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General Tabletop Discussion
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Skill challenges: action resolution that centres the fiction
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<blockquote data-quote="Heraldofi" data-source="post: 8735625" data-attributes="member: 35058"><p>The issue is bigger than just scripting; consider the actual game being played by players engaged in skill challenge resolution. Setting aside narrative development concerns, let's assume that whatever the challenge is, the players are motivated to achieve their goals, ideally as efficiently as possible.</p><p></p><p>Your character has say 3 skills they're effective at, 1 that they're very good at, and generally poor numbers with the rest. The incentive this creates is to figure out how to apply your effective skill to the situation, so if your highest number is Acrobatics, you're always going to try and tumble your way through the problem. If you can't do that, or if the DM provides enough context for you to understand that you're rolling against a worse DC with your preferred skill, you may be able to run a quick calculation and figure out which of your 3 effective skills you can leverage.</p><p></p><p>If we're in a basic skill challenge, you're entirely out of interesting decisions to make, and the game is a series of improv prompts. There's just not a lot of agency in a skill challenge scenario, because you can't meaningfully play well, outside of that small optimization to push for your highest skill number.</p><p></p><p>Skill challenges make for quite poor and low agency gameplay. Players can't generally do anything meaningful to affect the situation, outside of pushing to use their highest numbers. </p><p></p><p>If you want them to engage with the situation as a series of obstacles, they have to have abilities that affect the resulting game state <em>unequally</em>, thus that some choices will produce more (or faster, or greater) success than other choices. Ideally you don't want that to be intrinsic either, thus that Athletics is always a superior choice to Acrobatics, but that it can be in some situations. </p><p></p><p>You can do that in a skill challenge framework, but what are you really achieving then? You're just designing a bunch of new skill applications that are temporarily available for one challenge. The superior option is just to design a comprehensive skill system that provides a whole palette of actions and choices players can leverage well ahead of time. If your skill system spells out a series of actions that players can do ahead of time, (perhaps in the "Skills" section of your player's guide), then what's the point of the skill challenge? Just specify the obstacles, and let the PCs figure out how best to counter them in light of whatever goal they're trying to achieve.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Heraldofi, post: 8735625, member: 35058"] The issue is bigger than just scripting; consider the actual game being played by players engaged in skill challenge resolution. Setting aside narrative development concerns, let's assume that whatever the challenge is, the players are motivated to achieve their goals, ideally as efficiently as possible. Your character has say 3 skills they're effective at, 1 that they're very good at, and generally poor numbers with the rest. The incentive this creates is to figure out how to apply your effective skill to the situation, so if your highest number is Acrobatics, you're always going to try and tumble your way through the problem. If you can't do that, or if the DM provides enough context for you to understand that you're rolling against a worse DC with your preferred skill, you may be able to run a quick calculation and figure out which of your 3 effective skills you can leverage. If we're in a basic skill challenge, you're entirely out of interesting decisions to make, and the game is a series of improv prompts. There's just not a lot of agency in a skill challenge scenario, because you can't meaningfully play well, outside of that small optimization to push for your highest skill number. Skill challenges make for quite poor and low agency gameplay. Players can't generally do anything meaningful to affect the situation, outside of pushing to use their highest numbers. If you want them to engage with the situation as a series of obstacles, they have to have abilities that affect the resulting game state [I]unequally[/I], thus that some choices will produce more (or faster, or greater) success than other choices. Ideally you don't want that to be intrinsic either, thus that Athletics is always a superior choice to Acrobatics, but that it can be in some situations. You can do that in a skill challenge framework, but what are you really achieving then? You're just designing a bunch of new skill applications that are temporarily available for one challenge. The superior option is just to design a comprehensive skill system that provides a whole palette of actions and choices players can leverage well ahead of time. If your skill system spells out a series of actions that players can do ahead of time, (perhaps in the "Skills" section of your player's guide), then what's the point of the skill challenge? Just specify the obstacles, and let the PCs figure out how best to counter them in light of whatever goal they're trying to achieve. [/QUOTE]
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