Simple Skill Challenge Fix - The 1:1 System

[The Hitcher]

Okay, this may not fix the skill challenge maths in as much detail as say, Stalker0's system (http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=229796), but it's a lot simpler:

Simply set the Success/Failure ratio for ALL skill challenges at 1:1. ie. 3 successes before 3 failures, or 5 successes before 5 failures etc. XP rewards should then be set based on the relative DC of the challenge, rather than the Complexity.

Leave all other rules as written in the DMG.

This way, an average skill challenge for reasonably skilled characters will tend to succeed approximately 50% of the time, or about as easily as an average Skill Check.

Higher Complexity ratings will create more complex role-playing scenes, while making very little difference to overall difficulty (which actually seems to be the intent of the rules), while difficulty can easily be managed roll-to-roll by making small adjustments to DC. Enterprising players can also improve their odds dramatically by finding ways to get sundry +2 bonuses, without things getting ridiculously easy.

Having two separately adjustable variables in the system (Complexity and DC) may seem to offer more flexibility, but in the end it tends to create confusion. A similar issue was one of the main reasons that White Wolf updated the central ruleset of their World of Darkness games.

 

[Stalker0]

While obviously I'm a bit biased with all the work I've spent on my other system, I will say for a quick fix this system provides a lot of benefit. Its main advantage is its fairly intolerant of variance. A 3/3 challenge is roughly the same win rate as a 6/6, though the 6/6 is slightly easier.

Its main disadvantage is that assuming 50% for each success, each skill challenge is a coin flip as far as difficulty goes.

If you adjust the individual win rates to 65% each, you'll get that win rate to 82%

 

[DSRilk]

This was my first thought when it came to a fix as well -- success / failure pairing and a slight tweaking of DCs. I think it works far better than what's in the DMG (it's certainly more intuitive to me). However, once I read Stalker0's crit, skillful recovery, and stunt system... I found it worth the added bit of complexity. It does make it more dynamic.

 

[Tony Vargas]

How about just accumulating successes up to a target, before rolling a fixed number of natural '1's? Complexity means more successes, required, so more rolls to get those successes, so more chances of blowing it by rolling too many '1's.

A single 1 would probably be too few, as those can crop up quite suddenly...

 

[The Hitcher]

Stalker0:

Not to dis what you've done (in fact your work inspired the thoughts I'm having on the issue), but I'm definitely a man who prefers simplicity when it will get the job done.

I've been thinking more about the relationship between Skill Checks and Challenges. I'm not sure I agree that we should be aiming for an 80% success rate with skill challenges. I think that an average Challenge, like an average check, SHOULD be a coin toss. That way, the odds can easily be tilted in either direction by enterprising players grabbing +2 bonuses or slight DC adjustments by the DM.

Also, with a slight re-framing of the Complexity rules, my system allows Checks and Challenges to become one and the same thing. A Skill Check is simply a Complexity 1 Skill Challenge (one success before one failure). This is what the new Complexity table would look like:

Complexity 1 - 1 success before 1 failure (aka a Skill Check)
Complexity 2 - 2 successes before 2 failures (or best of 3 Skill Checks)
Complexity 3 - 3 successes before 3 failures (or best of 5 Skill Checks)
Complexity 4 - 4 successes before 4 failures (or best of 7 Skill Checks)
and so on...

This seems rather elegant to me. What do others think?

 

[Stalker0]

If you believe that 50% is a good target number, then your system is a wonderfully elegant way to do that, and I hope that anyone else who feels the same will use it.

I will also add that I mentioned in my first post that a 6/6 complexity becomes slightly easier than a 3/3 if your individual rates go up to 55% for example. To the audience though, let me say that the increase is VERY slight (on the order of 2-3%), so its really not that big of a deal.

 

[The Hitcher]

Cheers for the kudos. I'm not concerned by a few percentage points here and there, as they can easily be absorbed/ignored during actual play.

I'm curious as to why you chose 80% success as your average benchmark for Challenges?

It seems natural to me that the average success rate for a challenge should be similar to that for a check. It feels odd that more involved and complex tasks should be vastly easier to resolve than simple ones. Sure, a team can often achieve more than the sum of its parts, but that is accounted for by the much-discussed 'Aid Another' action. Setting the mark at 50% would seem to provide more motivation for player creativity in finding optimum solutions that will tip the pendulum in their favour.

Enjoying the discussion.

 

[Khuxan]

I'm curious as to why you chose 80% success as your average benchmark for Challenges?

I'm not Stalker0, but skill challenges are just like any other encounter. PCs are about 80% likely to succeed at a combat encounter, why shouldn't they be 80% likely to succeed at an out-of-combat encounter?

 

[Plane Sailing]

I mentioned in the first maths thread that this skill challenge approach is there in the granddaddy of skill check rules - those in unearthed arcana

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/complexSkillChecks.htm

Their basic complex check was "3 successes before 3 failures", they then had "5 success before 3 failures" and "10 success before 3 failures". They even had a chart!

[B]Required
Roll   simple  complex(3)  complex(5)  complex(10)[/B]
2      95%      99.88%      99.62%      98.04%
6      75%      89.65%      75.64%      37.07%
11     50%      50%         22.66%       1.93%
16     25%      10.35%       1.29%       0.004%
20      5%       0.12%       0% 	     0%

Their chart illustrated the problems with skewed success/fail ratios right back then, which was interesting.

I had thought that I'd probably go with equal ratios, thus more complex tasks just take longer but have broadly the same difficulty.

Cheers

 

[The Hitcher]

I'm not Stalker0, but skill challenges are just like any other encounter. PCs are about 80% likely to succeed at a combat encounter, why shouldn't they be 80% likely to succeed at an out-of-combat encounter?

I guess the main reason would be because lives are much less likely to be in danger in a Skill Challenge than in Combat, and failure in the former can still push the story forward. The stakes aren't as high, so a somewhat close contest is needed to build the drama. Players are encouraged to play cleverly, in order to nudge the odds their way. This could be said about the current rules, but they push things to a point where repeated failure will tend to blunt the thrill of occasional success.

I'm from the Blue Mountains too, by the by. Grew up in Katoomba.

I mentioned in the first maths thread that this skill challenge approach is there in the granddaddy of skill check rules - those in unearthed arcana

I saw that in the original thread. It does make things pretty clear, doesn't it? It's a really bizarre error to make it into the final rules, especially after they made such a fuss about the "robustness" of the system.