Removing homogenity from 4e

[SSquirrel]

That +6? Why would you ever use it? The DM doesn't tell you what skills to use in a skill challenge, you make that decision, and if the challenge it broad enough, and you're persuasive enough, you get to do it.

(snip)

So, in the end, everyone winds up having a +17 to the check. That +6 only gets used in specific, limited, obvious instances, depending wildly on how flexible your individual DM is.

A lot of the early skill challenges were written with 3 or 4 skills and many DMs will go with those and ignore all else. So depending on the DM, yes you could well be stuck with that +6.

If you can think of a way for your Athletics to convince the Duke that he should give you the MacGuffin (maybe you challenge his fastest scout to a foot race!), you get +17. You never have to use your +6 in Diplomacy or your +10 in Bluff. Maybe, at worst, you have to use your +14 in Insight. Since the DC is only 20 anyway, it doesn't really matter. Everyone contributes basically the same thing.

See, IMO, the Athletics isn't being used to convince him. Once you get it to the stage of the actual race, you have the Athletics come into play. Now if you work with your party and have one of the party who is good at influencing people talk about your athletic prowess and guide you throw a list of routines that you are using your athletics score to perform, yes. But if I asked someone what they were doing and they just said they wanted to roll their high athletics, I would say no.

 

[MerricB]

The gulf never comes into play, due to 4e's "Everyone gets to try their best skill!" skill challenge design.

On the occasions when a player convinces a DM to use a non-scripted skill, the game is rewarding the player's creativity; it's something that I saw more than one "old-school" person lament going out of 3E, due to what they termed as 3E's "button-pushing" mentality. (You want to find the hidden treasure? You push the button marked "search" and you find it - you don't have to actually specify where you're searching). I don't fully agree with that assertion, but I can see where it was coming from.

However, if a PC is dumped into a river and has to make a Skill Challenge of Athletics and Endurance checks to survive (see DMG2/Journey Through the Silver Caves), if you're allowing Streetwise checks to get out of it, there's something very wrong with your DMing.

Skill Challenges are not homogenous; they don't all work the same way, and they don't all test the same things.

Some skill challenges are definitely testing whether the party has the right skills. Can they swim the river? Tightly scripted challenges with little opportunity for additions from outside the designated skill set. In those cases, the roll of the die as it interacts with the skill bonuses is important.

However, you have the skill challenges where the actual skills used fall into the background (as does the success or failure of the challenge), and what you are testing is the ingenuity of the players to use the skills they have to overcome the situation. Yes, these challenges have default skills so that a well-skilled party can overcome them as the latter type; but a party with different skills can still overcome the challenge with ingenuity and daring.

Note that the design of skill challenges is evolving. The concept of group skill checks - where the group succeeds on a single check if most of the party makes the check - is relatively new, coming into play after the original release of the game.

 

[BryonD]

fanboy,
You are only pulling out a piece of the equation.
Your mage has nothing whatsoever going for it in terms of acrobatics. And yet because "the math works" this character still succeeds 45% of the time on a moderate challenge.

Yeah, +30 is very different than +12. But that distinction is misleading. The establishment of target DCs is just as critically important in the math. Once you get to the level of auto-success, additional pluses are pointless. And the math is built to make certain that even your gimped out mage is pretty damn good at acrobatics when all is said and done.
(You have demonstrated the nod to the rogue for "no need to roll" so 1 point for that)

And if you look over the whole skill list you will see pretty much similar numbers for the two.

Now look at defenses. Their ACs are nearly identical and the others are right around 30 with the rogue trading off a bit of fort and will for Ref.
And their attack bonuses with the attacks they will be using routinely are again right in the same zone.

What you have demonstrated with your own selections is that a worst case scenario is 1 tick short of 50/50 chance for a moderate task. (and even "hard" is still 20%, 1 in 5 for a completely untrained and untalented fish out of water at a task so-called "hard")
The difference between 12 and 30 is a red herring because when the players of these two characters are going to roll their D20 compare their total to the target DC and get the same answer over and over again. And even for moderate, or even hard, tasks, the allowed range of existence scales between quite competent and has extra pluses that don't even matter.

Add in monster building for how the attacks and defenses are established by monster level and the same result will emerge.

Remember, this is a relative analysis. Compared to what I like, your example is a fine demonstration of the homogeneity in 4E.

 

[BryonD]

However, if a PC is dumped into a river and has to make a Skill Challenge of Athletics and Endurance checks to survive (see DMG2/Journey Through the Silver Caves), if you're allowing Streetwise checks to get out of it, there's something very wrong with your DMing.

Skill Challenges are not homogenous; they don't all work the same way, and they don't all test the same things.

I agree completely with this.
Skill challenges are fairly cool in concept and a part of 4E I like. I have used similar type sets ups for years, (surviving a trail of endurance in a orc tribe encampment, getting through a particularly hazardous mountain pass, etc..) but never had a consistent structure.

But again, the math lets me down in 4E. Everyone is at least competent at Athletics and Endurance, so putting the wizard who can't swim in a really really bad spot and leaving it up to him to creatively solve the problem or up to the party to save him is constrained. It isn't "out of the question". You can easily slam deadly circumstances on the characters. But it is less good than other options I have now.

 

[SSquirrel]

But again, the math lets me down in 4E. Everyone is at least competent at Athletics and Endurance, so putting the wizard who can't swim in a really really bad spot and leaving it up to him to creatively solve the problem or up to the party to save him is constrained. It isn't "out of the question". You can easily slam deadly circumstances on the characters. But it is less good than other options I have now.

Well, using the numbers I gave upthread, assuming a 12 stat in something like Strength for a Wizard is a fairly positive assumption, most may even be less. This gives him the aforementioned +6. An untrained skill like Athletics would need the following at 10th level:
Easy:10, Medium:16, Hard:21

So at 10th level an average-medium strength Wizard would only need a 4+ for Easy (85% chance of success), 10+ for Medium (55%) and a 15+ for Hard (30%).

I don't know that I would look at something like this and say that "Everyone is at least competent at Athletics and Endurance". Some skill challenges you will be constrained by the nature of the challenge and that is probably correct. If the party was unable to stop a room from flooding with water and you are having to make Endurance checks to keep holding your breath (probably a bad skill challenge example, but my creativity is sucked away by work today), you probably can't use your Move Silent abilities instead.

It's entirely possibly the Wizard contributed heavily to the skill challenge which actually happened prior to the room flooding, but the rest of the party couldn't roll well enough to enact the engineering plan the Wizard provided. Now he is having to do what he doesn't do all that well (physical feats of endurance) b/c his first answer didn't work.

 

[fanboy2000]

]Remember, this is a relative analysis. Compared to what I like, your example is a fine demonstration of the homogeneity in 4E.

Compared to what I like, I think its a great example of 4e's homogeneity. It doesn't surprise me that the example I came-up with shows my own bias.

Your mage has nothing whatsoever going for it in terms of acrobatics.

See, I don't think that's true. Sadie has one big thing going for her: experience. She not just a little experienced, she's an epic level character. Think about it, she spends almost 24 hours a day/7 days a week with a guy who's skill in acrobatics is, literarily, epic. She's watched him preform all those acrobatic stunts in their time together. I'm sure that, in all that camping out in the wilderness between cities the conversation turns to acrobatic skill. PCs spend more time together than some married people. It's not formal training by any stretch of the imagination, but it would seem to me that some of it is going to rub off on her.

This is what I love about the level mechanic in 4e, it represents the basic level of competency people acquire just by going out and doing stuff. That is very realistic to me because I've noticed that, as people grow older, they learn the basics of things that they never invested any formal training in just by virtue of living. It's nice because it recognizes that people gain a basic level of competency in things outside their specialization.

That attitude isn't very popular in the US right now. It seems we favor uber-specialization over general competency right now. But I think that it's a valid way to model character advancement.

And yet because "the math works" this character still succeeds 45% of the time on a moderate challenge.

That is exactly what I would expect from a challenge that's described as moderate.

Yeah, +30 is very different than +12. But that distinction is misleading. The establishment of target DCs is just as critically important in the math. Once you get to the level of auto-success, additional pluses are pointless. And the math is built to make certain that even your gimped out mage is pretty damn good at acrobatics when all is said and done.

If I understand what you said, you're saying that a 20% success rate is "pretty damn good." That surprises me. If I knew that only had a 20% chance of success at something, I'd find another way. That just seems like common sense.

And if you look over the whole skill list you will see pretty much similar numbers for the two.

Some of them are, but that's to be expected. Many important skills have significant differences to me. At level 24, Sadie has a +22 diplomacy while Adrian only has a +13. Adrian has a +23 to perception while Sadie only has +13. Adrian has a stealth and thievery of +25 and +26 respectfully, while Sadie has only +12 in both of them.

Now look at defenses. Their ACs are nearly identical and the others are right around 30 with the rogue trading off a bit of fort and will for Ref.
And their attack bonuses with the attacks they will be using routinely are again right in the same zone.

While Adrian's AC is indeed only 2 greater than Sadie's, I would hardly call Adrian's 25 fort and 26 will "right around 30." Also, Saide's fort is 30, five higher than Adrian's. This seems fairly significant to me. But then again, as you've pointed out, what's significant to me isn't significant to you. Generally speaking attacks seem to hit or miss by only a few points, so I consider a difference of five or more important because it means the lower defense will get hit a lot more often.

What you have demonstrated with your own selections is that a worst case scenario is 1 tick short of 50/50 chance for a moderate task. (and even "hard" is still 20%, 1 in 5 for a completely untrained and untalented fish out of water at a task so-called "hard")

I'm glad you replied, and I'm glad I gave some hard numbers because now I understand better where you are coming from. I consider a 20% success rate hard. That said, it seems like, far from you're complaints being difficult to address in 4e, it would easy to implement harder DCs + a houserule that doesn't allow PCs to apply half their level to d20 skill checks unless the skill is on their class skill list.

The difference between 12 and 30 is a red herring because when the players of these two characters are going to roll their D20 compare their total to the target DC and get the same answer over and over again. And even for moderate, or even hard, tasks, the allowed range of existence scales between quite competent and has extra pluses that don't even matter.

Well, they won't get the same answer over and over again because 1) they won't always be challenged by things at their level. Sometimes thing will above their level and sometimes things will be below their level. 2) They always be rolling the same skills. And 3) Even within their level, the DCs will vary.

Again, this is beauty of level in 4e, the DM can vary the difficulty of something by varying the level of the hazard, trap, or NPC. The level mechanic allows a DM to pepper the world with obstacles of various levels, making the campaign truly seasoned to taste. The tool in 4e is simple: variety: variety in level, variety in DC, variety in type. Level progression is (mostly) linear at the same rate for all stats, making it easy for a DM to figure out how to make something easier or more difficult for the PCs. The tool is quite elegant.

I would expect an epic level character find heroic obstacles easy to the point of not a problem.

Add in monster building for how the attacks and defenses are established by monster level and the same result will emerge.

Reflex and fort defenses that exceed the mage's capacity to escape from don't seem to be uncommon at level 24.

 

[BryonD]

See, I don't think that's true. Sadie has one big thing going for her: experience. She not just a little experienced, she's an epic level character. Think about it, she spends almost 24 hours a day/7 days a week with a guy who's skill in acrobatics is, literarily, epic.
...

This is what I love about the level mechanic in 4e, it represents the basic level of competency people acquire just by going out and doing stuff.

Ok, that great. And I'm glad it works for you.
But my point is the homogeniety is present, not that you can't present a reason that the homogeniety is a good thing for your preference.

That is very realistic to me because I've noticed that, as people grow older, they learn the basics of things that they never invested any formal training in just by virtue of living. It's nice because it recognizes that people gain a basic level of competency in things outside their specialization.

I disagree that this comes anywhere near justifying a 1 in 5 success at "hard" tasks for a fish out of water. But it works for you, so good.

If I understand what you said, you're saying that a 20% success rate is "pretty damn good."

No, I said all in all she was "pretty damn good". In a separate place I pointed out that even in the "hard" tasks she has a 20% success.

That surprises me. If I knew that only had a 20% chance of success at something, I'd find another way. That just seems like common sense.

Agreed. But that does nothing to change my opinion that 20% success for a fish out of water attempting a "hard" task is way too high. But that is just my opinion. I have no desire to convince you that my opinion of chance is better than yours.
But the raw numbers in 4E are objectively much tighter than in 3E, thus it is more homogeneous. That is all I am saying. Telling em you like it doesn't make it untrue.

Some of them are, but that's to be expected. Many important skills have significant differences to me. At level 24, Sadie has a +22 diplomacy while Adrian only has a +13. Adrian has a +23 to perception while Sadie only has +13. Adrian has a stealth and thievery of +25 and +26 respectfully, while Sadie has only +12 in both of them.

I already covered that simply presenting a part of the equation is inadequate. The chance of success remains in tight bands.

I'm glad you replied, and I'm glad I gave some hard numbers because now I understand better where you are coming from. I consider a 20% success rate hard.

Again, this is not at all what I said. 20% is a low chance, but the range is not adequate.

That said, it seems like, far from you're complaints being difficult to address in 4e, it would easy to implement harder DCs + a houserule that doesn't allow PCs to apply half their level to d20 skill checks unless the skill is on their class skill list.

True. However, why do that when there are other games that are better as built?

Well, they won't get the same answer over and over again because 1) they won't always be challenged by things at their level. Sometimes thing will above their level and sometimes things will be below their level. 2) They always be rolling the same skills. And 3) Even within their level, the DCs will vary.

But the range remains within a tight band. Even if you go 4 levels up, you only add +2 to the DCs...

Again, this is beauty of level in 4e, the DM can vary the difficulty of something by varying the level of the hazard, trap, or NPC.

This boggles me. Of course it is true. But it is also true for 3E AND 3E doesn't have the front end homogeniety that you have to work around.

It is like you put handcuffs on and then explain that the beauty of the handcuffs is you can extend the chain an extra inch.

 

[BryonD]

The important point here is: There is homogeniety.
Your example demsotrates this.

The point IS NOT: No one should like 4E.
The point IS NOT: The homogeniety can not be rationalized.

 

[Mallus]

The important point here is: There is homogeniety.

From a certain perspective, it's unavoidable. But is the kind of homogeneity found in 4e really so different from the kind found in the other editions of D&D?

Sure, in 4e every wizard gets better at Athletics as they level.

But in, for instance, 1e, every wizard gets better at stabbing people (and taking a knife wound) as they level. In fact, every class gets better at fighting as time goes by, both in terms of hitting and taking a hit. Why does an ever-increasing talent for skills like swimming and tumbling in 4e lead to a sense of homogeneity, but an ever-increasing talent for beating the sh*t out of things in 1e does not?

To my mind, both design choices reflect a recognition that adventures, regardless of archetype, need a certain basic level of competence in common adventure-story activities (the most common being 'surviving a fight').

(I suppose the answer is simply 'because 4e feels overly homogeneous to me and 1e doesn't", and that's fine. I realize these are ultimately issues of taste. But I think my point stands. From a certain perspective, D&D has always featured characters with ever-increasing abilities in the "adventuring core competencies".)

 

[Hussar]

There is another perspective to take as well.

BryonD, you are absolutely right, I think. 4e is more homogeneous than earlier editions. But, and you knew there was going to be a but here didn't you , there's a question of degree.

If the range in 3e is 0 to autowin and the range in 4e is 20% to 80% success rates, that means that 4e has a flatter curve. Certainly. But, that ignores the effects of the rules in play.

IME, what generally happened was you had players who would never bother taking a few ranks in a skill because they were just wasted slots. If you focused, you would reach that autowin state, with autofails in everything else. The problem was, at higher levels, you couldn't spread the points around to give yourself a decent chance at a number of things, simply because you didn't have enough points (barring a few classes of course).

So, the range actually led to fewer options being exercised at the table. Everyone laser beam focused on a few skills and, across the group, you usually had someone who autowin'd every time.