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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Skill challenges: action resolution that centres the fiction
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8735800" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8735800, member: 6690965"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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Skill challenges: action resolution that centres the fiction
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