etc etc then suddenly the game's focus shifts away from the thematic material altogether, and instead it's become just a combat fest. (This is also an illustration of how pacing concerns, the ease of improvisation, and the ability to run a game that allows players to express thematic content, are all inter-linked.)

Basically you're taking how Permeton's particular skill challenges (which I'm not sure are exactly by the book) are designed and how his players appproach them and claiming that bothy of these are because of 4e's skill challenge rules... and they aren't. You're slapping your own coat of narrativist play over a predominately gamist system.

I'm not sure what "by the book" means here. I've got quite a few 4e books. They have a lot of sample skill challenges. I use these both as direct sources of skill challenge design, and as inspiration for my own ideas.

The very first skill challenge I ran in 4e - at a point when I had only the three core books plus Adventurers' Vault - was an adaptation from the Basic module Night's Dark Terror. The situation is this: the PCs, following the trail to the homestead that is their destination, come out of the forest, see the homstead on fire across a creek valley, and see goblins on wolves circling round the outside of the homestead to try and cut them off.

Having never designed or run a skill challenge before, I was able to determine in advance how I would adjudicate athletics, acrobatics and stealth checks, as well as attempt by one PC to help another. In the course of resolving the challenge I also worked out how to adjudicate an attempt by a PC to intimidate the approaching goblins. And I successfully implemented my pre-prepared idea that failures on the challenge would result in one or more PCs having to fight their way past a goblin wolfrider or two. I was even able to implement differential consequences for different PCs, with those who succeeded on athletics checks without opting to help others making it into the homestead fine, while those who opted to help, or who tried to hold off the goblins by intimidation while the squishier PCs made their way inside, had to fight the wolfriders.

I don't know if this was "by the book" or not, but it was what I came up with after I read the DMG, read the module, and thought about how to adapt it to 4e.

Of course a similar encounter could be played out in Rolemaster or 3E, but in my view, and consistently with what I've said earlier in this post, that would require detailed maps and terrain. And it would at least be more fiddly, and probably also more handwavey, to integrate considerations like one PC helping another, or one PC intimidating the goblins while others escape to safety. (In the module as written, the PCs make it to safety unless they hesitate for more than two rounds, in which case they have to fight the wolfriders. How to adjudicate the number of rounds passing in hesitation isn't explained. In particular, it's not clear whether the GM is meant to run a real-world stopwatch on the players - 2 rounds in Basic would be 20 seconds - or whether the GM is meant to actually adjudicate 2 rounds worth of actions on the part of the PCs, counting anything other than "run full tilt for the homestead" as hesitation.)

I honestly get the impression you aren't that familiar with 3.x/PF... am I right?

I've got a pretty good working knowledge of the rules. I've got a lot less play experience with it than with 4e.

What I do find interesting is that you seem to be saying that in 4e having pre-set DC's based on level (as opposed to ther world or even the choices the hero makes)... somehow empowers "heroic protagonism"... and I find that hard to believe. Is this what you are claiming?

Yes. It's 4e's version of the HeroQuest pass/fail cycle, which makes DCs depend on the place of the conflict in the narrative rather than determining them in a simulationist fashion. (In 4e, instead of escalating DCs in response to success, as HeroQuest does, the players gradually lose access to their enhancing resources or ablative resources, like powers and hit points/healing surges.)

Another, more practical, benefit of level-appropriate DCs is that they make determining difficulty on the fly very easy. You don't need to worry about how wide the river is, for example, in order to set a DC to cross it successfully without incident. (Combat works differently in this respect - it does depend on details accounting for time and space. I've already stated upthread that the lack of guidelines on integrating combat resolution with non-combat resolution is a weakness in 4e's action resolution mechanics.)

Yet another feature - which I think is a benefit, but which others may not - is that the way the GM conceives of the situation that the PCs find themselves in has comparatively little impact on the likelihood of their success, once the complexity of the skill challenge is determined (and subject to Nagol's general concern about skill challenges being a maths trap). Whereas in setting up a situation in the way Imaro describes his overland swamp journely, a lot seems to turn on the GM's fiat about whether swimming requires one check overall or one per round, or whether everyone in the party has to make a survival check or just the ranger, and whether everyone in the party gets a perception check against the bandits or just the best, etc, etc. In my view this makes the players' prospects overly subject to GM fiat. It also sets up a situation that encourages check mongering by either GM or players (or both).

There's a reason why this works. Because you don't have to worry about making poor decisions - for the most part, you know what DCs you will be facing - you are free to take thematic actions.

Right. This relates to the point I made upthread about combat, also, and how (in my view) it supports narrativist play - 4e combat is designed to force the players to step up or be beaten, with that crunch point coming somewhere about half-way into an encounter. This can be the focus for "step on up" play (and Balesir, on this thread, has helped me get a better understanding of how 4e works in this regard).

But because the system is robust across a wide range of choices - as LostSoul describes in relation to skill challenge DCs - this crunch point can also be the focus for thematic choice, as different ways of meeting the test express different sorts of commitments or ideals.

In 4E specifically the DCs are based on the PC's level (which is supposed to be the same as all other PCs in the party); the ramifications of failure are not defined unless it's HP damage - you can look at page 42 of the DMG to figure out any damage done.

It's possible that failure on a Perception check could lead to total oblivion, but looking at effects from traps and monsters give you an idea of what kinds of effects should happen based on the party's level.

I think it's a failure of 4E that they didn't codify effects by level, the way they did with damage by level. (Of course, I wouldn't have used that in my hack, but as far as regular 4E goes I think they dropped the ball there.)

Agreed, although there are a number of published example skill challenges that give a reasonable idea of what the designers think count as reasonable consequences. And, as you say, traps and monsters help - traps especially, because these often have a "disable traps" skill challenge built in that allows fairly clear inferences from failures to mechanical consequences.

Of course in many contexts the consequences of failure aren't mechanical but purely fictional (eg someone doesn't like you, or you lose an item crossing the river, or . . .). In some systems these could be handled mechanically, but they are not in 4e.