New to Forums, Looking for Skill Encounter Help

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=6678017]Trit One-Ear[/MENTION]
Yeah that sounds about right; you could even have her give out misinformation on a failure. Maybe the murderer gets to stage a surprise attack if PCs fail the SC? Or (and I like this better) the murderer goes after someone the PCs care about to either provoke the PCs into walking into a trap OR as leverage in case he is beaten.

The other thing you want to consider is what ends the skill challenge. By that I mean what rationale do you have were a player to ask "Why can't we just keep talking to her? It's obvious she knows more than she's letting on!"
For example, she gets picked up by the constable and taken to jail. Or she promises to reveal more if the PCs pay like her other customers; if they do they find her strangled on her bed. She is mortally terrified of revealing any more. And so on.

About high complexity SCs...

I've run these as broken up between other encounters, sort of like a staged boss fight. So you'd have the first round of the SC, then a fight, another round of the SC, some roleplaying and exploration, another fight, and the last round of the SC. For example, this could work with a siege or overland travel.

Another way I've run extended SCs is to break them down into several lower complexity skill challenges that progressively influence each other. For example, an investigTion where there are 3 parts, each with its own consequences for success/failure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Quickleaf
I had wondered about that as well. My idea, since this is a low-complexity encounter (roughly the xp of one monster), is that if the heroes should fail, she would give them -some- of the information, and then tip off the person of interested they're after, giving him time to scrounge up another thug or two to help in later encounters. Making up for the xp loss, and punishing the heroes for failing the encounter, without derailing the adventure.

Thoughts?

Also, @Colmarr , I really like your break-down on how you use complexity based on length of encounter. How do complexities of 4 or 5 fit in? Or do you find those not usefully lengths? The few skill encounters I've run with my group are always fun at first, but for harder complexities, they seem to lose their appeal after the first few rounds.

I'd break it down more by the number of elements that are present in the SC than by time strictly. So, yeah, a short SC that is accomplishing one specific thing like disarming a trap is not likely to be more than complexity 1 or 2 (unless maybe it is a really elaborate centerpiece kind of thing). Especially with the higher complexity challenges you really need a dynamic situation.

In the case of the Lady, you might do it 2 ways. You could have several SCs that are related to different things like finding out who to talk to and talking to her. That would be good if there is no reason to have a single tally of failures (IE how hard it is to find the Lady has little bearing on how easy she is to get info out of). OTOH if say the challenge is structured as a timing thing (the party will inevitably get the info but failures represent it taking a long time or bringing attention to themselves etc) then it can be one challenge and might be higher complexity (though probably still not too high, maybe 3 at most).

"Framing" is definitely one of the keys with SCs. Know what the scope of the challenge is, understand the logic of why failures accumulate, make sure the challenge logically makes sense as a single challenge. Giving it several phases is always nice, or break points where new elements come in. That gives you a chance to switch up skills some and have a sense of progress within the challenge.

 

[Colmarr]

Also, @Colmarr , I really like your break-down on how you use complexity based on length of encounter. How do complexities of 4 or 5 fit in?

Generally, I don't like them. As you said, they tend to bog down. They're also statistically quite hard to succeed at. But most importantly, it's difficult for me to imagine a 'scene' that would require so many successful skill checks to resolve. My preference would be to replace one '12 successes' scene with 2 'six successes' scenes or 3 'four successes' scenes.

If I were to use a high complexity challenge, it would be in a situation where multiple PCs each needed to put their respective skills to work (off the top of my head, the best example I can think of is a crashing passenger airship), as an overall tracker of a situation (I've heard that Revenge of the Giants determines the overall success or failure of the adventure via a giant - pardon the pun - skill challenge), or as a short replacement for a side trek (delving into Dorago's lost tomb could be a complexity 5 free-form skill challenge rather than a session-long combat fest).

Oh, and someone XP Nullzone for me. I agree with him 100%. I consider assigning skills to challenges to be best used as a guidance for the DM in (1) framing the expected course of the challenge and (2) making sure you've put enough options in the scene for the PCs to interract with. Once the dice hit the table, I allow the narrative to take over. If the PCs come up with a plausible way for Athletics to work, they get to roll Athletics.

I'd break it down more by the number of elements that are present in the SC than by time strictly. So, yeah, a short SC that is accomplishing one specific thing like disarming a trap is not likely to be more than complexity 1 or 2 (unless maybe it is a really elaborate centerpiece kind of thing). Especially with the higher complexity challenges you really need a dynamic situation.

Exactly right. Some of the skill challenges that drag the most are the ones that are more complex than the scene they are representing. Hence my rule of thumb about complexity and time. Short scenes tend to be simple ones. However, it is only a rule of thumb, and it's possible for there to be quite complex scenes (such as the crashing airship) that are nevertheless quite short.

Someone XP abdul for me, too

 

[Nullzone]

High complexity challenges should generally be rare; they're only useful if you have a narrative scene that requires some specific order of events to occur for the overall goal to achieve success. It's still several "scenes", the difference between three complexity 1 and one complexity 5 is whether or not the failures in any part of the scenes would directly impact the over-arching goal.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

High complexity challenges should generally be rare; they're only useful if you have a narrative scene that requires some specific order of events to occur for the overall goal to achieve success. It's still several "scenes", the difference between three complexity 1 and one complexity 5 is whether or not the failures in any part of the scenes would directly impact the over-arching goal.

Just to elaborate on it a bit. There is a 'natural decomposition' that has to happen with SC type scenes. If the tally of failures/successes across a set of related situations doesn't logically represent any particular criteria for overall success/failure then it makes no sense to have it be one SC. This can happen in a couple of ways. Logically a sequence where one thing strictly gates on another for instance. This could be "you have to find clue X to progress to situation Y". There's no logical connection between failures in the first part and failures in the second part. It also happens when 2 situations simply don't measure the same kind of progress. It makes little sense to have a challenge where you sneak into the bad guy's lair and pick the lock on the prisoner's cell where some checks represent the sneaking part and others the picking part since it makes little difference HOW you got to the cell, the lock will be equally hard to pick.

Now, any of those CAN be reformulated to be make sense as a single challenge, potentially. You just have to make all successes and failures tally to one consistent thing, like amount of time expended, suspicion raised amongst the guards, or whatever. The question then is always if it is really worth doing that vs just making each piece a smaller separate encounter. Level of abstraction counts here. It may be worth making one complex challenge if you say have a side quest that you want to make interesting but not take up a vast amount of time. You could package it as a single SC and be done with it. Another example might be the 'overarching SC' used to track overall success in a whole adventure, but with those there's little compelling reason to make them high complexity (and you probably won't use standard encounter type XP for this kind of thing either).

Overall I don't generally use many complexity 4 or 5 SCs these days. Up the challenge rating by making something lower complexity a bit higher level instead usually works better.

 

[Trit One-Ear]

Amazingly helpful. Thanks to everyone. I've got a much better idea how to wield both complex and simpler skill encounters now. This has also given me some more interesting ideas to try out, rather than just the examples in the DMG.

Trit

 

[Colmarr]

Up the challenge rating by making something lower complexity a bit higher level instead usually works better.

Agreed! Complexity and challenge level serve two different purposes and should not be confused.

Both make it it harder to succeed at the task, but in different ways. The former means you need more successes, while the latter keeps the number of successes but raises the DCs. In a sense, it's the equivalent of adding more monsters to a combat encounter vs increasing the level of the monsters instead.

Eg: Level 6, complexity 1: Convincing the troll under the bridge to let you pass.

Eg: Level 6, complexity 4: Convincing the troll under the bridge to let you pass as your makeshift raft hurtles towards the beast's ramshackle-but-spike-filled floodgate and you struggle with the doppleganger prisoner who sees his opportunity to escape.

The individual tasks in the second example (controlling the raft, negotiating with the troll and restraining the prisoner) aren't any harder than the tasks in the first, but complete success in the scene requires more of them.