D&D General Skill challenges: action resolution that centres the fiction

[Manbearcat]

Okay, this is legitimate confusion on my part. You're suggesting that the failure states for skill challenges might result in other minigames irrespective of the larger skill challenge, which makes sense and is not a scale on which I'd considered the use of a skill challenge.

I don't think it really answers any of my concerns, but it's interesting. If you generalized the skill challenge structure away from resolution and up to adventure design, thus that your "failures" and "successes" aren't so much about individual roles but generic obstacles, I'd be more onboard. Though again, I don't know that I'd find the particular timing structure useful so much as restrictive.

I’m just going to focus on this for now because your commentary on Blades shows a profound amount of daylight between us in terms of working mental models with respect to what player agency means and how that intersects with system (and likely player protagonism), that the conversation there will be massive.

Like we’re so far apart on that (eg you think something like D&D 3e yields more autonomy and more control over the trajectory of play and more authenticity and competitive integrity within the tactical/strategic profile of a player’s OODA LOOP than in Blades) that it’s going to be difficult to even have a conversation because our information processing/integration and the principles that undergird them diverge nearly completely.

We can maybe get to that later.

Let’s focus on the quoted bit first. So let me see if I can resolve your confusion. Order of operations on a Skill Challenge (I'm going to repurpose some fiction in one of my two Stonetop games):

* The players have just decided to leave their home steading and confront the neighboring steading's military caravan that is bearing down on their home. Aggression is likely so they want to get their Companion Characters (a pair of Rangers - Artillery in 4e Parlance) in an overwatch position on top of a butte overlooking the point they're going to intercept the caravan and confront them. The Druid says "you know what...go ahead...I'll catch up. Remember how Trys and Cullen encountered that Ankheg that was out in the Weald (a wild area of long grass, swamped reedy gulleys and gentle grassy rises)? I think he might be useful here...particularly against those Fen Trolls pulling the lead wagon. I'm going to attempt to gain its trust and convince it to join us for a hearty meal!"

* GM has to clarify goal and stakes and then actuate this with a Level and Complexity. "Alright, so the goal is to get back in time for the conflict with a friendly neighborhood Ankheg relatively leashed, yeah? Alright, if this is successful, you can have an Ankheg Companion Character for the coming conflict (parley Skill Challenge or actual combat depending upon what the players do). If you fail, you're going to be stuck in a combat with the Ankheg and you'll arrive late to whatever conflict comes next (mid Skill Challenge if its parley and beginning of round 2 if its combat). Level + 2 Skill Challenge, Complexity 2; you've got to get there quickly > convince the ankheg > the two of you get back quickly.


Alright, at this point I'm going to describe the opening situation (the topographical features, distance and terrain, between the Druid and the Ankheg's territory in the Weald). The player will then tell me how they're proposing to surmount this obstacle. If the Druid has the Overland Flight Ritual, then they spend the 100 Coin and make a Nature check to determine Overland Speed. I'd go with 24 or lower and that is 1 Success (the lowest rate) and 25 + and 2 successes. Its an auto-success regardless as they're investing in this resource (and did at character build) precisely to surmount this kind of obstacle. It just depends on if its 1 or 2.

If they shapeship into a fast animal and deploy the Encounter Power Spirited Wind to mitigate the rise and fall of the undulating terrain as the wind picks them up so they can surmount the snaking reed swamps around the meadowy rises, then they can have +2 to their Nature check.

Now if they get a micro-failure here? What is then in play for a consequence? Well, obviously they accrue 1 failure, I'll hit them with a Healing Surge loss, and I'll adversely change the situation with one of the following consequences:

* "Your culling of the wind spirit from its daily elemental duties undoubtedly annoys the Elder Spirit of the sky. You can see a great storm converging on the horizon, a sudden darkness consumes your path before you, terrible thunder, lightning, rain, galeforce downdrafts will assail your way forward and possibly frighten your Ankheg into staying in its burrow. I'm going to go ahead and use the 1 Hard DC I have for this Complexity 2 challenge. What do you do?"

* "The wind spirit you culled from the sky is cantankerous as hell or is just rascally and having fun with you. Regardless, on one of the great leaps into the air, the buffetting wind almost appears to chuff or chuckle...and then deposits you straight into the thick muck of one of those reed swamps. You're hip deep in the mire and its a sucking bog, not particularly intent upon letting you free. What do you do?"


Those complications are thematic to the Druid, they satisfy the fiction of the player's move made, and they satisfy changing the situation adversely in such a way that a new obstacle fittingly intercedes between the PC and the player's espoused global goal (getting to and charming a beast the is available for charming > getting back in time for the fireworks).

This is bog standard consequence handling specifically and procedures and GMing principles generally for 4e Skill Challenges (and other conflict resolution frameworks that are kindred to Skill Challenges) and looks like any one of the 700 + Skill Challenges I ran from 2008 to 20017 (wow...my last game was 5 years ago...where did the time go!).

 

[Pedantic]

I’m just going to focus on this for now because your commentary on Blades shows a profound amount of daylight between us in terms of working mental models with respect to what player agency means and how that intersects with system (and likely player protagonism), that the conversation there will be massive.

Like we’re so far apart on that (eg you think something like D&D 3e yields more autonomy and more control over the trajectory of play and more authenticity and competitive integrity within the tactical/strategic profile of a player’s OODA LOOP than in Blades) that it’s going to be difficult to even have a conversation because our information processing/integration and the principles that undergird them diverge nearly completely.

I feel like I did try to say that as clearly (if not concisely, because I'm quite bad at that) as possible. Someone once described my view as "player agency grows from the barrel of a gun" which I found amusingly appropriate. Agency is when you have an ability to force the game state to change in a known and specific way and you can leverage that to your benefit. High agency mechanics state declaratively what happens as a result of your action. In D&D's history spells have traditionally been very high agency, and skills have (when they've existed) tended to be low agency (and more so, if there's no way to push yourself off the RNG to achieve a given task, or we're using automatic success/failure rules on 20/1).

A good example of a high agency skill check is the 3.5 Tumble rules around moving through a creature, or avoiding an attack of opportunity. There's a specific number you're trying to hit, and you get a specific and useful ability you can leverage against opponents if you do.

Let’s focus on the quoted bit first. So let me see if I can resolve your confusion. Order of operations on a Skill Challenge (I'm going to repurpose some fiction in one of my two Stonetop games):

* The players have just decided to leave their home steading and confront the neighboring steading's military caravan that is bearing down on their home. Aggression is likely so they want to get their Companion Characters (a pair of Rangers - Artillery in 4e Parlance) in an overwatch position on top of a butte overlooking the point they're going to intercept the caravan and confront them. The Druid says "you know what...go ahead...I'll catch up. Remember how Trys and Cullen encountered that Ankheg that was out in the Weald (a wild area of long grass, swamped reedy gulleys and gentle grassy rises)? I think he might be useful here...particularly against those Fen Trolls pulling the lead wagon. I'm going to attempt to gain its trust and convince it to join us for a hearty meal!"

* GM has to clarify goal and stakes and then actuate this with a Level and Complexity. "Alright, so the goal is to get back in time for the conflict with a friendly neighborhood Ankheg relatively leashed, yeah? Alright, if this is successful, you can have an Ankheg Companion Character for the coming conflict (parley Skill Challenge or actual combat depending upon what the players do). If you fail, you're going to be stuck in a combat with the Ankheg and you'll arrive late to whatever conflict comes next (mid Skill Challenge if its parley and beginning of round 2 if its combat). Level + 2 Skill Challenge, Complexity 2; you've got to get there quickly > convince the ankheg > the two of you get back quickly.

I'm following, I would resolve this using actual time and distance as the limiting factors, not remapping those mechanics to checks as it goes.

Alright, at this point I'm going to describe the opening situation (the topographical features, distance and terrain, between the Druid and the Ankheg's territory in the Weald). The player will then tell me how they're proposing to surmount this obstacle. If the Druid has the Overland Flight Ritual, then they spend the 100 Coin and make a Nature check to determine Overland Speed. I'd go with 24 or lower and that is 1 Success (the lowest rate) and 25 + and 2 successes. Its an auto-success regardless as they're investing in this resource (and did at character build) precisely to surmount this kind of obstacle. It just depends on if its 1 or 2.

I think we're talking about Eagle's Flight? I'm seeing Overland Flight as an Arcana check and a fixed speed of 20, with no roll to activate. I don't have a problem with this, but I wouldn't measure this in successes, I'd measure in time and distance.

If they shapeship into a fast animal and deploy the Encounter Power Spirited Wind to mitigate the rise and fall of the undulating terrain as the wind picks them up so they can surmount the snaking reed swamps around the meadowy rises, then they can have +2 to their Nature check.

I think we're kind of conflating two rituals here, Eagle's Flight specifies that a giant eagle spirit shows up to carry you, so I'm not sure how shapeshifting would help. I also don't really see a need to design new mechanics on the fly here, because we already know a distance and a fly speed.

Now if they get a micro-failure here? What is then in play for a consequence? Well, obviously they accrue 1 failure, I'll hit them with a Healing Surge loss, and I'll adversely change the situation with one of the following consequences:

* "Your culling of the wind spirit from its daily elemental duties undoubtedly annoys the Elder Spirit of the sky. You can see a great storm converging on the horizon, a sudden darkness consumes your path before you, terrible thunder, lightning, rain, galeforce downdrafts will assail your way forward and possibly frighten your Ankheg into staying in its burrow. I'm going to go ahead and use the 1 Hard DC I have for this Complexity 2 challenge. What do you do?"

* "The wind spirit you culled from the sky is cantankerous as hell or is just rascally and having fun with you. Regardless, on one of the great leaps into the air, the buffetting wind almost appears to chuff or chuckle...and then deposits you straight into the thick muck of one of those reed swamps. You're hip deep in the mire and its a sucking bog, not particularly intent upon letting you free. What do you do?"

I would find this annoying. The ritual should do what it says it does. We already know distance, we already know fly speed, if I can get there, I can get there, if I can't get there in time I'm going to do something more effective with my time. Perhaps because I didn't know the distance and got the estimation wrong (a mechanic I think should probably fall under Survival?), then I'm going to be very disappointed after I've flown half that time, and come back in time to rejoin my friends, Ankheg-less. If I did know the distance, because we'd just walked from there, I'm scrapping this plan and coming up with something else to do before the encounter.

Those complications are thematic to the Druid, they satisfy the fiction of the player's move made, and they satisfy changing the situation adversely in such a way that a new obstacle fittingly intercedes between the PC and the player's espoused global goal (getting to and charming a beast the is available for charming > getting back in time for the fireworks).

This is bog standard consequence handling specifically and procedures and GMing principles generally for 4e Skill Challenges (and other conflict resolution frameworks that are kindred to Skill Challenges) and looks like any one of the 700 + Skill Challenges I ran from 2008 to 20017 (wow...my last game was 5 years ago...where did the time go!).

I have pulled out my core 4e books (as far as I got) and I'm not entirely sure I follow that based on the rules listed there. There is no discussion of minor consequences, though there is a suggestion under Step 4: Other Conditions that there may be ongoing effects unrelated to your checks, and on page 76 a suggestion that other skill checks might come up that don't count as successes or failures, but influence other checks. The example skill challenges do suggest you might also lose a healing surge in addition to whatever else happens on a failed check, but it's a little strange that it's not listed upfront.

There is also a side note about interrupting skill challenges that suggests encounters that come in to play between skill checks in extended challenges could add to success/failures on the check, but the implication is that these links are probably not causal, or part of the formal challenge structure.

I can see how you would stitch this together into the structure you put above, but I can also see how it took several years to get there, if these rules were intended to produce the results you've delivered, particularly when reviewing the examples.

All in all, I'm not persuaded this is anything like how skill challenges were routinely run until we got further guidance, possibly with the DMG 2? I will say, the rules are notable less...formal than I recall them being. There really isn't much scaffolding around the X successes before Y failures system, and a lot of that is more focused on how to fit skill challenges into the encounter budget and align them with rewards.

But yes, I think we can agree I'm informed about the underlying structure of skill challenge presentation, and I think my criticisms around agency still stand.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There are several depending upon the objective of the combat and the fiction surrounding it:

* Ablate Team Monster HP to 0.

* Force the Enemy Leader to Surrender (mechanically).

* Get to location x on the battlemat with y squares between you and Team Monster or before round n.

* Protect NPC Standard and Minion so they survive 4 waves of enemies.

* Survive 6 rounds until reinforcements arrive and take your spot on the wall so you can withdraw to the motte.

* Survive the enemy while you complete the Ritual/Skill Challenge to Close the Gate or Open the Gate and go through.

* Fight off your possessed friend's attacks while you exorcise him from the demon within him (Adjure Skill Challenge).


Plenty, plenty more. There are plenty of transparent win/loss cons to establish for combat outside of "get enemy HP to 0."

Right, in fact I have long held that 4e combat is actually not that thrilling when applied in the style of a 'Steel cage death match' where the two sides simply attempt to annihilate each other without any other recourse. That seems to be the TYPICAL way 4e encounters tend to get run (and this is pretty much also the case with other editions, at least more recent ones).

When I run 4e, I rarely put together an encounter where the PCs would have no other options besides kill or die. I mean, they may have to INVENT such options on the spot, but that's fine too!

 

[Manbearcat]

@Pedantic , Don't have time to engage with your post, but just one quick thing and clarifications:

1) This is your depiction of high agency: "Agency is when you have an ability to force the game state to change in a known and specific way and you can leverage that to your benefit. High agency mechanics state declaratively what happens as a result of your action. In D&D's history spells have traditionally been very high agency, and skills have (when they've existed) tended to be low agency (and more so, if there's no way to push yourself off the RNG to achieve a given task, or we're using automatic success/failure rules on 20/1)."

Your position seems to be that serial exploration and sussing out the dynamics of a GM's attempt to naturalistically model and derive a hugely complex imagined space (like a biome...like a social system at scale) + granular task resolution mechanics + getting the GM to decide in your favor ("playing/gaming the GM") when a conflict is over vs when its still in the balance (because this is always governed by GM decides in these systems) is higher agency than Blades in the Dark. I just can't fathom how you would come to that conclusion given what you've specified above (this is assuming you understand all the intersecting mechanical levers and gears of Blades, Player Best Practices, the game's ethos and you and your GM played the game skillfully and with fidelity to all the aforementioned). Hence, why I'm of the opinion presently that we should table that discussion for now. I mean, I know the words you're saying...I can read them. They just don't land with reality for me so that tells me that our orientation to the above statement you've made and "how that translates to the process of play and architecture of system" is a crazy distance apart.

I agree with your first sentence in the quoted above. I would probably subtly disagree with the rest of it, but only subtly. I would say that:

(a) agency very much depends upon the agenda of a game (therefore it will deviate depending upon the game).

(b) you can think you have tactical agency/strategic agency when you actually don't (because the GM basically has "Calvinball Rights"/veto and something else is happening beyond you onboarding all the tactical/strategic elements of a true and vital system and making skilled moves to affect the gamestate in a desirable trajectory)

(c) even if you have tactical/strategic agency in very particular moments of play (and abridged in others), such as combat, you may be completely deprotagonized (possessing no actual protagonasim agency) because the subject matter of the game isn't about PC dramatic needs evinced by the players and mediated through system...its basically about GM story or setting tourism or one of the GM's characters (eg Strahd in Ravenloft whose dramatic need is the nexus of play)

(d) skillfully employing your OODA (observe > orient > decide > act) Loop requires a firm understanding of your decision-space and of the prospective consequence-space downrange of the decision-made and how effective one action is vs another and the opportunity cost and strategic through line of exhausting/employing one resource vs another (if play entails such a thing)...and that requires deeply understanding the specific game in question (including ethos and all of the intersecting mechanical parts and the incentive structures/feedback loops for advancement vs attrition...and this gets complex because in some games ablation of character is desirable so this must also be folded into your decision-tree) + a very skillful GM + a very transparent and highly function conversation between involved parties (because your GM + PC build + game engine are your UI, so you need to understand the imagined space and gamestate possibilities through the lens of these converging things).

Blades in the Dark and Torchbearer are probably the two highest Skilled Play games I've ever GMed (and that entails agency in the way you're expressing above). So that tells you how far apart we are.

2) CLARIFICATIONS:

a) Yes, Eagle's Flight and not Overland Flight (I was just subbing "the thing you're doing" for "the name of the ritual).

b) In the above example I was instantiating two different declarations at the initial obstacle and what that contrast would look like. It wasn't Eagles Flight AND Shapeshift into an animal and use the Encounter Power Spirited Wind. It was instantiate (i) the action declaration of using the Ritual Eagle's Flight and achieving 1 or 2 Successes at first obstacle framing (pending Nature check) vs (ii) the action declaration of shifting into an animal form (this is just color in this case...if you have a Feat that gives you increased movement or expend a power that grants you additional movement rate, I'd bump that +2 for Spirited Wind up to +4) and then employing the Encounter Power Spirited Wind to nullify the gently undulating terrain of snaking reed bogs around meadow rises and then failing on the result to achieve a consequence. So effectively, you're talking about these alternative gamestates post first action declaration:

GAMESTATE: Success 1/2 (autosuccess due to Ritual but 1/2 pending Nature roll) vs 0 Failures +100 Coin spent and new obstacle framing post-traversing of the reed bog/meadows.

vs

GAMESTATE: Success 0 vs 1 Failure + Spirited Wind expended + 1 Healing Surge lost and consequence framing while still in the reed swamp/meadows.

 

[pemerton]

I just thing SC's addressed an issue many groups just weren't having and weren't looking for a solution to.

5e D&D, HERO, GURPS, T&T, 2nd ed AD&D, and many, many other RPGs address issues I'm not having and am not looking for solutions to. So what? What do you think follows from your biographical point?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I feel that I should specify my preferred resolution system is specific skill actions that are laid out in skills themselves. I am not a big fan of Dogs, the Apocalypse World line or Blades in the Dark, in case there's any confusion there. My stance is that something like 3e's skill descriptions was on the right track and needed to go further, until a fairly exhaustive list of "what skills do" was specified in player facing materials.

But then 4e really should have your back here, as EVERY SINGLE skill has an associated action that is appropriate for use in combat or similar situations, or which would quite often come up in an SC and could quite easily produce an outsized impact. For instance, Intimidate lets you force the surrender of an opponent who's bloodied. Now, granted, you have to come up with some SC fiction that equates to bloodied, but I'd say if the bad guy has got no successes and the PCs are halfway to winning, why not? All of a sudden he capitulates! Now, that might not win the challenge outright, but it doesn't explicitly win a whole combat encounter outright either. It could very easily provide a bonus on later checks, or justify the use of a different set of skills though. Additionally 4e has Skill Powers, which you can get using a feat and swap for other utilities. These are often almost tailor made for use in SCs. There are also rituals and practices, which key off skills generally, and are of course quite useful, and again pretty much begging to be brought to bear in an SC.

I'm not sure if I'm getting my point about gameplay and player agency wrapped in some other discussion about preferred skill systems, it's a long thread, please forgive me.

4e skills are generally pretty explicit about what they do. They don't overlap much, since there are only 19 of them. This does mean that each one is a broad 'knack' or generalized area of talent, and could apply in a bunch of situations, but usually its pretty clear which one you would use. The descriptions are also pretty clear.

So, specifically in the 4e context, I absolutely agree that utility abilities that modified skill checks were a great addition to an otherwise quite limited system. The ability to spend resources to influence the outcome of a given check meaningfully improves player agency, and such abilities should be more common in all resolution systems.

However, that doesn't actually have anything to do with skill challenges. In fact, you've invoked a few commonplaces entirely outside of skill challenge systems to make this situation more interesting. Notably that drawing a weapon will presage armed conflict (a totally reasonable evaluation of the fictional state, and something I would also adjudicate similarly without a skill challenge framework). That means, unless you'd just happened to have gotten that player to roll the final failure before X successes on that particular check, you're actually abandoning the skill challenge framework, in favor of "do skill check, evaluate fictional state, offer next action declaration" which I would argue was the default before skill challenges were added.

Huh? Read the actual DMG description of how an SC works... I mean, DMG1 really is rather lackluster in its presentation, but it says "You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results." Its a pretty straightforward loop, the GM describes the situation, the player describes a skill they will apply and how it applies, dice are rolled, and the GM describes the 'results', which is a new situation which follows from the old one and the action. What you call "actually abandoning the framework" is literally the description of how the framework works!

Now, if you go look at DMG2, and admittedly you wouldn't be expected to have to do so in order to play, obviously, it talks about 'progression' and 'branching' as elements of SCs, meaning that the situation doesn't simply follow a linear path, nor even necessarily end at the same outcome simply because the result was success or failure, it could go in a variety of directions. Still, I was never very satisfied with even DMG2's write up in terms of sufficiently emphasizing the contingent and extemporaneous nature of most challenges. The write up in my own game, which is pretty close kin to 4e, IMHO introduces a better way to think about them, much more akin to the way things like BitD and Dungeon World describe their game play loops.

 

[Imaro]

5e D&D, HERO, GURPS, T&T, 2nd ed AD&D, and many, many other RPGs address issues I'm not having and am not looking for solutions to. So what? What do you think follows from your biographical point?

Dude what is with the hostility... it's a discussion forum, SC's and people's takes are being discussed in this thread... I'm discussing mine... and I'm not forcing you to engage with them.

EDIT: I could in fact turn this same question around on many of your posts and pontifications... just saying.

 

[pemerton]

IMO, organic play is when the fiction and the resolution mechanic used are chosen real time in response to the previous fiction, results of mechanics and action declaration of the PC's.

As a very simplified example... if there was a D&D combat where the GM used a framework where the only mechanic in use was melee attack rolls and no matter what it ended after 3 rounds... without consideration for the fiction or the actual actions being declared... I would label it a non or in-organic combat. It has nothing to do with keeping things from players or concealing information though both of those could be present.

How is the turn-by-turn character of D&D combat resolution possibly organic? It's hard to find a clearer example of artifice in RPG resolution frameworks.

As for clear states of success and failure... if you as a player are stating what you hope to accomplish for the task that you are attempting... we have them. You succeed on the check, use of the power, whatever and you achieve what you were hoping to. You don't and the DM will set the consequences... just as he would in a SC

But does succeeding at the task take the player (and their PC) closer to achieving the desired goal/stakes? Or not? This is all under the authority of the GM. Which is the key difference from a skill challenge. (Or other closed-scene resolution.) I pick this up not far below.

And yet the DM decides monsters surrender halfway through a combat... the PC's flee...or both groups decide to parlay after losses... none of these examples use combat mechanics to resolve the combat. I would actually say it's pretty rare in my game for intelligent creatures to fight until they are all wiped out.

In a SC there are only two ways to resolve X successes or Y failures. to drive home what I am saying can a DM decide that the SC has had enough and surrenders the goal to the PC's?

Nothing stops a GM deciding part way through a skill challenge that the PCs just succeed. Nor, as per my post upthread, does anything stop the players deciding that their PCs concede.

My personal view, which is probably not surprising to those who have followed my posts in this thread, is that if the GM is inclined to decide part way through the skill challenge just to grant the PCs' success, then they are probably better off not using the skill challenge framework and rather just making things up in a more ad hoc fashion. Because this is exactly an example of decoupling success at the goal from success or failure at tasks.

The PCs choosing to concede is a different matter: that's their prerogative (whether driven by resource concerns, a change of mind about the importance of what is at stake, or something else).

The GM absolutely is not deciding the number of checks necessary to resolve the situation, they have decided the situation. Ideally, they aren't even deciding that, they're elucidating an existing world-state as it becomes relevant to the players. The river's width does not vary in reaction to the attempt actions to cross it, and decision making on how to tackle it is updated action by action, as the players ask for more information.

The GM isn't making ad hoc decisions about the number of checks or their difficulty, those are intrinsic to the actions the players attempt, and is instead describing the state of the world they see in front of them.

The "world" doesn't exist. It's made up. The GM doesn't "elucidate" it. They stipulate it.

In a well described situation, with specified actions, resolution should be...obvious? Like, if you want to get in to the castle, you will know when you are inside, when the sum total of whatever actions you took to get there have put you inside the castle. You can just use repeated action resolution, and having set a goal of "get into that castle" you'll know when you arrive there.

This illustrates precisely the contrast between (on the one hand) closed scene resolution and (on the other) resolution where, in effect, the GM decides whether or not the PCs get into the castle by deciding the fiction, the consequences, what checks are called for at what difficulties, etc, in a more-or-less unconstrained fashion.

I also have this terrible dislike of this super weird mistrust in the DM, and its equally to me as nonsensical, you mistrust the DM to make judgment calls in the moment but you trust him enough to make terms of success and resolution before anything solution by the players was put forward? What kinda crap is that?

It's nothing to do with trust. It's about how authority over the fiction is distributed. Given that the entirety of RPG play consists in resolving competing preferences as to how the shared fiction changes, it's not a surprise that the allocation of authority over who gets to decide is something that people care about.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My point is more broadly that player agency is increased and the resulting gameplay a more mechanically interesting set of decisions the closer you map resolution to discreet actions.



I don't think we're on quite the same page here. This might be clearer if I presented the counterfactual; how would this have been resolved if 4e was printed without skill challenges? The situation you presented (admittedly in the absence of the other actions taken before this fighter's action) is no different without a skill challenge framework. You made a quite reasonable judgement call that drawing a weapon makes the other party hostile, and the fighter failed a skill check to influence them, resulting in combat.

The situation did not require a skill challenge framework to resolve. The interesting decisions the fighter made (risking an escalation of tension to get a bonus to resolving it his preferred way) was not a product of the skill challenge system.



Then what is the value of the skill challenge, if you're going to evaluate the fictional state after any given action? How is the game meaningfully improved by having a skill challenge framework around the above interaction, vs. a different set of rules for resolving the situation?

To be completely honest, I am not entirely willing to yield "some fictional consequences obviously overwhelm the system" as a commonplace, because it is the source of many disagreements. The case you've presented I think is pretty clear, but the classic conceit of "clever gameplay" in D&D involving you know, flooding caves or dousing things in oil and lighting them up could easily fall into that same category, with some players claiming they should evade the system because their proposed action renders the skill challenge moot, and others suggesting the action is just another expression of a skill check inside the skill challenge framework.

See, I would extrapolate: Now, taken at its most basic face value 4e generally is pretty easy to construe as a fairly classic DM-centered D&D-style RPG with many classic traits (albeit not entirely). OTOH many of us who still discuss 4e have interpreted it in a much more narrativist and even Story Now kind of way. Whether or not this was an intended interpretation, one that was simply not made entirely explicit, or if it is a revisionist reading is obviously debatable. However it is a fact that 4e can be played in this sort of fashion. When you play this way, the closed scene framing kind of mechanism that SCs implement is pretty darn useful and appropriate. In fact one of its primary uses is when the PLAYERS invoke those mechanics! Now, 4e process of play doesn't really provide a super explicit mechanism for this, like there's no place in the rules that says "players can decide they are now entering into a skill challenge in order to achieve their stated goal." OTOH players DO get to declare quests, and it makes sense that the goal of an SC is likely to be something along the lines of "accomplish Quest X". Certainly the players are ALWAYS in charge of what their goals actually are, so it seems likely, given the many admonitions that fill the 4e DMGs about GMs 'saying yes', 'skipping to the action' (presumably the action the players want to get to).

So, imagine, one of the players says "we need the favor of Pelor, I will determine where the nearest ancient temple of Pelor is located, go there, and reconsecrate it!" This is a quest, no ifs, ands, or buts about it! While the DMG is a bit traditionalist and throws the GM a bone when it says he can (and should) 'approve' the quest, its pretty basically a player-side thing at this point. The player sends his Paladin to the archives of the local town temple and declares "I am going to find the location of the ancient temple which once stood atop the nearby plateau!" Now the GM COULD technically just string together skill checks, the advantage of an SC at this point is pretty obvious. It puts a scope on the whole enterprise and provides the formal structure of an encounter on it. So we can now formulate a pretty good adventure. Encounter 1 is an SC, Find the Temple! It starts in the archive and climbs up into the wilderness of the plateau above town and reaches its success when the PCs arrive at their destination. Further adventure can be prepped by the GM on the theory that the PCs will enter and try to clear the place out, etc. Or it might go other ways, but regardless, a general map of a temple complex and some inhabitants are probably a solid investment at this point.

That's kind of how I generally see 4e going, though you can definitely go even more hard core narrativist and let the players tell you what they're going to find there, or imagine finding there, etc. Naturally the SC, and maybe subsequent ones, will throw up plenty of "Oops, that's not what we hoped to find!" etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not going to entertain that first point, because we both know it's ridiculous and I'm already tired of having my position caricatured. DCs are for discreet actions, not geopolitical goals.



The DC to cross is a river, in the kind of skill system I'm proposing, will be resolved by the appropriate swimming, levitating, flying, rope tying, boating, long jumping, or whatever other rules the PCs bring to bear against the challenge, no doubt informed by the speed of the current, presence of monsters, visibility and anything else going on.

Unlike a skill challenge, the number of times they roll will vary wildly, based on which of those approaches they took, the appropriate speeds of the methods of transport available to them as a result of those choices, and in some cases will be trivial, as perhaps someone actually bought a folding boat. Honestly, the only difference between the sort of system I'm advocating and a skill challenge model, is that DCs are intrinsic to the tasks being attempted and the effectiveness of any given check is specified by the action that allowed the check in the first place, instead of attached to a timer on the number of checks or number of successful checks.



Oh totally. Give me structure HP, and we can figure out if there's a downside to attacking the wall, or if climbing is faster/safer, or if some completely unrelated approach will most efficiently solve the problem. The way I play these games is essentially iterated heist planning.



This is the fundamental difference here. In a system with objective actions, players are incentivized and rewarded for trying to find the most efficient solution to that problem, and will go off to deal with new problems, while in a skill challenge scenario they cannot have made a good decision about which path to take, because you specified a set of obstacles ahead of time. In some cases you might be able to resolve a situation thus that you face no or fewer obstacles than some other path, and the satisfaction is in finding and using that route, an option that isn't possible with a skill challenge structure.

Yeah, I don't agree that this is a difficulty. I know it seems hard to grasp when you haven't done it a bunch of times, but there's really no issue with these tallies constraining play. They may MEASURE play, such that you will not find some extra crazy amount of difficulty just because you picked a rather colorful but perhaps less than ordinarily practical method of solving your problem! So, the guy who deploys a raft to cross the river will employ raft-building-appropriate skills, and the guy who decides to charm 1000 hummingbirds to fly him across will employ a DIFFERENT set of skills (and probably some magic, etc. but whatever). Obviously each party in this case will need to demonstrate some fictional logic for how its attempt is feasible, perhaps genre appropriate, etc. but as the 4e DMG says "say yes." Certainly my Coure of Summer Winds Druid can summon up some birds, eh?

Certainly the skill challenge will produce a consistently cinematic set of events you could narrate later, but it isn't interesting as a game to play in the moment because you cannot do well as a player. The entire proposition is to use a skill challenges as a structure to generate fiction that's sufficiently exciting to talk about, when that's precisely the opposite of what I want to do at a gaming table. I want to receive a fictional situation, figure out the best way to resolve it to my advantage, and be rewarded if I manage to do so.

We might have different goals. OTOH I don't think the situation lacks opportunity for skilled play. There can be a huge difference in outcomes depending on how well you approach the problem you are solving! Pick the wrong skill, act rashly, be too conservative, take a path you are not well equipped for, you will find it much harder. This is tactics, is it not?

I don't think it's controversial to point out that this is something skill challenges don't and by their structure, cannot, do. That they do not do this is straight up getting called a strength in these examples, as they point out how you might set up a new challenge when you check the fictional situation before that last success is rolled. My point is that this strips them of a particular kind of gameplay.

I don't think what you are contrasting with is any different! How does a player have any idea what paths are likely to be more or less tactically advantageous when the GM presents a serial set of 'checks' to pass? Worse, how do you even gauge the consequences? The player doesn't know what is at risk and what the costs are. IME this leads to very conservative 'save all my resources and take no risks' play.

To summarize, in a skill challenge stripped of its fictional context you roll dice and try to get high numbers, and every once in a while you can cut down the number of times you need to do so by a third by spending some other resource. If the nature of the challenge was allowed to scale on the number of relevant rolls and the difficulty of those rolls was unbounded from the challenge, you would have more tactical engagement to make better choices. At that level of mechanical engagement, a skill challenge system loses out to a specified action system in terms of player agency.

No, because you have no idea what the GM is actually going to decide is how many checks you need to pass given any particular path that you take! There's nothing tactical about a blind walk. At best the player is playing their intuition and experience as a gamer or with the GM and considering 'what makes sense', which is exactly what they are doing when they decide which skill to utilize in an SC and what matching action to take.

It's very possible not to care about that. To be honest, I actually think a lot of these defenses of skill challenges could be restated as claims that lower mechanical agency makes for more consistent pacing and story structure, and allows for more freedom in narrative agency to players. That is a reasonable trade-off, one could in good conscience support, and specifically write mechanics for it, and arguably a bunch of indie games have. It's just not as interesting to play as a game, in the very specific sense I've been using the word game.

I mean, I don't offhand reject various propositions. I don't perceive it as really a trade off. IMHO it is just easier for GMs to run things in a way that suites them when they decide what and when all the checks are and how many are 'enough'. It IS less demanding in a sort of basic sense, but its also much easier for it to just fall rather flat. I'm perfectly happy with mechanical challenge, btw. I spent YEARS running games for some extremely ruthless and calculating wargamers, including one guy who COULD NOT LOSE at anything, no matter what, lol. So by creating these closed scene resolution style encounters, things were much more interesting. Now they could calculate the heck out of what would maximize their math, but they also had to contend with the fiction at the same time.

If that's what you want from your non-combat system, that's completely reasonable, but it's not an intrinsic good and does sit in opposition to various kinds of fun you can wring out of a roleplaying game.

I'm not sure what you mean about standing in opposition...