Skill Challenges: Bringing the Awesome

[Storm-Bringer]

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.

You are absolutely correct, and I apologize for my part.

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.

I am all for guidelines. My contention is that this codified system isn't going to help because of its flawed implementation.

 

[D'karr]

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

Why should he? It is obvious that you're biased without even seeing the rules. So why should he bother? Your argument continues to be the same, even though others that have played the game tell you differently. So the best thing to do is not continue the argument, it is tiring.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

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'.

Sure, the DM has to come up with the idea that there will be a skill challenge in the first place, figure out what it will be about, figure out what skills will be appropriate, figure out the DCs, narrate the action, and make spot rulings on skill uses.

It isn't easy, trust me. I stumbled over running skill challenges the couple of times I've ran them so far. And that's mainly because I had to change my way of thinking dramatically in order to run them properly. You need to be really quick on your feet and good at improvising. None of which I claim to be good at. It's just a very different skill set than simply interpreting the rules as physics and letting things fall as they may. However, done correctly, it can be a very satisfying experience.

There were charts. And guidelines.

You must be reading a different book than I was. Although the non-combat XP rewards section went on for about a page, it didn't say that much. It had no charts of its own. It said to use the XP from the combat table. It pretty much just said "The default method is to just give out XP for combat. IF you want to give out XP for non-combat stuff, you shouldn't give more XP than one monster would give and you should keep in mind that the PCs are now lacking the treasure they would have gotten from killing that monster, so you'll have to make it up somehow. And don't give out XP for non-combat stuff too often."

It never told you what type of non-combat things you should give XP out for and which ones shouldn't be worth XP. It didn't say how hard they should be. It didn't say whether to give out XP for one skill roll or a combination of 20 or 30. Should I give out XP for completing a quest that takes one session? What about 10 sessions?

There was just too much it didn't say. And what it did say was a lot of "be careful giving out XP for non-combat". I took the easy route and simply don't.

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.

Yes, you are right. That's what I like about it. It means that skills are flexible enough to either be run in "simulation mode", where you make a roll to climb every 10 feet(or whatever), figure out exactly when people fall, and the like. Or they can be run rather fast and loose and in a much more narrative fashion in order to just answer questions. You get to pick based on the pacing you are looking for in the situation.

Making a roll for every 10 feet creates a rather slow, deliberate, and precise pacing. It creates a very different feeling than "You succeed in your climb check, you scramble up the wall as fast as you can, reaching the roof and immediately start running again across the rooftops. The guards who are following you start searching for an easier way to get up than the way you took."

I like being able to use fast pacing for fast scenes and slow pacing for slow scenes.

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?

I'm not talking about published modules, per se. I write my own games the same way I write published modules as I take my cues from them. Plus, being a Living Greyhawk Triad member and a Living Forgotten Realms Regional Administrator does often make me think of things in terms of our writer's guidelines as well as ease of use for DMs. Since I know what we write and publish will be run by hundreds of different people all of whom have different ideas of roleplaying and how it should work. Plus, we have to follow the rules exactly.

However, I don't mean defeating monsters without killing them. I don't give out XP for every creature the PCs don't kill in the whole world. I'm talking about using diverging storylines in order to give players an alternate to ever encountering a monster.

For instance, the PCs need to find out some information about where an artifact is located. They know that there in a man in town who has a map that leads directly to it. However, the man refuses to give it to them or let them see it. Now, they could solve this situation by using a researching Skill Challenge at the library in order to track down all the information and build their own map. They might be able to use a Skill Challenge in order to distract the man while someone else sneaks inside and steals the map. Or they might simply attack the man and take the map when he was dead.

I wouldn't normally give out XP for having walked to the guys house and not killing him. Technically, going to the library and reading some books isn't defeating him either, so it doesn't deserve XP in 3e. However, with the skill challenge system, the rules actually support giving out XP for the research because it was a skill challenge with a good chance of failure and consequences for failure(in this case it might be that the artifact is found by someone else since it takes them too long to research).

 

[pemerton]

There are no rules for 'role-playing', there are only rules for 'game'.

Your role-playing, despite your protestations to the contrary, were never impinged upon by the rules. They may have been damaged by a bad DM, but the rules had nothing to do with it. Hence, you can't fix it with the rules. If you want to tell a story about your Rogue climbing up a wall before, during, or after you roll his Climb Rope skill, have at it. I may have failed to notice it, but I am pretty sure nothing in the PHB, DMG, or any other book for any edition has a section that says 'tell the players to shut up while they are rolling skill checks'.

Except that the players have no authority to specify the consequences of a successful check. Under a skill challenge they do.

What is left is discussions regarding mechanics. If you can show how the skill challenge system does things so radically better and different than was done previously, I will reconsider my opinion. But, to be quite honest, I don't give a crap about the role-playing any particular group does or does not engage in.

What is your measure for "better", if the sort of roleplaying that the mechanics support is irrelevant to you?

If your group picks up the dice twice per session, but spends the rest of the time weaving stories about what is happening, great. I am totally jazzed, and have fun. That has nothing to do with the mechanics.

You seem to be confusing "roleplaying" with "talking", as if, therefore, there is no roleplaying aspect to combat. That is not the only notion of "roleplaying", and probably not the most important one.

Narrative arguments are useless, because rules don't affect the narrative. Rules have never confined how a player describes their character's actions.

Do you have any familiarity with RPGs such as HeroWars, The Dying Earth or other narrativist systems? Or even with games like RQ and RM, compared to D&D. Rules have a huge impact on how player's describe their character's actions: for example, the combat rules in RQ tell a player whether or not they can describe their blow as a strike to the foe's head, but in D&D they do not; and in HeroWars the player can narrate such matters as hit location in response to their success or failure in the skill contest (in some ways not unlike D&D), whereas in RQ the dice dictate the narration.

In short, mechanics have a huge impact on what can be narrrated.