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

[pemerton]

Anybody have the errata they posted?

As far as the particular issue of turn-taking is concerned, they just deleted the sentence or two that set it out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There is a general requirement in TTRPG for mechanical structures that through a chain of resolution converge on an end result. Cyclical combat systems, skill challenges, and clocks all address that general requirement. The earliest reference I know of to skill challenges is in Mearls' Iron Heroes 2007 as Extended Skill Checks (Iron Heroes also contains "skill challenges", but those are a distinctly different mechanic.) Extended Skill Checks are essentially clocks, and include both monotonic and X before Y sub-mechanics. A faint trace of 4e Skill Challenges survives in 5e Social Encounters.

Regarding two possible key features

1. skill challenges centre the fiction in the process of action declaration and resolution.
2. the GM does not get to decide when the scene is resolved.

In terms of meeting the general requirement I outline above, the general purposes of TTRPG have traditionally included group wargaming* and narration. As perhaps @Jer gets at, any mechanical structure whether locked to a specific set of descriptions or freely applied can be wargamed (whether or not it's semantics are that of warfare.) Even so, it seems right to me to say that a less rigorous mechanical structure that accepts any semantics, is more likely to lean away from wargaming and into narration. So I agree with the first possible feature suggested by the OP.

Regarding the second possible feature, traditional modes of play often uphold a principle that upon entering into a cyclical combat system, GM does not get to decide when the scene is resolved. System decides. That is to point out that we have a host of options here, found in combinations of the following, and I'm not yet sure this thread has made clear why decider matters to centering the fiction (it can certainly matter to other qualities of play that we care about!)

1. Index of Results
The first concern (sometimes going unnoticed) is choosing what the possible results are. They can be chosen by system (game designers decide), a player acting as referee (GM decides), players with skin in the game (players decide), or a mixture, such as when GM chooses negative results and players choose positive. For example, "Skill Challenges" in Iron Heroes let's players add positive results by reducing their likelihood of success. I call the list of possible results their "index". Several posters point out that this list can evolve over the span of resolution.

2. Appointment of Decider
The second concern is who will decide between results. Often its roll, but it can be a negotiation, a rolling consensus, etc. If there will be multiple results converging to an overall result, decider might even move around.

3. Chain of Resolution
The scene is resolved at the end of the chain of resolution. The steps in that chain can include insertions and revisions, and can be singular or multiple, and temporally linear, cyclical, or retroactive. Typically, it becomes increasingly determined what the result is going to be as the chain is followed. It would be tedious to follow a chain with a predetermined outcome, so typically the mechanic will preserve the chance of a negative result even where things are swinging to almost certainly positive (and vice versa).

Regarding @DND_Reborn's comments, I agree that the "general requirement" has often been met informally, as non-combat encounters from simple to elaborate, compact to protracted. (Something I've discussed in other threads.) I feel what is most important to the fiction in many cases is that the resolution has a strong feeling of convergence to the end result, so that the group will agree it feels right for their fiction ("right" can mean a lot of things, including exciting, surprising, baffling... it doesn't have to mean simply obvious.) That may involve agreeing mechanisms for tracking along the chain, an index of outcomes either up front or by appointing from time to time new authors, and how we decide between them (in most TTRPGs, that is the core mechanic.)

At present, I haven't read anything that makes me believe that centering on the fiction depends on the decider of the result. I think it depends on the integrity of the system. That's not a fixed view, and perhaps further exploration of these ideas will change it?


*I use this word to mean tactics and strategy play generally, and not solely the simulation of warfare.

Yeah, I think WRT the comments that @DND_Reborn made, it is like with most of the approaches that are common to narrative play, you can achieve them purely by dint of playing most any RPG with careful attention to that. Many games will, however, work against you in some sense. Something like the 4e SC system is a pretty solid mechanical structure intended to bring about this 'bounded' characteristic of a 'scene'. It lets the GM focus on the fiction and how it evolves as opposed to worrying overmuch about what outcome to decide, or when things are decided.

Its interesting that many people ask for things like 'social combat' systems, but then when they get one, and the 4e SC pretty much fits the bill, its described as confining or trivial in effect. Certainly you could come up with different mechanics for such a thing, like opposed clocks and have the GM make checks for the 'opposition', but we found in the end all the alternatives we tried weren't measurably better, and were usually a bunch more complicated and often didn't quite fit well with the fiction in some cases. Its true that you can, now and then, find yourself tied in a knot over how to proceed with an SC, but following the structure is still the easier path, IMHO.

 

[pemerton]

I think the issue is with my point, is people dont quite understand how ridiculous and unintuitive skill challenges actually are and what they do in 4e actually is.

Simply comparing this very the actual extended skill checks/progress clocks people here are talking about, makes it a lot clearer

However you built them, it literally just boiled down to players picking a list of actions and rolling more success then failures separate from what the players were doing, or how it was going on, completely dissociated alien stuff, that require some weird initiative to handle, this was my point of contention, and why Skill Challenges are actively really bad.

The assertion I've bolded is what the OP denies.

To elaborate further on my post 67 upthread:

A GM in Apocalypse World has to make decisions about the hardness of moves. Say (as per the example of play in the rulebook) a PC goes looking for Isle, a NPC. What move should the GM make? In the example, the GM narrates the PC finding Isle sitting around eating peaches with friends and family. Imagine instead the GM narrates that the PC finds Isle bloodied and beaten to within an inch of her life, while the seeming perpetrator is driving off on a motorbike. Or imagine the GM narrates that Isle is nowhere to be found. Or is found dead. These different narrations, and the ones that follow on from player action declarations and their resolution, all shape the play space, open up and even invite some action declarations while closing off other possibilities.

The GM's narration in a skill challenge is more circumscribed than in AW, because the mathematics of progress towards overall success or failure are tightly defined. But the same sorts of skills a GM uses to narrate a skill challenge - a sense of opening up or closing of possibilities, of circling around conflict or forcefully putting it front and centre, of imposing costs and consequences, etc - will be useful in GMing AW. And vice versa.

And I think they're pretty different from the skills a GM needs to run (say) White Plume Mountain, or a typical CoC module.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you're conflating GM decides inputs into a scene with GM decides a scene's outcome. By judging the challenge of a scene to the PC's current fictional position, the GM, in setting the parameters of a Skill Challenge (or similar mechanic, like Clocks etc.), decides in the abstract the weight of a scene in the same way they do in setting the opponents in a combat challenge (do the PCs face a pair of dragons here or a kobold or three?). That's it. As each check along the way to deciding the final outcome of the SC requires changing the fictional position in some meaningful way, the GM does not decide in advance how (inevitably tied to when, since the success/failure tally, not any particular obstacle within the overall Challenge, is final arbiter) the overall Challenge's outcome gets decided; the players do, through the actions they declare and the success or failure of their rolls. There is a gulf of difference between "The PCs can navigate the haunted woods to find the witch's cottage by making 6 successful checks before 3 failures" and allowing the obstacles and action declarations chosen to shape the ensuing fiction and "The PCs can navigate the haunted woods to find the witch's cottage when I, GM, feel they have done enough to warrant it"! In the former, everyone at the table understands the criteria for meeting the Challenge; in the latter, the outcome is essentially whenever the GM whims it.

It is actually stronger than this, even! A 4e SC has DETERMINISTIC difficulty. Once a GM declares an SC of Complexity N and Level X, the total difficulty is a fixed, known, quantity. Certainly once the associated skills are chosen, nothing else weighs in (unless perhaps the players choose to spend some sort of resource to enhance their chances, like casting a ritual or expending a power). Granted, player tactics will have an impact, presumably, but its a pretty set thing, and most interestingly, it really does not depend on the specific fiction very much at all. Not to say the fiction is not central to the whole thing, but the point is more that the players are NOT in the thrall of the GM deciding to present situations they are good at, or which are less monumentally difficult, which would be the case in, say, 5e. In fact, the GM doesn't really have to care about that, her job is simply to make things interesting and etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh no Progress Clocks and such from blade in the dark are good, but those are pretty different from skill challenges, as they are used and resolved in a much different way, seperate from focusing on action resolution and more of a measure of something, usually time,, that is a smarter way of going about it, as its not expecting players needing to do X input to get X output or expecting an action to go in or out, and thats how they engage with a problem.

What im talking about is the very much player-action resolution-oriented 4E-styled Skill challenges that a lot of people seem to pedal those are awful, and will directly lead to the opposite of the resolves your describing because they are centered around how players engage with it, instead of designing based on describing the issue itself. That type of skill challenge is something far more designed, then the simple extended skill checks/Progress clocks we are talking about here.

I think throwing all of those mechanics under the Skill Challenge banner is bad, because Skill Challenges are a very specific type of thing, that is usually always terrible. This is a terminology issue, i feel.

Hmmmmm, I think that the problem then is applying SCs to pregenerated situations. I mean, there ARE SCs that will work fine as simple analogs of combat encounters, for instance, where everything is spelled out ahead. I don't think your objection holds there, any more than it does for combat. Those are pretty limited scope though. The OTHER kind, which is much more like what @Manbearcat is talking about are the more fluid situations which can take a wide variety of paths to resolution, or failure of resolution perhaps. If you try to script out something like that, it won't work. I saw a bunch of those types in Dungeon adventures back in the day. You can salvage them by just assuming whatever the author spells out is just one likely path that things could take, at least in some cases.

I remember an SC I had once where the PCs were trying to stabilize the planar location of a temple, and they just ran around the place doing rituals and various things. Once the dwarf failed a check and a big Godforged Colossus started careening around the place, and they invented various ways of distracting it while they resanctified the altar or something like that. It was just all made up, but whenever they did something it would have positive and/or negative effects that would complicate whatever they tried next, although a lot of times it just gave them some better chances to use their strong skills, lol. It was fun, and IIRC they barely succeeded in the end after one PC got crushed by the Colossus.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

both of those things actually represent something that describes or is meant to represent the scenario in question, as a description, separate from the actions the players are supposed to take to engage with it.

4E skill challenges are meant and designed to be engaged in a very specific way, a very distinct mode of play focused on how the players resolve it not on mechanically describing the situation the players are actually in, just focused on how to resolved it, this is of the highest of importance, as it changes how players fundamentally engage with the mechanics in question, and why those mechanics actually feel good to use and not absolute terrible like 4Es.

Its why im saying, you need to break that terminology, these systems are something quite different then what 4E considers skill challenges, which are legit awful.

I think what I'm getting out of this is you somehow don't think the fiction is really important in an SC, and we'll have to disagree. Fiction is fundamental. There is no defined AMOUNT of fiction, just a defined number of checks that must be passed/failed before no more is required to reach a consequence. The fiction determines what is at stake, and how the different successes and failures 'snowball' into each other to create the next stage of the fiction. So there's a through fictional line from starting situation (scene frame) to final outcome. As I said before, the STRUCTURE is definitely deterministic, but it isn't related to that through line, which is where all the significance is. Seen that way, I don't see much difference between any of these techniques, really.

 

[pemerton]

A 4e SC has DETERMINISTIC difficulty. Once a GM declares an SC of Complexity N and Level X, the total difficulty is a fixed, known, quantity. Certainly once the associated skills are chosen, nothing else weighs in (unless perhaps the players choose to spend some sort of resource to enhance their chances, like casting a ritual or expending a power). Granted, player tactics will have an impact, presumably, but its a pretty set thing, and most interestingly, it really does not depend on the specific fiction very much at all. Not to say the fiction is not central to the whole thing, but the point is more that the players are NOT in the thrall of the GM deciding to present situations they are good at, or which are less monumentally difficult, which would be the case in, say, 5e. In fact, the GM doesn't really have to care about that, her job is simply to make things interesting and etc.

This is another point of resemblance to AW: the relative independence from maths and from tactics in the wargaming/boardgaming sense.

Tactics, in the context of a skill challenge, really means addressing the fiction so as to change the fictional position of one or more PCs so as to open up certain possibilities or maybe close of certain GM narrations (eg by picking up the idol, a player makes it much harder for the GM to narrate the players being knocked one way while the idol is knocked another).

My experience is that the resource expenditure is mostly initiated by players, when for whatever reason (eg it's the last check; but that's not the only reason I've experience) they care about the outcome of a particular check; but sometimes I'll call for it or perhaps negotiate with them to open up a particular fictional possibility (eg if you spend such-and-such a sort of encounter power, that makes it feasible to use such-and-such a skill in the way you want to - it's a bit like spending a Plot Point to "stunt" and boost your dice pool in MHRP).

 

[Aldarc]

If this is an example of what I would have found in 4E, I would probably have been thrilled when 5E was released. The more I learn of 4E, the more I understand why some players feel it was needlessly complex.

Anyway, again I do appreciate the replies to my request. Thank you!

I would suggest avoiding the temptation to conflate the complexity of @Manbearcat's writing style with the complexity of 4e's skill challenges.

 

[Manbearcat]

@clearstream

My end of the course of our exchange was ruddered by the first thing you wrote to me:

I think where I most diverge from some others here is that I don't have this same sense of worry or antagonism about GM. They're just another participant whose role is differing but equal to others. They hope to unravel, discover and enjoy.

We then had a subsequent exchange over the "conflict as golf course" analogy of which you appended this to your thoughts:

Where I have used the word "validity" in my longer post above, I mean something like - the strongest ideas don't require the strawman. One may simply not accept the proposition that they play against GMs who exercise a harmful arbitrary-fiat, and if the argument is unchanged then that prejudice wasn't needed in the first place. And I think the important arguments are unchanged.

My takeaway from the above was a few things. If I've got you wrong, then please correct me. First, I want to remove the value judgements of "harmful" (with respect to arbitrary fiat) and "against" the GM (meaning a developed, negative adversarialism-oriented relationship when Skilled Play is prioritized because the GM is, by necessity, playing the opposition). I don't hold either of those two things as de facto orientations. It appears that you believe I did, but I don't. I'm just talking about games. Arbitrary fiat doesn't have to be "harmful" (in fact, it might be necessary for some forms of play) and the orientation of player : GM relationship doesn't need to be "against" even when they're in opposition with respect to "controlling units on the board" in a Skilled Play environment (in fact...to be honest...I think the "against" orientation is actually considerably more likely to turn out "injured and injurious" Skilled Play - and by that I mean "to the integrity of the competition of the players drawing upon their abilities to defeat obstacles dynamic of the game)."

Alright, so here is my takeaway of your above:

* Regardless of game, GMs are always oriented toward unraveling and discovering (this is a large area of disagreement).

* (I already talked about the value judgement above, but I'm going to talk about the actual process of play here) GM Fiat that is systemically and principally unconstrained (whenever you see me use "arbitrary", this is how I mean it...unbounded by narrowing game text constraints, driven by personal whim) is necessarily harmful to play.


So I don't agree with either of the above bullet-points and I folded that lack of agreement into my Starting Point > Obstacles Array > Endpoint model above. Some games and techniques require a GM be oriented toward unraveling and discovering. Some are absolutely the inverse (the GMs aren't discovering or unraveling...if play is, in any quantity outside of extreme exception, unmoored from what the GM already knows, then something has gone wrong). Some games and techniques require a GM be systemically and principally constrained such that their decision-making cannot be mistaken for unbounded, personal whim (while in the middle of play or upon review or even in their own head!). At every moment their thinking is anchored to/captured by multiple constraining parameters (along multiple, often converging, axes). Whereas other games and techniques rely upon the GM being unconstrained and work their way artfully through play by feel and whim. They aren't incorporating various parameters of constraint in their cognitive workspace. They're just "doing their thing."

The Conflict Matrix model I composed above relies upon agreeing with my directly above paragraph and disagreeing with the two bullet points above (which was my takeaway of your position).

So that is why I was flinching a bit at your seeming agreement with my model.

Thoughts? Again, happy to be corrected if the two bullet points above aren't your position and you agree with my paragraph above.

I would suggest avoiding the temptation to conflate the complexity of @Manbearcat's writing style with the complexity of 4e's skill challenges.

Obligatory

Speaking of "complexity of Manbearcat's writing style," behold the monstrosity of this post!

 

[FallenRX]

I think what I'm getting out of this is you somehow don't think the fiction is really important in an SC, and we'll have to disagree. Fiction is fundamental. There is no defined AMOUNT of fiction, just a defined number of checks that must be passed/failed before no more is required to reach a consequence. The fiction determines what is at stake, and how the different successes and failures 'snowball' into each other to create the next stage of the fiction. So there's a through fictional line from starting situation (scene frame) to final outcome. As I said before, the STRUCTURE is definitely deterministic, but it isn't related to that through line, which is where all the significance is. Seen that way, I don't see much difference between any of these techniques, really.

In your own post, you have shown the issue with the fiction in question, which is you have made a very specific set of inputs to get a specific output separate from the actual thing you're describing itself but focus on how the players with resolve X thing. This is terrible, because players can resolve X thing in 100 ways that go beyond that input scope, but you have basically limited them to a specific input, to get X amount of times to get an output separate from the reality itself. This is quite literally, unironically railroading, and if the players think up anything outside of that structure that simply resolves the problem, the structure itself quite literally doesnt work, because like railroads it is too frail to actually last in any meaningful way. Aka why 4E skill Challenges are terrible, notably worse then the far simpler progress clocks and such because those are separate from "How" the players resolve it, its more a measure of something else, like time. The point is no matter what "fiction" you make, no matter what you produce, it will not matter, you are just telling the players to roll X till they win, separate from the actual thing they are trying to do, and anything they do does not matter until they rolled a X amount of time to do X.