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

[pemerton]

I think the reason that SC's work for some and don't work for others is because they are the solution to a problem/desire only experienced by some groups. The main problem/desire they seem to solve is the need for a pre-determined & closed point of success to a series of skill checks used to obtain a goal. Outside of you need X successes before Y failures they don't really bring anything else to the table that can't be provided by a DM calling for skill checks and letting the fiction flow from what the resolution is organically.

It seems the want and/or need for this is driven primarily by having a DM/group who is not able to bring a series of checks to address obstacles to an organic length & resolution (based on the resulting fiction) that is agreeable to the group without some kind of hard delimiter

This element of finality is the way in which they resemble the basic method D&D uses to resolve combat. Instead of the GM deciding when the situation is resolved, a mechanical process is used to do this.

 

[Voadam]

I think criticism is being misunderstood here. I'm not concerned that if you remove the fictional context the mechanics are just dice rolls, I'm concerned that if you remove the fictional context, the decision making one has in the mechanical layer isn't good. If you tore out the roleplaying game bits and presented a skill challenge as a board game, it would have the mechanical heft of Chutes and Ladders.

You could, for example, present D&D combat in isolation of the rest of the system as a board game if you specified some specific character level range it works best at in various editions. That game would actually be pretty fun, as a puzzle to solve cooperatively to try and come out of alive on the other end. Round to round, players have multiple options, multiple choices, and their decisions will meaningfully affect the outcome. Each mechanic they use is interesting, because there is more than 1 path to victory, and charting the best route through to victory would involve making a series of interesting decisions.

The same is not true of a skill challenge system. While you may be flexing interesting narrative muscles as your roleplay, you aren't engaging in meaningful gameplay, where you make decisions to try and optimize for a desired outcome, or doing so is pretty trivial.

I want the game to be good and interesting, wherein players will pick the course of action they feel will best achieve their goal, and pointedly not pick another because they think it will hurt their aims. Skill challenge systems can't do that. To be fair, skill systems in general have become such an anemic part of design they're rarely interested in doing it regardless of whether a skill challenge model is implemented or not.

Combat is mechanically significantly more complex than skill challenges.

Skill challenges are more complex than a skill check.

Skill checks have more mechanics than DM ad hoc adjudication.

These are a continuum with each having advantages and disadvantages for different situations, not a scale of good to bad. DM ad hoc adjudication can be a great part of the game.

Skill challenges are generally for when you want some rolls for an adjudication, but more than just a single decision point and roll.

 

[niklinna]

Thus the OP!

And yet people are still doing it this far into the thread.

I think that's why they errata-ed that out in extremely short order (like within weeks, maybe a month or two).

Good thing, although sadly I'm pretty sure my DM wasn't checking errata....

 

[pemerton]

And yet people are still doing it this far into the thread.

Dunno why. I thought the OP was pretty clear.

 

[Imaro]

This element of finality is the way in which they resemble the basic method D&D uses to resolve combat. Instead of the GM deciding when the situation is resolved, a mechanical process is used to do this.

I want to be clear we are talking about the same thing here... What is the mechanical process that is used to decide when combat is resolved? If you say zeroing out of hit points then it would mean no NPC or monster can surrender, run away, etc.

 

[niklinna]

I think criticism is being misunderstood here. I'm not concerned that if you remove the fictional context the mechanics are just dice rolls, I'm concerned that if you remove the fictional context, the decision making one has in the mechanical layer isn't good. If you tore out the roleplaying game bits and presented a skill challenge as a board game, it would have the mechanical heft of Chutes and Ladders.

You're not supposed to remove the fictional context!

You could, for example, present D&D combat in isolation of the rest of the system as a board game if you specified some specific character level range it works best at in various editions. That game would actually be pretty fun, as a puzzle to solve cooperatively to try and come out of alive on the other end. Round to round, players have multiple options, multiple choices, and their decisions will meaningfully affect the outcome. Each mechanic they use is interesting, because there is more than 1 path to victory, and charting the best route through to victory would involve making a series of interesting decisions.

I have always found D&D combat to be incredibly tedious, not interesting, and not fun. I much prefer combat in Blades in the Dark, and even then I much prefer handling things in ways other than combat, with a skill-challenge system that works with the fiction instead of imposing round-by-round attrition of a predetermined set of resources (spell slots, attacks/round, hit points).

The same is not true of a skill challenge system. While you may be flexing interesting narrative muscles as your roleplay, you aren't engaging in meaningful gameplay, where you make decisions to try and optimize for a desired outcome, or doing so is pretty trivial.

Hard disagree. And I'm not (exclusively) looking for an optimized desired outcome, I'm also looking to be surprised and entertained.

I want the game to be good and interesting, wherein players will pick the course of action they feel will best achieve their goal, and pointedly not pick another because they think it will hurt their aims. Skill challenge systems can't do that. To be fair, skill systems in general have become such an anemic part of design they're rarely interested in doing it regardless of whether a skill challenge model is implemented or not.

Again, hard disagree. I think skill challenge systems excel at that.

 

[Imaro]

Good thing, although sadly I'm pretty sure my DM wasn't checking errata....

Honestly, I doubt the average DM of 4e kept up with the errata... or bought the books with the subsequent changes to them. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of D&D groups at that time ran off the core books

 

[niklinna]

Dunno why. I thought the OP was pretty clear.

I've thought that, too, about many posts I've made here on enworld.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think criticism is being misunderstood here. I'm not concerned that if you remove the fictional context the mechanics are just dice rolls, I'm concerned that if you remove the fictional context, the decision making one has in the mechanical layer isn't good. If you tore out the roleplaying game bits and presented a skill challenge as a board game, it would have the mechanical heft of Chutes and Ladders.

You could, for example, present D&D combat in isolation of the rest of the system as a board game if you specified some specific character level range it works best at in various editions. That game would actually be pretty fun, as a puzzle to solve cooperatively to try and come out of alive on the other end. Round to round, players have multiple options, multiple choices, and their decisions will meaningfully affect the outcome. Each mechanic they use is interesting, because there is more than 1 path to victory, and charting the best route through to victory would involve making a series of interesting decisions.

The same is not true of a skill challenge system. While you may be flexing interesting narrative muscles as your roleplay, you aren't engaging in meaningful gameplay, where you make decisions to try and optimize for a desired outcome, or doing so is pretty trivial.

I want the game to be good and interesting, wherein players will pick the course of action they feel will best achieve their goal, and pointedly not pick another because they think it will hurt their aims. Skill challenge systems can't do that. To be fair, skill systems in general have become such an anemic part of design they're rarely interested in doing it regardless of whether a skill challenge model is implemented or not.

Does it have as much mechanical heft as Dogs in the Vineyard?

No it does not.

But the statement that it has little heft at the mechanical layer and no meaningful decision just doesn't mesh with my vast, vast, vast amount of GMing of the system.

I mentioned elsewhere that I've run about 700ish Skill Challenges in all my 4e GMing. I've had maybe 35 to 70 macro-failures as I reflect back on it so somewhere between 1 and 2 and 20 Skill Challenges in ended up as failures...which had both (a) story snowballing implications and (b) gamestate through line implications.

I can think of dozens and dozens of decision-points off the top of my head where a player made a decision in a Skill Challenge that reverberated not just mechanically through the Skill Challenge but also snowballed into the through line of the subsequent gamestate (for several gamestates to come).

An easy one was when a player of a Fighter PC was in a Social Conflict to convince a demon-worshiping Gnoll Tribe to momentarily cease hostilities with the neighboring steading and join them in their conflict against a greater threat of a cult of Devil-Worshippers in their collective midst...they could go back to warring afterward. It was very important to this player (thematically due to their Theme and Paragon Path) and to the group at large to have the Companion Characters (1 x Huge Swarms of Hyenas that would turn into 1/2 budget worth of Minions on Bloodied+ 1 x their Elite Leader) available to them for the conflict to come with the powerful cult and their devilry.

So in the middle of the social conflict, with things turning against them, they pulled out:

Steely PersuasionFighter Utility 10​

Your skill with the blade is enough to daunt even stalwart foes.

Encounter ✦ Martial
Free Action Personal

Trigger: You make an Intimidate check or a Streetwise check

Requirement: You must be wielding a melee weapon.

Effect: You gain a bonus to the skill check equal to the weapon's proficiency bonus plus the weapon's enhancement bonus.

This gave them a huge bonus to their Intimidate check (which they were trained in but they had no Cha bonus) to try to get them a much needed success when things were swinging against them in the SC. They failed their check. This is an escalation to violence. As such, they know this beforehand that this is turning into a nested combat where they have to physically cow these Gnolls (who are now drawing weapons themselves) in order to get back to the Social Conflict.

* So meaningful decision vs an alternative because of the escalation of the consequence space.

* Consequential because they needed to win this social conflict to get these assets for subsequent gamestate purposes + their staking Daily resources now (Healing Surges and Dailies in this combat) in order to facilitate this.

* Worth it for this player due to thematic reasons.

* The investment of PC build resources into this Skill Power was worth the opportunity cost over another Power because it let them ignore Charisma and positively impacted a great many Skill Challenges (just not this one) and Surrender moves in combat against Bloodied Leaders....and it was thematically coherent with their PC.

---

My 4e games were shot through with this where the 4 bullet points were in play.

 

[Pedantic]

This is true of Apocalypse World too: what move is made on the player-side doesn't change the span of results (6-, 7-9, 10+). Or Marvel Heroic RP: what move is made on the player-side doesn't change the fact that a dice pool is rolled and its result compared to a similar opposed dice pool. Or Burning Wheel (outside of Fight! and maybe Range and Cover) or Prince Valiant or Agon or Cthulhu Dark or In A Wicked Age.

Skill challenges aren't a wargame resolution system. Nor a boardgame resolution system. They're a RPG resolution system. The fiction is central, as the OP states. What drives them is not clever wargaming play but caring about the fiction, engaging with it, and changing it. Just as in the other RPGs I've mentioned.

I also find it slightly ironic, or at least amusing, that the traditional criticism of 4e, that it's too boardgame-y, has now morphed to be that it's not boardgame-y enough!

I mean, I'm not a big fan of any of those games. Detailed lists of specific skill actions is very much my preferred approach, but we're really into an ideological discussion of what TTRPGs are for.

Fundamentally, I think RPGs differ from board games primarily in that your objectives are unbounded, and player determined. You get to decide what you want, and then roll back to the mechanics to best achieve those outcomes. Trying to optimize for those outcomes is a fun and engaging part of the game, and the same part of the brain I'd use to say, play a game of Barrage and navigate difficult worker placement through limited choices. TTRPGs offer a unique ability to do that, while engaging in a narrative, and while controlling the victory conditions that result from my choices.

There's no reason a skill system couldn't be built with high-agency decision making. You could absolutely present a situation wherein a player has a difficult choice to make between diplomacy and stealth, because both will spiral out into different failure points and tax different abilities (and/or cost different resources) that they have to decide the best trade-offs between.

Combat is mechanically significantly more complex than skill challenges.

Skill challenges are more complex than a skill check.

Skill checks have more mechanics than DM ad hoc adjudication.

These are a continuum with each having advantages and disadvantages for different situations, not a scale of good to bad. DM ad hoc adjudication can be a great part of the game.

Skill challenges are generally for when you want some rolls for an adjudication, but more than just a single decision point and roll.

Complexity is related, but not directly comparable to the kind of decision making agency I'm talking about. "More mechanics" does not lead to more agency necessarily. A 3e Fighter built for tripping, for example, will be playing a mechanically heavy combat game, but will actually have a really straightforward set of decisions to make. The optimization/decision making case will usually be "trip something, then attack it," because that's really all that build could do, and having to do anything else is a failure state.

On the other hand, getting over a wall might involve only a single skill check, but could be a higher agency situation. You might have a viable case for trying to jump it (unlikely but puts you in a better position) climbing it (slower, but pretty easy) or smashing through it (loud, but hey, if you're made of adamantine, it will definitely work and quickly). A player might reasonable choose any of those options to optimize for a specific state they want to be in, because the next skill check they have to make will be advantaged in some other way they believe they can predict.

My preferred resolution system would allow me to adjudicate any of those three choices based on the known state of the fictional world, and then evaluate the game state after they've happened to try and come up with the next best course of action. A skill challenge system would weight them equally, leave the same amount of distance between my character and their goal after the check. The only thing I can manipulate as a player there is the combination of Hard/Medium/Easy DC I'm rolling against vs. the highest modifier I can leverage. It's a trivial problem to solve.

The levers I want to be able to play with are trying to get closer to my goal by trying one action over another, and ideally I'd like to be able to influence what kinds of actions are possible at all with my declared actions. Skill challenges smooth all of that out to a flat plane.

It's easy to resolve, and easier to make declarations about the fictional state around, but it's less engaging as a game*.

*I realize I'm using "game" idiosyncratically here, I'm not trying to suggest anything absolute about what makes an experience gameplay, but I'm striving for language to differentiate the loop of making optimization decisions that is engagement with most games, vs. the narrative/improv/storytelling aspect that is also part of the RPG experience.