Skill Challenges: Bringing the Awesome

[Imp]

I like skill challenges a lot. My concern is that they seem to demand a lot of the improvisational storytelling abilities of the DM, and I can see situations where a player throws a really weird use of an unexpected skill at me and I fumble the whole thing. Sort of the catastrophic version of Celebrim's "what if they win it in three?" scenario.

 

[I'm A Banana]

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.

Sure. And in that situation, you'd rely on the DM to be able to be able to see how a player could use Diplomacy to help disarm a bomb (or rely on the player saying "I use Diplomacy to try to persuade a passerby to help!" or whatever).

 

[smathis]

Wouldn't it be the other way round. The PC says I'm going to attempt an easy challenge and then the PC gets to describe however he wants to describe it. Thus, a person can triple somersault up the roof even if he wants.

The disadvantage of taking an easy challenge I imagine would be mostly time limited and how many successes you can generate in a time frame.

If there was a time limit then it would have gone better. The problem was there was no time limit in our demo so the players could roll an infinite number of times until they got either 6 successes or 4 failures. So there was no incentive to take anything other than an Easy difficulty. It was actually penalizing to take anything other than an Easy difficulty.

If I ran one of these, I'd run it Forge-style.

1. DM sets out stakes of total skill challenge ("Trap goes off and the party is trapped" vs. "Party evades trap and insert some benefit here")
2. Each round, the DM and Player rolling will set stakes ("I climb up the tree to get a closer look" vs. "Your weight on tree branch introduces an additional complication.")
3. The Player establishes how she's going to resolve that conflict ("I'll roll Athletics")
4. DM will define the difficulty ("Climbing a tree? Let's see... Are you a dwarf? No? Okay, then that's Easy... DC 11.")
5. Player rolls. ("A 19. Yes!")
6. Stakes are resolved. ("I'm up on the branch. Now I'm going to take a closer look at this trap.")
7. Go back to step 2 until the NCE is completed.

I'd probably let the player raise or lower the stakes to adjust the difficulty. But I don't think players should out-and-out set the DC unless there really is some sort of time limit (and we didn't use it in the demo I played in). I wouldn't be averse to it if the rules stated something like "6/4 in no more than 8 rolls". Just something that provided any sort of incentive for a player to choose anything other than his highest bonus vs the lowest DC (which is what the players in the demo did).

I'd also pretty much limit players to choose different skills in consecutive rounds. So that the usage of the highest skill over and over and over is broken up a bit.

But we haven't seen the final rules. And I'm pretty certain that the way we played it at the demo was not correct.

So, I'll have to wait until I see the rules to say anything binding, definitive or relevant regarding how I'd use NCEs. But based on my experience, this is what I'd do with them.

Actual rules will likely change all this significantly.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I like skill challenges a lot. My concern is that they seem to demand a lot of the improvisational storytelling abilities of the DM, and I can see situations where a player throws a really weird use of an unexpected skill at me and I fumble the whole thing. Sort of the catastrophic version of Celebrim's "what if they win it in three?" scenario.

How is the "What if they Win it in 3" problem any different than "What if my players manage to defeat the epic final encounter I had planned within one round or less"?

In general, the consensus answer to most questions is that if it wont harm your game in the long term, then reward unexpected successes of that sort by just going with the flow.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Hussar]

Wow. I would walk away from a game that worked as you described it. Seriously. I cannot put into words how distasteful that system would be. Fortunately for me, I don't think the 4e skill challenges will work like that -- mostly because I think the developers are better than that.

Really? Why? All I've done is hand a small amount of narrative control to the players (with DM approval). In order for the players to have any narrative control though, the outcome must be fluid. If the possible results are fixed (disarm the trap/don't disarm the trap) then the players cannot have any narrative control.

Actually, that's not entirely true. They can have a very limited amount of control, based on very strict parameters set by the DM. However, because the parameters are so closely set, any narrative control by the players is really meaningless.

So, I'm failing to see where the problem is. Unless, of course, you reject the idea of players having narrative control (which lots of games do), in which case, fair enough, this rule isn't for you.

 

[Celebrim]

Walter Kovacs: There is no 'sequence'. If there is a sequence in which you must do A in order to do B, then we are fundamentally doing without the skill challenge framework.

pemerton: You may be right, but I never had a hankering to play nar D&D.

VannATLC: Dungeon crawling is enherently simulationist, with a map, and an encounter table, causality tends to only go forward, and multiple parties playing the same encounter might approach it in different ways, but they could agree upon the details of what they interacted with. D&D is tradiationally played fortune nearer to the end, and even in its most abstract (say hitpoints) its played more near the end than not. In the skill challenge as it is anticipated, none of this is true - fortune is nearer the beginning than the end, there isn't a map, there isn't a strict encounter table, 'A' doesn't necessarily lead to 'B', casuality works backward to maintain logical structure, and multiple parties approaching the challenge in different ways would not be able to agree on the details of what they interacted with.

LostSoul: You are quite right to assert that hit points have always relied on a certain amount of fortune in the middle. For many this has caused difficulties with things like lava, falling from great height, and so forth. To a certain extent, yes, this is just moving further in one direction.

Mistwell: There is initiative all the time, I just don't usually bother to track it unless it matters a lot who goes first. Any time that more than one player wants to do something at the same time, whether than wait for another to finish we need iniative. We need initiave whenever the players race themselves or anything else. There is no such thing as a 'combat challenge'. I merely inform the players that I need to begin tracking character's order in the turn. It's entirely up to the players how they want to approach the challenge that forces me to start tracking initiative - run away, try to open negotiations, fight, cast spells, use skills, whatever. You can do anything you want with your turn, not just tally a skill success or failure.

 

[Celebrim]

How is the "What if they Win it in 3" problem any different than "What if my players manage to defeat the epic final encounter I had planned within one round or less"?

For one thing, in the 'What if they win it in 3' problem the temptation is to break the rules to let the players succeed. In the 'What if my bad guy goes down in one round' the temptation is to break the rules to prevent the players from succeeding.

 

[Professor Phobos]

I like skill challenges a lot. My concern is that they seem to demand a lot of the improvisational storytelling abilities of the DM, and I can see situations where a player throws a really weird use of an unexpected skill at me and I fumble the whole thing. Sort of the catastrophic version of Celebrim's "what if they win it in three?" scenario.

Eh, if you're no good at improvising and your players throw you a curveball, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom. Or go get a glass of water. Or say, "hey, gimme a minute to think."

 

[Lacyon]

Walter Kovacs: There is no 'sequence'. If there is a sequence in which you must do A in order to do B, then we are fundamentally doing without the skill challenge framework.

This is true if and only if each of A, B, ... can only be solved by one particular skill. Otherwise you just start with step A, ask how the players want to resolve it, and allow someone to move on to step B when appropriate.

 

[Hussar]

pemerton: You may be right, but I never had a hankering to play nar D&D.

And that's fair enough. But, that doesn't change the fact that if you want to give narrative control to the players, which is what this is doing, you have to relax what you see as cause and effect.

Now, if you don't want to give narrative control to the players, then the skill challenge set up will not give you what you want.

That doesn't make the mechanics a failure, just not to your taste.