Skill Challenges: Bringing the Awesome

[Storm-Bringer]

I feel tempted to make hongs question a bit more verbose. Why are you adding flavour text to an result that doesn't make a lot of sense, considering the rules? I mean, I could understand it if he you didn't know that there was a possibility for a healing surge, but if you know it, why use flavor text that can never remain consistent? Cutting through anyones torso isn't even something that should happen in 3E without outright killing someone - or are you telling me someone* could survive this for nearly a minute, and possibly "stabilize" to get better on his own?

How many rounds is it acceptable to wait until you retcon the results of dropping to -19hit points?

Similarly, since each individual roll in a skill challenge doesn't actually advance the challenge, how many times will you be able to retcon the results until it becomes incoherent?

I am seeing this as 'fortune at the beginning', where the only way to coherently structure the encounter would be to have everyone roll their skills until the success or failure is determined, then weave a story around that.

In the same way that dropping to -19 hit points has to wait until the recovery roll succeeds or fails to describe, the skill challenges have to wait for determination of success or failure to determine exactly what happened. Except, once you determine success or failure, the story has no further mechanical effect, really, and the only reason it wasn't employed prior to or during the challenge is because of the meta-game need to determine the outcome before it could be accurately described.

Rather like rolling a strike in bowling. You don't know how much it is worth until two frames later.

 

[Lacyon]

How many rounds is it acceptable to wait until you retcon the results of dropping to -19hit points?

Similarly, since each individual roll in a skill challenge doesn't actually advance the challenge, how many times will you be able to retcon the results until it becomes incoherent?

I am seeing this as 'fortune at the beginning', where the only way to coherently structure the encounter would be to have everyone roll their skills until the success or failure is determined, then weave a story around that.

In the same way that dropping to -19 hit points has to wait until the recovery roll succeeds or fails to describe, the skill challenges have to wait for determination of success or failure to determine exactly what happened. Except, once you determine success or failure, the story has no further mechanical effect, really, and the only reason it wasn't employed prior to or during the challenge is because of the meta-game need to determine the outcome before it could be accurately described.

Rather like rolling a strike in bowling. You don't know how much it is worth until two frames later.

This is only a problem if you make it one. There are plenty of descriptions you can use that don't require any retconning at all.

 

[Harr]

In re improvising in general, there are really lots of little issues that go along with a heavier improvisational burden on the DM, not just catastrophic brain failure – things like falling into cliches ("oh great, Thog, you failed another History check; the DM's going to send a crow again to set off the trap") or whatever.

This is actually a real issue in play (and no offense to anyone, but it's the only thing in this thread that is actually a real issue in play); when two challenges are very similar to each other, players tend to fall into repeating the last solution almost in a carbon copy of the earlier one. It's a very fast fun-breaker. Just like it would be boring to have the same fight with a gelatinous cube over and over, it's the same, only more so.

The solution is of course to never repeat a challenge in a way that is similar, to always have something completely different lined up, and that sort of thing brings quick burnout.

My solution so far has been simply to steal cool ideas from the very, very few posts on these boards that have any (though to be fair, I'm aware that content-creation is not the point around here at all) and from books. So far we have done stuff like:

- The original "young dryad about to die from poison", which I wrote up above, which was actually my idea
- A big "ship caught in a living elemental-lightning storm", inspired from these boards
- A very cool "the party must lead an army into battle using their social and war-related skills" completely stolen from these boards
- A "rescue the children from the fat druid's horrible Dance" sequence stolen from Robin Hobb's "Shaman's Crossing" trilogy
- A "cross over into the spirit realm and reach the Tree-Lady" challenge inspired from the same trilogy
- A fun "the floor turns into a big conveyor belt!" thing stolen from the WotC boards
- A straight "The town is burning, what do you do!" scene stolen from these boards
- A chase across the plains with a horde of mosquito-women close behind, courtsey of China Mieville's "The Scar"
- A "dig for treasure and see what you find" sequence on a beach whose sand is made of tiny mechanical remnants from an ancient age, from the same book

And some others. It has all worked fine, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes just OK.

I think the main thing to avoid burnout through improvisation is to just accept that you can't come up with everything yourself, and get help from where you find it.


As to everything else in here, well, what can I say. It's one thing to sit and imagine how you would logically assume that something should turn out if you were to try it. It quite another to actually try it. Using just the bare-bones structure of the challenge system that we have right now on these boards, none of the other problems brought up in this thread have ever come up in-game for us... and none of them will.

In some ways, because of things I've already explained at length; like, the thing where the stakes of that particular challenge was not in any way, shape or form whether the trap sprung or not (Yeah, I actually explained that, and then explained it again, in the old thread, and I won't do it again just to satisfy the chronic tail-chasing urge that comes from nebulous theorizing. This was a skill challenge that happened to have a 'trap' in it as one of its elements. End of story. Want more? Read the old thread again).

But really mostly because... they just aren't. I really don't know what to say... they aren't. Players trying to do nothing but knowledge checks to disable a trap? Doesn't happen. Players losing immersion because you ask them if they want to accept or pass on a skill challenge? Doesn't happen. Etc, etc, etc. Go ahead and try it all in your game. Yeah, you would logically assume that if you were to try it, those would be problems, and I would too. But they aren't.

It's not a computer algorithm where you have to account for corner cases or the whole thing is going to crash. It's a guideline, and a coaching to help you as the DM keep up a pace that is fun and moves along and is interesting. And it works, if you let it work, and more importantly, if you ever even give it a chance to.

Please note that I'm not saying the system is entirely without problems; we have run into several of them. There are problems that arise from play; they are just nowhere even close to anything being discussed here (aside from the burnout thing, for one). But I'm not going to enumerate them, at least until I see that there are people who have played and come across them too.


Having said all that, I really look forward to the time when this stuff is all out and published, with whatever changes or corrections, and we can focus on giving each other cool ideas for interesting challenges that work and are awesome, which I believe was the initial point of this thread before it got the massive, shameless jacking that it did.

 

[WhatGravitas]

How many rounds is it acceptable to wait until you retcon the results of dropping to -19hit points?

Similarly, since each individual roll in a skill challenge doesn't actually advance the challenge, how many times will you be able to retcon the results until it becomes incoherent?

Why do you have to retcon anything. And why don't successful checks don't further a skill challenge?

Cheers, LT.

 

[AZRogue]

Things I have in mind for Skill Challenges:

Escaping a burning building.
Finding their way out of the Underdark.
Escaping prison/captivity.
Mine car craziness, (see Temple of Doom).
Uncovering clues to find a murderer before he kills again ... that same night.
Rescuing the people trapped on a sinking Pleasure Barge.
Surviving being lost in the desert.
Getting off a mountainside before being caught by an encroaching forest fire.

Basically, so far, I've confined them to "events" and not just the mundane. I try to make sure there's SOME sense of urgency to each one I think up and obvious goals to be gained or lost. Each Skill Challenge is still special, this way, or so I'm hoping, and just as exciting as a combat and very memorable.

So, is this the way they're done? Or are they meant to be used for a lot more things than just "action scenes" that weren't easy to pull off before? I didn't imagine them as a tool for mundane social encounters, or traps, which I have run DURING combats, or handled with just a simple skill check so far, but maybe they're just flexible enough to be used for what you want.

All I know if that if the Skill Challenge system DOESN'T let me have my mine car madness I'm going to just keep the half-made-up system I'm using now.

 

[Cadfan]

I'm going to adapt the skill challenge system to function for combat in certain situations, with combat scenes taking the place of skill challenges in an overall "you need X successes without Y failures" context.

It should provide an excellent way of resolving issues like a war between two armies. If the PCs successfully resolve, say, four battlefield problems before they fail at 2, their army wins the fight. If not, their army is routed. This should provide the sense of immersion that players need ("do we take out the siege weaponry before it can break down the wall? Or should we go after the wizard that's demolishing our front ranks?"), while providing me with a context that lets me keep things manageable, and still making the outcome dependent on the player's actions. And dependent on how they resolve the conflicts, and which ones they resolve, I can use the results to generate an explanation of the situation after the fight. If they took out the siege, for example, but didn't get to the wizard, then the wizard is still alive, and they've lost a lot of manpower, but they've retained the battlements.

Its actually better, I think, than the old flowchart options I was using from Heroes of Battle.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

This is only a problem if you make it one. There are plenty of descriptions you can use that don't require any retconning at all.

Such as?

 

[LostSoul]

My solution so far has been simply to steal cool ideas from the very, very few posts on these boards that have any (though to be fair, I'm aware that content-creation is not the point around here at all) and from books. So far we have done stuff like:

That sounds like a good idea for a thread.

 

[Lacyon]

Such as?

Every actual example of play I've seen so far.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Such as?

The Devils Trident hits your arm, hurling you to the ground. As your head connects with the ground, you drop unconscious. Your comrades see you're bleeding from the arm and the head, but nobody really has the time to check you.

The Axe hits you directly in the chest, but the armor is absorbing the worst, but the impact is strong enough to press all air out of your lungs, and you drop to the ground.

The Dagger pierces your skin, and you feel a sudden wave of intensive pain, until everything blackens.

The Fireball explodes directly in front of you. While you are still trying to evade, hot air fills your lungs, and you feel the flames covering your eyes, before you go down.

...

As you open you eyes, you see the Warlord standing above you. "No fainting in face of the enemy! Stand up, you fool! You can sleep when you're dead!"
or
You feel hands touching you, and a terrible headache, and hear the wizard mumbling. "Just a superficial wound, my friend. The bandage might not sit perfect, but it'll do! Quick, get up, I am afraid another wave of Kobolds is en route!"