Skill Challenges: Bringing the Awesome

[Cadfan]

Idle speculation- skill challenges will apply only when the party is directly opposed by someone or something. Otherwise there will be skill DCs just like 3e.

It makes sense that way. The DC for climbing a wall shouldn't change based on the encounter. But it makes sense for it to change when you're really in a conflict resolution mode, and the real test isn't climbing the wall, its climbing the wall fast enough to escape from the guards. In that context, the DC for the wall is just a floor you need to beat. The real challenge is whether you gained advantage in the overall resolution of the conflict. And that definitely varies depending on who's chasing you.

Just idle speculation, but it makes sense.

 

[LostSoul]

My hopes for the skill challenge rules they, first of all make a significant non-combat encounter feel significant by expanding the scope beyond a single roll by a single character.

I think you make things feel significant in a few ways:

• The in-game situation is considered significant by the players (including DM, of course).
• You spend more real-world time resolving the encounter.
• You have a variety of meaningful choices to make while resolving the encounter.
• There is some sort of reward involved with success.
• There is some sort of risk involved with failure.
• How the situation resolves is left unclear (to all players, including the DM!) at the beginning of the challenge. In other words, what the in-game situation will look like after the challenge is unknown at the beginning.

From what we've seen, the skill challenges hit a number of these points but not all. We need to see the advice (or rules) on when to initiate a skill challenge, who can initiate one, and what advice (or rules) there are for failing a skill challenge.

Disable device is the obvious choice for fixing things, so I'd count a success or failure as double value, and I could see the same argument for healing.

Maybe you'd grant a bonus to the roll?

That takes us to a place where a skill challenge is something of a mini adventure in itself, with somewhat amorphous flows. That'd be fine so long as the system accounts for PCs occasionally taking a passwall-like action that "crits" the encounter (or fumbles it, as the case may be). The system had better help DMs structure these encounters, too -- I don't want to spend an entire evening mapping out the vagaries of a single encounter. And, I hope that it handles checks that are passive -- the samurai shouldn't have to say "I think about history and how this applies", though it's fair for the player to remind the DM about certain skills or suggest applications.

Totally agree.

 

[ZappoHisbane]

In regards to the example by Celebrim with the paranoid adventurers who do nothing but think about the problem, we have to remember that each check is not happening in a vacuum. While a successfully History check reveals certain information, events can happen that spur the adventurers into action. Perhaps a crow lands on the corpse, and the successful History check makes them realize this is a bad thing. They must take action to shoo the crow away before it sets off the trap. Perhaps the Dryad overhears their discussion and reveals herself after the second knowledge or insight check. Perhaps this sort of thing only happens after redundant checks start being done, which should not count against either success OR failure.

The skill challenges provide a framework that allows all the players to get involved. The DM still has to guide the story and players along however. At no point should the DM have to invoke a Deus Ex Machina either for or against the players, like the crow just happening to land and setting the trap right off, or the trap falling and just happening to be a dud.

I for one am grateful for a defined structure to do this. If you don't need it in the games you DM, who cares if it's in the DMG or not?

 

[Lord Zardoz]

1, 2, and 3) Should the DM ignore the narrative with respect to skill checks if the checks used to not entirely fit the situation at hand? If not, are these rules even needed in the first place?

4) Should the DM ignore spectacular stupidity or implausibility, such as answering a Diplomacy check with an attack roll?

Please keep in mind that I'm not saying that the DM can't successfully invent explanations, nor am I saying that it is impossible to adhere to the rules and also provide a logical framework.

There are a few ways to look at this. One is that in addition to spinning the narrative relative to the checks for a skill challenge, the DM can also decide which skill check successes are applicable to the challenge. Following the intent of the rules is generally better than following the rules as written in some cases, and this is one of them. No one would say that a successful Craft (Basket Weaving) check should count as a success in a chase scene. If the PC's are just going for a bunch of Knowledge checks, you could consider some of the checks to be extraneous to the challenge.

As for handling a spectacular failure due to the choice of a course of action, it comes down to a DM judgement call. Some things do not work, and should not be allowed to have even a hint of success. My own reccomendation is to allow a 'Failure with consequences'. The players get 1 failure towards screwing up the challenge, and the guy who commited the stupid act probably incurs some real damage.

Now, given those views, should we even have the codified system in place at all? How is it better than a DM pulling things entirely out of his arse?

Rules that do not interact with combat in the D&D game tend to fill the same role as Military doctrine, in my view. Doctrine is what amounts to 'given this set of circumstances, these responses are typically optimal'. Not all situations are typical, but having a default fall back plan in place allows you to respond much more fluidly to otherwise unanticipated situations. On top of that, the system does have quite a few things going for it.

1) It is widely applicable. The X success before Y failures mechanic can be adapted to face to face negotiations, chase scenes, traps, physical obstacles, and library research. Learn one rule, and you know how to run a huge number of in game situations.

2) It is simple. Consider these sentences. "Decide on a number of successes and a number of failures. To win a challenge, the players need to attain the number of successes before they reach the number of failures. Pick a DC for Easy, Medium and Hard. Succeed an hard check, and the players get an extra benefit on success. Fail an easy check, and the players suffer an extra penalty". Do you really think you will need to flip through the rule book to use these rules in play?

3) It allows for multiple right answers. There was an example of a pursuit challenge where one player chose Bluff for his check based on the notion of lying his way out of trouble. Another player chose Endurance / Athletics and just tried to out run the pursuers. This approach is a great deal better than having the DM or the adventure determine which skill check would be used. It increases player choice at the game table in how a situation will be handled. It also increases player involvement.

The last thing I will comment on is that it breaks immersion at the table to announce a skill challenge. I will answer that with a question.

Is player immersion in the game more important than player involvement?

As a DM, I would prefer to have my players having out of character meta game conversations about the matter at hand to having them involved in out of game conversations about the movie they watched last weekend. Having the players fully immersed in the narrative of the game is great, but it is pretty damn hard to pull off. But having everyone at the table involved in the game at hand makes achieving immersion a great deal easier.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[JesterOC]

It sure feels that traps or any other specific task is just not the right use for the new skill check mechanic.

I think that some people see this new mechanic as a great new hammer, and traps are starting to look like nails.

I have read the posts describing the rules as well as a postcast where Andy Collins describes the process, and everything I have seen that this new mechanic is not made for the situation described in the OP.

Check out the Tome Podcast (www.thetomeshow.com) at about 33 minutes into episode 52. Also in this interview he discusses how difficuly is decided. He clearly states that the Players Pick the skill and the DM decides based on the situation, if the check should be easy, meduim or hard. The player can never say "I want to make an easy check to see if I jump over the house!" (My quote not Andy's)

I think the new rules are for far more abstract things like winning an argument with a king, searching a library, or escaping guards in a fairly lage town.

If the check is smaller and more specific, then I think standard skill checks are the way to go.

 

[Cadfan]

It sure feels that traps or any other specific task is just not the right use for the new skill check mechanic.

I think that skill challenges are best suited for times when the party is attempting to use skills while they're being opposed by something. They're not for individual, discrete tasks like climbing a rope. That being said, I think that more elaborate traps can function as skill challenges. Look at the example given above. One player figured out information about the trap that assisted them in disarming it. Then others used their skills in various combinations to carry out a multi step trap disarming process. The party was opposed by a rule that said that the more you fail your skill checks, the more you screw up the disarming process and the more likely it is that the trap goes off. For example, a character who fails an athletics check to catch the trap might jostle or drop it. Jostle it enough, it explodes.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

Maybe you'd grant a bonus to the roll?

That would be inappropriate. Choosing the 'right' skill shouldn't increase your odds of succeeding at that skill, otherwise it is one step removed from pixel-hunting the 'more correct' skills the DM has decided ahead of time. This is only different is that encounters have a smaller chance of failure, but a larger chance of success with 'more correct' skills.

Honestly, I am not sure additional successes is significantly better, since it still falls under the 'more correct' rubric, but is at least appropriate. Considering skills are all the same value unless they are trained anyway, there is no sensible way to give a bonus for appropriate skill use unless you overhaul the whole system.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I really like what we've seen of skill challenges, honestly.

The thing is, I don't think traps are an area where they'd really apply -- I don't see a Disable Device skill in 4e, and I think that's intentional. Even if this is an area where they'd apply, IIRC, the Escape from Sembia stuff mentioned the "improper use of a skill," and seemed to aknowledge that not all skills should be used in all situations.

The skill challenges are also different from pure skill checks. I think for some fairly common activities, a simple check will tell you what happens.

Skill challenges are more to make "combats" out of skill use, to turn each skill into an ability you can use to overcome the challenge in front of you and take it's stuff. It's when multiple skills in multiple situations would be used, not for a simple, static encounter.

Using that trap as base, the example skill challenge might be "uncover the mystery of the dead body." Multiple skills can be used to approach this idea (with perhaps Perception being the most obvious), and with enough "successes" they arrive at who killed it, how, why, and what they're doing. Enough successes may reveal knowledge behind it, while failures would come up empty, and the PC's wouldn't learn about what happened here. Which would make them ill-suited later when they encounter the creature who has been doing it.

This would be independant of the booby-trapped bodies issue -- if you trigger the trap, it goes off, regardless of how you came to that point.

 

[Cadfan]

This would be independant of the booby-trapped bodies issue -- if you trigger the trap, it goes off, regardless of how you came to that point.

It depends on the nature of the trap.

If the trap is a "open the chest, dodge the poison arrow" variety, then whether the trap goes off is a binary condition. Did you open the chest? [yes/no]. That's not really skill challenge suitable.

But it works alright for traps that are a bit more amorphous. Basically, the test seems to be whether the party is opposed by something. If you can phrase the challenge as "do X without letting Y happen" or "do X before Y occurs" or "do X better than Y does Z," and if doing X requires a multi step process, then a skill challenge seems appropriate. In the above example, the test was "disarm the trap before it explodes," and disarming the trap was a multi step process, so a skill challenge works.

 

[Mistwell]

There are two reasons why I'd never use the skill challenge described:

1) It requires an metagame announcement. To me, saying 'This is a skill challenge with general skill DC 18' or anything like that ruins the scene. It ought to be implicit that everything is a challenge if the players want it to be.

So you never use the words "roll initiative" in your games, which is a combat challenge?

2) If the specific challenge is 'disarming the trap', then a skill challenge disarms the trap (as is shown from the example) even if the PC's take no action to do so until after they win the challenge. I've got no problems with taking specific actions to make other specific actions easier, but I do have a problem with specific actions replacing other unrelated specific actions. I likewise have a problem with a challenge failing before it fails, in as much as playing it this way could have resulted in 4 failures foredooming things before the players really did anything.

I think you missed the point of this challenge then. It wasn't a challenge to disarm the trap. That's 3.5-type thinking. You could, as one aspect of the challenge, disarm the trap. And, a consequence of failure could be the trap going off. But it was not only a "disarm the trap" challenge.

I'm just failing to see how the system part of this encounter made it better. Isn't it enough to discover the problem, come to understand the dangers, and then take action to remedy the problem without a tally system?

It's just a useful way to resolve the challenge in a manner that involved all players, and carries it out to a more full extent than a single die roll.

You COULD enter into a combat challenge without a tally system as well. Some other RPGs do that. This one however does not, and these types of skill challenges seem more consistent wil combat challenges to me when you add a tally system to the skill challenge.