Non-combat encounter playstyle preferences

[KidSnide]

In my mind, the method of creating material for the game world as a justification response for the mechanics is bass ackwards. The game world space belongs to the participants and the mechanics should fit into that space rather than the space expanding and contracting to fit the mechanics.

I agree with you that game world material as a justification for the mechanic is wrong, but I don't think that's what going on in the "modern" style. The right way to think of the modern style is the "level appropriate DCs" are guidelines to the appropriate challenge. Climbing a smooth 80-foot cliff should have the same DC for 4th level characters and 14th level characters. The difference is that it's a deadly impossible challenge for 4th level characters (who should be finding a way around the cliff) while it might be a level-appropriate challenge for 14th level characters.

That module writers provide DC 34 cliff faces with no explanation (e.g. it's 20 miles tall and made out a solid sheet of oily glass) is an example of bad module writing, not bad mechanics.

I find the concept interesting but the actual procedure too structured and tedious for my tastes. Mechanically it is a combat against a task featuring players taking turns rolling to "attack" the task with thier chosen weapon (skill). Challenge complexity is opponent level. Number of successes represent monster hit points, and number of failures are PC hit points.

For what it's worth, skill challenges are a lot more fun when there are big modifiers (I use -10, -5, +0, +5 and +10) for how good your idea is of how to engage the skill challenge. That makes what the character is trying to do (as well as the player's ability to reason within the game world) at least as important the character's stats and the players' ability to stack assist attempts.

-KS

Edit: As Barastrondo says...

 

[ProfessorCirno]

In my experience, the key to a good skill challenge in any edition or game is in not telling the players they're in one.

Put them in a situation, see what they do, and on occasion tell them to roll a die. Try to make sure one player doesn't dominate everything. Make marks behind the screen that they don't see.

Ideally, the only thing between the player and the character is the roll of the die. When you start cramming more and more crunch between the two, it becomes way too dissociated for my tastes.

If a player wants to scale the wall of a building, it's the same DC regardless of the player's level. Does this make some challenges incredibly easy as they level up? Yes! And it damn well should! They're level 10 now, climbing up a building should be a piece of cake. The key isn't to just scale DCs up, that's flat out asinine. The key is to give more appropriate challenges, while letting the PCs feel awesome for hitting level ten. If all DCs scale up, you hit blisteringly stupid situations like you have in some video games, where common bandits are running around in rare artifact armor and the peasant's door you're trying to unlock is somehow the most well made lock in the universe.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

Must it be one or the other?

It seems to me that the two work at their best side-by-side. To use the "climb walls" example, when you're at 11th level, you can now climb walls that flummoxed you when you were 1st level at a tiny difficulty. On the other hand, you're now going to environments inaccessible to you before; you can now try to climb the fabled glass mountain, which will still challenge you. By moving back and forth between the two, you get the best of both worlds: the mundane environments you cut your teeth on are realistically no longer much of a challenge (though you may still hang out there often, and find different challenges within them), and there's always a new level of challenge to find so you don't get bored.

This!

I'm quite happy for the skill checks to get harder, but it needs to have a good reason why... the challenges need to be suitable for the DCs.

The above example is ideal, each wall has a set DC, but higher level PCs don't climb easy walls any more.


Speaking as a player:

I'm happy as long as I don't get too much of a view of the mechanics... If someone says "This is a skill challenge, you may use Diplomacy, Bluff and Intimidate." then my brain goes straight to sleep. It just needs to flow and I don't really care how the GM adjudicates it behind the scenes. Traditional, modern, magic beans - I really don't mind.


As a GM:

Personally, I find the new skill challenge mechanics really fantastic to GM with. I grab ideas for conversation topics, use it to set sensible DCs, pretend I'm following one, scribble meaningless notes to myself and get on with entertaining plot related conversation.

Edit: Realised I wandered exclusively into talking about social encounters above. I really like skill challenges for non social encounters. One GM I gamed with turned them into fun little minigames, usually on a tac map - he'd write notes explaining how each obstacle worked and what you needed to do to circumvent it. They worked really well and I nicked them for myself.

 

[FireLance]

One of them is about "traditional" versus "modern" approaches to resolving non-combat encounters.

In the traditional approach, the GM sets a game-mechanical difficulty that reflects the imagined reality of the ingame situation. The players then try to succeed at their die roll, or perhaps to change the ingame situation to reduce the difficulty before rolling. It is the GM's job to work out how much benefit the players get from those sorts of efforts (eg what is the bonus to a Diplomacy roll if the players offer the NPC a bribe). Once the dice are rolled, it also the GM's job to specify what exactly is the ingame meaning of game-mechanical success or failure (eg does the NPC agree to become your lifelong servant, or simply offer you a small grunt of encouragement?)

In the modern approach, the game-mechanical difficulty is determined by the game's encounter-building guidelines - whether the level of a skill challenge, in 4e, or the dictates of the pass/fail cycle, in a game like HeroQuest 2nd ed. The GM then describes the gameworld in such a way as to make that difficulty level make sense (eg the difficulty of the Acrobatics check for level 30 characters is 35 - it's Astral Teflon Slime!). The players engage the challenge by making skill checks, and depending on how those skill checks pan out as the challenge unfolds the GM describes the ingame situation as evolving in the appropriate way, and the players respond to that in their subsequent skill checks.

I tend to set non-combat challenges via the "modern" approach (setting a general level of difficulty and appropriate rewards and consequences based on guidelines) and run them by the "traditional" approach (the PCs can change the ingame situation to reduce the difficulty). I think that gets me the best of both worlds - in the worst case scenario, the players can simply roll the dice and succeed or fail at the challenge accordingly. In the best case scenario, they are interacting with the game world creatively and realistically (within the context of a fantasy RPG, anyway ).

I personally see it no different from setting the difficulty of combat challenges. The PCs should generally face challenges that are appropriate to them, and as the PCs gain levels, the nature of the challenges they encounter changes, too.

 

[Doug McCrae]

If all DCs scale up, you hit blisteringly stupid situations like you have in some video games, where common bandits are running around in rare artifact armor and the peasant's door you're trying to unlock is somehow the most well made lock in the universe.

Sounds like a society approaching a singularity - runaway technological advance.

 

[LostSoul]

I'll tell you what I like.

This:

In the traditional approach, the GM sets a game-mechanical difficulty that reflects the imagined reality of the ingame situation. The players then try to succeed at their die roll, or perhaps to change the ingame situation to reduce the difficulty before rolling. It is the GM's job to work out how much benefit the players get from those sorts of efforts (eg what is the bonus to a Diplomacy roll if the players offer the NPC a bribe).

Plus this:

The players engage the challenge by making skill checks, and depending on how those skill checks pan out as the challenge unfolds the GM describes the ingame situation as evolving in the appropriate way, and the players respond to that in their subsequent skill checks.

 

[pemerton]

It is important to note that in this approach it is not the world changing to fit the party. There is no "world" as a fixed entity at all. There is a story with these main characters, and not any others; the story defined by their backgrounds, their relations, their nemeses. It's perfectly reasonable for the dice rolls to be affected by how important is something in the character concept, not what his level of proficiency is, of for wounds to be something that mechanically help the hero.

I've seen what you describe here called the "No Myth" approach to play.

Based on my own experience, I think it is possible to have a game that is a bit more background-heavy, and so less no myth, that still takes the "modern" approach. But this does require drawing lines between the background (which is fixed), and various aspects of the present scene and colour (which are flexible, and narrated to fit the mechanical outcome in the sort of way you describe). Keeping those lines clear requires a bit of GMing skill - otherwise you risk using your background to hammer the players and force them into a railroad instead, which is perhaps the worst degradation of either the modern or the traditional approach!

 

[pemerton]

I think your distinction between "modern" and "traditional" isn't correct... both types have existed since D&D started. Whether you were playing one or the other depended on your GM.

Interesting. Ron Edwards says much the same in his essay on Dungeons and Dragons. I certainly don't have any grounds or desire to contradict you. That's partly why I put the terminology in inverted commas - the labels are as much about widespread present-day perceptions as about what is actually new or old in the hobby.

I should add that what Gygax says about saving throws in the DMG - first the roll is made, and then the story is narrated to explain the outcome (the fighter found a niche in the rocks, the MU successfully tweaked the magic, etc) - has hints at least of what I'm calling the modern approach. Also some of the discussion of abstract hit points. But I get the impression that Gygax's play as a whole fell under my "traditional" rather than "modern" label.

 

[pemerton]

The question at hand is this: What is the game?

Is the game the events transpiring in the imagined space or the application of mechanical operations?

For me the game is primarily the former.

I think the former as mediated by the latter - which I think, from your perspective, effectively means the latter. On the Numbers Going Up thread, I've used the phrase "engaging via the game mechanics" in contrast to the traditional approach of directly "engaging the situation".

I find the concept interesting but the actual procedure too structured and tedious for my tastes. Mechanically it is a combat against a task featuring players taking turns rolling to "attack" the task with thier chosen weapon (skill). Challenge complexity is opponent level. Number of successes represent monster hit points, and number of failures are PC hit points.

Interesting. LostSoul has talked in some recent posts about using skill challenges in a similar way.

The approach I've been using with my group so far is closer to the one that LostSoul used to talk about a year or so ago (eg in his Keep on the Shadowfell thread) and which draws on some of the other games I've mentioned (which I think explain the rules better than the D&D rulebooks). At a very abstract level it's the same as what you've described, but at a more detailed level of description it's different in at least one respect which I think is important for game play - because the ingame situation changes in response to each individual successful or failed check, the context for each subsequent check is evolving, sometimes in quite unforeseen ways. So the players are always reevaluating which "weapon" to choose, and the ingame meaning of either the "monster" or the "PCs" losing a hit point is changing. For me, this is what stops it being a mere exercise in dice rolling, and where the player agency and creativity come in.

 

[pemerton]

Must it be one or the other?

I think I agree with what you've said in your post. But if I've understood your post rightly, it's more about encounter placement than encounter resolution. I was meaning to focus more on the latter - though of course the two are pretty closely connected, as your post shows!