D&D 5E Out of Combat Woes

[iserith]

[MENTION=6779864]Pvt. Winslow[/MENTION]: Check out this transcript of mine for a session I ran that had a "skill challenge" in it. It kicks off around page 8 and revolves around the PCs assuaging the fears of their townsfolk. As you might notice, they fail the skill challenge and this ends up knocking the attitude of most townsfolk from Friendly to Indifferent which impacts any future interactions with them until improved.

 

[Pvt. Winslow]

[MENTION=6779864]Pvt. Winslow[/MENTION]: Check out this transcript of mine for a session I ran that had a "skill challenge" in it. It kicks off around page 8 and revolves around the PCs assuaging the fears of their townsfolk. As you might notice, they fail the skill challenge and this ends up knocking the attitude of most townsfolk from Friendly to Indifferent which impacts any future interactions with them until improved.

That was pretty neat, thanks for the example. I always like reading people's play transcripts. That seems like a pretty cool game.

 

[Sailor Moon]

I don't like out of combat scenarios to be based on just rolls and numerical figures.

I encourage a lot of free form out of combat scenarios and we roll if necessary. I absolutely hate 4th editions "skill challenges" idea. I think it actually takes away from the imagination to the point where players just look at their sheets, see the relative skill, and then roll. I like for players to look at their skills and find creative ways to use them in various scenarios.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I encourage a lot of free form out of combat scenarios and we roll if necessary. I absolutely hate 4th editions "skill challenges" idea. I think it actually takes away from the imagination to the point where players just look at their sheets, see the relative skill, and then roll. I like for players to look at their skills and find creative ways to use them in various scenarios.

That just gets into how you handle individual skill checks. In 3.5 or 5e or 4e or BRP or any of a variety of systems that happen to have pass/fail skill checks, you can either treat them as a bland roll, or put some thought and description into them. (You can also - as 5e openly encourages you to - just ignore the system, and base success or failure on how you, as the DM, judge how the players describe or act out their characters' actions, with no reference to the abilities of the characters themselves. Though that's getting more into freestyle RP than any given system.)

Apart from that, some important considerations we can take from experience with past editions of D&D might include: Old-school D&D had no skills - special abilities like thieves finding traps or rangers tracking, and there were very specific checks for opening doors, determining surprised, or lifting portcullises or the like - but outside of that, any action other than combat or spellcasting consisted of the player describing the action and the DM deciding what happened or if some roll was called for. 3.5: checks got highly divergent and there was no structure to out-of-combat challenges, so most such challenges ended up being a one-man show, either the guy with the highest stat, or the one casting a spell to automatically accomplish the given end. 4e Skill Challenges provided a structure so that each player was expected to participate, and gave exp for the challenge, which at least tried to give it some of the gravity of a combat challenge - it was a halting start at making non-combat challenges better, but it's been abandoned. 5e 'bounded accuracy' means that, for any given skill check where it's at all plausible, everyone might as well and jump in and roll, because someone might roll high - and, where it's not plausible, it's back to the 3.5 paradigm of it being all the specialist's show - aside from that, it goes back to emphasizing the old-school approach of player description and DM judgement.

Each of those have problems, some obvious. You can't afford to invest a lot of time in a non-combat challenge to make it interesting if it's only going to involve one player. You can't let the story hinge on a single pass/fail skill check. You can't generate interest with nothing but simple pass/fail checks, either, even if you do have a lot of them (it helps, but only a very little). If you do away with checks, you take the character's ability out of the equation, and lose the player-PC connection, character concept/development, and any sense of the player being or controlling the character.

 

[BoldItalic]

I don't like out of combat scenarios to be based on just rolls and numerical figures.

I encourage a lot of free form out of combat scenarios and we roll if necessary. I absolutely hate 4th editions "skill challenges" idea. I think it actually takes away from the imagination to the point where players just look at their sheets, see the relative skill, and then roll. I like for players to look at their skills and find creative ways to use them in various scenarios.

I'm with you, there. I can give you lots of examples from my sessions of where, what might have been run as a dice-rolling skill challenge, was instead run as a free-form role-play episode. But it doesn't suit all varieties of player. Some players prefer to feel more structure. The key thing, is that it requires buy-in to that style by both the players and the DM, who have to be comfortable with mentally making judgements as they go along and have to know each other well enough to recognise each other's "moves" and play along. It's great when it comes off. If you analyse it afterwards, you can often superimpose a skill challenge structure post hoc although to my mind, that rather misses the point.

Here's an episode from a session we ran last year, that I wrote up afterwards as a narrative. See if you can spot the moments where we could have been rolling dice. The PC was a female rogue called Poli, who had split off from the party and wanted to get the co-operation of the local guild-master of assassins. The player's goal was to persuade him to use his influence to spy on a high priestess called Anelia but to ensure that Anelia wasn't murdered gratuitously, because she might be useful to the party later. Poli had Expertise in Persuasion and her plan involved offering information and confidences (using thieves' cant) to move the man from being neutral to being friendly. She succeeded, but not easily, and there were moments in the conversation when she had to backtrack and try harder. I was the DM, playing the guild-master.

[sblock="Narrative"]Poli said farewell and revisited some of her old haunts. At one shadowy doorway in a street frequented by people who were not there, she said, to no-one in particular, ‘The man wants to see me.’ A door opened and she walked up a flight of stairs. In a dingy room, a fat, balding, man sat behind a heavy desk writing in a ledger. ‘Take a seat, Poli,’ he said, ‘I believe I wanted to see you?’

There was a keyhole with a silver escutcheon plate on her side of the desk but Poli knew that there was no lock behind it. Unless you counted a crossbow mechanism as a lock. This man had a decisive way with visitors who disagreed with him. She wasn’t planning to. ‘Something big going on,’ she began. ‘Can’t say much but I need a favour. Might have something for you. Not definite.’

The man put down his pen. ‘Go on.’

‘Temple in Upcross. Priestess there, scrawny woman, about as holy as I am. She might be coming through in the next day or two.’ Poli made a gesture, a sweep of the hand, palm upwards, meaning she might be useful to me.‘ I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her.’

The man’s stony expression said: give me a reason to care.

‘She is noted for her generosity to the poor,’ said Poli, phrasing her words carefully, ‘Hand-outs of large amounts of silver are not unknown.’

‘The poor are always with us,’ agreed the man. ‘You arrived here today, did you not?’ Poli nodded. No need to wonder how he knew. ‘Then you will not be aware that a certain holy woman came through yesterday, having apparently ridden through the night in her carriage. She stopped only for fresh horses before leaving by the Amber Gate.’

Poli was surprised. She hadn’t expected Anelia to move so quickly. ‘They say that the price of horses was exceptionally high yesterday,’ she offered.

‘Supply and demand, supply and demand.’

‘Her temple has many treasures. I was amazed to see them,’ said Poli meaningfully.

‘To rob such a temple would be sacrilege.’

‘And it is guarded. By as many as two guards in the daytime.’

‘No doubt these treasures are heavy and difficult for the cleaners to move.’

‘It would take as many as three wagons.’

The man made a small note in his ledger. ‘Well now, we are busy people, was there something else I wanted to see you about, Poli?’

He called me by name, that means he is satisfied with the trade, thought Poli. She chose her next words with care. ‘I may need to disappear for a while. If anyone should come to this town asking about me or anyone resembling me, or about the priest I have been travelling with, the innkeeper at Bythorpe might like to be informed.’

The man nodded. ‘They do say that innkeepers are especially astute at knowing what occurs in distant towns. Who can say how the news comes to them? They also say that red-bearded halflings are especially good at this. But tell me, how is Ganhard and his pretty little maidservant?’

Poli was careful not to give too much away. She told the man what she guessed he already knew. ‘Ganhard is exceptionally well. The girl he calls Tammy suffered a brutal attack and still bears the bruises but she has forgiven her assailant.’ She held her fingers in a circle as she said this, and tensed the muscles to signify: I nearly strangled her.

‘A young girl’s beauty quickly fades. A woman’s strength is in her hands,’ quoted the man diplomatically. ‘It is all a matter of position.’ He rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully as he said this.

Poli understood. He was suggesting she tried again, with better technique. Well, that was a close as she needed to go, as a story. The trade of information had been satisfactory on both sides and it was time to get out. ‘Now, if you will excuse me,’ she said, ‘I have to make some arrangements.’

The man nodded. ‘I believe mother Maggins has a bed free.’[/sblock]

I should explain that Ganhard was the cleric of the party, that Poli had earlier tried to seduce him and failed, and that she had tried to strangle his girlfriend Tammy in a fit of jealousy. Rogues are not all nice people.

 

[Manbearcat]

I guess I'm just hoping to hear some examples from posters on how they run the game outside of combats. How do you resolve scenes like chases, infiltrations, a political soiree where you're trying to coax out info, a trek in the wilderness trying to find an ancient ruin, etc. Do you use skill checks? How do you determine who gets to go, how many checks are involved? How do you determine DC's?

Really, any suggestions will help.

One of my favorite subjects.

One of the major adversaries for running interesting, dynamic noncombat conflicts is GM tunnel vision on causal logic and the tight coupling of it to produce, inevitably, narrow outcomes after the resolution mechanics are consulted. That mental framework rarely yields the situation changing in interesting ways. As a result, you get subsequent player action declarations of "I diplomance the king HARDER (!)" * or "I climb the tree BETTER (!)" **. Or you get kings that can't be diplomanced and trees that can't be climbed. None of which produce particularly compelling play.

Alternatively, it might be ruleset driven. When the nuts and bolts of GM procedures are vague, or without bounds/focused priorities and the resolution mechanics are extremely open-ended or potentially incoherent, you open a gateway to the nether realm of GM force. Nothing has to come through, but the gate is wide open nonetheless. As a player who is aware of that gate being open, I would feel pretty insecure about how our play is actually emerging. GM force wreaks havoc on interesting, dynamic noncombat conflicts because the game's "needle" is demonstrably (at the beginning or over time - contingent upon how proficient the GM is at illusionist GMing and/or how willing the players are to have their role co-opted by GM machination) moved mostly/wholly by GM desire with little to no meaningful input from the players by way of their PCs. Once this is realized by the players, assuming they care not to be puppets in the GM's grand narrative, action declaration, mechanical resolution, and resultant outcome becomes a practice in tedium. Historically, noncombat conflict resolution is most vulnerable to this sort of GMing due to the nature of D&D rulesets. Conversely, combat has been less vulnerable because of the relative robustness, transparency and focus of the action resolution mechanics.

* Example:

[sblock]See PBP here. The prove it right frigging now isn't going to manifest as more words (physical mettle and/or sincerity of the threat leveraged against the king needs to be proven) - eg INTIMIDATE HARDER! It is going to manifest as an immature aboleth stalker grabbing the king from a ceiling crack and pulling him up with its tentacles (toward his potential demise and ultimate irrelevance). We shall see how the PCs respond and what comes out of it. As soon as I can get around to writing my turn up, that is.[/sblock]

** Example:

[sblock]In a 4e game I ran, the intent behind a PC climbing a tree was to get a vantage on a fleeing marauder, who was heading for a gully/dried riverbed, and snipe them. The lone PC knew that the base of operations was nearby so if this guy escaped the PC, things would get dicey (the PC had just killed several members of the band). When she failed her Athletics check, it wasn't "you're a crappy elf and can't climb a tree". It was "you scale the tree, reaching a vantage to put arrow to string...but as you do so, the figure drops out of sight into a crevice in the hardpan." Fail forward. Climbing or not climbing a tree or falling and losing meat points isn't interesting and doesn't have to do with the intent of the action. A dangerous villain momentarily escaping, on the other hand, is an interesting change of the situation and serves to escalate the dramatic tension. This in turn led to desperate pursuit through a trap-laden cavern that was the back door for the bad guys' underground complex (the discovery of which came in handy later in the game). The PC ultimately succeeded in the Skill Challenge so a nasty deadfall claimed her clumsy prey right before he could enter the complex proper and alert his comrades. Interesting, dynamic noncombat conflict resolution as a result.

The GMing procedures and the resolution mechanics are robust, focused, clear and transparent so GM force is basically impossible. Establish stakes > frame the scene > player action declaration > resolve action mechanically and narrate as success with complications or a failure forward with the situation changing dramatically/dynamically at each stage > continue until the resolution framework's win/loss condition is cemented, thus locking in the outcome of the stakes.[/sblock]