Skill Challenges: Bringing the Awesome

[Lacyon]

This deserves a better response than I gave it last time, so let me attempt to do it now.

I'm going to continue running under my assumption that the primary design purpose of the skill challenge system is to lay down an idea of what skill DCs and ratio of successes to failures required for 'success' are, in some sense of the word, 'level-appropriate'.

Or, you could just 'wing it', responding to the various propositions the the players make and creating content as needed. This is almost exactly like having a skill challenge, sans the arbitrary tally of abstract successes and failures.

This is exactly like a skill challenge except that the arbitray tally of successes and failures is replaced by the arbitrary whim of the DM, or the arbitrary whims of the players and DMs working in concert, or whatever other arbitrary convention you replace it with. Arbitrariness is not removed from the system.

Meanwhile, if the system is well designed, the arbitrary tally of successes and failures conforms to a likelihood of success by characters of a given level, much like the CR system (or 4Es XP-based encounter-building system) is.

Or, you could use a narrative map instead, in which various decisions moved the party between preplanned scenes and challenges. That you wouldn't have to have the whole city layout prepared (much of which would go unused anyway). And you could combine that with 'winging it' when or if the party went off the map.

Like the CR system, a well-designed skill challenge system (including, yes, an X before Y subsystem) can assist you in designing this narrative map as a level-appropriate challenge, as well as assisting you in adjudicating the results of 'winging it'.

That doesn't mean that every path leading to overall success needs to require X successes if you've planned them out ahead, just like every encounter doesn't need to be EL = Party Level. But having a baseline to work from is better than not, and having some guidelines for how long to draw out the encounter when the players stray from the path is also handy.

Or you could really mix it up and use a combination of random encounters, a game map, a narrative map, and winging it - which is what most DMs are doing after they've been on the job for a couple of years.

Yes. And many DMs don't need the assistance of the CR system to plan out their combats, but I would suggest that few of them begrudge its existence. Likewise, some will not need the assistance of the skill challenge guidelines to adjudicate noncombat challenges in a way that keeps their players entertained and involved, nor to give them a fair shake at success while keeping the threat of failure real and imminent.

All of which is really quite reutine. In a typical city escape challenge, you have some rough idea of the physical layout of the city and the hazards of escaping it (are thier natural obstacles?, is it on an island?, is it walled?, does it have regular patrols?, does it have streets or canals?, how big is it?, how deep within the city are the players?, what section of the city are they in?, etc.) You have some idea of the demographics of your campaign and the city in particular (what level are typical guards in my campaign world?, what races inhabit the city?, what resouces do the pursuers have?). So you respond to the PC's propositions and set the challenge according to what they do. If they want to flee, well then you improvise a chase scene, possibily with a couple prepared (or at least preimagined) chase scenarios. If they want to fight, well then you improvise some combat. If they want to talk, then you improvise that. Perhaps they end up doing a bit of everything.

Yes. A set of guidelines that assists you in adjudicating overall success and failure is complementary to this, not antithetical.

The only problem with it is that it makes a lousy system for handling a tournament encounter because it doesn't communicate to the end GM user exactly how you wanted the encounter to play out. It's too abstract. It leaves too much up to GM judgement. It is not going to be played out consistantly between groups.

Enter the skill challenge system.

The skill challenge system still leaves a lot to GM judgment, and will almost certainly play out differently between groups.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

Please post everything like this from now on. Much, much better.

PS

So, there's you, Hong... We need one more for a chorus, if you want to keep the running commentary on me rather than the topic.

 

[beverson]

So, there's you, Hong... We need one more for a chorus, if you want to keep the running commentary on me rather than the topic.

At the risk of getting bounced by the mods, I'd like to say that I wish both you AND Hong would stop wasting our time and space in this thread with your petty threadcrapping and take it elsewhere.

In my opinion, any guidelines provided for adjudicating skill challenges is helpful for inexperienced GM's, and I am very excited to get the chance to read the book when it finally comes out.

 

[Storminator]

So, there's you, Hong... We need one more for a chorus, if you want to keep the running commentary on me rather than the topic.

If you would just stop posting drivel that adds nothing, I would stop pointing out that you're doing it.

PS

 

[Crosswind]

I think we're coming to agreement here, Lacyon. If you view the Skill Challenge mechanic as a guideline for DMs as to what sort of DCs they could set, and the mean percentage of success they might expect, it's fine as a helper tool for DMs who had trouble doing this on their own.

If you view it as a set of ironclad rules, it sort of sucks. Since 4.0 has tended to put things down more as guidelines than rules, your interpretation is hopefully the right one!

-Cross

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This part makes no sense to me.

What about it makes no sense to you? My job as a DM is to make the players have fun. I do that by narrating an interesting story and letting them take part in it.

If the players have fun escaping from a city since they can imagine the chase scene in their heads and it is exciting and interesting then I have done my job.

I can do that in a number of ways. Some of which take a lot more work than others.

One way is to map out an entire city, writing down the location of important landmarks. I can then figure out(based on the population and the political, economic and sociological situation in this city) how many guards there would be in the city and how many of them would be on duty. Then figure out where they would be based on the time of day and run the situation round by round as I track the movement rates of all the guards in the city. This should probably take me a good couple of days to map out correctly pre-session and would likely slow the game down to a crawl during the session as I have difficulty figuring out the actions of 50 guards at the same time.

The other way is to abstract the situation with mechanics. I understand that I want it to be fairly easy for the PCs to escape from the city. So, I let it come down to a couple of die rolls how everything works out. If the PCs make, let's say, 4 successes before they get 2 failures then they get out. This requires about 5 minutes of prep time(or not even that much as I can probably open the book to the correct page and pick the difficulty and mechanics in about 10 second, so I can do it on the fly). During the game its quick and easy since I'm concentrating more on using my imagination to come up with interesting description than I am in tracking movement rates.

However, from the players' point of view they get close to the same experience from both. In both cases they have it described to them that there are guards after them and they need to escape. In both cases they use their skills in order to get away. They both have the tension and uncertainty of being caught. However one of the ways saved me 100% of my prep time.

So, you never used the previous system, but are certain this one is better?

They aren't the same thing at all. The 3rd edition system just said "Sometimes your players will do stuff that isn't combat and you'll want to give them XP for it. You shouldn't give them too much and about the same as one monster is probably good. You may not want to give it out, though as there isn't any risk involved in non-combat situations."

I didn't use them because they weren't really mechanics. They were an afterthought at best that said "Oh, and instead of monsters, some DMs might want to do non-combat things."

Skill Challenges are much more of an actual system. One that balances difficulty of succeeding with the amount of XP given out in a quantifiable way. They are modular so that when you are writing a mod you can easily say "The PCs attempt this skill challenge, if they fail, then they fight this encounter. Both give the same amount of XP. This way if the group decides to solve it the non-violent way they get the same XP as if they had fought the encounter."

 

[Jack99]

Hmm. Storm-Bringer reminds me of someone.

So, Storm-Bringer, what do you think about Dragons without spells?

+

Ja postcount-herausgefordert ein, ist das, was ich sagte.
Nur durch jene Willen, zu den absurden Längen zu extrapolieren.
Ja ist das auch, was ich sagte.
Genau. Die Spieler, die Würfel rollen, um das Problem zu lösen, selbstverständlich.
Das ist das Wesentliche des Vermeidens Pixel-meckernd. Gut annehmend können wir einigSEIN über, was das Pixel-Meckern ist. Vermutlich ist es nicht postcount.

I think you are on to something MusRid, or maybe it is just a German thing..

 

[Lacyon]

I think we're coming to agreement here, Lacyon. If you view the Skill Challenge mechanic as a guideline for DMs as to what sort of DCs they could set, and the mean percentage of success they might expect, it's fine as a helper tool for DMs who had trouble doing this on their own.

If you view it as a set of ironclad rules, it sort of sucks. Since 4.0 has tended to put things down more as guidelines than rules, your interpretation is hopefully the right one!

the existence of rule 0 means that you only ever really get guidelines anyway*. And I know that I for one am really going to get a lot of mileage out of the guidelines (assuming any level of detail), for a lot of reasons.

*It's not really a new thing that 'rules' published in the DMG are phrased as guidelines, while those published in the PHB are phrased as rules. This is likely due to the idea that while campaign worlds and specifics of encounters will and should vary a lot from game to game, players need to have a solid default reference for character-building fundamental action resolution within the game

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Ugh, this entire thread annoys me mostly because it is based on so many wrong assumptions. None of which I can clarify due to my NDA. I think I'll go back to hiding.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

If the players have fun escaping from a city since they can imagine the chase scene in their heads and it is exciting and interesting then I have done my job.

Technically, in this example, the DM hasn't done anything, really. I don't see how assigning some numbers to a mini-game makes it easier for players to 'imagine'.

They aren't the same thing at all. The 3rd edition system just said "Sometimes your players will do stuff that isn't combat and you'll want to give them XP for it. You shouldn't give them too much and about the same as one monster is probably good. You may not want to give it out, though as there isn't any risk involved in non-combat situations."

I didn't use them because they weren't really mechanics. They were an afterthought at best that said "Oh, and instead of monsters, some DMs might want to do non-combat things."

There were charts. And guidelines.

Skill Challenges are much more of an actual system. One that balances difficulty of succeeding with the amount of XP given out in a quantifiable way. They are modular so that when you are writing a mod you can easily say "The PCs attempt this skill challenge, if they fail, then they fight this encounter. Both give the same amount of XP. This way if the group decides to solve it the non-violent way they get the same XP as if they had fought the encounter."

It is a system inherently divorced from the skills. On it's own, a Climb Rope check tells me how far a character climbs up a 30' rope, or if they slip back or fall. Within a skill challenge, that same 30' rope is climbed with a single check. The skill has different meanings based on its context.

Even discounting the fact that the number of players who write published modules is vanishingly small (in other words, the modular argument is irrelevant), earning XP for defeating monsters without killing them has been around since... I dunno... 1st edition? BECMI, maybe?

If you have the rules in your hands, surely you can come up with some better, non-NDA breaking arguments.