New Legends and Lore:Head of the Class

[Balesir]

At a deeper level there is another issue here, which is what are the proper dimensions of abstraction? In my canoe racing system what are the natural elements that I will model? Individual strokes of the paddle? What? It isn't exactly obvious. With combat this issue exists too, but nearly 100 years of war game development and 35 years of RPG development have given us some good answers. We lack equally good answers for other situations.

I, for one, realise this. To throw away that learning for combat (and for "physical action sequences" in general, in fact) would be madness when it suits the most fitting mode of D&D play as well as it does.

But does that mean that we should simply resign ourselves to half baked non-combat systems forever more? I would say, emphatically, no!

We have finally got a pretty well functional combat system - balanced, interesting and sophisticated. Now let's get the same for systems to handle the non-combat challenges!

 

[pemerton]

This is a perfect example of the "good DMing trumps all" thing I was talking about. You fix the problems inherent in the system. Which is GREAT DMing, but it's not good rules design (the mantra of "Monte Cook can probably run a pretty good game of FATAL").

<snip>

Rather than tell us to work harder and be better at playing the game, I'd prefer them to design a better ruleset.

Have your read FATAL? I know the comparison is meant to be a light-hearted one, but in my view it actually obscures as much as, if not more than, it illuminates.

To run a tolerable session of FATAL, you would have to override and/or ignore the mechanics. When I run a tolerable skill challenge, though, I don't ignore the mechanics, nor override them. I use them, and build on them, in various ways.

And while it's flattering of you to call my a good GM, I don't want to take all the credit! I didn't work out how to do what I do on my own. I had rulebooks to help me. Just not the WotC ones. Which means I also think your reference to "working harder" is a little hyperbolic. It's not particularly hard work in 4e to build and run an interesting combat encounter, because the guidelines are there to help you: monsters classified by role, lots of terrain features presented in a fairly systematic way, sample encounter groupings, and plenty of advice on how to put it all together, and on what effects different choices will have.

Giving that level of advice for skill challenges wouldn't make GMs have to work harder. It would make our lives easier, because we wouldn't have to do it from first principles, or adapt advice for HeroQuest and Maelstrom across to the slightly different framework of skill challenges.

Replace skills with something more akin to powers, where instead of a raw check, you get to say, "This Happens." Make skill checks more like attack rolls. Use defenses. Use economies. Have attrition. Have the challenge fight back. Have victories cost. Allow retreat. It's all very possible.

I've got nothing against any of this. But I don't think it needs to start with a complete rebuild. A lot of this can, in principle, be done with what's there: we've already got encounter and daily powers, healing surges, action points, rituals, other forms of gp expenditure, "advantages" etc (per DMG2 and RC), all of which create economies and attrition and allow victories that cost. Retreat can be incorporated in the evolution of a "structure" challenge (per DMG2). Challenges fighting back is not really discussed at all, and (as I've said above) I think is the one thing on your list that can't be done with the current mechanics other than in a narrative fashion (by "pouring on the pressure").

But where is the advice and guidelines on how to use encounter and daily powers, healing surges, action points, rituals, other expenditure, advantages? It's not there - half a page in DMG2 and a sidebar in RC don't cut it. Imagine trying to build and run 4e combats with no more than a page of advice! That's what we're trying to do with skill challenges - and, in my view, that's what makes it hard.

Again, I'm not saying that alternative mechanics couldn't achieve what you're looking for - and, for at least some groups and GMs, be prefereable to a "pour on the pressure" approach. But it would require rebuilding from the ground up, both in respect of character building and action resolution mechanics. So we're not going to see it for a long time, if ever. Whereas better advice, guidelines, examples, illustrations of actual play (and not imagined idealised actual play, but actual actual play), etc - stuff that made what we already have easy to work with - could be done, if not literally overnight, at least in a timeframe of weeks and months.

I mean, the models are there - HeroQuest extended contests (yes, these have active opposition, but much more abstract than 4e combat - I think it could be replicated by a sophisticated mix of DC-setting and "advantages", and action points or power use could be used to emulate the resource-dynamics of Hero Points); and Maelstrom Storytelling's scene resolution (I haven't got my rules in front of me, but from memory these have less active opposition and rely more on narrative pressure - and they have a system of "quick takes", based on resource expenditure, to allow limited victories to be snatched from overall defeat - which could be amulated in 4e via action points, powers and/or advantages).

The other place where work could be done would be in the existing areas of feat and utility powers (including skill powers). This could help fill your "This happens" space (although I think skills can also be used in this way - "this happens", but what else happens depends on how the skill roll turns out).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But where is the advice and guidelines on how to use encounter and daily powers, healing surges, action points, rituals, other expenditure, advantages? It's not there - half a page in DMG2 and a sidebar in RC don't cut it. Imagine trying to build and run 4e combats with no more than a page of advice! That's what we're trying to do with skill challenges - and, in my view, that's what makes it hard.

Playing gadfly for a moment...

The entire combat rules of Holmes' Basic (and the original D&D alternate combat system it is a rewrite of) actually take up less word count than the 2 sidebars you cite. Yet I have never heard any complaint about Basic D&D that people had doubts about how to put on a combat or required guidelines. Nor is there any 'economy' beyond the action economy and hit points (and daily spell resources if you will).

I'm not convinced that more kinds of points and chits and whatnot adds anything significant. I think true tension and drama always come out of the story itself. Even things like HQ or BW story mechanics don't make a story tense or engaging. They can present queues to the players. I think that is the MAIN virtue of these things, they prime the participants and tell them "the game expects you to try to pull some crazy thing off here, and the GM is going to give you a chance, now and then." The elements of drama have to be there, the players have to be engaged enough to care, and then they need to be prodded somehow.

Again, though I come back to my earlier point. Basic's combat system could exist on a single page BECAUSE everyone is already very clear about what combat is, it has clear roles (protagonist, antagonist) and clear goals (kill the other guy before he kills you), and clear ground rules (hitting people with sharpened metal poles kills them).

Clearly the material in the 4e books missed the mark in terms of explaining that the same needs to be true of a conflict situation regardless of whether it is a combat or not. I think the flaw with the way SCs are presented is that they talk about the mechanics before establishing (and then fail to really establish) these things. There's no real discussion of the elements of conflict, establishing the context, establishing roles in the scene, making the goals clear, and establishing the ground rules of the situation. At best the examples and advice fumble their way towards this. The description of skill uses for instance establishes some ground rules, but in an awkward form that is more limiting than enabling.

There is also a failure IMHO to properly address framing of a challenge. There's just the 'make sure everyone has a skill they can use', but the way this advice is written it is basically like saying "make up some rationalization for rewarding a character with a success when he uses one of his skills that has no obvious applicability" instead of actual framing, which would be "create new story elements to allow the challenge to encompass things relevant to each character's sphere of competency."

I have mixed feelings about the '3 strikes' core SC mechanic. It has certain virtues. It is simple for the players to grasp, works well for smaller 'extended skill check' kind of challenges, and actually works pretty well for a lot of larger challenges, especially the 'action adventure' sorts where you go chasing around. The idea that it induces people to sit out has merit though, and many things which seem like they could use SC-like mechanics don't work well with a simple counting mechanism. You can reframe constantly to get to the point where the challenge DOES work that way, but I think it would be better if the SC system simply got a more flexible core mechanic.

 

[Balesir]

I'm not convinced that more kinds of points and chits and whatnot adds anything significant.

I would agree that extra resources and such should not be added. And I don't think that changes are required for every skill challenge.

What I think would help considerably, though, is a 'toolbox' of systemic tweaks together with notes about what circumstances they might be useful for. Some examples might be:

- Have the DCs for some challenges start lower than standard and increase by 1 each round of the SC. This rewards getting all the PCs involved and introduces a game-time pressure not quite as harsh as a round limit.

- List out rewards for successes and penalties for failure for some challenges. Example failure events would be a minor combat (worth half the XP of the SC, but giving no XP reward). Example success rewards would be partial revelation of the information available from the full challenge, or gaining an ally in a diplomatic challenge.

- Use the "Disease" track mechanism to track the progress and advantages/hindrances that the party must work under, instead of the basic "3 strikes" for some challenges. This may represent the political climate, or the progress of a Geas or Quest enchantment associated with the challenge.

- Organise the tasks in the challenge; what may be attempted simultaneously, what must follow sequentially, what must be done simultaneously to count as successes?

These sorts of sub-mechanisms in the toolbox would help putting together interesting challenges that encourage and require player concentration and engagement, instead of bored die rolling. The boredom can be countered by skilled narration, of course - but there are still players who will "see through the curtain" if all the challenge boils down to is a series of die rolls.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

But now lets say you put the farmers at risk to get a fate point, why NARRATIVELY did you do that? It may create a new aspect to the story, but from the PC's perspective why did he do it? There certainly can be a narrative answer to that, but I often found that kind of mechanic to seem a bit forced. You can explain it like BW does with an aspect of your character "well, I'm just greedy, so of course I borrow the money from the lone shark to up my bet at the track!" but it does really seem a bit foreign to the whole "We're a band of heroes, we go around kicking butt" that is where D&D in general mostly is at.

Think of the skills in 4E as a primitive dial. They are practically a binary choice (and thus not a dial), but are edging into being a real complexity dial. You can easily play 4E, using the skills alone, ignoring skill challenges altogether, and if your style fits that, it will work. If that sounds good to you, then you might also be tempted to expand the skills themselves somewhat (dial up the skill list, instead of the skill system).

OTOH, you could (if you really inclined to pushing heavy narrative), run nothing but skill challenges. That is, every time an isolated skill use came up in story, you "Say Yes" and grant success. Only when something is seriously enough at stake to justify running a skill challege do you even roll. If inclined to run this style, you are probably going to want to expand the options in the skill challenges, since by definition so much is riding on them.

Of course, most people playing 4E are going to mix and match. It's just too much in the tradition of D&D play to, say, forgo a Stealth check when the rogue wants to scout out the opposition. And to the extent that the existing 4E skill rules are a dial, it is mainly because of something rather murky in the middle where you run "kind of" a skill challenge. I do this a lot--straight skill rolls that turn into skill challenges because of heightened interest from the players or skill challenges that morph into a few skill checks because of lessened interest. There is absolutely nothing in the rules or guidelines to explicitly call out this option. But unlike the two purist approaches outlined above, everything you need is right there in the mechanics.

So to go the long way around to answer your question, the characters put the farmers at risk because the GM pushed situation hard throughout the campaign. That is, they can't spend "Fate" on everything, and they know it. They gamble that this time, they can get away with the basics. Narratively, it can probably best be explained by some kind of karma, fate, or the like (i.e. what the characters believe). You may be a big hero, but when it comes to stopping the zombie hoard, there are tricks to be used, and you can only draw from that well so many times, before it comes up dry.

So assuming that both skills and skill challenges are expanded to handle their respective jobs, any "Fate" or other resource added to support this kind of "pushed to the limit" feel should be unavailable or at least not very productive to use in regular skill checks. Or, alternately, you explicitly call out regular skill checks with sufficient things at risk to deserve using the resources and gaining them. The normal Stealth scout check doesn't count. A really difficult Stealth check when failing means that the rogue is caught by trolls that will rip him apart instantly, does. And then their might be guidelines to push more towards the skill challenge side during such a check.

That is, there can be skill checks (and ability checks, and even in touranments and the like, weapon use checks) that are mainly done to complicate things. You shoot the arrow into the target, you move onto the next round, but Prince John may now suspect your disguise. There is too much of a tradition in D&D of using these kind of things to ever want to get rid of it, as BW does.

Then there are skill checks (and ability checks, and most combat checks) where something serious enough is riding on the checks as a whole that you get XP for dealing with it. For these, you always must push situation hard. If engaged in that kind of enterprise, you need decision points. An easy way to have decision points is to include resources to manipulate. They aren't the only way. You could also have, for example, a more robust verison of "Aid Another", where the people aiding you are not only gambling their actions but taking more risks. This is seldom true in 3E/4E except by GM thoughtfulness or happy circumstance. (E.g. the two brutes aiding the rogue to pick the lock are close enough to suffer from the trap exploding.)

I believe this latter style is the kind that KM, others, and myself would like to see more explicitly and mechanically supported via options.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My feeling is that there's a continuum in 4e. I think that is the way it is intended to work. You have:

1) Basic d20 roll (check, attack, ability, etc) - resolves a simple situation or adjudicates an atomic action. These are binary, the situations they deal with are binary and rarely resolve anything completely.

2) A check which modifies something - The case here is still a simple d20 check but in this case the results are not so black and white. If you fail a History check you know that the book is a copy of an ancient Turathi text on devils, but miss the reference to some useful tidbit of information. It could also represent the rogue scouting the enemy but making a little noise. He gets the lay of the land, but the opposition is more alert.

3) Group checks - Situations where failure or success will depend on the group as a whole executing a task. There COULD be variable success, but the situation isn't one that involves any extended narrative and where a single level of success/failure works. The whole party sneaking closer to the monsters to launch a surprise attack could be an example.

4) Simple complexity 1 SC - These are often used as 'extended skill checks'. They can accomodate variable levels of success and deal with situations where several skills are useful. The rogue scouting could simply be made into an SC of this type. Variable success is now easily accommodated.

5) More complex SC situations. At this point all the various possible narrative machinery is fully engaged.

I think the 'risk more' concept really is inherent at several of these levels, but it has been a tradition of D&D that these are always narrative in nature. The brutes aiding the rogue to disarm the trap are close enough to be hurt in the explosion because the trap hits everyone in a 2 square radius and you can't aid if you aren't close enough to perform the task.

In other systems like BW the key difference seems to me to be that the player's 'fate point' (or whatever resource it is in any given system) is a plot token. It gives the player permission to alter the conditions of the situation (the world) in such a way as to create a greater level of risk and reward. Spend a fate point and the goblin guarding the door goes to relieve himself and you can sneak inside the cave to see what he's guarding. In 4e this CAN be handled, but it is done using the reverse procedure. The rogue would say "hey, DM is there any way I can sneak past this guard?" and the DM might say "OK, he momentarily goes off to relieve himself, make me a Stealth check." You're still raising the stakes. It could also involve using a resource, "OK, but you'll need to be invisible, do you want to use your encounter power to do that?"

 

[pemerton]

Playing gadfly for a moment...

I wondered where that buzzing was coming from!

I'm not convinced that more kinds of points and chits and whatnot adds anything significant.

<snip>

Basic's combat system could exist on a single page BECAUSE everyone is already very clear about what combat is, it has clear roles (protagonist, antagonist) and clear goals (kill the other guy before he kills you), and clear ground rules (hitting people with sharpened metal poles kills them).

Clearly the material in the 4e books missed the mark in terms of explaining that the same needs to be true of a conflict situation regardless of whether it is a combat or not.

<snip>

There's no real discussion of the elements of conflict, establishing the context, establishing roles in the scene, making the goals clear, and establishing the ground rules of the situation. At best the examples and advice fumble their way towards this. The description of skill uses for instance establishes some ground rules, but in an awkward form that is more limiting than enabling.

There is also a failure IMHO to properly address framing of a challenge. There's just the 'make sure everyone has a skill they can use', but the way this advice is written it is basically like saying "make up some rationalization for rewarding a character with a success when he uses one of his skills that has no obvious applicability" instead of actual framing, which would be "create new story elements to allow the challenge to encompass things relevant to each character's sphere of competency."

I agree with all of this, except maybe on the "chits" bit - the game has lots of chits, and DMG2 gestures toward using them in challenges, and I'd like more about that - especially, more examples of how it can be made to work!

But everything you say about framing and resolution is spot on. This is what I've been trying to say above, when I say I want more guidelines and examples and advice.

It's also why I've been using HeroQuest and Maelstrom Storytelling rather than Burning Wheel as my comparitors. They're both much more streamlined, mechanically, than Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits or Fight! subsystems, and so I think provide a better model for how to explain skill challenges and get them to work.

I have mixed feelings about the '3 strikes' core SC mechanic. It has certain virtues. It is simple for the players to grasp, works well for smaller 'extended skill check' kind of challenges, and actually works pretty well for a lot of larger challenges, especially the 'action adventure' sorts where you go chasing around. The idea that it induces people to sit out has merit though, and many things which seem like they could use SC-like mechanics don't work well with a simple counting mechanism. You can reframe constantly to get to the point where the challenge DOES work that way, but I think it would be better if the SC system simply got a more flexible core mechanic.

Very good points here.

On the "constant reframing" issue - at the moment, given that I'm using the "3 strikes" mechanic, I would benefit from more advice on how to handle this. And examples. The original HeroWars rulebooks have a good discussion of how to frame contests, and then narrate resolution, so that sufficient flexibility is maintained to permit meaningful and consistent narration of whatever the climax turns out to be. But 4e has some features that differentiate it from HW/Q - a default assumption of all the PCs being engaged, for a start, as well as the lack of active opposition. Advice tailored to those distinctive features could go a long way.

On the "more flexible core mechanic" issue - maybe. An alternative is to be given better advice on how so-called "advantages" can be used to undo failures.

Part of what is needed on both these issues is also more advice about the metagame aspect of skill challenges. For example, suppose that the challenge is primarily a social one. And the party socialites have been doing well, making progress and so on (and the narration reflects this), although 2 failures have also accrued. And then someone rolls a 1 and the challenge fails. How should this be narrated? Did the player make a faux pas? Break wind unexpectedly? Lose his/her mojo at the last minute. Or did her henchman, or perhaps another PC, drop a crystal decanter that is an ancient heirloom of the Duke's estate, and this is what makes things go wrong? And if the latter, can the Ranger in the party save the day by catching the decanter with a successful Acrobatics check (perhaps also paying an Action Point to act out-of-turn like that)? Or can another socialite PC make a final Diplomacy check to ensure that, even though the party as a whole has failed, s/he remains in the Duke's good books?

Advice on, and ideas for, this sort of stuff would in my view go a long way to making what we've already got work better.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I wondered where that buzzing was coming from!

Well, you know what brings flies!

I agree with all of this, except maybe on the "chits" bit - the game has lots of chits, and DMG2 gestures toward using them in challenges, and I'd like more about that - especially, more examples of how it can be made to work!

But everything you say about framing and resolution is spot on. This is what I've been trying to say above, when I say I want more guidelines and examples and advice.

It's also why I've been using HeroQuest and Maelstrom Storytelling rather than Burning Wheel as my comparitors. They're both much more streamlined, mechanically, than Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits or Fight! subsystems, and so I think provide a better model for how to explain skill challenges and get them to work.

Very good points here.

On the "constant reframing" issue - at the moment, given that I'm using the "3 strikes" mechanic, I would benefit from more advice on how to handle this. And examples. The original HeroWars rulebooks have a good discussion of how to frame contests, and then narrate resolution, so that sufficient flexibility is maintained to permit meaningful and consistent narration of whatever the climax turns out to be. But 4e has some features that differentiate it from HW/Q - a default assumption of all the PCs being engaged, for a start, as well as the lack of active opposition. Advice tailored to those distinctive features could go a long way.

On the "more flexible core mechanic" issue - maybe. An alternative is to be given better advice on how so-called "advantages" can be used to undo failures.

Part of what is needed on both these issues is also more advice about the metagame aspect of skill challenges. For example, suppose that the challenge is primarily a social one. And the party socialites have been doing well, making progress and so on (and the narration reflects this), although 2 failures have also accrued. And then someone rolls a 1 and the challenge fails. How should this be narrated? Did the player make a faux pas? Break wind unexpectedly? Lose his/her mojo at the last minute. Or did her henchman, or perhaps another PC, drop a crystal decanter that is an ancient heirloom of the Duke's estate, and this is what makes things go wrong? And if the latter, can the Ranger in the party save the day by catching the decanter with a successful Acrobatics check (perhaps also paying an Action Point to act out-of-turn like that)? Or can another socialite PC make a final Diplomacy check to ensure that, even though the party as a whole has failed, s/he remains in the Duke's good books?

Advice on, and ideas for, this sort of stuff would in my view go a long way to making what we've already got work better.

Maybe we could use some more deep change to the rules to make a resource that is 'like' AP say that worked with SCs, but I doubt 4e will go that way anyhow.

I know what you mean about better advice. There are a lot of little meta-gaming, pacing, etc issues with SCs that could be explained. I figure the WotC guys are probably about the same place on the learning curve we are, so maybe they'll come out with a 'Worlds of Intrigue' or something. Hard to say.

The biggest flaw with the 3 strikes thing is pretty much exactly what you're talking about. While it is easy enough to measure out strikes, it is often harder to see how different partial failures 'add up' to create a fail of the whole SC. It is also hard for the DM to pace the SC when he doesn't know how many checks will happen before it ends. You can use Obsidian, which avoids that problem. It does have advantages for a lot of challenges.

One way to deal with it might be to just get rid of failures like Obsidian does, but have a failed check create a penalty for another check. Then you could allow someone a chance to make a recovery instead of a regular check. It would erase the penalty. It can also obviously be on a different skill, like the acrobatics check in your example. Winning the challenge would then be like Obsidian as well, where you just have to pass N successes and the challenge has some number bigger than N checks. You can leave out the 'everyone makes a check each round' part though if you want. That's about the level of real mechanical changes that might be good.